By: RS Janes

RS Janes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:02:48 +0000

Bob, I have to disagree with John Leland’s premise — that Kerouac was always conservative. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some people who knew those close to Kerouac in the 40s and 50s, during the birth of the ‘Beatniks’. They claim he only became conservative after his heavy drinking caught up with him in the 60s (exacerbated by a fame he deplored), and he moved in with his mother in Florida, cutting all ties to his old friends like Alan Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. He hated rock music, hippies, and the whole 60s counter-culture, regarding it as a dumbed-down abomination of the ‘purity’ of the Beatniks — cool jazz, esoteric intellectualism, commitment to an artistic vision, and the rejection of American establishment conformity. To him, The Beatles and what they spawned were nothing more than a vacuous pop-music movement and without true soul, artistry or intellect; and shaggy-haired people mindlessly spouting “Right on!” and “Far out!” while they smoked pot — which he apparently considered a sacred drug at one time that helped him achieve some sort of nirvana — caused him to embrace such right-wingers as Buckley and Goldwater as a revulsive reaction to what he perceived as a cheapening and coarsening of the ideals of the Beatniks and the personal search for truth he pursued.

Even though he died in 1969, a depressed and dysfunctional drunk, the light of his mind and his talent had sadly died years before.
By the mid-60s, Kerouac was suffering the ‘wet brain’ effects if the alcoholic and could barely carry on a cogent conversation most of the time.

Comments on: On the Road to the Bloggers’ Hall of Fame

By: RS Janes