RITE & REASON:Catholic influences on Jack Kerouac permeated all aspects of his writing
Now that the film version of Jack Kerouac’s cult classic of 1950s counter-culture, On the Road, has been released, it may be a surprise to learn that Kerouac is considered a “Catholic” writer.
It may be a bigger surprise to know that he would have been happy with that title.
His French-Canadian mother was a devout Catholic to whom he was devoted. She instilled her religion into her three children.
After his First Communion, Jack became an altar boy and received some of his schooling from the Jesuits before attending public school.
His teachers had remarked on his writing skills. He went to New York (after a short stint in Columbia University and the American navy) where he hoped to become a professional writer. There he met Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and the three became the writers of the so-called Beat Generation, a phrase that Kerouac himself coined.
“Beat” for him had nothing to do with music or with being a “beatnik” (a later derogatory word) but was about being optimistic and open to life’s possibilities – actually, “beatific”. A biographer wrote that he got the inspiration for the phrase from a visit he made as an adult to the church of his childhood, where he claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary.
Kerouac began writing his first novel with the help of marijuana, Benzedrine and amphetamines, the use of the latter landing him in hospital with blood clots. He returned to his native Lowell, Massachusetts , to recover and to nurse his dying father, whose final injunction on his wayward son was to take care of his mother.
In fact, it was usually the other way round – he frequently returned to his mother so that she could take care of him. It was the one steady relationship in his life, his three marriages included.
On the Road, his most famous book, is based on car trips he took across America with his friend Neal Cassady, who was also raised a Catholic.
Kerouac described the book as “really the story of two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God” and seeking “the inherent goodness in American man”. One critic has asserted that the book takes religion out of the church and returns it to the mass of the people.
Although the literary establishment did not like him, he developed a following and was sought out by radio and television. He became spokesman for a generation. He was particularly anxious to defend the Beat Generation against charges of being angry, violent young people out of sorts with their times. They were rather, he said, “basically a religious generation” wanting “to be in a state of beatitude like St Francis, trying to love all life”.
He could not cope with fame and became increasingly dependent on alcohol. He took an interest in Buddhism for a time but eventually became disillusioned with it.
Asked why he had never written a book about Jesus, he responded angrily: “All I ever write about is Jesus.” A biogra- pher has claimed that “Catholicism kept him from going to pieces faster than he did”.
Nevertheless, he went to pieces far too fast, dying from complications caused by cirrhosis of the liver at only 47.
His diaries in his latter years are filled with prayers but the power of prayer could not save him from his addiction.
Brian Maye is a journalist and historian