What do we do afterward, Kerouac wondered: “Wander and beg our food off poor hard-working householders?”Īnd yet, at the end of Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac writes, “I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing this. Yes, he writes in his final novel, Vanity of Duluoz, Christ’s example is not to be taken “lightly,” given that “He really meant it right down to the cross.” But following Jesus would cost him his “kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much.” Something else prevented him, too: “There’s a hole in even Jesus’ bag.” The “hole” is Christ telling the rich man to sell everything and give to the poor. He believed that he was able to, at times, “stop being a maniacal drunkard” on account of “the Holy Mother”: “Ever since I instituted the little prayer, I've not been lushing.”ĭespite these litanies to saints, Kerouac never formally returned to the faith. Jeanne de Arc’s statues returned to him regularly, though. Thérèse of Lisieux continued through decades until death he watched for her roses from heaven. Joseph (a “humble, self-admitting, truthful saint”), on whose feast he was born in 1922. Ti Jean (Kerouac’s nickname) was baptized in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of “mill rats”-French Canadian Catholics who lived in ghettos. Jeanne de Arc, suddenly, with tears in his eyes, he had a “vision of what I must have really meant with ‘Beat.’” It came in the “holy silence” of the church, “the candles. In a postwar world where “sinister efficiency” posed as peace, the “serious, curious” beats hungered for more soulful realities they could meet with “intense conviction.” Sometimes the Beats sought the Spirit in the booming underground of bop according to Kerouac, jazz transfigured hipsters into “12 th Century monks high in winter belfries,” listening “wildeyed” to “the Gothic organ.” And in his essay “Origins of the Beat Generation,” Kerouac swears that circa 1954, when he returned to his childhood church of Ste. The Beat poets, he said, tried to cultivate “joy of heart” in a “mad modern world of multiplicities and millions.”

Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness.” Whereas the Lost Generation had “believed in nothing,” Kerouac claimed he never heard more talk of first and last things than when among his Beat Generation peers. Jack Kerouac, who coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” railed against those who interpreted it as meaning “beat down,” “heedless,” or “rootless.” For him, it meant “ beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St.

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