Digging into the Subterranean Kerouac

By Benjamin Oren | Monday, August 31, 1998

Growing up, there is a natural order of reading for all rebellious teenagers to go through. It begins around 9th or 10th grade when you pick up J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The story of Holden Caufield triggers every drip of angst within you; he is the first character you have ever been able to relate to. In 11th grade you get your drivers license, get to cruise around in your dad's car, and keep a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road in your knapsack and afterwards, whenever you're on the highway you have the urge to keep on driving until you hit the burning red sun setting over the coast of the Pacific Ocean .

By the time you're ready to go to college, you're looking for something a bit more extreme, so the acid-washed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is recommended to you by your older brother's best friend who had been traveling with the Dead or Phish or whoever for the past year. It freaks you out.

From those three modern classics, only one stays truly ingrained in your soul. Its not Catcher because it too personal; you've experienced those feelings and you never want to go through them again. Fear and Loathing is something you never want to experience, or if you had, you never want to experience again (since you're still probably having flashbacks about the giant lizards). However, On the Road is eternal. It plays off every dream you've had since you were little— about love, about friends, about life. Kerouac's novel helped you to define yourself, as well as helped to define the feelings of the generation that wanted to break through the facade of idyllic morality that post-World War II America began to embrace. It was because of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beats that hippies were allowed to have the sex, the drugs and the decadence of the 60's. They made it happen through sheer will and intensity.

In his new biography of Jack Kerouac, entitled Subterranean Kerouac, author Ellis Amburn examines how Kerouac pushed the Beats out of being a bohemian footnote in 20th century literary history into an intellectual force which demanded to be recognized and catered to by the masses of American culture. Amburn, Kerouac's editor for his last two novels, Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz, pieced together Jack's copious collection of journals and letters to create a new picture of the author. Amburn's Kerouac is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the 1940's and 1950's — a hard drinking, hard partying, binge-writing narcissist. However, many of Kerouac's demons are a of a different sort altogether.

Jack Kerouac was born into a working class French-Canadian Catholic family in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. He was blessed with all the qualities which any boy would die for; he was athletic, smart, and handsome. He was aggressively masculine, stealing the virginity of any young lass that came his way and telling his buddies all the tawdry details afterwards.

However, the real Jack was unsure of himself and his sexuality. His heart drew him to the 'feminine' art of writing while his insecurity drove him to the testosterone-fueled art of the gridiron. He was a high-school football star whose jock friends didn't understand his close relationship with Sammy Sampas, a 'sissy' in the eyes of Lowell, who became Jack's first love. In Lowell, Jack began his inner struggle to come to terms with his own homoerotic and homosexual feelings which continued for the rest of his life.

Amburn follows Kerouac to New York City, where he earned football scholarships first to the prestigious Horace Mann School and then to Columbia University and plunged deeper into the depths of alcohol and drugs.

It was in Morningside Heights that Jack met Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Casady. They lived communally, which quickly plunged into a proto-Melrose Place lifestyle: everybody slept with each others' girlfriends, wives, and each other, all the while debauching themselves on a daily basis. Throw in the murder of a stalker by Beat-socialite Lucien Carr in 1944 and you've got yourself a season and a half's worth of drama-packed episodes.

Kerouac's fate led him across the country and beyond until he was ultimately named crown-prince of the Beat generation by both its members and critics. He conquered almost everything that he wanted to in the world, however his sexuality bore his fundamental insecurity and Jack's mind and body eventually deteriorated. He finally renounced his literary movement, and moved back in with his mother. Jack Kerouac died in 1969; the bottle, his inner-conflict, and his lost love for writing killed him.

Amburn focuses on Kerouac's sexual confusion from the get go, graphically drawing out five-year-old Jack's 'masturbatory 'pissadventures'' with two other neighborhood children. His fascination with men escalated from there, to the football locker room to a Greenwich Village apartment, however he never acknowledged that he was being 'un-hetero' — since he was never the submissive partner he concluded that he wasn't feminine.

Unfortunately, most of Amburn's research is not drawn from one-on-one interviews from Kerouac's friends and family, but instead from already published and publicly-made available books and documents on and from the Kerouac estate (several critics doubt that Amburn ever met Kerouac in person).

He dwells too much on examining the novels of Kerouac for bibliographic information, referring to characters as allegories for Kerouac's real life companions. While it is true Neal Cassady was the model for On the Road's Sal Paradise and Sammy Sampas for Sabby Savakis in Vanity of Duluoz, Amburn insistes that these people were more than merely models for fictional characters. Everything that Kerouac wrote as fiction he takes as necesarily and exactly reflective of the truth of Kerouac's life, and, by not offering any corroborating evidence from outside sources or authorities, Amburn hurts any claim to journalistic legitimacy and integrity.

Amburn's smooth style of writing and his interesting subject manner, however, are able to mask this deficiency quite easily. Kerouac became the god of deviancy to millions, and Amburn documents his maturation on the streets of New York City:

'After only one day at Horace Mann he reverted to his habit of truancy and hopped off the subway at Times Square, where he discovered a world of hookers, con men, and dope addicts, the lost of the earth whose poet laureate he would soon become....Kerouac himself recalled in Maggie Cassidy that he was absolutely terrified, thinking of nothing but 'sins and syphilis.''

Many a time Amburn morphs and confuses the real with the fictional and as a result gives unsubstantiated introspection which is easy on the eyes and the brain.

Jack Kerouac was an inspiration and an idol to a generation and still is today. Ellis Amburn understands this hero-worship, but tries to let the adoring masses know that there was more to Jack than the Beat-hipster macho man which oozed from much of his work.

Jack was a man who had problems with himself and with his contemporaries; a man who after living forty-plus in a life which many thought was full, still felt empty, confused, and shamed by his true self; a man who was still 'man' despite his concealed femininity.

Jack Kerouac loved his work, his travels, his friends, and his lovers, but could not love himself. He died embarrassed, but not in vain; his novels have defined a lasting literary and cultural legacy.

Ellis Amburn cares about Jack, and this alone infuses his prose with a vivacity and spunk that make Subterranean Kerouac worthy of his subject.

Digging into the Subterranean Kerouac

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