More Kerouac, please
Because it's hip to be square.
I just bought my 51st book by—or about or including—Jack Kerouac. I’ve written about Kerouac here and there and elsewhere and a new essay will appear in a Beat literary journal this fall.
A few months ago, someone looked at my bookcases and asked, “Did you read all those books?” My answer is some books are meant to be read, and some are meant to be used. For example, I’ll read books by Kerouac and use books about Kerouac. By “use” I mean research, reference, etc.
Today’s post is triggered by something I found “using” my 51st book while digging into Kerouac’s strained relationship with Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), the well-respected San Francisco-based writer, poet, and literary critic.
Kerouac fascinates me, his writing, yes, but even more, his life. The poor guy died in 1969 at 47 of alcoholism and if you have any kind of personal experience in that world he makes it easy for you to suffer along with him in his letters and journal entries.
But it’s how and when he writes or talks about his Catholic faith that is most interesting; it’s his lifelong, at times enigmatic, relationship with the Church I find intriguing. There is a tendency—I haven’t found enough of it (yet) to call it a pattern—of leaning on his Catholic identity when his character is questioned—almost as a shield, a piece of armor, but not a weapon.
To wit: he and Kenneth Rexroth were at odds beginning in the late 1950s; suffice to say (though there is much, much more to the story) that Rexroth was critical, panning Kerouac’s novels and poetry in his published reviews.
Here is Kerouac in an interview with a reporter from The Village Voice:
“You don’t know what a square is? Well, old Rexroth says I’m a square. If he means because I was born French Canadian Catholic, sometimes devout, then I guess that makes me a square.”
In the Kerouacian universe it’s hip to be square, and I’m totally on board with that.
By the way, before his death Kenneth Rexroth converted to Catholicism and was buried with the Last Rites of the Church.
More Kerouac, please … and more Rexroth.
Wonderful, Jim…Some books are meant to be read, some to be used, and some to be read once or twice, then kept as companions, consolers, friends….
And re It’s hip to be square—exactly! These celebrity conversions that are trumpeted—that seem almost to take place on—social media…to each his own, but I prefer to cower in the shadows at the back of the church with the other misfits, fanatics, and run-of-the-mill (or flamboyant, as the case may be) sinners, thirsting and hungering for mercy…Another plus: as a Catholic you can’t be cancelled, because you’ve already put yourself so far beyond the pale that for the culture at large, you hardly even exist…
Anyway, long live Kerouac. He seems never to have lost his Catholic heart, which surely accompanied him into eternity…Infinitely better to suffer the torments of conflict, dividedness, sin than to pretend none of it matters…
When I was in my teens. I spent a month with a missionary priest in Puerto Rico, a Holy Ghost father (the order now uses the hip name, Spiritan). Your note brought to mind one story from that time. Knowing Puerto Rico was a Catholic territory from it's days under Spanish rule, I asked Father Neil if there were any Protestants. He laughed. He told me that no matter how many individuals Protestant ministers were able to get to join them, the ministers were always angry that, at the time of death, their "converted" wouldn't ask for them but for a Catholic priest for the Last Rights. Apparently, no matter how attractive the Protestant way may be during life, few Puerto Rican cradel Catholics wished to travel it when the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
Perhaps when you reach your 52nd book, I'll find the courage to take up the square, Kerouwac. Until then, he'll remain in that 60's group of rebels. Looking forward to book 52. Keep digging up and sharing stories of the obscure, especially the ones about messy lives. And, if you find one about a Catholic who became a Protestant just before dying, that would truly be obscure.