The consistent life ethic (CLE), also known as the consistent ethic of life or whole life ethic, is an ideology that opposes abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Adherents oppose war, or at the very least unjust war; some adherents go as far as full pacifism and so oppose all war. Many authors have understood the ethic to be relevant to a broad variety of areas of public policy as well as social justice issues. The term was popularized in 1983 by the Catholic prelate Joseph Bernardin in the United States to express an ideology based on the premise that all human life is sacred and should be protected by law.
While there are many adherents, CLE is not exclusively but primarily a
Catholic doctrine and/or associated with the Catholic Church.
History
The phrase "consistent ethic of life" was used as far back as a 1971 speech delivered by then-Archbishop Humberto Medeiros of Boston.
Eileen Egan
In 1971, the Catholic pacifist Eileen Egan coined the phrase "seamless garment" to describe a holistic reverence for life.The phrase is a Bible reference from John 19:23 to the seamless robe of Jesus,
which his executioners left whole rather than dividing it at his
execution. The seamless garment philosophy holds that issues such as
abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice,
and economic injustice all demand a consistent application of moral
principles valuing the sanctity of human life. "The protection of life",
said Egan, "is a seamless garment. You can't protect some life and not
others." Her words were meant to challenge members of society who
divided their commitment to protecting and cherishing human life,
choosing anti-war stances but not anti-abortion work, or those members
of the anti-abortion movement who were in favor of capital punishment.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago
helped publicize the consistent life ethic idea, initially in a lecture
at Fordham University, December 6, 1983. At first Bernardin spoke out
against nuclear war and abortion. However, he quickly expanded the scope
of his view to include all aspects of human life. In that Fordham
University lecture, Bernardin said: "The spectrum of life cuts across
the issues of genetics, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare and
the care of the terminally ill."
Bernardin said that although each of the issues was distinct,
nevertheless the issues were linked since the valuing and defending of
(human) life were, he believed, at the center of both issues. Bernardin
told an audience in Portland, Oregon: "When human life is considered
'cheap' or easily expendable in one area, eventually nothing is held as
sacred and all lives are in jeopardy."
Bernardin drew his stance from New Testament principles,
specifically of forgiveness and reconciliation, yet he argued that
neither the themes nor the content generated from those themes were
exclusively Christian. By doing this, Bernardin attempted to create a dialogue with others who were not necessarily aligned with Christianity.
Bernardin and other advocates of this ethic sought to form a
consistent policy that would link abortion, capital punishment, economic
injustice, euthanasia, and unjust war.
Bernardin sought to unify conservative Catholics (who opposed abortion)
and liberal Catholics (who opposed capital punishment) in the United
States. By relying on fundamental principles, Bernardin also sought to
coordinate work on several different spheres of Catholic moral theology. In addition, Bernardin argued that since the 1950s the church had moved against its own historical, casuistic
exceptions to the protection of life. "To summarize the shift
succinctly, the presumption against taking human life has been
strengthened and the exceptions made ever more restrictive."
The Network also consists of member groups such as Rehumanize
International, created under the name Life Matters Journal by Aimee
Murphy in 2011. Secular Pro-Life, Democrats for Life of America, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (PLAGAL), and All Our Lives (a pro-contraception feminist group), New Wave Feminists (led by Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa), and the American Solidarity Party, a Christian Democratic political party, are all additional members. These organizations collaborate with Consistent Life Network for activism and volunteer outreach efforts.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops promotes the culture of life,
which their endorsers also claim to mean the consistent ethic of life,
through publications, volunteer efforts, and declarations. Several
Catholic dioceses have groups created with the aim of promoting the
consistent life ethic in their communities and putting it into practice. The Catholic Worker Movement, established by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin,
is an organization primarily aimed towards grassroots organization and
volunteer work to serve the poor, marginalized, and those facing
unexpected pregnancies.
Bernardin considered opposition to abortion to be an integral part of the consistent life ethic. In a 1988 interview with National Catholic Register,
he stated, "I feel very, very strongly about the right to life of the
unborn, the weakest and most vulnerable of human beings. I don’t see how
you can subscribe to the consistent ethic and then vote for someone who
feels that abortion is a 'basic right' of the individual. The
consequence of that position would be an absence of legal protection for
the unborn."
Many consistent life ethic adherents advocate for increased social support for parents in addition to legal protection for the unborn.
Advocates for the consistent life ethic have reacted positively to the release of the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision (2022), which overruled both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
According to Herb Geraghty of Rehumanize International, "Right now is
clearly a moment for celebration, and for mourning the lives that have
been lost in the last 50 years due to the Roe v. Wade decision."
In a 1977 statement following the Gregg v. Georgia decision—which reaffirmed the United States Supreme Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States—Bernardin
wrote, "Many have expressed the view [...] that in this day of
increasing violence and disregard for human life, a return to the use of
capital punishment can only lead to further erosion of respect for life
and to the increased brutalization of our society."
Bernardin's opposition to capital punishment
was rooted in the conviction that an atmosphere of respect for life
must pervade a society, and resorting to the death penalty would not
support this attitude.
Modern-day adherents to the consistent life ethic continue to oppose
the use of capital punishment; in this advocacy, some echo Bernardin's
appeal to the sanctity of life, while others emphasize the relationships between class, race and capital punishment to argue that there is not a way for capital punishment to be used justly.
One outspoken anti-death penalty activist is Sister Helen Prejean. Her books Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account to Wrongful Executions are autobiographical accounts of the time she spent ministering to death row inmates.
Health care
Bernardin
understood the consistent life ethic as implying a societal
responsibility to provide adequate health care for all, especially the
poor.
As such, appeals to the consistent life ethic have been made in support of universal health care.
In vitro fertilization
In vitro fertilization is a process in which multiple viable embryos
are created, and a single one implanted, with the extra ones frozen for
potential future use. After the parents stop paying the storage fees
for these, they are discarded, which has been opposed by anti-abortion
advocates.
Herb Geraghty, executive director of the secular group Rehumanize
International, which promotes the consistent life ethic, said, "We
should not intentionally end the life of a human being, regardless of
where they are in their lifecycle, in a womb or in a fertility lab",
but also that he does not know what should be done with the "thousands
of human beings who are currently frozen against their will."
James Hedges,
in an article titled "Prohibition Platform incorporates a Consistent
Life Ethic," stated that "Alcohol in many ways causes 'premature
deaths,' and it degrades the quality of life before death." However, with the exception of the Prohibition Party, most organizations that embrace a consistent life ethic do not take a stance on the prohibition of alcohol.
Refugees
The consistent life ethic has been invoked to include care for immigrants and refugees.While not directly appealing to the consistent life ethic, other
Catholics have sought to apply the pro-life ethic to the issue of
immigration.
Criticisms
One
criticism made of the consistent life ethic position is that it
inadvertently helped provide "cover" or support for politicians who
supported legalized abortion or wanted to minimize this issue, a
circumstance that Bernardin himself both recognized and deplored. A critic of Joseph Bernardin, George Weigel
rejected the claims that the consistent life ethic had been created to
cover up for abortion rights, saying that Bernardin was "a committed
pro-lifer". He still criticized the concept as a legacy of what he
considers to be Bernardin's "culturally accommodating Catholicism".
The concept of a consistent life ethic is often rejected in the
United States and abroad by those who prefer to use the concept of a culture of life as was promoted by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in their encyclicals. Archbishop José Gómez
of Los Angeles dismissed the "seamless garment" approach in 2016
because in his view it results in "a mistaken idea that all issues are
morally equivalent". The "seamless garment" approach was also criticized by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger while he was serving as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a July 2004 letter written to now former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick
and to the United States Bishops as a whole, Cardinal Ratzinger makes
it clear that the church does not treat capital punishment with the same
moral weight that it does abortion and euthanasia: "Not all moral
issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For
example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father [the
Pope] on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to
wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present
himself to receive Holy Communion...There may be a legitimate diversity
of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death
penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."
Jesuit magazine America
stated in an article published on 6 December 2023 that the consistent
life ethic, generally speaking, has been a failure, writing:
"Depressingly, 40 years since Cardinal Bernardin first proposed the
consistent ethic of life, the ethic remains mired in the same senseless,
polarized partisanship that Bernardin proposed the ethic to overcome."
In religion and ethics, the sanctity of life, sometimes described as the inviolability of life, is a principle of implied protection regarding aspects of sentient life that are said to be holy, sacred, or otherwise of such value
that they are not to be violated. This can be applied to humans,
animals or micro-organisms; for instance, in religions that practice Ahimsa, both are seen as holy and worthy of life. Sanctity of life sits at the centre of debate over abortion and euthanasia.
Pikuach nefesh
allows the Jewish person to override all other Jewish laws and
practices in order to preserve human life. It places the conservation of
humanity and the survival of a human being above every other possible
thing. It applies to both saving the lives of Jews and non-Jews.
All denominations of Judaism allow abortion to save the life of
the mother, but there is no common consensus for other situations in
which abortion could be used. Due to the treatment of a foetus as a part
of the mother, but not as a separate human being, this is often cited
to permit abortion by Jewish people.
In Islam
Islam
considers all life forms sacred, but puts humans above other living
things. Islam considers the unlawful killing of a person on the same
level as the killing of all humanity. The same is applicable in the
inverse: saving a life is as important as saving the entire of humanity.
The Qur'an never explicitly refers to abortion, but other teachings can be applied to the matter. Muslims believe that ensoulment occurs on the 120th day of gestation.
Before ensoulment, abortion is allowed for foetal anomalies. After
ensoulment, all schools of Islam allow abortion to save the life of the
mother, and in the case of an intrauterine death
(miscarriage), but on little other grounds. However, there is a
growing movement to allow abortion for malformed foetuses whose deaths
are inevitable shortly after birth.
The inability to provide for a foetus is generally dismissed as an
acceptable reason, but some schools of thought are more lenient on the
matter.
In Eastern religions
In Western thought, sanctity of life is usually applied solely to the human species (anthropocentrism, sometimes called dominionism), in marked contrast to many schools of Eastern philosophy, which often hold that all animal life is sacred―in some cases to such a degree that, for example, practitioners of Jainism carry brushes with which to sweep insects from their path, lest they inadvertently tread upon them.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal
hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his
literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have
been published.
Biography
Early life and adolescence
Jack Kerouac's birthplace, 9 Lupine Road, 2nd floor, West Centralville, Lowell, Massachusetts
Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to
French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and
Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).
There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac.
His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family
legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis
Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his
name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec. Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.
Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek), and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany.
Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland
before the time of Christ and the name meant "language of the house". In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for "language of the water" and related to Kerwick. Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.
His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell
Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu".
The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother
Gerard died of rheumatic fever,
aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who later said
Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of
Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard.
He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was
referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his
childhood.
Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English
at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late
teens. He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons. He later said she was the only woman he ever loved.
After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his
father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.
Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg
towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his
parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously
unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published
as La vie est d'hommage.
On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession. For penance, he was told to say a rosary,
during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he
would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end
receive salvation. This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary
(as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a
later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified
the worldview which informed his work.
Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side
of New York. He recalled "a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in
arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this
Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi
right in the gutter."
Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar
contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation
from Gabrielle.
From around this time, Kerouac's journal includes an ambitious
"Immediate Reading List," a wide-ranging list that includes sacred texts
from India and China as well as a note to read "Emerson and Thoreau (again)."
He spent a year at Horace Mann School,
where he befriended Seymour Wyse, an Englishman whom he later featured
as a character, under the pseudonym 'Lionel Smart', in several of
Kerouac's books. He also cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to
the new styles of jazz, including bop.
After his year at Horace Mann, Kerouac earned the requisite grades for
entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his
freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year he argued
constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.He was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived.He also studied at The New School.
During World War II, Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before its maiden voyage.
A few months later, the SS Dorchester was sunk during a submarine
attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates
were lost. In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserves.
He served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on
the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he "asked
for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox
and sent me here." The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's
military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: "I just can't stand it; I
like to be by myself." Two days later he was honorably discharged on
the psychiatric grounds that he was of "indifferent character" with a
diagnosis of "schizoid personality".
While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother.
The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over
40 years after Kerouac's death. Kerouac described the work as being
about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities,
frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." He viewed the work as a
failure, calling it a "crock as literature" and never actively seeking
to publish it.
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr
since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a
native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know
both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr said Kammerer's homosexual
obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death
in self-defense.
Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help
from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried
Kammerer's eyeglasses.
Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac
and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's
father refused to pay his bail; Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker
if her parents would pay the bail. They married on Tuesday 22 August
1944 in the Municipal Building, with two detectives as witnesses, before
Kerouac was returned to his cell in the Bronx City Prison (their
marriage was annulled in 1948.) Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park", alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park", and to the film The Wizard of Oz.
Early career: 1950–1957
Jack Kerouac lived with his parents for a time above a corner drug store in Ozone Park (now a flower shop), while writing some of his earliest work.
The Town and the City
was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and, though it
earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily
influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe,
it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of
small-town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the
city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.
454 West 20th Street
For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly.
Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation"
and "Gone on the Road", he completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.
The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip
adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the
late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat
writers and friends. Although some of the novel is focused on driving,
Kerouac did not have a driver's license and Cassady did most of the
cross-country driving. He learned to drive aged 34, but never had a
formal license.
Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a
three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac
wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him
with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to
keep him going. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper
into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together
into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine.
This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of
reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or
paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which was
eventually published. Though "spontaneous," Kerouac had prepared long in
advance before beginning to write. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.
Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a "railroad brakeman and fire lookout" (see Desolation Peak (Washington))
traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn
money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for
writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and
befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced
Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers.
According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story
about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we
found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those
2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all
the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR
GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever
Established and really must not be spoken about." According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road
has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks,
but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an
American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his
diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to
be forgiven.
In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac. In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, whom he acknowledged as his daughter after a blood test confirmed it nine years later.
For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling,
taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced
episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he
finished drafts of what became ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.
In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with Alene Lee,
an African-American woman, and member of the Beat generation. Alene was
the basis for the character named "Mardou" in the novel The Subterraneans, and Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.
In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose
Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between
1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called
"Nin," and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, North Carolina ("Testament, Va." in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism. He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.
Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum,
the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism
and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism;
characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).
In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication. Many of the most sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel
suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's "characters." These
revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of
Kerouac's style.
Later career: 1957–1969
In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso,
among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation.
The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation
held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term "beat" to describe a person with little money and few prospects. Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.
Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the
post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the
king of the beat generation,"
a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, "I'm not
a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, "You know who painted that? Me."
The success of On the Road
brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers
desiring unwanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before its
publication. After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.
In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco–area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26 and December 7, 1957. To begin writing Dharma Bums,
Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid
interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years
previously for On the Road.
Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki,
that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I
was a monstrous imposter." He passed up the opportunity to reunite with
Snyder in California, and explained to Philip Whalen
"I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent
and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more." In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green's café recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul:
"A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the
Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light."
Kerouac used earnings from On the Road to purchase the first of three homes in Northport, New York
— a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street that he shared with his
mother, Gabrielle. They moved there in March 1958 and stayed in
Northport for six years, moving twice during that time.
The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men "on the road" in a Corvette
seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful
temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled
stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized
misappropriation of Kerouac's story model for On the Road.
Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic
Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd
been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems
TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled
against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.
John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Show in November 1959. In response to Allen's question "How would you define the word 'beat?'", Kerouac responds "well ... sympathetic."
In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a Breton American
like him in New York, and they became friends. Gwernig used to
translate his Breton language poems into English so that Kerouac could
read and understand them : "Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for
instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak Breton he asked
me: 'Would you not write some of your poems in English? I'd really like
to read them ! ... ' So I wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him,
and kept on doing so. That's why I often write my poems in Breton,
French and English."
During these years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his older sister
to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke
in 1966. Kerouac moved in with his mother in Hyannis, Massachusetts, for almost a year in 1966. In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.
Despite the role which his literary work played in inspiring the
counterculture movement of the 1960s, Kerouac was openly critical of it.
Arguments over the movement, which Kerouac believed was only an excuse
to be "spiteful," also resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.
Also in 1968, Kerouac last appeared on television, for Firing Line, produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of his from college). Seemingly intoxicated, he affirmed his Catholicism and talked about the counterculture of the 1960s.
Death
On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida,
Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He
suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom, where he began to
vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital,
suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage. He received several
transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors
subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood
from clotting. He never regained consciousness after the operation, and
died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47.
His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse.A possible contributing factor was an untreated hernia he suffered in a bar fight several weeks earlier.His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he was buried at Edson Cemetery.
At the time of his death, Kerouac was living with his third wife,
Stella Sampas Kerouac. His mother, Gabrielle, inherited most of his
estate.
Style
Kerouac
is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although
he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily
influenced by the prolific explosion of
jazz, especially the bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, he included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as "spontaneous prose". Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or roman à clef)
based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he
interacted. This approach is reflected also by his plot structure: his
narratives were not heavily focused on traditional plot structures.
Instead, his works often revolved around a series of episodic
encounters, road trips, and personal reflections. The emphasis was on
the characters' experiences and the exploration of themes such as
freedom, rebellion, and the search for meaning.
Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.
The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath
(borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising
words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited
revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.
Kerouac greatly admired and was influenced by Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder.
While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956,
Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary. (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder].") That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Whalen's stories of working as fire spotters. Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in "Alone on a Mountaintop" (published in Lonesome Traveler) and The Dharma Bums.
Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and
strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would
later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing
prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans
that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his
style. Of his expositions of the spontaneous prose method, the most
concise was "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose", a list of 30
"essential" maxims.
... and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life
after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a
commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman
candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you
see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote said of it, "That's not writing, it's typing". According to Carolyn Cassady and others, he constantly rewrote and revised his work.
Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in
English, in addition to his poetry and letters to friends and family, he
also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. The existence of his
two novels written in French, La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin
was revealed to the general public in a series of articles published by
journalist Gabriel Anctil, in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir in 2007
and 2008. All these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy (originally written in French), have now been published together in a volume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française had already published excerpts and an article on "La nuit est ma femme", and scholar Paul Maher Jr., in his biography Kerouac: His Life and Work', discussed Sur le chemin.
The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a
telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language,
a language he often called Canuck French.
Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal
Cassady (who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean
Moriarty) dated January 10, 1953. The published novel runs over 110
pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac
archive by Professor Cloutier. Set in 1935, mostly on the East Coast, it
explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of
a spoken word narrative. Here, as with most of his French writings,
Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying
on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the
French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as
one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version
of an incomplete translation that later became Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America). The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Gabriel Anctil have pointed out.
Influences
Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady. The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read". In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.
James Joyce was also a literary influence on Kerouac and alludes to Joyce's work more than any other author. Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique. Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, "I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity." Additionally, Kerouac admired Joyce's experimental use of language, as seen in his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices.
Legacy
Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, and the Doors
all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and
lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band the Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences. In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek, keyboard player of The Doors, wrote "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed."
The alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song bearing his name, "Hey Jack Kerouac" on their 1987 album In My Tribe. Hip-hop group the Beastie Boys mention Kerouac in their 1989 song, "3-Minute Rule", from the album Paul's Boutique. The 2000 Barenaked Ladies song, "Baby Seat", from the album Maroon, references Kerouac.
As the critic Juan Arabia has written in relation to Kerouac's work and rock 'n' roll:
In
order to vindicate the cultural, ideological and aesthetic advancement
in Kerouac's work and its relevance–and the genesis of rock ‘n' roll–one
must first understand the origins of jazz and its offshoots.
The first forms of jazz were formed in New Orleans from a melange
of blues, work songs, marches, work songs, African and European music.
Bop–the form of jazz that most influenced Kerouac–was created by African-American musicians in New York basements between 1941 and 1945.
Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers (e.g., Benny Goodman
and his swing band) in an attempt to reclaim the cultural property of
the black community which had informed every popular music genre.
There has always been an exchange of ideas and musical forms between
black and white communities. For example, Elvis
sings gospel and blues and white country songs and some black rock n'
roll artists sing in a manner similar to Elvis or borrow elements from
European music or folk. Rock n' roll borrows elements from blues,
country-western, boogie, and jazz.
This is the scenario that surrounds the dénouement of Kerouac's work.
It's in 1948 that he finishes his first novel, The Town and the City;
very soon after came the birth–and its explosion of popularity in the
1950s–of rock ‘n' roll.
In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado.
The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing &
Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.
From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.
Kerouac's French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama, Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson. Other tributes in French Canada include the 1972 biography by novelist Victor-Lévy BeaulieuJack Kérouac (essai-poulet), translated as Jack Kerouac: a chicken-essay,
the second in a series of works by Beaulieu on his literary
forefathers, and two songs that came out within months of each other in
1987 and 1988: "Sur la route" by Pierre Flynn, and "L'ange vagabond" by Richard Séguin.
A street, rue Jack-Kerouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010. In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.
The character Hank in David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch is based on Kerouac.
In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc.
This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the
same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered
for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by
journalist Oscar J. Corral
that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac's family and
the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac's estate, Gerald Nicosia. The
article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac's estate, worth $91
at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998.
In 2005, Kerouac was mentioned in the single "Nolwenn Ohwo!" by French pop singer-songwriter Nolwenn Leroy, released on her album Histoires Naturelles.
In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur,
with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight
into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which
Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby
Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, "One Fast Move or I'm
Gone", features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.
In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th
anniversary of the literary festival "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" was
held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured
walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on
Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.
In the 2010s, there was a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.
A species of Indian platygastrid wasp that is phoretic (hitch-hiking) on grasshoppers is named after him as Mantibaria kerouaci.
In October 2015, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.
While
he is best known for his novels, Kerouac also wrote poetry. Kerouac
said that he wanted "to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long
blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday."
Many of Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing,
uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism.
"Mexico City Blues," a collection of poems published in 1959, is made up
of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of his poetry,
to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in
place of a period. Several examples of this can be seen in "Mexico City
Blues":
Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness—
Anger
Doesnt like to be reminded of fits—
— fragment from 113th Chorus
Other poems by Kerouac, such as "Bowery Blues," incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind.
Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac's poetry features
repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in
life.
Posthumous editions
In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.By far the more significant is Scroll,
a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on
sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot
(37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to
be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends
rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay
paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition
tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.
The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008, by Grove Press. Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.
Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house,
obtained rights from Kerouac's estate to publish a collection of works
titled La vie est d'hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme
have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in
collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of
America in The Unknown Kerouac.
Literary executorship and representation
Since 2017, John H. Shen-Sampas, the son of Kerouac's brother-in-law, has been the chief literary executor for the estate of Jack Kerouac.
Together with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Shen-Sampas
has worked to preserve and archive all aspects of Kerouac's life.
.png)
