Book review #34: Cambridge Companion to Kerouac

Prestige press' new release attracts praise

Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, edited by Steven Belletto (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

By Jim Cohn

THE KING IS DEAD. Long live the King. No, I’m not referring to the accession to the French throne of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422. I’m talking about the French-Canadian American writer, poet, and archivist Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), ‘King of the Beats’. This is the conclusive viewpoint of the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, a fascinating new collection of scholarly essays tightly focused on the published and unpublished writings of the man credited with being the pioneer of the Beat Generation.

When the hardback arrived in my mailbox, compliments of Cambridge University Press, the first thing that caught my attention was the cover photo of Kerouac. An undated Getty image, there’s something in Jack’s eyes – the eyes of a legendary white male mid-twentieth century cultural figure, experimental prose poet writer, archivist-memorist extraordinaire, noted for his impact on disrupting youth culture conformity, for his sexual provocations, and for his influences across color lines during a transformative era of race relations. Eyes that led me to a word he used to describe his life’s work. A word of his own making – describing the creative usefulness of loss – mentioned in the last sentence of the last page of the last chapter of this new title: ‘losefulness’ (270). Kerouac’s eyes reveal a life of losefulness.

The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, edited by Steven Belletto, is an essential, dynamic, and revelatory collection of eighteen precise, stylistically deft and narrow-focused scholarly essays. Preceded by Belletto’s groundbreaking editorial work on the Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017), the publisher’s first foray into Beat Studies, the new Kerouac edition marks the first time Cambridge University Press has published a work by an individual author of the Beat Generation in its Companion Series to Literature.

With Shakespeare and Chaucer as the press’ first two authors (1986), the Companion Series has gone on to publish over 130 titles. Titles in the series are described by Cambridge University Press as ‘authoritative [italics mine] guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions [italics mine] to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.’

Kerouac’s inclusion in this series marks an historic moment in Beat Studies, and – along with the Cambridge Companion to the Beats – suggests that the Beat Generation writers and poets will continue to be studied and influential long past the individual lives of its authors. Hopefully, other leading figures of the Beats – men and women – will be added to the catalog eventually.

I would argue that Steven Belletto has indeed achieved in this volume the best scholarly introductory guide to Jack Kerouac’s work that has come out to date. This guide to Kerouac’s work is both expansive and inclusive in its commentary with introductory notes on the contributors that demonstrate their areas of expertise. Additional prefatorial notes also provide a detailed ‘Kerouac Chronology’ by Brett Sigurdson and a ‘Jack Kerouac Sociogram’ by Steven Watson that charts Kerouac’s extensive literary associates, social circles and key locales.

As editor Belletto notes in his introduction, the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac appears to have come about as a result of the Jack Kerouac Centenary Conference in 2022. The Beat Studies Association marked the occasion with a conference devoted to the author and his work that brought together early pathfinders in Kerouac Studies including Ann Charters and Dennis McNally, ‘old guard’ Kerouac Studies members, and younger generation scholars interested in understanding Kerouac’s literary legacy.

He also notes that the Centenary Conference was highly ‘spirited’, that ‘Kerouac is a living author, by which I mean his work still retains its capacity to surprise and delight, to open up big, relevant questions – and, depending on the contexts one cares about or the formal or theoretical aspects one emphasizes – his life’s work, the Duluoz Legend’ (2).

Belletto’s introduction concludes with his hope ‘that this book will be of use to scholars, students, and fans alike, that those new to Kerouac will find rewarding avenues for further exploration, and old hands might discover a tidbit or two that they hadn’t considered, perhaps seeing pieces of his work in fresh ways’ (7).

I myself certainly did experience seeing Kerouac in new ways from reading this book. Without doubt, my impression of this enterprise is that Belletto has created a kind of cumulative, literary mandala that brings together the complex Kerouac Archive of published and unpublished works. In short, the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac can serve as a textbook, a teacher’s guide, an academic resource tool and also a work beyond academia; something that Kerouac lovers and afficionados, as well as post-Beat artists working in varied Beat traditions, would gain new and valuable insights.

In my reading, it became clear that the purpose of the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac is – as the renowned Kerouac bibliographer and biographer Ann Charters describes it in the volume’s opening essay, ‘Kerouac’s Concept of His Duluoz Legend’ – to refamiliarize the present and the future with Kerouac’s own vision of his books, ‘his “true-story” novels and dreams, his Buddhist studies and mediations possibly’ (8), and to advocate for the eventual publication of Jack’s books into the Legend framework once and for all.

But Charters is also aware, perhaps more than anyone, that we really don’t know today any better than we knew when Kerouac was alive the chronological order he intended for his Legend’s chapters, or which individual books he planned to include. ‘Although he meticulously organized his papers, journals, and manuscripts at home,’ Charters writes, ‘at the end of his life he never drew up a definitive list of the titles he considered to be the different chapters in his Legend’ (10).

What I found impressive and delightfully surprising about the collection was how each chapter seemed organized and structured to both flow and expand upon Kerouac’s literary achievements from distinct lenses. Content areas include Matt Theado’s ‘Kerouac and the Profession of Authorship’, Nancy M. Grace’s ‘Truth in Confession: The Foundation of Kerouac’s Literary Experiment’, Tim Hunt’s 'The Textuality of Performance: Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose’, George Mouratidis’ ‘The Spontaneous Aesthetic in The Subterraneans’, Douglas Field’s ‘Kerouac and the 1950s’, Kurt Hemmer’s ‘The Impact of On the Road on the 1960s Counterculture’, David Stephen Calonne’s ‘Vanity of Duluoz and the 1960s’, Belleto’s own significant contribution, ‘Late Kerouac, or the Conflicted “King of the Beatniks”’, Michael Hrebeniak’s ‘Visions of Cody as Metafiction’, Eric Mortenson’s ‘Making the Past Present: Kerouac and Memory’ and Regina Weinreich’s ‘Spun Rhythms: Jack Kerouac as Poet’.

The final chapters of the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac look at some key issues in Kerouac’s work and propose new ways of understanding his writing. These chapters were remarkable to me in their compassionate wide-angled perspective on questions and issues that surround JK to this day: Ronna C. Johnson’s adroit study of Kerouac’s female characters and the question of their agency in ‘Kerouac’s Representations of Women’, Amor Kohli’s equally excellent study of ‘Kerouac and Blackness’, Hassan Melehy’s profound ‘Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture’, Sarah F. Haynes’ ‘The Two Phases of Jack Kerouac’s American Buddhism’, Franca Bellarsi’s clear-eyed take with ‘Jack Kerouac’s Ambivalences as an Environmental Writer’ and Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s brilliant ‘The Essentials of Archival Prose’.

I was particularly taken by Melehy’s study of Kerouac’s not being a native speaker of English and all the implications regarding Jack’s relationship to language. That inherent with Kerouac’s native French was a sense of displacement, and with this strong awareness of displacement, the fascination with travel (207), and with rootlessness (209). That within Kerouac’s prose and poetry, his aim, as framed by Melehy, was ‘to depict the language he grew up with, which was decreasingly spoken as the French-Canadian communities in the United States yielded to assimilation, to record it for posterity, to commemorate it’ (209). That the road of On the Road was ‘the place of migration, […] a conduit across national borders’ (210). And that his travels were both reenactments of his migration and ‘his attempt to reveal an identity made distant in migration’ (213).

I was also struck by Jean-Christophe Cloutier concluding essay regarding Kerouac’s ‘obsessive record keeping’ and the methodical nature in ‘the management of his archive’ (256). Cloutier makes clear that Kerouac’s achievement of a lifetime form [italics mine] resides in ‘the meticulous, lifelong building of his archive, a labor informed by his visceral knowledge of life’s ceaseless losefulness [italics mine], and one that he put in the service of a grand literary project he called The Duluoz Legend’ (259).

What I found illuminating overall was the sheer focus and attention all of these scholars gathered for a greater and more profound story each could tell, centering their research on the archive of what Kerouac left to the world; how he saw it. Not how others saw him.

Two chapters mentioned earlier point out the introductory nature of the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac: Matt Theado’s ‘Kerouac and the Profession of Authorship’ and Sarah F. Haynes’ ‘The Two Phases of Jack Kerouac’s American Buddhism’. In each of these studies, there seemed the idea of dividing Kerouac’s life into ‘Phase 1’ and ‘Phase 2’, with Phase 1 being the Kerouac many of us love and admire before his fame and Phase 2 being the Kerouac that troubles many of us to this day after he became a celebrity.

I wondered, for example, why Theado’s piece on Kerouac being a professional writer did not take on a more expanded thesis to talk about Kerouac’s often fraught entries over money. And while Kerouac may have signed book contracts, and has been translated into numerous foreign languages – which is important for people being introduced to him to know – there might have been data provided on overall sales of Kerouac’s work since first publications appeared, number of new edition reprints published, to better inform new readers of just how major an author Kerouac remains.

While not wishing to be critical of Theado’s piece, how professional a writer actually was Jack Kerouac otherwise, as the reclusive figure he became? For example, Allen Ginsberg appears to me as a far more professional writer, extensively travelling the world, doing public readings, mainlining into youth culture and politics throughout his activist life, co-founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (1974) and teaching throughout his later years while simultaneously writing important works of poetry and poetics.

Haynes’ piece got the Buddhism better than most other scholarly writings I’ve seen on the Beats, but didn’t get around to saying much about Buddhism’s later impact on Jack’s life after being crowned generational spokesperson. While Haynes argues correctly that Kerouac’s Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (1955) provides readers with the various Buddhist texts he studied, and also is correct that Kerouac’s influence on shaping Buddhism for an American audience was profound, she provides little evidence of what Jack’s late Buddhism looked like other than to suggest he had ample opportunity to contemplate the Buddha’s cornerstone teaching: life is suffering.

‘Overall,’ Haynes notes, ‘Wake Up offers a window into Kerouac’s Early Buddhist Period and an illuminating introduction to the Mahayana Buddhist ideas that are fully formed in his later Buddhist writing’ (238), without providing evidence of what ‘later Buddhist writing’ she is referencing.

While the Companion does not shy away from discussion of fame and alcohol’s effect on Kerouac, the editor may have used the book’s status as an introductory text to not go too deeply into the weeds of Kerouac’s biographic downfall beginning after the publication of The Dharma Bums and continuing through his final years in which the liquid truth he succumbed to left him withdrawn, isolated, and out of step with his Beat associates, the times, and the younger fans who were so inspired by his books.

I admit that the primary reason I so enjoyed reading this work is that its focus is on the literary and textual aspects of Kerouac’s achievements. His biography is discussed minimally, touching on his cohorts, for example, with only brief mentions of key figures such as John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Neal Cassady. There is minimal discussion of Kerouac’s sexuality, his politics or his psychology.

Regarding Kerouac’s demise, I believe Steven Belleto is on to something important when he posits the idea of ‘cultural schizophrenia’ as the ‘unyielding’ force on Kerouac’s latter life, and best expressed in Big Sur and Satori in Paris (132). It is all too often that society casts the individual as the repository of abnormality/disability when, in fact, it is the other way around.

Belleto is also onto something of critical import when his discussion of Satori in Paris zeros in on the seemingly close connection ‘between the implied author, Jack Kerouac, and the character of Jack Kerouac,’ suggesting instead that ‘the distance between the two, moments when the implied author holds the narrator-character up for scrutiny and even derision’ (123) allegorizes Jack’s own concurrent later preoccupations with being both a generational celebrity and an object of general ridicule and mockery.

To that end, I would have liked to have seen a chapter dedicated specifically to Kerouac’s consciousness regarding his formation and use of characters, dialog and agency, and what distances or closenesses were held up in their creation. Personally, I’ve often wondered about Kerouac’s treatment of his cohort as fictional characters and the real-life conflict these treatments instigated when he would show what he’d written to those whom he’d fictionalized.

One omission from the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac that somewhat surprised me, given this book’s inclusion of a chapter on the performative nature of Kerouac’s texts, as well as some biographic treatment of his relationship to jazz, is that there was no essay about Kerouac’s remarkable collection of vocalized performance-driven spoken word recordings archive, or for that matter, his video archive from live television performances.

Jack Kerouac remains one of the greatest spoken word performative voices of his or my generation. His recordings are treasures to many. While analysis of his texts shows their “performative” nature, it seemed natural to follow up with Jack’s actual spoken word literary sound tracks.

If a definitive version of the Duluoz Legend is the prize in Kerouac Studies, which is good, it seems this research may ultimately lead to a more indeterminant set of Kerouac productions. In the ‘Further Reading’ section at the back of the Companion, for example, we learn that 52 books by Jack Kerouac have been published as of 2024. Jack lived to see only 18 of those books reach print. I wonder if the Beat Studies/Kerouac Studies universe will need to form an ongoing committee of scholars tasked with coming up with approximate versions of what Kerouac may have had in mind.

See also: ‘Belletto: Kerouac editor speaks’, November 1st, 2024