Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America [1] by Dennis McNally was published in 1979. As the title states, this is more than a biography of Kerouac but a history of his Beat contemporaries and how they all fit within the nation as a whole. The lives of Kerouac’s intimate friends such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were fleshed out which gave them a solid place in literary history instead of being merely peripheral figures. McNally also profiled other writers, poets and friends in the Kerouac circle such as William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lucien Carr and Carolyn Cassady. In spite of these additional details I found this book an unfortunately slow read. This had nothing to do with my recent read of another Kerouac biography. If anything, I think that two biographies about the same person read almost in succession would lead to a faster read of the second. Yet Desolate Angel was so boring. I’d have thought that tales of Kerouac jumping free rides on trains, crisscrossing the US, his family’s never-ending series of moving house and his stoned times in Mexico would be exciting reading. It wasn’t until well past the halfway mark, when McNally wrote about the success of On the Road and Kerouac’s inability to deal with the attendant fame, that it became interesting to the degree that I couldn’t put the book down (but only so much for me to up my rating of the book from two to three stars out of five).
Kerouac loathed the media’s misappropriation the Beat label and this was a challenge for him whenever he appeared in person or on television. He had an image to sustain yet it was not what his interviewers were making it out to be. “Beat” did not mean dropout, lack of ambition and delinquent, however near the end of his life Kerouac was fulfilling this very impression with his public drunkenness and behaviour. He was even arrested several times for it. McNally portrayed Kerouac as a drunk throughout the entire decade of the 1960’s, and he was thorough in his reporting of brawls, confrontations, TV appearances and letter exchanges where Kerouac fueled himself on Dutch courage.
A surname like Kerouac is Celtic in origin and Jack, whose parents were both Québécois, traced his ancestors back to Brittany. I was most interested in Kerouac’s exploration of his Breton heritage but his constant state of intoxication resulted in an endless string of non-starters. McNally told of countless trips Kerouac took, often crisscrossing the US with the intention of visiting friends or to do work, only to turn around as soon as he got there.
As I have several Kerouac novels in my library still unread, I appreciated the detailed backstories McNally provided, such as:
“Just after he returned to Florida, Jack sat at the typewriter for a week with a bottle of cognac at his side and produced a new work, Satori in Paris. It was the first time he’d written while drinking, and it showed.”
It’s good to know this, as I have this book in my collection. I’ll be more inclined to let things go, and not pull my hair out trying to get into Kerouac’s mind to understand what he had written, now that I know that he was drunk while writing it.
Neither of the other Kerouac biographies I had read talked at great length about his funeral. As I read about the guests and tributes I was left with a profound sadness and as I finished the final paragraph I might have had a good cry had I been somewhere else.
This book was worth reading if you can tolerate the slow pace that painted Kerouac’s life before On the Road. I raced through the rest of the biography but it was sad that McNally only made Kerouac’s life interesting when he was transformed into an unkempt alcoholic who hung out in bars and told everyone off.
I probably will shed some tears for him on his one hundredth birthday. I admire Kerouac’s talent as a writer and as a scholar of literature but he wasted his life away on booze.
[1] The title page omits A Biography as seen on the cover.