Book review #43: Self-Portrait

Kerouac works unseen, unread but not unloved

Self-Portrait: Collected Writings by Jack Kerouac, edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Charles Shuttleworth (Rare Bird Books/Sal Paradise Press, 2024)

By Simon A. Morrison

WITH SELF-PORTRAIT, editors Paul Maher and Charles Shuttleworth have, in effect, provided the literary equivalent of the DVD extras to Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend. Kerouac wrote throughout his life and was, despite the wild, loose and peripatetic nature of that life, meticulous in preserving, storing and archiving his work. Some would of course go on to evolve into the novels, but elsewhere in this collection we have varied character portraits, journal entries, sketches, narrative fragments and the beginnings of some roads ultimately abandoned.

In one piece, Kerouac simply writes in a bar while waiting for a date who ultimately stands him up, ‘this sourpussed beef-witted bastard bull-slinger from Lowell'. In his improvised narrative to the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, Kerouac refers to his ‘secret naked doodlings’ and, essentially, that’s what we have here. In fact, collected at the back are actual doodlings, illustrative plates including pictures Kerouac has drawn, such as the self-portrait that forms both the name, and the cover image, of this intriguing collection of largely unseen, and thereby unread, Kerouac.

Kerouac wrote for personal, psychological, social and then commercial reasons and left a wealth of material for these editors to trawl through. The material chosen was sourced (and logged meticulously – down to box and folder number) from the Kerouac Papers archive housed at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library and Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

As editors, their approach is respectful, sensitive. Maher and Shuttleworth also pen short contextual introductions – welcome scene setters – and provide detailed footnotes that are useful rather than intrusive. The format is chronological. The first piece, for instance, is a journal entry from fall 1939, the first line of which reads ‘My name is John L. Kerouac, regardless of how little that may matter to the casual reader.’

How intriguing that, at the age of 17, Kerouac was already addressing us as ‘reader’, as though he somehow knew, or hoped, that some 85 years later there would be readers, digging back into his life, digging his life. As Shuttleworth comments in his introduction, what we now have with Self-Portrait is a ‘portal into his psyche’.

Pictured above: The book cover featuring a head sketch by Kerouac’s own hand

The very last entry is undated, although we are in the latter 1960s and that young Kerouac, packed with joyful hopes and ambition, is now lost, many roads back. Instead, we have someone drunk, railing at the world, not Beat but beaten. Kerouac rages against the volume of adverts in the breaks on TV, then turns his ire on his fellow Beats and what he now considers the failed Beat experiment.

Penning an article (never submitted) for Playboy in 1963 he writes of Gregory Corso that ‘he and practically all the rest of the beat generation, I now realize, are the biggest creeps I ever saw in my life’ and later ‘I denounce them now.’ Kerouac is by turns self-aggrandising and a sad crank, reflecting on his youth and childhood in a series of biographical fragments that never really go anywhere, fighting with the person he has become, looking for the youth he once was.

In ‘On Drinking’ he writes, tragically: ‘It isnt funny at all – I’m allergic to alcohol, to the toxin in it – My face and belly react by swelling full of water so must be the liver swells.’ As a Kerouac acolyte, and aware of the parabolic trajectory of his biography, it’s a tough read.

So let’s focus for a while on the young Jack – a teenager with it all ahead of him – writing down his thoughts while at the Horace Mann School in New York, trying out short stories, then on the SS Dorchester during his time in the Merchant Marine in World War II, writing his journal: Around August 18th-19th, 1942, for instance, Kerouac ponders ‘Vagabonding across the 48 states. Could develop that into something someday.’

In a short story from the same year he dreams of going to places like ‘Liverpool’. Armed with biographies and hindsight we know he did indeed do that, reporting the experience in Vanity of Duluoz. Indeed, much later in these pieces Kerouac reports how he actually conceived of the Dulouz Legend while in Liverpool in 1943. Elsewhere, in a 1953 fragment titled ‘Memory Babe’, Kerouac lists 12 works comprising this Proustian exercise at a point in time – we should remember – when he had only ever published one novel, and had four years to go until the next.

The reader can also track his evolving approach to writing as his own style emerges and takes shape. At school he is extremely well read and a very literary and intellectual young man, citing ‘Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wolfe’' and reporting he reads the Bible each morning. Even on the Dorchester the crew christen him ‘The Professor’.

In the latter 1940s, we start to see now familiar characters start to enter, stage left (or should that be page left?), thinly disguised renderings of what seems to be Herbert Huncke, a glowing portrayal of Burroughs and an interestingly hot-and-cold friendship delineated with Ginsberg. Digging into, and beneath, the text we see the experimentation begin – sexual, literary, pharmaceutical – and the binds loosening on both prose and lifestyle, as this generation abandons the social contract in favour of a life of louche behaviour and expansive travels.

In 1948’s ‘Ray Smith’ (the author’s chosen alter ego in The Dharma Bums a decade on), we see an early attempt at an On The Road-style narrative, with premature glimpses of Kerouac’s voice, interestingly when describing music and a jukebox playing Louis Jordan’s ‘Early in the Mornin’’: ‘a weary song, a tired song as of then spectral New York dawn when one’s been up all night in the street, broke, hungry, looking for others, beat, disgusted, sick – a song of pale dawn in the honky-tonk blocks.’

In a letter, from that same year, to his friend Allan Temko, Kerouac writes: ‘I want you to know that a new generation is existing, and rising, in America, and I call them “The Beat”.’ Interestingly, having used the word himself continuously, he details in a later 1953 essay, ‘In America’, that ‘What we are now seeing in America, in what my esteemed friend John Clellon Holmes calls the “Beat Generation”.’

To be critical, justifiably I think, you can see the reason why Kerouac himself abandoned many of these pieces in his process of self-editing, and why they never went on to be published (aside from here). The writing is, at many points, not quite there, lacking the focussed energy of On The Road. The style is laboured, as though it needs the levity of the open road to lighten it up for him, as he looks to be the modern American Dostoevsky or Dickens but to ‘write simply in the language of ourselves’ and ‘to do it richly, to write it in a prose which is neither skinny nor fat, but muscular.’

Kerouac was starting to realise the conventional structure of The Town and the City had failed to land, and, in an unpublished ‘Declaration’ in 1951, he writes: ‘There is absolutely no reason in the world why a man in America may not write exactly what he feels, in any form that suits him […] My book is going to be about how I feel about life.’ Four weeks later, Kerouac started the scroll that would become On The Road.

Self-Portrait will nevertheless be of great interest to Kerouac scholars, fans and completists alike and as such is an important addition to the literature. I fell in love with Kerouac’s writing after reading On The Road when travelling myself, as a teenager. And I recall my excitement when, in a pre-digital age, someone located a cassette of Kerouac reading and his voice came to me for the first time.

Although not at all the same epiphany, the chance to read box-fresh Kerouac, released from the archive, is much like the Beatles releasing ‘Now and Then’… not core canon material, agreed, but certainly a welcome and useful addition to Kerouac scholarship. More words, more magic, more road.

Editor’s note: Simon A. Morrison is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Music Journalism at the University of Chester, UK. He has been journalist and broadcaster and published Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction in 2021. He is most recently co-author of Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music (2025)

See also: ‘Interview #28: Simon A. Morrison’, October 18th, 2024; ‘Beat Soundtrack #33: Simon A. Morrison’, May 2nd, 2024