A Village Icon—Jack Kerouac

By Roger Paradiso

Jack Kerouac was an artist and that is a tough bag to carry around in any time period. His father came from Quebec but Jack was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In the 1940s he moved to Greenwich Village, his spiritual home for his artistic life. He had many hangouts like Café Wha, Café Regina, the Kettle of Fish, and places he “crashed”—mostly apartments of women he had affairs with or his friends.

But his true home was always where his mother lived—in Queens and Long Island. He even lived in Florida in the late sixties because his mother was paralyzed from a stroke and she wanted to get out of the winters in the Northeast.

Kerouac was like any artist stuck in a time capsule. He was trying to understand himself and the times he lived in. It was a period where you could have a Cold War yet be nuked to oblivion at any second. It was also the time when America’s blue-chip economy would lead the world. It was certainly the high point of Greenwich Village artistic life when many flocked to the Village because it had cheap housing, clubs, vibes, and talented artists who would lead the Village into becoming the epicenter of the counterculture. Those times started in the 1950s and live on to this day. However, we can see the ending of this reign as gentrification eliminates all the factors that made the Village “the scene.” We don’t have anyone ready to call the counterculture dead but it is on life support.

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“Portrayed as a hard-living free spirit,
Kerouac was in fact dedicated to his craft and lived a mostly
“monastic life” with his mother and his Persian cat Tyke.
—Elle Hunt, The Guardian

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In a way, Kerouac’s life was much like ours today. We are born in our time and we try to understand it but it won’t be understood until decades later. On the Road took three weeks to write and seven years to publish. It came out in 1957 and made Kerouac a cult hero. He continued to drink and drug himself to oblivion while becoming a celebrated “beatnik” writer. I italicized “beatnik” because a lot of artists at that time resented the term or at best tolerated it.

It seemed that Madison Avenue’s caricature of the American “beatnik” artist was Kerouac. He was the white American male, a pot-smoking, liquor-drinking, jean-wearing rebel. Kerouac traveled on the road to find himself and in that process discovered America. But he always came home to Greenwich Village and his mother’s nearby house.

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“When he died in 1969, Kerouac left an estate valued at ninety-one dollars.
Needless to say, at the time few people were very concerned about
getting their piece of the Kerouac pie. Today (2005), however, that same estate
is estimated to be worth approximately ten million dollars.”
—Patrick Raftery, Literary Traveler

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Kerouac died in his St. Peterburg, Florida home when he was just 47 from “massive abdominal hemorrhaging” according to the New York Times. Like most artists, Jack Kerouac was never to enjoy the financial riches of his writing. Much like many artists today who wonder how they can make a living, he wondered until the day he died. The irony for many artists is that they will make more money when they are dead than when they are alive. And I’m not talking about rich and famous money, but money to live on comfortably while being an artist.

We celebrate Jack who would have been 101 this past March 12th. Until he died at the age of 47, he could still come home to the Village to find the comfort and love he never did find in the outside world.

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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
desirous of everything at the same time,” he wrote in On the Road, a novel he completed in
only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published.”
New York Times Obituary