Near the end of his novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac's persona Sal Paradise sings a little poem:

Home in Missoula,
Home in Truckee,
Home in Opelousas,
Ain't no home for me.
Home in old Medora,
Home in Wounded Knee,
Home in Ogallala,
Home I'll never be.

It comes at a point in the book, based on Kerouac's own experience living with his mother, when the narrator is living with his aunt in New York. He has just sold a novel (The Town and the City) and has fine prospects of becoming a successful writer in the literary capital of America. Instead of exploiting this opportunity, he packs his belongings into a rucksack and once again sets out on a bus going west. Why does he leave? Kerouac explained: “Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go.” For a writer so concerned about his homelessness, it might seem strange to be voluntarily leaving home. But the truth is that Kerouac's whole life was a search for the home he never had.

Of course, Kerouac did have a home, like everyone else. He was born and raised in the French-Canadian community in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a place he would come to love above all others on earth—the empty, red brick mill buildings, the machine noise and inky smell of his father's print shop, the canals built for hydraulic power, the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, the high old haunted-looking frame houses, the tarry street corners where French and Irish and Greek kids played games and made mock wars and dreamed of triumphs that for most of them would forever remain imaginary. It was the time of the Great Depression, when men went for long periods without work; but that meant more time to get together, have fun, and share with one another at big dinners and parties. His own family belonged to a set of about a dozen couples that met every week at a different house for food and merriment. What people lacked in money and material wealth, they made up for in camaraderie and loyalty to friends and family. It was an enchanted time, a time of love and promise, for the world could only get better, it seemed, and good times were just around the corner.

What happened, instead, was the Second World War, and the uprooting of millions of families. Jack Kerouac's father Leo lost his printing job in the late 1930s, and after several moves the family ended up in New York, since his parents wished to be near Kerouac while he studied at Columbia University, and near to their daughter Nin, who was in the WACS (Womens Army Corps). But his father was not able to hold a steady job in New York either. Soon he contracted cancer of the spleen, and for two years before his death, his life was a living hell. Jack was permanently traumatized by the sight of his father dying this slow, painful death. Worse, his father bequeathed a great bitterness to Jack during this time, while Jack helped to care for him. Leo Kerouac told his son that life always ended badly, that one's happy days quickly perished, and that one was left with only loss and a bleak old age. Then, as if to confirm the prophecy and at the same time to try to refute it, he died in Jack's arms, making Jack promise to take care of his wife Gabrielle.

The move to New York and the subsequent death of his father were major forces behind Jack Kerouac's enormous insecurity. But looking at the earlier stages of his life one finds that Kerouac's childhood, however rich in mythic lore and family intimacy, was far from secure. His brother Gérard, whom he was inseparably attached to, died a painful death from rheumatic fever when Jack was only four. The family moved nearly twenty times before Jack was seventeen—a sign of poverty and other financial problems, most notably Leo Kerouac's penchant for gambling away his paychecks on poker games and the racetrack. Moreover, Jack Kerouac could not speak English until he was seven years old. Like other French-Canadians who had come to New England to work in the mills, the young Jack Kerouac found himself an alien because of his language and his heritage.

His mother was herself an orphan in New Hampshire—she had lost her twin sister at birth, and her mother and father soon afterward—and so she was doubly deprived of both historical and personal continuity. Yet it was from listening to his mother's and his aunt's tales of a happier life in Canada, he said, that he learned the art of “natural story-telling”. His first introduction to writing, then, came from hearing descriptions of a better world that was also a lost world—a paradise lost to the senses but not to the imagination, and recoverable, at least in part, through the magic of language.

With the coming of World War II, the whole nation began to experience the same sense of homelessness and rootlessness that had long troubled Jack Kerouac. He dropped out of Columbia University, where he had never felt at home—where he was continually ridiculed for his clothing which never fit quite right, and for his working-class manners. He was at Columbia because he could play football, not because he fit in with the scions of Ivy League society. So he signed up with the Navy, but got himself discharged by punching a commanding officer who had reprimanded him for smoking before breakfast. He made a couple of trips with the Merchant Marine, then got himself blacklisted by jumping ship in Norfolk, Virginia. Back in New York, no longer a student but a kind of raffish dropout, he hung aroung Columbia University and Times Square and began meeting the future members of the Beat Generation - a substitute family that was more satisfying than the bleak apartment on Long Island where his father lay dying of cancer and his mother kept reproaching him for his uncouth lifestyle. For a brief time the apartments he shared with his future wife Edie, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Hal Chase, Joan Adams, and other disenchanted young rebels became a veritable home away from home. But Lucien Carr's homicide of Burroughs' friend David Kammerer, and Jack's subsequent arrest as a material witness, put an end to that brief, joyous interlude. Then came the death of his father, the meeting with Neal Cassady, and the promise of the great spaces of the West, where even oddball writers might find a place to fit in.

The literary influence of Thomas Wolfe upon Kerouac has often been noted, but it is seldom pointed out that one of the key themes that both writers share is the mourning and eulogizing of a home they cannot return to—Wolfe's in Asheville, North Carolina, Kerouac's in Lowell. Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, can be read as a very literal record of this loss and the resulting disorientation experienced by all the characters — but most poignantly, and autobiographically, by Peter Martin, whose life most closely parallels Jack's own.

The motif of a lost home runs through The Town and the City. It is seen at the very beginning, when two neighbour boys run away from home, and Peter agrees to hide their trail from family and police. Later, when the boys run into real trouble, Peter and two of his brothers set out on their own to rescue them, and they in turn get in trouble when their boat is driven ashore in a storm. Suddenly they find themselves drenched by something colder than rain:

It seemed to the boys that there was something they had betrayed, something that had to do with home, their parents, their brothers and sisters, even their things in drawers and boxes in closets and chests—and that this now was their dark punishment.

The same theme recurs in the older brother Joe's wanderlust and his bouts of madness in wartime England, where he goes AWOL and loses the last traces of his patriotism in prison. When he returns to the United States after the war, Joe finds hardly any difference:

… between love or indifference, devotion or disgust, confidence or carelessness, and finally—between living joy or outlawish fury … there was no more joy, somehow no more beauty in life, no more young man's awe and delight in it, and it seemed to him that something was over and done with.

Even more significantly, we see this confused sense of direction in the arguments that Peter and his lover Judy (based on Edie Parker) have about the question of getting married. She often complains to him that he is still a child because he can't bring himself to settle down with her, and instead keeps disappearing for days at a time. He claims he wants to spend time at home with his parents, but she contends that he should make a new home with her. Peter refuses, accusing:

You want to get married, but you don't want anything that goes with it. Sure, sure, you want to get married … I don't know what kind of mother you'd make—you won't even speak a civil word to my own folks.

She protests that she wants to marry him, not his folks, but he counters that: “Where I come from young married couples get along with their folks.”

There is already an irreconcilable split between the world of exciting kicks in Manhattan, to which Peter is fatally attracted, and the last vestiges of small-town domesticity represented by his folks, which seems to offer his only hope for inner peace. He cannot have both, but he wants neither by itself. And so, at the end of the novel Peter, like Kerouac himself, hits the road in search of a new home where the opposite drives in his psyche can be satisfied. He seems confident that such a place can be found: “Don't worry about me,” he cried. “It's not raining hard at all. See? Just a drizzle, just a little drizzle. I'll be all right.” But it is clear that his journey will be long and solitary:

He was on the road again, travelling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river's cape, towards tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life.

In other words, the very nature of the journey almost precludes the possibility of his ever finding the kind of comfort and the sense of belonging he has left behind—the pursuit of this home is rendered futile even as it is begun. That both Peter and Kerouac perceive this is illustrated by the ghosts that cry out as the journey begins: “Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?” They are answered only by “a big soft gust of rain”; and, as if inured to his perpetual exile, Peter: “put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.”

Of course, when the ghosts, “the dear voices of everybody he had known”, cry out to him, “Where are you going?” the question refers to more than just physical direction—travels in the real world. The question also has to do with the career and lifestyle Kerouac has chosen, so different from that of his ancestors — French-Canadian farmers and carpenters and small shopkeepers—and from the Breton and Cornish seamen that preceded them. His family and ethnic heritage comprised working-class people who earned their living by physical toil. He alone had chosen to become an intellectual, a writer, an artist. He was well aware of the working man's scorn of such an effete, superfluous profession. His own father had scorned writers as “sissies” and degenerates, and he had warned Jack against spending time with such dangerous ne'er-do-well young poets as Sam Sampas and Allen Ginsberg, whom Leo Kerouac called “the cockroach”. In the eyes of Jack's father, artists were parasites; most of all he worried that as a writer Jack would not be able to earn his own living, let alone support a family. For most of Jack's life, that worry proved all too true.

Spiritually Jack was treading on even more perilous ground. His friend Ed White tells of how in the late 1940s Kerouac was seriously tormented by the question of whether or not he should remain a member of the Catholic Church. The Church was a strong tie with centuries of French tradition, and his own mother was a devout believer and churchgoer. But Kerouac concluded that he could not explore life sufficiently—which he needed to do as a writer—and still obey all the proscriptions that are incumbent on a good Catholic. He wanted to get drunk, to get high and get wild, and to enjoy all the pleasures of the body as well as the spirit. A part of Jack Kerouac always wanted to remain a solitary, ascetic Catholic mystic saint, scribbling his visions of heaven. But it was only in “the streets of life”, he said, that he could find the material for those visions. His brother Gérard, whom the nuns of St-Louis-de-France had called a saint, did not have to live to adulthood and struggle with adult desires, passions, and needs. Jack Kerouac, as obsessed with heaven as his brother, had to carry that quest into the real world, and the resulting paradoxes and ambivalences literally tore him apart. Perhaps that is why he often spoke of reaching a point where he would not have to write any more—where his visions would be sufficiently pure and clear that they would not need to be articulated in words. But he never reached that point, and so he never completely returned to the Catholic Church in his lifetime, though he died believing in and praying to Jesus Christ. His choice of art over religion was in some ways a measure of his integrity, but it was one more destroyer of his peace of mind, and made the possibility of finding a home even more remote.

On the other hand, Jack Kerouac was not breaking completely with family tradition by leaving the Church, since his father Leo was vociferously anti-Catholic. But Leo Kerouac had other strong anchors to the real world—a wife, children, a good trade—which his son lacked. Nor did Leo stray into such foreign and spiritually difficult waters as Jack—neo-platonism, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, etc. For Leo Kerouac, to disavow Catholicism was just a convenient ploy for a jovial businessman who liked good times, drinking and gambling and an occasional extramarital adventure. For Jack Kerouac, leaving the Catholic Church meant leaving behind any certainty about life, the meaning of life, and his own purpose in life. It meant he was completely free, and thus completely alone, in the struggle to define his own identity.

The core of Kerouac's most famous novel, On the Road, is Jack's fascination with Neal Cassady. And a great part of that fascination lies in the fact that Cassady is a saint—however unusual a variety—who goes all over the continent having fun and yet “moaning for man”, appreciating mankind's suffering and caring for it as much as he is able. Thus Cassady—known as Dean Moriarty in the novel—is never really a stranger or an outsider; he creates a family around him wherever he is at the moment. He is at home everywhere, whether in a little village in Mexico or in New York City; women love him, men love him, children love him. At one point Dean, like the reallife Neal, has wives and children in both New York and San Francisco. But rather than condemning him as a bigamist, Kerouac praises the exuberance of Cassady's life force, and of his attachment to other people. He is not the lonesome writer that Kerouac is, and Kerouac wishes desperately to be like him. But Jack is never able to work steadily at a paying job as Cassady did on the railroad, or to devote himself to a woman with the lifelong dedication of Cassady, who continued seeing his wives and lovers long after he divorced or broke up with them.

In real life, Kerouac was continually drawn to Cassady not only because of the excitement Neal generated, but also because he allowed Kerouac to enter into his extended family, and even to become the lover of his wife Carolyn. Bill Tomson, a close friend of Neal's, said that Neal used Jack's love for Carolyn as a means of manipulating Jack's friendship for him. According to Tomson, Neal always held over Jack's head the threat that he might at any time reclaim Carolyn, who was of course his lawful wife. Thus Jack was only being allowed to participate in the Cassady family by Neal's good grace, which could be revoked any moment, especially if Jack did not pay sufficient homage to Neal's masculine superiority. In fact, Jack described the nature of his problems with Neal in a similar fashion in a letter to John Clellon Holmes, where he complained of Neal cultivating the “familiar American pseudo-virility of workingmen and basketball players.”

The root of the problem was that Jack Kerouac was never capable of forming his own family, of being the breadwinner and paterfamilias that his own father Leo had been. In On the Road Sal (who is Jack) and Dean continually seek for Dean's lost father, but in effect they are searching for the father in themselves—a quest in which Dean succeeds too well, whereas Sal (Jack) succeeds not at all. In real life, Kerouac could never bring himself to acknowledge paternity of his daughter Jan, not even when he met her face to face, when she was sixteen and about to leave for Mexico. He told her, “Sure, go to Mexico. Use my name. Write a book.” That was as close as he could come to acting as a father toward her. And in cutting off his connection to his own child, to future generations, he was also cutting off his own tie to the French-Canadian ancestors whom he so deeply revered. That is the great irony of his life—that the heart of his writing, like William Saroyan's, is respect and admiration for the family, for the continuity of generations upon the earth, but in order to write the story of that continuity he was forced to isolate himself from almost everyone close to him.

The novelist Nelson Algren, himself a victim of several bad marriages and love affairs, once wrote that writers must inevitably lead lonely lives. According to him:

The writer needs, as much as anybody, he needs this steady situation with one woman and he knows, as everybody knows, that it's not good to scatter yourself. If you stay with one woman then it gets better. But, if you do that, the conflict arises in this because he not only wants that, but he also wants to use this particular ability he has. Everybody he knows, anybody can get married and have children. He wants to be the one who does it differently. Anybody just by falling in love and having somebody fall in love with him can achieve that, but not many people can get love the way Dickens had, where people, an ordinary housewife, would follow him down the street and thank him for the people he had given her. So this is a very rare opportunity and if you see this, and even if you only see it or even if you begin to get through letters from people you've never seen a kind of a love and a kind of a recognition that you're helping them, this is something more. This is something that can seem to the writer to make it worth while giving up the stable situation.

Clearly Jack Kerouac wanted that something more—the love and recognition of his country and his people. Like Whitman he wanted to be a voice both for past ages and for the unborn. And he could not at the same time manage a steady commitment to a wife and children. Algren at least had a home in the city of Chicago, where he lived for most of his life, even though Chicago often repudiated him and severely criticized his pictures of the city. But Kerouac had lost Lowell as a teenager, and did not come to live there again till a few years before his death. The only real tie he had to humanity was in the person of his mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, known as Mémère.

Quite simply, Mémère represented home to him. Much has been made of that mother-son connection, in Freudian neurotic terms, and there is no doubt some truth to the unhealthy quality of Jack's great dependence on her. One of the poems he liked to read began with the line, “I keep falling in love with my mother.” But he did not mean merely that his mother held more attraction for him than most of the women he knew; but rather, that he needed that confirmation of love which only his mother provided with any consistency, and which he had failed to find elsewhere in thousands and thousands of miles of travel. Home, after all, is where you are loved and accepted, and it was only with his mother that he could be certain of feeling that way.

Again, in Kerouac's novel The Subterraneans, critics often attach an Oedipal significance to the narrator Leo's rejecting the black woman Mardou in favor of his mother. But there is a very important passage near the end of the book, when he speaks of his fear that Mardou will some day disappear. In terror of being left alone, he has a vision of his mother's face that reassures him. He seems to hear her speaking to him in dialectical French:

Pauvre Ti Leo, pauvre Ti Leo, tu souffri, les hommes souffri tant, y'ainque toi dans le monde j'va't prendre soin, j'aim'ra beaucoup t'prendre soin tous les jours mon ange. Poor Little Leo, poor Little Leo, you suffer, men suffer so, you're all alone in the world I'll take care of you, I would very much like to take care of you all your days my angel.

He attributes his deep attachment to his mother to the fact that she will unconditionally offer him a vision of the face of the woman:

… who is your mother who loves you so much she has supported you and protected you for years, you a bum, a drunkard—never complained a jot—because she knows that in your present state you can't go out in the world and make a living and take care of yourself and even find and hold the love of another protecting woman.

Similarly, in his book Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac tells how after a week of sightseeing in London, he listens to a performance of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion by the St. Paul's choir, and suddenly sees “a vision of an angel in my mother's kitchen”, which suggests to him that it is time to return “home to sweet America again.” It is interesting how the combination of Christian music with memories of his mother inspires him to go back to his house in Florida and resume writing; as he leaves St. Paul's Cathedral, he writes, “I saw my own mission.” Clearly that mission is as much to find a home as to write the story of his search; and somehow he believes that the writing will lead him to his goal.

It is also useful to examine Kerouac's interest in Buddhism as a further extension of his search for a home. Homelessness is one of the principal themes of his Buddhist novel The Dharma Bums. As he hitch-hikes, the narrator Ray Smith sings a song called “Everybody's Got a Home but Me”. He speaks of the bleak feelings of homelessness that oppress him in cheap hotel rooms along the road. And most movingly, he relates how one night in a hobo jungle in Los Angeles, for no particular reason, he began to cry: “I felt rather sad, in fact real sad … After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.” The function of his Buddhism is in some ways to deny the importance of a physical home, by declaring that the world, indeed the whole universe, is completely empty. At the same time, that vast emptiness becomes a kind of ultimate, supreme home for him. He is empty, the world is empty, and that emptiness is where he belongs:

I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things, I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry. …

He tries to convince himself it is “better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”

To the perfect Buddhist sage, of course, one's home is in the tranquility of the one mind; and it matters not whether you sleep in a mansion or by the side of the road. In San Francisco Blues he wrote: “I want to go to Golden—that's my home—sleep in my golden dream.” But the truth is that Jack Kerouac never attained such serene acceptance. His good friend Gary Snyder, a practicing Buddhist, said that in his more honest moments Jack knew better than to claim he was a Buddha. Jack's endless religious preoccupation was rooted in his inability to accept any solution completely. In effect, he was often seeing his own problems reflected in various religious scriptures, rather than entering into those scriptures on their own terms. So it was that what attracted him in both Buddhism and Christianity was the description of the holy wanderer, the man without a home who then embraces all of humanity—in the case of Buddhism, the whole sentient universe—because of its similar situation. One of the most famous passages in the New Testament is Jesus' declaration that: “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” In a description of St. Patrick's Cathedral in “Manhattan Sketches”, Kerouac writes a wonderful paean to Saint Joseph as “an old hobo saint of haylofts and camel trails.” What Kerouac loves about Saint Joseph is his absolute humility and lack of pretension:

… eyes lowered to a mystery he himself wasn't hipped to yet he'll go along in the belief that poor St. Joseph was clay to the hand of God … a humble self-admitting truthful Saint—with none of the vain freneticisms of Francis, a Saint without glory, guilt, accomplishment or charm—a self-effacing grave and demure ghost in the Arcades of Christendom—he who knew the desert stars, and spat with the Wise Men in back of the barn. …

In Saint Joseph—the anonymous carpenter glad of the opportunity to rest in a stable, and yet helping to unfold a mystery of which he himself is ignorant—Jack saw himself.

One of the ambivalences that Kerouac could never resolve was his simultaneous reverence for hobos, for men of the road, and his insistence on tracing his human roots across the centuries, as if to fix with great finality his place in the ever-evolving pageant of mankind. He accepted his own mortality, but he wanted to leave behind a long shelf of books, the story of “what really happened to him”, which would be read forever. And as he grew older, and saw death approaching, the writings were no longer sufficient guarantee of a permanent home for his self in history, and he became obsessed with tracing and recording his exact genealogy.

Even casual visitors to his home in the 1960s would hear him expound about his Breton ancestry, about the Baron François-Louis-Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac who left Brittany and came to Canada to help Montcalm fight Wolfe for the valley of the St. Lawrence, and how the Baron later travelled north with an Iroquois princess to found a large family that spread in all directions, from Prince of Wales Island down to New England. Even farther back, he speculated about the path of his ancestors from Ireland to Cornwall to Brittany, and he claimed that Kerouac was “the oldest Irish name on earth”. He also claimed that the legendary Isolde was a Kerouac kidnapped by the Cornishman Tristan; and he imagined that he could remember a past life as an Arthurian knight. Eventually he traced his supposed ancestors back to Scotland, Russia and Persia, from whose warrior caste came the Buddha. When he spoke of these matters, he did so with great passion and insisted that they were “generally true”; but it seems clear that he was really trying to convince himself of his right to participate in this world, in the family of man, from which he had always felt excluded.

The folly of his genealogical pursuit appears most clearly in Kerouac's novel Satori in Paris. Back in 1957, on his first big trip to Europe, he had stopped in the British Museum and looked up his family in Rivista Araldica, where he found “Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.” So in June 1965 he began what was to have been an extended trip to Paris, Brittany and Cornwall, to further research his family's history. But by this time he was a severe alcoholic and scarcely capable of taking care of himself. He did get as far as the Bibliothèque nationale, but the librarians were suspicious of his drunken and dishevelled appearance and would not entrust him with the rarer volumes necessary to trace the royal lineage of his family. He was similarly snubbed at two other libraries and was even asked to leave the office of his publisher Gallimard because of his intoxication. From there he proceeded to have numerous misadventures with bartenders, prostitutes and cab drivers. But finally, in Brittany, he did make contact with a distant relative, Ulysse Lebris, the proprietor of a large restaurant in Brest. Of course, he was proving a point just by being the first Kerouac in 210 years to return to his French roots—and it was his feelings about belonging in France that really counted, not the specific entries in biographical dictionaries. But in reality he was so drunk and disorderly that he just barely kept out of serious trouble, and depended upon numerous compassionate strangers to get him safely on his plane back to Florida, where he looked forward to hearing the sound of the Sunday paper being thrown on his driveway.

In Satori in Paris he makes clear just how farcical the whole endeavour had been: “Johnny Magee around the corner as anybody knows can, with any luck, find in Ireland that he's the descendant of the Morholt's King and so what? Johnny Anderson, Johnny Goldstein, Johnny Anybody, Lin Chin, Ti Pak, Ron Poodlewhorferer, Anybody.” Ultimately finding a heraldic shield connected to his name could provide no more satisfaction than mingling, as he did years earlier, with what he called the “fellaheen” people, the peasants of Mexico and Tangier, or asserting his brotherhood with the Indians of the Southwest or the Northwest Territories. Since at this point in his life he had put so much of himself into his writing, what he needed was acceptance for that writing. And the great tragedy for Kerouac is that, as the 1960s wore on, his books went out of print almost as quickly as they were published, and the recognition he lived for dwindled to almost nothing.

Gregory Corso has painted one of the finest pictures of Kerouac at this time in his poem “Elegiac Feelings American.”

How inseparable you and the America you saw yet
was never there to see. You and America, like the
tree and the ground, are one the same; yet how like
a palm tree in the state of Oregon … dead ere it blossomed …
How so that which you were or hoped to be, and
the America not, the America you saw yet could not
see …
Did it look beautiful to you, did it sound so too, in
its cold electric blue, that America that spewed and
stenched your home, your good brain, that unreal
fake America, that caricature of America, that
plugged in a wall America … a gallon of desperate
whiskey a day it took ye to look that America in its
disembodied eye …
And it saw you not, it never saw you, for what you
saw was not there … and sad and lonely, you the
real face and voice … caught before the fake face and
voice—and it became real and you fake,
O the awful fragility of things.
What happened to him? What happened to you?
Death happened to him; a gypped life happened; a
God gone sick happened; a dream nightmared …
And you, Jack, poor Jack, watched your father die,
your America die, your God die, your body die, die,
die, die; and today fathers are watching their sons
die, and their sons are watching babies die, why?
why? How we both asked WHY?
O the sad sad awfulness of it all.

What Corso proposes is that Kerouac's vision of America was somehow truer than the actual course America chose to take in the 1960s—the time of imperialistic warmaking, of police repression at home. Indeed, in the last essay he wrote, “After Me, the Deluge”, Kerouac argued with great pathos that he could no longer identify with anyone in America, neither the right-wing warmongers, nor the long-haired, unwashed kids in the street burning the American flag and screaming, like Jerry Rubin, “Murder your parents!” No wonder he turned seriously to the writing of a long story of his ancestry, to be called Memory Babe, which unfortunately he lacked the health and concentration to finish. And in 1962, he began a series of futile attempts to return to Lowell, to the home of his memories, which no longer existed in the real world.

Kerouac's return to his native town in those last years marks one of the saddest episodes in his life story. When he reappeared in 1962, hoping to buy a house with money from his lastest novel Big Sur, his appearance shocked most of his former friends and acquaintances. He was dirty, his face booze-lined, his hair dishevelled; he was loud and overbearing, singing off key to jukeboxes, guzzling booze by the quart, making a disgusting spectacle of himself. He came back again in 1964, with similar intent and with similar results. It was only with the protection of close friends, like the Sampas family, that he managed to escape serious beatings or arrest by the police. And then finally, in 1967, after his mother's stroke and his marriage to Stella Sampas, the sister of his boyhood friend Sam, he did purchase a home in Lowell, and proved to himself once and for all that “you can't go home again.”

The tales I heard of him during that year and a half in Lowell, 1967-1968, suggest a man so tormented and abused that it is painful even to contemplate. It seems he hardly drew a sober breath; he was drunk almost continuously. His former best friends, like G. J. Apostolos, would cross the street to avoid meeting him. His vile language in front of women caused several old friends to punch him and throw him out of their bars. He was even thrown out of the Pawtucketville Social Club, which his father had once managed. People complained that he “stank like a goat”; they laughed that the great author was often to be found passed out under a pinball machine. Those close to him barely tolerated him. Most people did not understand him at all, and out of sheer loneliness and boredom he chose the company of barflies, bartenders, bums, and minor criminals. His wife Stella loved him but was unable to control his bouts of madness and Dionysian drinking. Sometimes she would hide his clothing and shoes to keep him from going out, but he would go out anyway in his pajamas and bedroom slippers, and sometimes get arrested for exposing himself while urinating on a fireplug.

Out of the alienation of those last years he produced one of his greatest novels, Vanity of Duluoz. His present status as outcast made him recall lovingly the time when men passing on the street were not afraid to look in one another's eyes; and if they didn't look, it wasn't out of guilt or fear, but merely because they were so deeply absorbed in things they believed in. He described:

… a guy going home for supper with his fists buried deep in the side-pockets of his jacket, whistling and striding along in his own thoughts, not even looking at anybody else on the sidewalk, and after supper you'd always see the same guy rushing out the same way, headed for the corner candy store, or to see Joe, or to a movie or to the poolroom or the deadman's shift in the mills or to see his girl.

In Vanity of Duluoz he deplores an America “where everybody's begun to lie, and because they lie they assume that I lie too.” The worst of those lies was the way people now denied their origins, and in so doing they robbed themselves and others of the dignity that accrues to families and nations that have struggled to maintain their traditions and values down through the centuries. The worst insult he received was from a woman who wrote him, “You are not Jack Kerouac. There is no Jack Kerouac. His books were not even written.” To her, and to the world, he answered in Vanity of Duluoz: “Who is he that is not ‘he’ because of an idiot's ignorance?” The main impetus of the novel was an insistence on the authenticity of the Duluoz Legend, the legend of his life, to keep himself from believing that:

I'm not Jack Kerouac at all and that my birth records, my family's birth records and recorded origins, my athletic records in the newspaper clippings I have, my own notebooks and published books, are not real at all, but all lies. …

Indeed, he used all those records and clippings and notebooks while writing the novel, and even went so far as to set a mirror above his typewriter, so that from time to time he could stare into his own face while writing the book.

In his earlier novel Desolation Angels, Kerouac had decided that his travels on the road must end—this was in 1957—because the loneliness and pain of living as a stranger in strange places was simply too much for him to bear. At the end of that book he stated his intention to:

… live with Mémère in a house of her own miles from the city, it's a peaceful sorrow. A peaceful sorrow at home is the best I'll ever be able to offer the world, in the end, and so I told my Desolation Angels goodbye. A new life for me.

He also spoke of his house as a monastery, of which Mémère was the Reverend Mother. Now in Lowell, in the late 1960s, that new so-called monastic life had proved even more lonely and more painful than his life on the road. And as the intensity of his personal horror grew, so his vision of the perfect home his family had left behind in Canada came to occupy his mind ever more strongly.

In March 1967 a Montreal television crew invited him to appear on the Radio-Canada television program «Le sel de la semaine». Kerouac was embarrassed that the audience laughed at his pronunciation of French words, for the French-Canadian dialect in Lowell was quite different from the language spoken in Canada. But the brief trip to Montreal inspired Kerouac to attempt a longer trip that summer to Rivière-du-Loup, to research the civic and parish records for both his mother's and father's families. He made the trip with a good friend of his from Lowell, another French-Canadian, Joe Chaput, who served as his driver. But the trip proved even more disastrous than his trip to Paris in 1965. Jack was terribly drunk on cognac for several days, and kept himself from passing out only by taking large doses of benzedrine. He got in fights in bars and was turned away from numerous motels. Fortunately, Joe protected him from serious injury. He never got to see the archives in Rivière-du-Loup. He was simply grateful for a few days away from the anguish and misery that awaited him at home in Lowell. For he could no longer avoid the realization that he had no real home on earth. His home, he then saw, was with his father and his brother (and now also his sister) in heaven.

This notion had occurred to him as early as 1955, when he had written in Mexico City Blues: “I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.” The great significance of heaven, for Kerouac, was that it was a home that could not be taken away from him. If the French in Canada are exiles in their own homeland, the French-Canadians in America have no homeland at all. The only town he could call home, Lowell, was a decaying mass of betrayed dreams and dead hopes. If hope still existed, it had to be found somewhere outside of his own experience. “Christ was right,” he wrote in Satori in Paris, “in that, the life of a person is, as W. C. Fields says, ‘Fraught with eminent peril’ but when you know that when you die you will be elevated because you've done no harm, Ah take that back to Brittany and Elsewhere too.” He came finally to realize that all the research in the world will lead one only to the grave, and that the answers to be found there cannot be read with human eyes.

The result of this understanding led Kerouac, in his last years, to see life as if he were looking at it from his own grave. It may seem a final irony that this man, who celebrated the idea of home with such glorious poetry, should have ended his life by turning away, at least in spirit, from the earth itself, and from all attachment to the material world. But one must remember what Father Morrisette said in his eulogy at Kerouac's funeral in St-Jean-Baptiste Church in Lowell. He declared: “To share completely is to give up completely. Christ did this.” And in truth, by giving up at last his claim on any particular home, or on any particular forbears, Kerouac was somehow reaching out to join all of us more completely—just as his books would eventually travel across national boundaries and lines of race, creed, sex, and colour, to touch millions of individuals, rich and poor, dropouts and college graduates, homebodies and revolutionaries, all around the world, and make each of them value and appreciate their own unique lives more than they could have done before.

Jack Kerouac was a writer without a home, and so he found a home with all of us, in all our hearts.

And yet, to the very end, those deep ties of blood and memory were still with him. On the morning of his death, he was writing in a notebook on his lap, making notes for a new novel to be called The Spotlight Print, after his father's last print shop in Lowell. There you have it—the French-Canadian father, the hometown of Lowell, the printed word—all together in one integral vision of the meaning of his life. It would have been a masterpiece, had he lived to write it. As it is, we will have to write it for him, in our thoughts and memories, and in our own visions.