I keep a journal. I think everyone should keep a journal and I don't mean a journal where you write entries like you are a Jane Austen heroine ("Dear Diary -- this evening, that lout Mr. Knightley rudely reprimanded me for acting socially uncouth. A pox upon my heart...") I mean everyone should keep a journal as a means to carry on a meaningful dialogue with themselves. I write a lot about books, writers, and literary scuttlebutt in my journal. So much of what I write in my journal, I was planning on sharing in this blog, but that is where I found a problem. I don't always like to share. Plus, I really enjoy writing for myself and myself only. To write for an audience or to think anyone out there would want to read my writings is rather a strange concept to me...Hence the reason, why I haven't posted for so long. I only like to write for and to amuse myself...But anyway...here's a confession all about Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac.
In The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac rails against how television has become a tool that cultivates conformity, compliance, and consent. He states that there is, "only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the one eye: they're not hurting anyone." Kerouac implies that the TV viewers aren't hurting anyone because they have become comatose, hypnotized, and apathetic by television.
In 1950's America, the suburb was a stagnate place where not much was expected of anyone except to try to be "normal" like everybody else. Kerouac philosophizes that the surrender of personal autonomy begins in, "colleges (which are) nothing but grooming schools for the middle class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time." In other words, there is not much "living" going on in the great American living room...
However, this is the young, idealistic, romantic writer Jack Kerouac who soon grew into and gave way to the older, despondent, decaying Jack Kerouac and this is the Jack Kerouac, I love, the one who embraced television as void that one can pass into. Kerouac welcomed television as a sad and lonely dreamscape that lifted the burden of being Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats from his shoulders. He was simply Jack Kerouac - Couch Potato.
After the fame and infamy of being the King of the Beats wore off, Kerouac sought solace in alcohol (lots of alcohol) and television and everyone acts like the last few years of his life is this great mystery to be solved - What Happened to Jack Kerouac? What Killed the King of the Beats? Well, besides the obvious answer of excessive consumption of alcohol, it is no mystery what killed Kerouac. It was television.
Jan Kerouac, Jack's daughter, writes of a reunion with her estranged father in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was in the early Autumn of 1967 and Jan found her Dad, "in a rocking chair about one foot from the TV, upending a fifth of whiskey and wearing a blue plaid shirt. He was watching "The Beverly Hillbillies." In reading this it is obvious to me, that Jack had a plan the whiskey was to numb him, the television was to lobotomize him.
Jan recalls her Dad shouting over the TV, "Hey, why doesn't somebody turn this thing down, I can't hear myself think!" Jack acted as if he had no control over the TV but that the TV had some control over him. Jan recalled that the request, "seemed odd, for he was closer to the TV than anyone else in the room. But someone did turn it down for him, and he continued to guzzle his giant baby bottle, rocking himself as if in a cradle." It appears, television had unraveled Jack Kerouac and soon Jack Kerouac would unravel on television. Television is a great mythologizer but also a myth destroyer and it coaxed Jack into its crosshairs and set the stage for Kerouac's great collapse...
Long before Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, et al. made the celebrity mental and emotional breakdown another facet of public entertainment. Jack Kerouac appeared on William F. Buckley's conservative talk show, "Firing Line" on September 3rd 1968, the topic of the show was to be a panel discussion of the hippie movement. (On a side note: Jack Kerouac bumped into fellow writer Truman Capote in the "Firing Line" green room. Capote who had once famously criticized Kerouac's writing as not writing at all but merely typing, braced himself as Kerouac approached him. Jack surprised Truman with a jovial pat on the back and a kind word.) Kerouac appeared on the show, bloated, surly, and obviously drunk out of his mind. Buckley knew good entertainment when he saw it and seemed delighted in putting the inebriated countercultural hero on display. Kerouac played the drunken fool to perfection, claiming that the Viet nam war was, "nothing but a plot between the North and South Vietnamese, who are cousins, to get jeeps into the country." Kerouac went on to deny any allegiance or affection for the hippie movement but also denounced his long time friend, Allen Ginsberg. He made an anti-sementic crack at a fellow panel member. It was obvious to everyone watching that Jack Kerouac was self-destructing on national television.
However, the old Kerouac wisdom shown through in a brief moment, when the discussion turned to the recent protests at the Democratic convention in Chicago. A quite Kerouac finally cut through all the political analysis mumbo jumbo and finger pointing bullshit of the panel by simply stating, "there are people who make a rule of creating chaos, so that once that chaos is underway they can then be elected as the people who take care of the chaos."
What comes next, I have long thought of as one of the saddest moments in American Literary History. After the taping of the show was finished, Jack Kerouac meet up with Allen Ginsberg who was in the studio audience watching the show live. (The "Firing Line" camera had even quickly cut to a serene looking Ginsberg for reaction as Kerouac had railed against even knowing him). The two writers greeted each other and walked out of the television studio together, just Jack Kerouac and the friend he had just denounced on national television. The two men paused at a New York City street corner and Ginsberg sensing the desperate straights his friend was in, reached over and touched him on the shoulder, "Goodbye, drunken ghost" he whispered. It was the last time, Allen would see Jack alive.
It should come as no surprise that the end of Kerouac's life began in front of the television set. Kerouac was watching "The Galloping Gourmet" when the bleeding had begun. He had been eating a can of tuna fish. Years and Years of heavy drinking had finally taken its toll on his body. A vein had ruptured and he was bleeding internally. Jack was rushed to St. Anthony's hospital. Saint Anthony being among other things, the patron saint of lost articles. At 5:30 in the morning, on October 21, 1969 - Jack Kerouac died. He was killed by television.
