A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi.
Here is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts:
He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers Jack had, in the Roman Catholic Church. Burroughs was a brilliant and heroic old devil, but Jack hadn't seen him since his trip to New York for William Buckley's Firing Line. ''I admire Buckley,'' he said. ''He stopped the show and took me into his office to give me hell about being drunk. Then we went back to do the show and I still gave those intellectuals the old raspberry.'' Burroughs was staying in the same hotel at the time, but didn't want to go out. ''Into those streets?'' said the man whose daring and decadence had become a legend, and Jack gave up on him.
But of Neal Cassady, Jack's companion on the road through many of the novels, he was more sure: ''Neal's not dead. He'll show up someday and we'll go someplace.'' Jack loved Cassady, who died on a railroad track in Mexico on one of the last trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. ''Turn your mind on,'' Jack said bitterly. ''I've been trying to turn mine off.''
Jack was also trying to get his affairs in order. He knew he was going to die soon; the doctor had told him his liver was nearly gone. He talked about his will, read and reread his genealogy and spoke much of the Kerouac family tradition and his boyhood home in Lowell. He worried that critics would fail to see his novels as he intended them to be read - not only as an ambitious chronicle of America, but also as a loving portrait of his family and his childhood home. In his later writings, he seemed more interested in capturing Lowell than in an America he no longer understood or liked. He asked about funeral homes and embalming: ''Do they treat you with dignity?'' He asserted his faith in the church he had abandoned years ago for Zen Buddhism.
[. . .]
People sometimes wrote or called me to ask what Jack had really been like, hoping I could confirm one romantic thesis or another. One man wanted to believe he died from the scuffle in the black bar. Ironic, but untrue. Nobody wanted to believe he died of drinking.
He did. Drinking was part of his pilgrimage. He was a sensitive soul who'd set his sights on nothing less than enlightenment. When the booze failed to take him there, it at least numbed the disappointment. It is a classic alcoholic pattern, which has produced statements as powerful as Under the Volcano as well as several Kerouac novels - from the sweetness of ''The Dharma Bums'' to the terrifying wine-soaked hallucination of the true cross over ''Big Sur.'' We may know the drinking wasn't necessary, but Jack didn't. And though he gave in to his drinking, he never completely abandoned his search. His record of that search reminds us why we value him so much. It was a sacrifice from which most of us shrink, a gift for which he paid the highest price. We can argue that his life was tragic or his talent misspent, but never doubt the passion that drove it. He showed us America through his innocent eyes, singing to us like the canary old-time coal miners took underground. When the bird died, they knew it as a warning that the air was deadly and that their own lives were no longer safe.
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