Jack Kerouac's Creedal Moment

New Oxford Review, May 2024

Several weeks ago, I posted my essay “Kerouac and What Might Have Been” published two years ago by DappledThings.org.

Today I am pleased to share (reprinted with permission) my latest piece on Kerouac in the current issue of New Oxford Review.

Jack Kerouac’s Creedal Moment

GUEST COLUMN

By James K. Hanna | May 2024

It has been called one of the most bizarre panel discussions ever held on television.

Episode 32 of the third season of author and columnist William F. Buckley Jr.’s television talk show Firing Line aired on September 4, 1968. Buckley began by announcing that the episode’s topic would be “the hippies, an understanding of whom we must, I guess, acquire or die painfully.” Buckley’s pain, though not fatal, began soon after his opening monologue. The panel included Beat movement writer Jack Kerouac; sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, author of The Hippie Trip (1968); and poet, musician, and polemicist Ed Sanders.

Buckley, introducing Kerouac, called him a “regular practicing novelist” and referred to his bestselling On the Road (1957) as “seeming to preach a life of disengagement and making a virtue out of restlessness” — an image Kerouac himself would project during the 30 minutes that followed.

Kerouac sat to Buckley’s immediate left. The host, known to lean to the right politically, now physically leaned far-right, anxious to put space between himself and the clearly soused Kerouac. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Kerouac’s who was in the audience, later claimed that when Kerouac arrived at the studio inebriated, Buckley asked him to replace Kerouac on the panel. Ginsberg politely declined.

That Firing Line episode was Kerouac’s final television appearance, and it was a disappointment to many, including Beat movement scholar Ann Charters, who omitted it from her otherwise comprehensive Kerouac: A Biography (1973).

Reviewers of the episode have described Kerouac variously as “grossly overweight and obviously very drunk,” “somewhat intoxicated,” and, perhaps most precisely, “disheveled, drunk out of his wits.”

Find it and watch it, if you haven’t already (it can be viewed online). Kerouac, slouched in his chair, grunts, harrumphs, rolls his eyes, lights up a cigar and puffs great clouds of smoke at his host, slurs his speech, and once demands of Buckley, “Get your question over with!” He routinely interrupts his fellow panelists, and he gives a thumbs-down to Yablonsky, who asks, “Why couldn’t you keep quiet while I was talking?” At one point, Kerouac suggests that the war in Vietnam was simply a ploy by the Vietnamese, in both the North and the South, “to get jeeps into the country.” He later says he’s not the first-century Athenian judge Dionysius the Areopagite, but he should have been.

Through all this, the studio audience sat in awkward silence, save for a very few instances of guarded laughter.

In such a state, could Kerouac have hoped for a single lucid moment? Could Buckley and the audience expect one? Could viewers, decades later, with the benefit of the recording, find one?

The answer to the last question is yes.

“A drunk mind speaks a sober heart” is a saying often attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That night, the unkempt Beat writer delivered one simple, sound, logical, even theological — and, dare I say, beautiful — moment while slovenly holding forth on Buckley’s dais.

Looking back carefully from our horizon, we can see that Kerouac gave a flash of insight into his faith. It came about eight minutes into the program, in response to Buckley’s asking him to what extent the Beat generation was related to the hippies. Kerouac, with eyes closed, began with a slight slur, saying his original idea was “a movement of beatitude and pleasure in life and tenderness,” which, he said, had been corrupted by “hoodlums and communists” and misunderstood by observers. The media, he said, “called it…a ‘beat-mutiny,’ a ‘beat-insurrection’ — words I never used.”

It didn’t have the feel of a build up to something significant, but significance followed, and in a profound way. It came like an unexpected cool breeze on a heat-stifled evening, but in retrospect, and in context, it feels more like a swift, gale-force gust of wind. Kerouac opened his eyes, looked purposefully at Buckley, and with both hands open-palmed and moving in concord to emphasize his sincerity, he proclaimed in a clear, articulate, and well-paced manner, “Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.” For added weight, with pursed lips, he silently kept his eyes laser-focused on Buckley a moment longer, seeming to expect, even hoping for, a follow-up question from his Catholic host about being Catholic.

But the pertinent question never came. Buckley stammered a bit but seemed perplexed, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, perhaps stunned by Kerouac’s sudden, unexpected clarity.

But Buckley should not have been shocked. Kerouac’s response was spontaneous, like his writing style, which was known as “spontaneous prose.” In other words, natural, instinctive, and genuine.

And then it all collapsed.

Kerouac took a long pull on his cigar, closed his eyes, and, veiled in smoke, drifted off, returning to his restless, detached state. But in that one brief oasis of calm, he affirmed his faith, cited a gift of the Holy Spirit (piety), and named two virtues (order and tenderness) the Church addresses at length in her current-day Catechism. Not only was his response cogent and spontaneous, it was also creedal: “Being a Catholic, I believe….” In that singular moment, he sounded and looked like the most sober man on the planet.

Kerouac was in his religious element, ascending from his stupor to deliver a public declaration of his Catholicism, a clear signal that, despite his alcoholism and failing health, he fully embraced the faith that his family, especially his mother, Gabriella, and his early Catholic-school teachers had nurtured in him. It was a signal that reflected his lifelong affection for Catholic devotionals and the saints, especially his beloved Thérèse of Lisieux, whom he often invoked.

You may have read that Kerouac was a Buddhist, or that he considered himself a Catholic influenced by Buddhism. The former is false, the latter true. Ginsberg knew Kerouac best and said that from 1953 to 1955 Jack “was undergoing Buddhist inspiration.” Nevertheless, Kerouac never lost his Catholic heart. Historian Douglas Brinkley searched his personal journals and concluded that his “lifelong devotion to mystical Catholicism comes through very strongly. His spiral notebooks are adorned with crucifixes, and scarcely a passage appears without invoking glory to God” (Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, 2006).

Others can scour Kerouac’s writing for more examples — there are many — in which order, tenderness, piety, and Catholic symbolism are found. In his first novel, the semi-autobiographical and often-ignored The Town and the City (1950), they are on full display. In Kerouac’s account of his fictionalized experiences as Peter Martin — is it merely coincidence that Thérèse’s last name was Martin? — he weaves order, tenderness, and piety into Peter’s psyche and the psyche of others. In the eyes of the local priest, Peter and his siblings “had the makings of splendid Catholics,” Kerouac writes, influenced by their mother, who exhibited “a simple and dignified tenderness,” a mother who, “appreciating the order of Creation, to keep things together, presides over the sweet needs and satisfactions of life and orders the furies of existence around all these things.” And Peter, for all his brooding, has an “underlying tenderness,” is capable of finding “a new sense of order and joy,” and at Christmas finds that “the winds died down as if pious.”

And yet, one may ask: What happened to “order” in Kerouac’s own world, in the wrecked marriages and other well-documented tribulations of his personal life? It’s a legitimate question, and one succinctly answered by Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-step program Kerouac unfortunately never encountered: “The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others. Hearts are broken. Sweet relationships are dead. Affections have been uprooted. Selfish and inconsiderate habits have kept the home in turmoil.”

Kerouac was only 46 when the Firing Line episode aired. Thirteen months later, on October 21, 1969, he died in Florida of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage due to bleeding gastric varices from cirrhosis of the liver, the result of many years of excessive drinking. His mortal remains were returned to his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. On October 24, a Requiem Mass was celebrated in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in Lowell, where in 1922, on the Feast of St. Joseph, Kerouac had been baptized and later served as an altar boy. The principal celebrant was Fr. Armand Morissette, who had known the writer since his high-school days and recalled that “he was very religious and very spiritual. He loved mysterious things, miraculous things. He spent hours sitting in churches looking at the crucifix and statues.”

Jack Kerouac should not be remembered as someone and something he never considered himself to be — a champion of some sort of revolutionary counterculture. Nor should he be remembered as merely a social phenomenon. He should be remembered as an artist, specifically a Roman Catholic artist. This is what he asked of us in front of Bill Buckley and the world, one year before his death.

Buckley and the secular world did not get from Kerouac what they hoped for in that Firing Line episode, but the Catholic world received an unexpected gift. In that singular ten-second, ten-word flash, he gave us not only a cogent, creedal moment, but a catechetical one — that is, if Catholics would dust off their Catechisms and read the 24 paragraphs on order, tenderness, and piety. 

“Mademoiselle magazine wanted to take pictures of us all so I posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix, and all…and the only publication which later did not erase the crucifix from my breast…was the New York Times…. I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it.” 

— Jack Kerouac, Encounter, August 1959

James K. Hanna is a Director of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania and author of The Remarkable Life of Bishop Bonaventure Broderick: Exile, Redemption, and a Gas Station (Serif Press, 2022).

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