Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road [Hardcover]

Isaac Gewirtz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2007

Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was a touchstone for a generation and the centrepiece of the Beat movement in literature and art. This new book examines Kerouac's life and career, and accompanies a major exhibition at The New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication in 1957. Kerouac's achievement as both a literary and cultural figure is traced, including his innovations in narrative techniques and in character development. His counterculture vision is explored, showing his image as a seer and sage who wanted to save America from its obsession with consumerism, the inhibition of sexuality and other conventional bourgeois pieties. The author also explores Kerouac's relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and other Beats, as well as the Beat movement in general. The book is heavily illustrated, with material from the extensive Kerouac literary archive owned by The New York Public Library, including typescript drafts of On the Road, as

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Scala Publishers (October 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857594975
• ISBN-13: 978-1857594973
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,244,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Impressively illustrated, but a huge textual fail, February 18, 2011

By 

Paul A. Maher "author of Kerouac: The Definit... (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Hardcover)

All the big cats of Kerouac studies will tell you that this book is the Second Coming of Kerouac studies. What they can't (or won't) tell you is why. Certainly, the book boasts fantastic photos of what the Kerouac archive has in store for scholars in years to come.

To be fair to all of those, myself included, that have written books on Kerouac, we were/are at the mercy of the Kerouac estate. What that means is that we had the ingredients for a great book, but we couldn't cook with them. The same cannot be said for Dr. Isaac Gewirtz, the curator of the Kerouac archive at the Berg collection of the New York Public Library.

At his disposal are literally thousands of Kerouac documents, most of which hasn't been seen, save for a handful of people. Gewirtz has the opportunity to totally rewrite Kerouac scholarship merely by perusing even a small portion of what he has privileged access to. But he doesn't, because it seems the personal interest just isn't there. It reads like a pedestrian walk-through, sort of spat out of obligation. Gewirtz's background is in the Renaissance. Upon arrival to his appointment at the Berg, Gewirtz had yet to taste the writings of Kerouac. To be fair to him, what his job entails is a massive amount of accountability with the 35,000 printed items and 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives covering 500 years of English and American literature Finding the time to research and write knowledgeably about a complex figure like Kerouac doesn't seem possible. Instead of delving deep or even wide into Kerouac's literary legacy, he steps back, reigns in outdated scholarship as his chief sources and uses it for the premise of his research. To that end we have the biases and limited biographical perspective of Ann Charters and Gerald Nicosia as his chief secondary source supplements. Not Jack Kerouac, to which we have to ask ourselves, "why?"

Here are a few examples:

1. The author doesn't waste any time spewing the tired history of the beats regurgitated since the 1970s. Yes, here are the familiar anecdotes. Huncke as progenitor of "beat." This may be so, but why waste page space when there is so much else to talk about?


Or that the "core members of the Beat Generation were drawn from Kerouac's circle of friends." Let us not forget that that core circle does not, as Gregory sagely informs us in one documentary or another, "a generation make." There is no generation. What we have is a fallout of mediocre Kerouacian derivatives, most of which are pushed into the spotlight by Ginsberg, eager to make famous authors out of anyone with little more than an amateur grasp of the English language.

As a side note, it is important to mention that in Kerouac's journals and notebooks, from 1944 on, there is scarcely any mention of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Carr, and Cassady. They were part of a much larger network of friends and acquaintances of Kerouac. There were literally hundreds whom he had corresponded with and met on a regular basis. This is selective mythmaking, and Gewirtz is as guilty as his predecessors in prolonging this deplorable tale.

We also have Burroughs killing his wife, or Ginsberg's landmark reading of "Howl." Or Cassady driving Kesey's Further bus and his decline. None of these have any place in this book.

As a souvenir of the exhibit displayed by the NYPL, it should have been a book solely driven as a retrospective of Kerouac's literary career, a chronological timeline of remarkable documents that will, eventually, rewrite Kerouac scholarship placing him as a singular American author and not part and parcel of a "generation."

There are, for example, over sixty diaries written by Kerouac. This alone would have amply filled out these pages. They would have articulated for the lay audience what a profound, soulful intellect he was. Instead we have a sorry mess of a textual narrative. Gewirtz has the means and the obligation as curator to dive deeper into the archive, or at the very least sprinkle anecdotes and facts with the silver platter he has at hand. Instead, he takes the easy way out because he has no respect for Jack Kerouac or his writing. He drags Kerouac kicking and screaming through the muck of melodramatic documentary ... again.

2. The second chapter, Early Life, Influences and Writings, gives Dr. Gewirtz an opportunity to take a stab at interpreting Kerouac's paintings with the careful precision of a bored freshman in an Art History course. This was ably done before in a book superior to this, Departed Angels, but yet, the unquestionably unqualified Gewirtz feels a profound need to share what he thinks he knows.

He then surmises the aftermath of Gerard Kerouac's death in 1926 and Jack's reaction to it.

Here, again, he ignores the existence of extant factual records, of which he has access. He writes that Gerard's death left Jack in a paralyzed state of fear, not on anything he has in the archive, because it isn't there, but because he is basing this presumption on the amateur sensationalistic surmising of Charters and the Freudian embellishment of Nicosia. Neither of these biographers was there in 1926/27, nor did either interview Kerouac about this matter. And neither had access to the archive.

Yet, in 1995 Charters edited the selected letters where Kerouac admits to his sister Caroline that he remembered next to nothing about his long dead brother, except for his face being slapped. Regardless of this solid proof to the contrary, Gewirtz drops in a quote from Visions of Gerard to corroborate his lazy research, neither validating his point nor effectively embellishing it: "After his coffin was lowered in the rectangle of mud in Nashua, N.H. on a rainy day, they say I became pale, thin, quiet, solitary." Nothing about Kerouac's dubious recollection hints at a "paralyzed state of fear," though if he were pressed for it, he could have found it in Dr. Sax. Gewirtz then writes that "despite Kerouac's childhood fears," it was a "period of awakening to the mystery and wonder of existence." I truly feel that Kerouac the child shares this phenomenon with the rest of mankind, yet, still, it was not only a "period" for Kerouac, it was the whole thrust of his life.

We are again pushed into the notion that Kerouac thought his brother was a "saint." Gewirtz and other scholars cut from the same cloth (though he is no Kerouac scholar, he is a curator. The custodian of records at your town hall that has access to your tax records is not a scholar of you!) accepts this at face value. But also remember, that Kerouac felt whores, hobos and Allen Ginsberg were saints.

Ginsberg was a "great saint concealed in a veneer of daemonism."

No, to understand Jack's stance on Gerard, one has to absorb his entire attitude, his spiritual meditations on death. Gerard, in the novel Dr. Sax, amounts to nothing but a dead boy in a casket, "in the sun of worms looking for the lambs of the sky."

Existence is flawed, suffering is death, and Gerard is not the distinct Technicolor memory we are led to believe, not by Kerouac. but by his commentators. Gerard exists as a sensory tremor reverberating through the whole of Kerouac's life.

Gerard was a constant reminder of the fragility of existence, a point driven home by the passing of Leo Kerouac a little over twenty years later when he is buried side-by-side with his late son. Gewirtz, for all of his posturing as a Kerouac scholar and his unrivaled everyday access to all things Kerouac, working amid a veritable Nirvana of unpublished documents, does not flavor his pages with Kerouac's words writ through a lifetime of sweat and blood, but relies upon the cold copycat recipes of secondary source materials.

Gewirtz finds no room in his book to share with the world the massive archive, of its contents, or of what we can now learn about Kerouac. Like his book on Whitman, he resorts to Kitty Kelley-level tactics of mud-flinging. It seems that Gewirtz's pressing desire is to drag the Good Grey Poet through the Camden mud, and he does no different to the King of the Beats.

Again we are told that Gabrielle Kerouac was anti-Semitic. Fine, but where is the evidence? Why is this anecdote in this book? Didn't we read about it from Charters? Nicosia? Ellis Amburn? This book aims to tell another story, but Gewirtz is harnessed in by a need to maintain a veneer of faux respectability.

Quite simply, he hasn't an ounce of evidence to prove that Gabrielle taught Jack that "Jews were inherently evil." What I know, is that Jack was taught this in his childhood parish. It was a community belief, it was a scare tactic for provincials, it was ingrained into their being. I do believe that she had more than a spark of xenophobia to her, but with a slew of documents at your disposal, why throw in second-hand information? It beggars sense. Gewirtz rehashes five fat paragraphs devoted to Gabrielle and her shortcomings as a human being. He moves on to Leo, writing about what is already known about his love for the horses, his printing press and his business loss in 1936. Gewirtz never thinks of documenting any proof of the vicious accusation of antisemitism he states with authority. He has no interest in bolstering the literary reputation of Jack Kerouac.

This review is growing longer than I wanted it to, but I will leave you with this one other thing. On p. 40, Gewirtz captions a list of Kerouac's that he kept tracking various sexual liaisons with women. At the end of the list Gewirtz writes, "His Lowell High School sweetheart, Mary Carney*, is almost certainly the woman whom he calls, in a tasteless quasi-pun,"Mary Filth," i.e. "carnal." Mary Carney was not Mary Filthy, Mary Filth was a girl... Read more ›

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential for Kerouac Fans, June 15, 2008

By 

Besenkopf (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Hardcover)

If you have an interest in Kerouac, you should buy this book. It's one of the few books that is actually worth its cover price.

The reproductions of materials from the Kerouac archive are beautiful, and Gewirtz's text is just what you want to read. This is a perfect companion to the published version of _On the Road_, the original scroll version of _Road_, and the journal entries published in _Windblown World_. Taken together, these books affirm that Kerouac was a brilliant and dedicated writer and reader. The documents in _Beatific Soul_, especially, allow the reader to see Kerouac's beautiful mind at work.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating study of the development of Kerouac's classic, January 29, 2009

By 

Pitoucat (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road (Hardcover)

At last a detailed study of the development of Kerouac's classic novel "On the Road", which examines all extant material, pre- and post- the version that was typed out on a 120-foot scroll of paper in a period of three weeks in early 1951. Dr. Gewirtz is ideally placed for this task, being curator of the New York Public Library, where the Kerouac archive is now stored, and so having access to items not previously available to other researchers.

Coverage of Kerouac's early work on his "Road" book begins in 1947, and includes an exhaustive look at the various drafts, fragments, and journals in which the initial attempts were recorded, with photographic images of many of the actual pages. Of particular interest is the development of the published version of "On the Road" from the 1951 scroll version. According to Gewirtz, Kerouac made three different conventional typescripts of the book between 1951 and about 1956, each with somewhat differing content, the final one being used as the basis for the book as eventually published in 1957.

Gerwitz claims that the first of these typescripts is now "lost" but the other two, currently stored at the NYPL, are well-illustrated in the book, which contains eight full-page images from the second, and seven from the third. Five sections from the scroll are also presented -- the first part, and four other full-page images previously unpublished. These illustrations are clearly readable and demonstrate how a facsimile edition could be produced, either in book form or on CD, of the scroll and the other typescripts, drafts, and fragments. Such a product is apparently being discussed in various circles, but until it finally appears this book provides a valuable interim measure, and is recommended to all Kerouac enthusiasts.