Biography: This is a story of two photographs. The cover of Paul Maher's methodical biography shows Jack Kerouac, the All-American star footballer, one-time marine and merchant seaman, of brash good looks, slicked back hair, the Windsor knotted tie loosened around the poplin-shirted neck, staring the camera down; over his left shoulder, like a film noir moon, the light blurs in what might be a hotel room.
Kerouac takes up the full picture, confident, self-propelling, no messing.
The second photograph, taken the year before his death in 1969 at age 47, reveals a totally different figure, slumped in a chair, bloated with drink, the shadow of good looks blunted by the sunken body language, his arm around his friend, John Sampas. A life that burned brightly had all but burned out.
Author of one of the great post-second World War novels, On the Road (1957), Kerouac pioneered a form of "spontaneous prose" (which it wasn't) and trans-genre writing (which it was) - an ebullient, lyrical, physical mix of autobiography as fiction. He was the centre of a group of writers in the US who fought for personal and artistic freedom in the aftermath of the second World War and the conformist Fifties. The "Beats", as they were to be known worldwide, consisted of lost souls - dangerous, broken and damaged in many ways, among them criminals, junkies and "high-class" girls, looking for thrills. They all shared a restlessness and curiosity about the American continent and spent most of their lives trying to find out what America "was"; not the American dream so much as the American dawn. Their lives make Sex and the City look like a ride in the park.
Both Allen Ginsberg, who Kerouac met in New York, and Neal Cassady were, like Kerouac, from immigrant backgrounds; William Seward Burroughs, another key figure, was, however, a Harvard graduate, grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, and lived off $200 a month (a tidy sum) provided by his wealthy and long-suffering parents.
The vulnerabilities of Kerouac's upbringing in a French-speaking Canadian family - the loss of his brother, Gerard, at a young age; the early death of his father; and the unhealthy obsessions of his mother with whom he was to live for the best part of his life - were matched in Cassady's shattered childhood of sleeping in dosshouses with his alcoholic father. Ginsberg saw his own mother crack at a relatively early age and live her last years in a state hospital.
The heady ether that drew these men together - drugs, booze, sexual experiment, sentimentality and living on a knife-edge - scandalised the proprieties of mainstream America while simultaneously fascinating the burgeoning print and television media.
With the success of On the Road, Kerouac was swept on a tide of admirers and imitators as the celebrity of the Beats brought undoubted fame and recognition, particularly to the unholy alliance of the foursome which he immortalised in this and other novels. They pursued their hallucinogenic "new vision", primed with Benzedrine and booze, with readings of Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, the anarchistic influence of Californian Kenneth Rexroth and what Ginsberg called their "secret heroes", particularly jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The "risk" of jazz, solo performances of searing emotional intensity, was the sound and structure Kerouac admired and attempted to reproduce along with the speech rhythms and phrasing of American English - so different from his native French-Canadian tongue. Indeed the rigid, Jansenist Catholic pieties of his upbringing clashed continuously throughout his life, as the freedoms he sought were held in check with guilt and paranoia.
Strangeness set in. Maher informs us that Kerouac "kept a lifelong list of every woman he had sex with, along with the type and frequency", though not, it seems, with the men.
In this extensive biography the gory details of Kerouac's life stack up in front of the uninitiated reader and obscure even further the writing upon which he expended such mind-altering energy. Little time is spent on the many books he wrote, and their reception is left largely unaccounted for and under-analysed.
Caught in the headlights of his own celebrity, even in his final retreat, mulling over the lack of critical respect, rejecting the detractors, Kerouac's destructive spiral veered between aggressive, mocking narcissistic self-belief (check out his priceless Paris Review interview with Ted Berrigan) and the intoxicating, lethal frailties that unmanned him.
The western world does not make writers like Kerouac any more, only pale pretenders. Like many other forms of popular culture, writing is now part of the very media and entertainment business which Kerouac saw coming but could not outpace. The wretched diet of colloquial racism and anti-Semitism of his upbringing, inflamed by the rhetoric of McCarthyite 1950s, meant that Kerouac's politics were always going to be volatile and incoherent. No wonder he kept wind-side of the Hippy Sixties with their veneer of radical politics.
The tragedy is that no one seemed to mind (except boyhood pals and his old girlfriend whom he eventually married) and instead entertained his eventual fall. When that came, as Maher has it, Kerouac's body rejected "the donated blood" before "he lapsed into unconsciousness" where he lay "for 15 painful hours before being declared dead". He had literally killed himself with drink. Fifty years after its composition, the original 1951 version of On the Road "set a world record for the highest-paid bid for a literary manuscript at auction", bought for $2.43 million by the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team.
Kerouac's Proustian plan, a series of interlinked novels, building into one great saga, was never completed. A ghost project, perhaps even a delusion, it haunted his imagination to the bitter end.
For Kerouac, freedom meant proving himself a difficult, moving target; when he slowed down the writing seems to have done the same. Not interested in his daughter, Jan, he had used up his friends until there were precious few capable of bearing the late-night drunken rants on long-distance calls.
Burroughs and Ginsberg outlived him; Neal Cassady, high on speed, Seconal and pulque, a potent Mexican drink, was found "comatose" by the train tracks to San Miguel; his unclaimed body was cremated and the ashes sent to his estranged wife.
Ill at ease outside America, suspicious even of those friends drawn to his obviously infectious personality, Kerouac was possibly happiest in the company of strangers - those whom he picked up on the road, in bars, diners, gas stations, on Greyhound buses; on the move, like himself, through the awe-inspiring magnificence of the American landscape; temporary, transit families of his own making, substitute brothers and fathers, providing uncomplicated emotional ties from which he could draw fictional life before fleeing again like a fugitive; running away, it looks like, from himself.
Gerald Dawe's poetry collections include Heart of Hearts, The Morning Train and Lake Geneva
Kerouac: The Definitive Biography By Paul Maher Jr Taylor Trade Publishing, 555pp. $27.95