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By Root 892 0

Robert Creeley instantly understood, was if anything more professional than his peers, not less, an artist “old-fashioned [and] devoted,” in his own words, but for most critics and reviewers, subscribers to then fashionable if spurious notions of authorial objectivity, avowed vulnerability and spontaneity spelled amateur; Kerouac had declared open season on himself, and they welcomed the sport, calling him a “know-nothing Bohemian,” “the latrine laureate of Hobohemia,” and “a slob running a temperature.” Truman Capote, who later created his own form of the nonfiction novel, publicly dismissed Kerouac’s method as “typing,” not “writing.” By nature painfully sensitive and self-conscious, the least well-protected of men, capable in his cups of rage but never of malice and utterly devoid of media smarts, Kerouac was helpless before the onslaught. Foolishly, he took advantage of his new visibility to rush his huge backlog of manuscripts into print, strengthening the misapprehension that he tossed off a book every few days.

If his discerning readers were few, Kerouac didn’t lack for groupies, and they terrified him too. “You’re twenty-one and I’m twenty-nine,” one avid fan told Kerouac’s girlfriend, the writer Joyce Johnson, pushing her aside at a party. “I have to fuck him now.” Perfect strangers felt free to pound on his door. He had finally “popped” into view, Kerouac lamented, only “to be slashed down” by critics and torn apart “limb from limb” by his uncomprehending followers. And by his own reckoning a problem drinker since his late teens, by 1957 Kerouac had burnt his way through several lifetimes. Norman Mailer, an uneasy rival, liked him when they met, but marked his air of fatigue, an exhaustion not surprising, Mailer said, in a pioneer, “the first figure for a new generation,” who had traveled in realms where “the adrenaline devours the blood.” A critic’s darling himself, Mailer was too astute to miss the obvious contrast between them: Kerouac had spent the better part of a decade hitchhiking and jumping freights across America and Mexico, “out there living it,” while he stayed home, “an intellectual, writing about it.”

Kerouac’s creative outpouring continued between 1955 and 1957, the years of his closest friendship with Snyder, but The Dharma Bums, written in late 1957 and published the following fall, had no successor for four years. Big Sur (1962), set like The Dharma Bums in northern California, a gorgeously written tale of despair, was Kerouac’s last masterpiece, though not his last book, before his hideous, bitter death of alcoholism in Florida on October 21, 1969. By then, most of his work was out of print. Critical contempt, compounded by Kerouac’s naïveté, had translated into consistently poor returns. Mailer got $35,000 for the paperback rights to The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones $100,000 for From Here to Eternity (1951), but Kerouac received only $1,000 for the rights to On the Road, a bestseller in hardback. Kerouac’s two Hollywood sales (for On the Road and The Subterraneans) were no better. In the mid-1960s, he calculated his income at $65 a week.

Kerouac himself was agonizingly aware of his decline and honest enough not to put the blame entirely on abusive critics or carnivorous fans. He dated what he described as his “complete turning about from a youthful brave sense of adventure to a complete nausea concerning experience in the world,…a revulsion,” not to the time of On the Road’s publication, but to the period right after Snyder’s departure for Japan to study Zen in May 1956. That summer, following (at Snyder’s suggestion) in Snyder’s footsteps, Kerouac spent two months in complete isolation as a lookout on Desolation Peak in the Mount Baker National Forest in Washington state just south of the Canadian border, an experience covered in The Dharma Bums and treated in greater detail and depth in Desolation Angels (1965). Snyder remained in Japan on and off for more than a decade; though they corresponded frequently at first, with Kerouac continuing to put in the occasional drunken phone