On that day in 1969, Jack Kerouac received a visit from a reporter from the local St. Petersburg newspaper. The writer was waiting for him in a house without attributes, while he watched Walter Cronkite on television deliver the evening news with the volume turned off, and the stereo blared. Messiah of Handel. He smoked Camels, drank whiskey from a pill bottle and Falstaff beer from a pint can. The legendary beatnik He was 47 years old and three years ago he had moved for the second time with his mother and Stella, his third wife, to Florida. He came fleeing the answered prayers of fame: the 1957 publication of In the path he had made him a generational idol despite himself. She told the reporter, “I’m glad to see you. I feel very alone here.” He also complained about her health and his finances. A few weeks later he died in a city hospital from an abdominal hemorrhage, caused by decades of alcoholism.
Kerouac would have turned 100 this Saturday. He was born in Lowell (Massachusetts) on March 22, 1922, “at five o’clock one afternoon in a red envelope for dinner,” as he wrote in Doctor Sax, book in which he reflected his childhood memories in the industrial city on the banks of the Merrimack River. That novel, like the rest of his work, is also a monument to his prodigious memory.
The boy, a son of French-Canadian immigrants who didn’t learn English until he was six and kept the telltale accent until he was 20, achieved literary glory by stumbling through “America’s vast night,” but ended up writing a quarter of his dozen. of novels in the State of Florida. He lived first in Orlando in the 1950s, in a house that now serves as a writers’ residence, and later in St. Petersburg. There he ended up due to a persistence of her mother, who trusted that her old health would benefit from the climate of the so-called City of the Sun, so benign that Kerouac sometimes took out a mattress to sleep in the open in the garden. . Perhaps he was looking to feel like a wandering stranger again for one night.
The house, which was closed between 1990 and 2020, is owned by married couple formed by retired literature professor Ken Burchenwall and his wife Gina, a Kerouac fan couple. They bought it two years ago for $360,000. This Saturday they will open their doors to host a packed program of free activities in commemoration of the centenary, which includes film screenings beatnikpoetry readings and live folk music.
The events are organized by the association The Friends of Jack Kerouac, whose president, the artist James Hartzell, explained on Friday that they were born with the mission of “saving the house from its collapse.” For years they were dedicated to maintenance tasks such as fixing broken windows or keeping the grass in check, and now, after ensuring that the property has been left in good hands, they are dedicated to “serving the literary community of St. Petersburg by organizing activities” and claiming the role of the city in the novelist’s history, despite the fact that the final was not his most brilliant period. “In St Pete [diminutivo empleado por sus vecinos para referirse a la ciudad] wrote satori in paris and his latest book, Pic”, Hartzell recalled.
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At seven o’clock in the evening, the party will continue at the Flamingo bar, where the septuagenarian Dale Nichols, who met the novelist in 1967, is still waiting behind the bar. to Kerouac in the mornings reading the newspaper, killing time until he arrived to open the bar. “I didn’t know he was a famous writer until he died,” he recalled in a phone conversation Friday with the bustle of the Flamingo in the background. “He was a nice guy who loved to play pool. They say that he had a bad drink, but I never saw that, and, believe me, we got drunk many times together. They also say that he especially liked the scotch, but in reality he did not dislike anything. At that time I didn’t have a license to sell liquor, so we hit wine, beer and weed.” Half a century later, already fully licensed, Nichols serves a concoction called Kerouac Special, a mix of beer and whiskey, which is one of the highlights of the menu (in part because it sells for $2.50, a price more typical of sixty than in today’s inflationary America).
Another of Kerouac’s habits in St. Pete was to visit Haslam’s Bookstore, apparently to see to the advantageous placement of his titles. Until its temporary closure with a definitive air at the beginning of the pandemic, it boasted of being “the largest bookstore in Florida” and even has its own ghost story: an urban legend says that the specter Jack still walks there.
In Lowell, where the author was born and where he is buried under a tombstone renovated in 2014 that says that “the road is life”, he also plans to mark the anniversary. They have scheduled guided walks through emblematic places, discussions of academics and more poetry. They have also brought the mythical roll in which he typed In the path, no, it didn’t take long for three feverish weeks to end, despite what the legend says. The content of that relief remained unpublished for readers until 2009.
The Canarian writer and editor Dani Ortiz has traveled to Lowell as part of the end of his “personal search”, which he has captured in the recently published book, Beatnik hunters. In it, he collects his pilgrimages around the world (from San Francisco to Tangier; from Mexico to India) in search of the traces of the post-war generation that blew up American literature and also jazz-based customs. , drugs and a bit of mysticism. Ortiz published at the beginning of the last decade some of Kerouac’s lesser-known novels (such as Doctor Sax) in his small publishing house, called Escalera, which has been resurrected years later to release his new book. He says that Lowell lives “a little behind” the legend of his neighbor (“they are thinking, yes, of enabling a church as a museum”). “Let’s leave it at that these days,” he adds, “it is very easy to distinguish those who have gone there to celebrate the centenary.”
Nor can it be said that the United States has turned to the anniversary, although the press has prepared more or less topical articles and in the bookstores of a city like Washington there will be no lack of copies of its most remembered novels these days (and one cannot say what of many of his contemporaries). But this is not Europe: celebrating writers’ anniversaries depends more on the devotion of its readers than on public institutions. It also counts the fact that Kerouac’s work has been subjected in recent years to judgment from areas such as feminism, critical of his figure. Above all, it examines In the path, the story of a fascinated friendship between two men (Kerouac himself and the charismatic Neal Cassady) who go in search of freedom from coast to coast, without paying much attention to anything other than themselves. “It is true that there are female characters, but they cannot be said to be represented as human beings, and to say that Kerouac is inelegant on racial issues is to be generous,” he wrote in The New Yorker the journalist Amanda Petrusich (in an article entitled “A slightly embarrassing love” in which she ended up declaring herself a fan despite everything).
The American comic artist Alison Bechdel, who gives her name to the Bechdel Test (which, born in a strip of her series Some careful lesbians, aspires to measure female representation in cultural products) explained this week in an email that she was unable to finish that mythical title. “She simply didn’t see the point in spending so many pages inside the mind of such a man; I ended up throwing him against the wall.” In her latest graphic novel, The secret of superhuman strength, Bechdel confesses, however, his passion for Dharma wanderers, which he places on the list of his “ten favorite books”. That novel tells of another fascinated friendship, this time with the poet Gary Snyder, who introduced Kerouac to mountaineering and Eastern philosophies. Snyder, 91, is, after the death in 2021 at 101 of publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last of the beats. She lives in Northern California, in a house in the Sierra Nevada, with little contact beyond her inner circle.
The mixed feelings of Petrusich and Bechdel are perhaps the definitive proof that there is a Kerouac beyond his clichés. And is there also a Kerouac, author of one of the most influential coming-of-age novels of the 20th century, the kind of novel to read before it’s too late, relevant to young people today? Jonathan Thaw is 30 years old and thinks so. He is a web designer and for the love of art maintains a page called Friends of Kerouac, about the real characters that inspired his fiction. “His books of his are important for anyone who feels the emotion of travel, the vibration of feeling lost, the pulse of adventure,” Thaw explained this week from Turkey, who plans to spend the centenary at the next stop on his journey, in Budapest. “It may sound stupid, but Kerouac has taught me to dare to be brave.”
“It has become commonplace to say that his work has aged poorly,” Ortiz considers, “but what in my opinion has aged worse is that legend of excesses that blurs his artistic achievements and the fact that he was an extraordinarily well-read man. , not just someone who did drugs and drank nonstop. For any awake young man, capable of looking beyond his mobile, he will continue to be an important author, and I believe that his influence is especially alive in Latin America, thanks to figures who have served as a medium, such as Roberto Bolaño”. Harztell, for his part, clarifies that he sees “many young people” in the activities organized by his association in St. Petersburg. He also says that letters from readers whose literature “changed their lives” still arrive regularly in the mailbox of the house with no name on that day in 1969 Kerouac received a visit from a reporter.
Passion for the ‘beats’
That Jack Kerouac’s reader base continues to be renewed in Spanish is confirmed by Silvia Sesé, editor of Anagrama. Sesé explains her most emblematic book (translated in 1986 as In the path and then, in its latest version, that of the 2009 typed roll, as On the road) is what in the jargon is considered a long-seller (for its sustained sales figures).
But his bet is not only a thing of the past. “We have also contracted other titles that we did not have: Big Sur, Sadness and Maggie Cassidy, and in September we inaugurated a Kerouac Library”, adds the editor. Until now, Anagrama had kept the most emblematic novels in its catalog: in addition to On the Road, The Dharma Wanderers, The Downworlders and The vanity of the Duluoz. They also feature a selection of his correspondence with another giant of the beat generation, Allen Ginsberg.
Beyond the already well-known titles, the publishing world in Spanish has also shown in recent years a renewed interest in beatniks. Gary Snyder is being translated more than ever, as is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The contributions of the great poets of the movement have also finally seen the light of day, in anthologies such as Beat Attitude, who come to deny that that revolution was a matter only of men.
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