I often think of Kerouac. What was it... the other day I was thinking about a situation he gives us in The Dharma Bums. It's wintertime and he arrives from the West Coast by bus to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to stay with his sister Nin, his mother and his brother-in-law. He is in full sail in a brilliant writing career, which subliminally and more he must sense. He's found a way not to feel completely guilty, and this is because he's doing good things, things he believes will benefit humanity.

This winter and spring he is St. Jack of the Dogs. There is a place to walk from the cabin and sit in the woods, and the dogs are happy with him. He conducts conversation with them. He finds some peace with himself and all creatures. ( What wonderful obscurity, a time of being in nature for the writer.) At some point there is mention of trials and sufferings:

I wasn't exactly unconscious of the fact that I had a good warm fire to return to after these midnight meditations, provided kindly for me by my brother-in-law, who was getting a little sick and tired of my hanging around not working. Once I told him a line from something, about how one grows through suffering, he said: "If you grow through suffering by this time I oughta be as big as the side of the house." (Chapter 20, fifth paragraph.)

This period here is a secretively productive one. What started as readings in a library now becomes a serious work for him, now recently published, after years of complete obscurity, as "Wake Up," his translation and telling of the life of Buddha. It's a piece that obviously took serious effort, and it's sat around hidden, and to this day we are still realizing the significance of it. How perfect, really. Buddha was humble. Buddha was not about making a cult of his own personality. And really, nor was Kerouac. Kerouac was a serious man, looking for lasting stuff and truth and insight. Again, quite remarkably, and not with any more help than a few books here and there. That is the sweet story of Kerouac, the writer. A man of some deep admissions that are touching. And one can guess, he did not know where he was headed with all this writing stuff and uncertainty, and surely that must have been painful, and surely it would have been healthy for him to write it out.

The other story of him being the personality cult which insisted on selling him not on his merits of sensitivity, but as some sort of early Melville exotica. Good to know that this co-opted popularity as King of the Beatniks ("hey, man') has been embraced by young people not just looking for rebellion but for ways to be thoughtful and consider life. To sell Kerouac on the teller of tales of crazy Dean Moriarty (and all that Roman candle hype, for that matter) is to largely miss the point of a sensitive guy who liked his contemplations and made great stuff happen in them, and not to forget the great prose he wrote.

And sadly, it seems, many wanted a part of telling that tale of the commercial rather than the sensitive artist Kerouac. And even Ginsberg is pushing the story line of 'bloated unrecognizable alcoholic' of strong-framed man thickening with age. Yes, by all accounts he did end up drinking himself to the grave, but one wonders, the persona pushed from all angles. I should think Ginsberg and the like who, after initially criticizing him rather severely as being in need of serious and exhaustive edits, then made careers using his methods of spontaneous bop prosody, the Kerouac style you find in Howl, and which Ginsberg acknowledges, would rest on the positive, as maybe that would have been more helpful to the man.

Yes, your fables, misinterpreted, catch up with you.

He understood it. He grasped suffering and Buddha wisdom that winter in Rocky Mount with the sister and the suffering brother in law. He continued strongly on his way toward lasting achievements philosophical and literary. He made future generations of serious expository literature possible, and to this day and beyond, we are in debt to the man and the style he pretty much founded and set in stone undividedly.

What does the writer do for a job though? That still is the problem. The writing that does sell kowtows to the modern cult of personality and worldliness which quickly gets tiresome.

Kerouac didn't often say it, but he himself had pulled hard jobs on the railroad. He did his best. Not fair to think of him as some sort of slacker, as that he was not.



(Indeed, one could listen to his detractors and find out a lot, about them, not him. He is a kind of blank slate people are willing to read things into, some without too much restraint. Agendas.)

After editing this for correction, in a kind of middle-aged pre-holiday 'who cares' sort of feeling that happens upon those who once temporarily fancied themselves as a writer (ugh) in some form--I am guilty of this juvenile pre-grown up fallacy--I wonder at the purpose of the activity, this solipsistic bouncing of a ball against a wall. A reason I look to Kerouac. Did he find meaning and some modest form of enlightenment in that period in Rocky Mount, NC, that began at Christmastime some more than fifty years ago?

It is a fine moment in American Literature, an asking of basic questions, albeit from the limited perspective of one individual who tries to be well-read as best as he personally can, on top of his own flawed experiences. Can one find a moment of enlightenment? If found, what does one go and do with it? What right does one have to this new inner knowledge? How does one express it, and how does one relate it, or with it, to other people? What does one now go and share with whatever part of the world he comes into contact with?

What does, then, a writer go and do? What will he have to write about? The past is now a lesson of some sort, the learnings of which he must convey.

A calling: that which is not easy, for one reason or another, to do, but which one finds the strength to do consistently and well and with depth.