Visual Kerouac

John Greiner
December 2016

Old Angel Midnight Over Lowell, India ink & pastels,  1959

On the Road by Jack Kerouac has long ago moved away from the status of cult classic to that of American and world literature classic.  It is a novel of the open road, of potential and possibilities and above all the motion into the vastness of the future.  This is the work that Kerouac will forever be known for, but there is so much more to him than this one novel, or even the series of Beat novels where epiphany is achieved through travel, bebop and Buddha.  There are three phases to Kerouac’s fiction; the traditionalist, the Beat / wanderer and the Duluoz Legend / Remembrance of Lowell Past.  These three phases do not run in consecutive order, the works of the last two phases being created simultaneously.  All three have their instigation in particular people or places, but it is only in the Duluoz Legend / Remembrance phase that we can trace the origin to Jack Kerouac’s work in the visual arts and how his paintings and drawings sparked a mental process that helped to open the road into his past.

There has been a growing interest in Jack Kerouac’s visual work starting with the publication of Ed Adler’s Departed Angel: The Lost Paintings which appeared in 2004 up to the recent Beat Generation exhibit at the Centre Pompidou.  It is by examining Kerouac’s artwork that we are able to clearly see where a second path in his writing begins in the remembrance of his lost youth in Lowell, Massachusetts in a romanticized America which was quickly fading.

From the time of the publication of Kerouac’s first novel The Town and the City in 1950 the duality of time and personal history becomes apparent in his work.  Jack Kerouac is the writer who has left the simplicity of the town behind to pursue the grandeur of the city, but it was not Kerouac’s destiny to rise up into the annals of American literature with his premier novel.  The Jack Kerouac of 1950 is the Kerouac based in a more traditional form of novel writing, influenced by Thomas Wolfe.  He is a polished post-World War II writer in the vein of Mailer, Heller, Styron and Jones, a writer who has seen the world and the view of it so radically changed by the war that the dynamic of the before and after divided by the horrible awakening in between is established as the literary precedent.  This is the same dynamic that, after the First World War, led to the creation of the Lost Generation.  Unfortunately, Kerouac at this time does not have the stylistic command, or originality to create works comparable to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms after World War I, or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or James Jones’ From Here to Eternity after World War II.  He has not yet come to the more avant-garde Beat style which was instigated by his travels across country between 1947-1949 and his meeting with Neal Cassady.

It is after his meeting with Cassady that Kerouac breaks through into a distinct style; Cassady being the physical embodiment of the Joycean stream of consciousness.  The pursuit of freedom from bourgeois convention and traditional stylistic confines are the defining traits of Kerouac’s Beat/wanderer phase for which he is most commonly known.  This is the Kerouac that was to inspire the generations to come, the drifter through cities, the lookout on the mountain, the hipster, the Buddhist bodhisattva bebop aficionado and finally the drunk seeking salvation, or at least a steadying of nerves at Big Sur.  It was in the Beat/wanderer phase of his writing that Kerouac’s place in American, as well as world literature, was firmly established.

While Kerouac was looking forward, he was also looking back and creating a body of work that was to capture a more mysterious and lost time.  This was the Lowell, Massachusetts of the Depression Era with its French speaking proletariat. Kerouac was going back to his roots in a dark and mystical Catholicism of saints, such as his brother Gerard, and sinners.  He was going back to an era of radio serials filled with wonderment in the word and the enigmatic shadows it created.

The starting point from which Kerouac’s novel Dr. Sax developed was a comic that he created for the children of Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Dr. Sax and the Deception of the Sea Shroud.  From the comic Jack Kerouac progressed to the novel Dr. Sax which he began writing in 1952.  It is a fantastical work of vampires, magicians, monsters, the Great World Snake and the black caped alchemist Dr. Sax (reminiscent of The Shadow of the 1930s youth of Kerouac).  Now however, after his road and Cassady experiences, Kerouac has a grip on a style more fluid, more Joycean, that moves away from the confines and traditions of American storytelling that prevented his freshman novel from hitting the artistic mark.  Jack Kerouac is now a writer delving deeper into the psychological and uses one of the primal routes, visual representation, to further open the roads into the past.

Kerouac, in his paintings, calls up images, and emotions from his past, that were to have an impact on his literary output through the rest of his writing, continuing after Dr. Sax to Maggie Cassidy, Visions of Gerard and finally to Vanity of Duluoz.  The influence of Jack Kerouac’s paintings and drawings upon his literary work cannot be underestimated.  With the works in the Duluoz Legend Kerouac’s writing becomes far more visceral than in the road novels.  By going back into the raw and the somewhat primitive in painting Kerouac is better able to plum his own psyche.

For Jack Kerouac painting and drawing were the metaphorical Proustian madeleine that instigated the Duluoz Legend / Remembrance of Lowell Past phase of his fiction.  Kerouac’s visual works are filled with the dream figures of the past; men in trench coats and fedoras drinking, drunk or silent on street corners watching, femme fatales of bygone times that haunt boyhood imagination, innocence spread out on the grass and the long shadow of the crucifixion of Christ holding in it all that Catholicism would come to represent; characters and situations more of the mind than of reality.  In a way Kerouac’s paintings are reminiscent of the work of Bruno Schulz, who also called up the ghosts of lost time and gave them flesh.  Just like Schulz, who created dually in the realms of the visual and literary, Kerouac is able to create a hyper- reality.   Both men conceived a past of ethereal mystery greater than the limitations placed upon them by history and geography.  Kerouac’s Lowell, much like Bruno Schulz’s Drohobycz is a heaven, hell and purgatory of majestic revelations that could never be fully known within the physical confines reality.  It is through the dialogue that occurs between the visual and the verbal that both Kerouac and Schulz create sustaining works in those individual fields that strive and achieve the metaphysical.

The novels that compose the Duluoz Legend are some of the most psychologically rich works in the oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and with the growing interest in the visual realm of Kerouac’s career, these works can be understood in a much deeper sense.  Having a greater appreciation of these visual works we are now given the opportunity to examine Kerouac’s process from a new, fresh and invigorating perspective which is more comprehensive, and by doing this gain a greater understanding of the profound expanses of creativity which contributed to making Jack Kerouac one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century.