The Jack Kerouac revival, which began several years ago with the publication of The Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956, and continued in 1997 with the 40th-anniversary edition of On the Road, shows no signs of coming to an end. Nearly 30 years after his death in Saint Petersburg, Florida, at the age of 47, there’s more Kerouac in print than ever before, more information available about him than in all the books about Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs combined, and still more books by and about him on the way.
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Given Kerouac’s exalted status today, one might have suspected that biographers would want to take him down a peg or two. That is precisely what Ellis Amburn in Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac and Barry Miles in Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait set out to do. Amburn, Kerouac’s editor at Coward-McCann for Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz, the last of Kerouac’s books published in his lifetime, once considered himself a crusader for the writer, but now behaves as though Kerouac betrayed him and a generation of young men. Barry Miles, an Englishman who read On the Road as a young man and promptly set out on his own road in search of adventure, now regards Kerouac as a kind of false prophet who failed to live up to his own ideals. Not only that, he dismisses On the Road as an advertisement for the American automobile, as woeful a misreading of that novel as could be imagined.
Amburn and Miles both pay perfunctory homage to Kerouac as a liberator who broke through the repressive 1950s and helped pave the way for the freewheeling 1960s, but their primary goal is to deflate. Both go over familiar ground and repeat almost all the stories already related by Kerouac’s previous biographers, most notably Ann Charters and Gerald Nicosia. In fact, there’s no new information here about Kerouac, though there are radically new interpretations of his life. Playing amateur psychologists, both Amburn and Miles insist that the solution to the puzzling Kerouac mix of rebellion and conformity–the Kerouac conundrum, if you will–can be found in his childhood.
Biographers would do well to accept Kerouac in all his complexity–to remember that he was often a man at war with himself–and not try to explain or dismiss him with a single psychoanalytic stroke. Indeed, what makes Kerouac so appealing to many of us–aside from his obvious personal charisma–is that he offers up so many different sides of himself. When you examine his life you notice a series of paradoxes. Kerouac was uncompromisingly cool, but he could also be embarrassingly square. He was sometimes sexually liberated, at other times sexually inhibited. He was apolitical for much of his life, but he also flirted with political causes and ideologies. In the early 1940s he attended Communist party meetings, read the Daily Worker, admired Lenin and the Soviet Union, and took as his hero John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World. No biographer has yet explored Kerouac the youthful communist, or Kerouac the middle-aged anticommunist who admired Joseph McCarthy, much as no biographer has mapped the links between Kerouac’s Catholic faith and his Buddhist beliefs or the connections between his manic creativity and his devastating self-destructiveness, which he himself recognized and monitored.
Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac by Ellis Amburn, St. Martin’s Press, $27.95.
