Issues → November/December 2009 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Lowell, MA: Jack Kerouac

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

EMAIL

PRINT

SHARE:

(page 3 of 4)

"Everyone wants to leave," a girl who worked in a gift shop told me. "There's nothing here."

I asked her if she'd ever heard of Jack Kerouac.

"Oh yeah," she exclaimed, giggling.

"What have you heard? He's a world-famous writer?"

She giggled again. "I heard he was a degenerate. I really don't know much about him. None of my friends knows who he is."

This seemed to be a common Lowell line on Kerouac at the time. The owner of a used-book store gave me a sour look after I bought a Kerouac button and grunted, "He was a boozer. People here didn't think much of his lifestyle. He was an original writer, maybe, but people were embarrassed about him."

But the boozer had his champions, foremost among them Paul Marion, a poet who was also the cultural-affairs director of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission. It took years of arguing that if Lowell could rehabilitate its stifling sweatshops and turn the mill girls into local heroines, then surely a spot could be found for the city's most famous writer. At last the city council designated a section of the new Eastern Canal Park for a monument.

It is possible to divide Jack Kerouac's novels into two piles. In one pile, by far the largest, are his true-story novels about the Beat generation. These are the books that most people associate with Kerouac, the ones that have secured his literary reputation. The other pile consists of four relatively obscure books: Dr. Sax, which is about Kerouac's childhood and teenage years; Maggie Cassidy, about his first love affair; Visions of Gerard, about the death of his brother; and Vanity of Duluoz, about his high school athletic exploits. In these books young Jack scores the touchdowns, chases the innocent Catholic girls of his adolescence, and roams the streets with a gang of uncomplicated guys.

This is the Kerouac that Lowell remembers.

The next day, the crowd for the Classic Jack is so large that the little tour bus has to be scrapped in favor of a larger city bus. The early stages of the Classic Jack seem to be one nondescript house after another. Between 1925 and 1930, Jack's father moved the family five times. I can feel Kerouac aging as we pass from house to house, can sense the strands twisting to become the rope of his talent. In the Lowell novels, Kerouac portrays himself as a wild, rambunctious kid, but that's not the way friends remember him. They thought of him principally as an excellent athlete.

At a symposium held at Salem State College after his death and attended by some of Jack's fellow Beat writers, one of his childhood friends stood up and said, "Jack Kerouac, when I knew him, was a clean-cut kid. But when he left Lowell and took up with you guys, you screwed him all up with booze, drugs, and all that Beat bullshit."

A few days later a letter appeared in the Lowell Sun. "After Jack's death, if you read about him and did not know him as we do," it said, "you would picture him as a drunken bum who had a way with words and could write books. . . .We want people to know that for half of his life Kerouac was a kind, hardworking, good-natured friend."

He died in Florida, on October 21, 1969. The funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste church, which was unusual because it wasn't one of the parishes where the Kerouacs had lived. It took place there, Reggie surmises, because the priests of Jack's original parishes were too uptight to bury such a great sinner.