Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac at NYPL
by Jessica Verderame
"Beat" isn't just a word - it's a feeling. You feel it in music; you feel it when you're down and defeated. Jack Kerouac felt it in experiencing life, truth and spirituality. He was the heart and soul of the Beat generation, an intellectual generation that took the word to a different level. They were a generation of writers; Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder and Neil Cassidy also made their mark in a major way, each one crazy for the same type of ideal as Kerouac.
The New York Public Library on 42nd Street has put together an exhibit in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's most famous novel, On the Road, until March 16. The exhibit showcases pieces of this erratic soul put together in such a way as to capture his fleeting energy, mostly through photos, artwork, drafts of works and dozens of his pocket notebooks. The first thing you see when you walk in, however, is perhaps the most exciting to Kerouac fans. Walk under the flashing yellow "Kerouac" sign, through the doorway, and you see a long glass case that seems to continue into a large image of a road on the opposite wall. Inside this case is the first half of the original scroll, 60 feet of the taped together papers, on which On the Road was born.
But if you were to start at the beginning instead, you would get a pleasant introduction to the Beat generation. It briefs you on the other major players, their famous works, their correspondence, and shows tons of pictures they took of each other. The next portion on Jack's adolescence, showing his early pictures, writings and influences, is pretty dull, but it becomes more interesting if you move on to the section that displays his ideas, drafts and notes pertaining to On the Road. It's interesting to see the development of this novel, especially considering that it was widely believed to have been written without stopping, editing or planning. Well, apparently not. Jack carefully worked out the novel in notebook upon notebook, maps of the character's route and scraps of paper before hitting the typewriter.
Jack's innermost thoughts, collected in his notebooks, are also scattered throughout the exhibit. If you are interested in perusing the author’s soul, then it is worth spending the time deciphering the things he wrote in these notebooks. Some of them show examples of his experimental "sketching," which he called "spontaneous prose," in which he recreates the spontaneity of a moment through words. Others are his writings on Buddhism and his spirituality, which were his main focuses for a good portion of his short-lived life.
Just these snippets from his journals say so much - even someone with no prior knowledge of the author could pay a visit and by the time they leave know the essence of him. His artwork that is displayed also helps, which ranges from portraits of Van Gogh to landscapes to crayon drawings depicting religious scenes. They show his extreme nature: peaceful but crazy, playful but intense. However, some of the most interesting things here are also the most eccentric, like his lists of women he has slept with - if he remembers their names - and the cities he slept with them in; or even stranger, his unsuspecting love for fantasy baseball and horse racing.
Somehow Kerouac doesn't seem to equate well with fantasy sports. He loved jazz, literature and Buddha. Though he was known to be a sports fan all his life, the extent to which he took his fantasy sports to seems a little odd. Yes, I am aware fantasy sports exist today and are pretty popular, but don’t they usually concern sports teams the actually exist? The final portion of the exhibit shows his strange hobby. There are no spiritual and literary ramblings here. Only fake, meticulously handwritten news articles complete with illustrations about horse races that never happened with horses that never existed. There is more to the fantasy baseball, however. He made intricate, color coded charts for each of his made up teams, all of them named after American'made cars; all of them have imaginary players, each one named. These teams battle it out, and Jack had kept records of each teams wins and losses every season. It shows a refreshingly silly side to the author.
Whether you love him or hate him, Kerouac was an interesting character, one who burned rather than faded out. Stop by the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at the New York Public Library to catch a glimpse into the life of a man who helped to define his generation.
