‘On the Road’ and Jack Kerouac still inspire

Jack Kerouac, the son of French-Canadian immigrants, was born in Lowell in 1922. He was gifted in mind and body, a handsome football star who also obsessively composed stories, drew cartoons and invented a fantasy baseball league, complete with cards and dice. His favorite authors included Thomas Wolfe and Mark Twain, and he developed an early passion for jazz.

Football, not literature, was his way out of Lowell. He was accepted by Columbia University on a scholarship and in New York eventually met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and assorted other writers and hustlers who formed the core of the “Beat Generation,” so named by Kerouac with suggestions both mystical (“beatific”) and musical (“on the beat”).

His work had appeared in school publications since the late 1930s, and his first novel, “The Town and City,” was published in 1950, an autobiographical, Wolfe-influenced story set in New York and Massachusetts that received mixed reviews and little commercial interest.

Like a man juggling so many lovers, he often had numerous books going on at once and began “On the Road” in the late 1940s. “‘On the Road’ is a sure bet,” Kerouac wrote in his journal in 1948. “It reads ‘for everybody.’ It fulfills (childhood friend) Mike Fournier’s desire, expressed last spring, that I write ‘true action’ stories. And it is vast, complex and funny.”

Kerouac was famous for his “spontaneous prose,” for supposedly finishing “On the Road” in a single caffeinated rush, a long scroll on which words were flung as if he were Jackson Pollock. But the scroll, a collector’s item that has just been released in book form, was only one of many versions of the novel, which evolved over several years and finally came together in the mid-1950s, with the help of Viking Press editor Malcolm Cowley.

“On the Road” was released in September 1957, after Ginsberg had set off an early Beat explosion with his poem, “Howl.” Kerouac’s novel was immediately praised — and immortalized — by The New York Times’ Gilbert Millstein as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ’beat.”’

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?” Kerouac writes. “It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Set in the late ’40s and early ’50s, “On the Road” is almost visibly pregnant with a world it helped give birth to: the rock ’n’ roll world, a world of sex and drugs and exploration, of cars on the open road. Even as characters dance madly to mambo and rhapsodize over bebop, you can imagine someone placing a Chuck Berry record on a turntable and mimicking the guitarist’s duck walk.

Countless rockers cite Kerouac, from the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, who once said that the band would never have been born without “On the Road,” to Bob Dylan, who in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” itself a Keroauc-like narrative, wrote that “On the Road” had “been like a Bible for me” as a young man.

“The rock ’n’ roll generation sure picked up on Kerouac’s book, but it was definitely not a rock ’n’ roll book, and Jack was definitely not a rock ’n’ roller,” says Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, who has written often about Dylan.

“Kerouac gave something for American young people to latch onto that wasn’t in the black-and-white, Popular Front ’Which side are you on?’ ’30s mentality. You could still be politically engaged (as with the civil rights movement), but Kerouac spoke to ... a different part of the American spirit. It’s what Bob Dylan saw in Kerouac, I think.”

Kerouac himself seemed to live a ’60s lifestyle before anyone knew what to call it: He took up Eastern religion, smoked pot, dropped acid, slept around and generally seemed dedicated to the expansion, and destruction, of the senses.

But he was more of a ’50s rebel, deeply attached, like Elvis Presley, to his mother, and interested less in changing the system than in getting out of it. In one of his last published works, the essay “After Me, the Deluge,” Kerouac rejected Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and other revolutionaries said to be carrying on in his name.

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“I’m not a Tax-Free, not a Hippie-Yippie — I must be a Bippie-in-the-middle,” he wrote. “No, I’d better go around and tell everybody, or let others convince me, that I’m the great white father and intellectual forebear who spawned a deluge of alienated radicals, war protesters, dropouts, hippies and even ’beats.”’

Kerouac drank himself to death, suffering a fatal internal hemorrhage in St. Petersburg, Fla., in October 1969. He was 47, his last few years a blur of bar fights and bad reviews. But his passing was news enough to be reported by CBS-TV anchor Walter Cronkite and for a crowded memorial back in Lowell.

“He was haunted by Lowell,” says Douglas Brinkley, who edited the Library of America volume. “He once said that the only heroes he had known in his life were the ones he had in boyhood. He never got out of the high school mode of thinking that seeing a high school friend was more exciting than seeing a movie man. In a lot of ways, he was a homeless man, Kerouac, and the one place that has a right to consider him as one of their own is Lowell.”

Kerouac’s posthumous reputation in Lowell took off at the same time sales for “On the Road” momentarily dropped: the ’80s. “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!” — a nonprofit organization with a mission to “promote a better understanding and appreciation of Jack Kerouac’s life and literature” — was formed in 1985 and still holds an annual festival. Jack Kerouac Park, part of the Lowell National Historic Park, was dedicated in 1988.

At Lowell’s Barnes & Noble, Kerouac T-shirts can be seen in the window and his books have their own special place, a shelf of titles to the left of the cashier. Manya Callahan says she sometimes plays a wicked joke on those who look for Kerouac under “K” in the fiction section.

“I tell them that we don’t carry any Kerouac books,” she says with a laugh. “You should see the looks on their faces.”

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