Kerouac’s first marriage: he married a girl and moved out to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and worked at his father-in-law’s ball-bearings factory. It lasted two months:
At home Edie and her mother, anxious to see Jack as a competent husband, were alarmed that he spent most of his free time in the bathroom, reading Shakespeare and the Bible.
From Paul Maher’s Kerouac, His Life and Work, which appears to be the proper biography of the man – based on actual research, rather than Beatnik hagiography and self-tripping, like many of the Kerouac books.
I find Kerouac utterly dismal as a life, but lovable as a man in a way that transcends all reason. No one seemed less capable of steering his own life towards happiness. Even his artistic thoughts were really all wrong, once he finished the On the Road scroll (which is astonishing). But the zest, the passion, the locking himself in the bathroom to read the Bible, the long debates over the meaning of Spengler and Dostoevsky (probably the two most important thinkers in my life too) – it’s just fabulous. And the prosaic horror of it all, the inability to master the practical details of life, the poverty, the broken relationships, the hangovers that came like clockwork after every intoxicating happiness – it is terrifying.
The crucial period of his life – his early twenties when he wrote On the Road – was spent in Richmond Hill, where I am now; and there is actually something about the place, I think, which embodies the polarities of Kerouac’s life: Richmond Hill is a comfortable place to launch into the profundities, and to dive into New York City, but it is for the most part very quotidian and normal. To a certain kind of personality this bland oasis only enhances visions of the desert of weirdness that surrounds it. Part of the magic of On the Road is that all the adventures start at the doorstep of home, with mom in the kitchen and the ballgame on.
I know I have to write about this more fully, and hopefully this essay will coalesce soon. I read the biography to set it fermenting in my head.
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