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notable writers: jack kerouac - an analysis

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” - Jack Kerouac

Requested subject Jack Kerouac was part writer, part American legend; his drinking was as infamous as Hemingway’s, and his books are even now inspiring epic cross-country road trips. Like Kurt Cobain, another counter-culture Pisces who seemed to be truly (as opposed to fashionably) miserable, Kerouac expressed his unhappiness nakedly in his art and was not taken seriously. His seminal work, On the Road remains Kerouac’s most widely acclaimed novel, partly for its literary merits — boundless energy, quicksilver prose, an almost mystical view of the American landscape — and partly because of the legendary way he created it, typing it on a 120-foot scroll so he wouldn’t have to interrupt the flow of words by changing paper. For all the dreaming and freedom Kerouac’s life on the road signified, that road ended in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he died in 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding due to his alcoholism. One story described his esophagus detaching from his stomach, which means that he drank until alcohol burned a hole in his body.

Jack Kerouac, according to astrotheme, was a Pisces sun and Virgo moon. The youngest of three children, he was a devoted mama’s boy who was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine. Kerouac's father, a printer and well-known local businessman, began to suffer financial difficulties, and started gambling in the hope of restoring prosperity to the household. Jack hoped to save the family himself by winning a football scholarship to college and entering the insurance business. He was a star back on his high school team and secured himself a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. His parents followed him there, settling in Ozone Park, Queens. Things went wrong at Columbia. Kerouac fought with the football coach, who refused to let him play. His father lost his business and sank rapidly into alcoholic helplessness. Jack, disillusioned and confused, dropped out of Columbia, bitterly disappointing the father who had so recently disappointed him. He tried and failed to fit in with the military (World War II had begun) and ended up sailing with the Merchant Marines. When he wasn't sailing, he was hanging around New York with a crowd his parents didn’t approve of: depraved young Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, a strange but brilliant older downtown friend named William S.Burroughs and a joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal Cassady. He spent the early 1950's writing one unpublished novel after another, carrying them around in a rucksack as he roamed back and forth across the country, eventually following Ginsberg and Cassady to San Francisco. After years of wiring, his novel On The Road was finally published in 1957 becoming a tremendous popular success. Kerouac did not know how to react. Embittered by years of rejection, he was suddenly expected to snap to and play the part of Young Beat Icon for the public. He was older and sadder than everyone expected him to be, and probably far more intelligent as well. Literary critics, objecting to the Beat 'fad,' refused to take Kerouac seriously as a writer and began to ridicule his work, hurting him tremendously.

He tried to live up to the wild image he'd presented in 'On The Road,' developing a severe drinking habit, going on alcoholic binges. His friends began viewing him as needy and unstable. True to his sun and moon, he was a conservative who espoused free thinking ideals; when he appeared on William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative TV show a year before his death, Kerouac said he rejected the “mutiny” and “insurrection” that the Beats had come to connote; instead he favored “order, tenderness and piety.” Weighed down and ultimately defeated by alcoholism and depression, Kerouac produced little of note after 1960 except the novels Big Sur (1962) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). He felt badly misunderstood by the American public, and although he was right, he was also to blame. His footloose characters and propulsive writing style had convinced admirers and detractors alike that being Beat meant disdaining the ordinary social rules — which was true as far as it went, but far less important to Kerouac than the need to be both “beat” and “beatific,” meaning saintly in a literal sense. Through his first forty years Kerouac had failed to sustain a long-term romantic relationship with a woman, though he often fell in love. He'd married twice, to Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, but both marriages had ended within months. In the mid-1960's he married again, but this time to a maternalistic and older childhood acquaintance from small-town Lowell, Stella Sampas, who he hoped would help around the house as his mother entered old age. Defeated and lonesome, he left California to live with his mother in Long Island, and would not stray from his mother for the rest of his life. He would continue to publish, but his works after his last great novel, Big Sur, displayed a disconnected soul, a human being sadly lost in his own curmudgeonly (Virgo moon) illusions (Pisces sun).

Next week, I’ll talk about a true diva whose colourful life masked intense heartache: divine Sagittarius Maria Callas.

Stats

birthdate: March 12, 1922

major planets:

Sun: Pisces

Moon: Virgo

Rising: Virgo

Mercury: Aquarius

Venus: Pisces

Mars: Sagittarius

Midheaven: Gemini

Jupiter: Libra

Saturn: Libra

Uranus: Pisces

Neptune: Leo

Pluto: Cancer

Overall personality snapshot: Was he an artist who is impossible to pin down, or was he a down-to-earth realist? Did he want to take everything apart and put it under a microscope, or did he want to stand back and capture the grand design? His personality was a potentially very creative combination as it was a confrontation between intuition and reason, imagination and practical logic, the capacity for infinite understanding and for fastidiously precise judgements. He got an overall ‘feel’ for things – people or ideas – and then his fine analytical mind came into play, putting your hunches to work in precise ways. The true essence of a person or situation spoke to his heart in a manner that defied scientific explanation. He then moulded his behaviour in a modest, conscientious way that served the emotional impression which had moved him. When he got it together, he had natural organizational gifts. The broad brush-stroke and the fine line detail came equally easy to him, giving him an ability to hold the wider vision whilst attending to specifics. When he was able to combine his accurate sense of detail with his rich imagination, and his instinct for duty with his romantic, intuitive grasp of life’s meaning, he could be a powerful force for good and an accurate barometer of soundness in people, policies and ideas. The dilemma in him between his instinct to keep his feet on the ground and his desire simply to escape from life’s pressures could be very strong. As the saying about Pisces goes, he couldn’t stand too much reality. This was due to his extreme sensitivity, and he needed to be careful about what kind of atmospheres he lived and worked in.

Crass and cruel traits in people could really get him down, yet he did sympathize with suffering, and wanted progress in real terms. He’d happily work for the goals of improving social conditions, offering the principles and practices that restore health, helping lives become more sane and worth living. The health of mind and body was often a primary interest. He knew that he couldn’t have one without the other. Because he was a full-moon personality, however, the interaction between his irrational, emotional nature and his instinct for orderly categorization of experience may at first have been felt as difficult, and the two sides of him may have seemed irreconcilable. His feelings and hunches may have led him in a direction he felt he must defend logically, and so he ended up weaving intricate arguments that made his philosophy believable. If it made sense to him, then it was alright. An individualist with a deep moral conviction about all he did, he was not, however, inflexible or dogmatic. His views developed with experience, his outlook changed, his compassion deepened whilst his sense of duty remained intact. A mystic could be defined as someone whose head was in Heaven and whose feet were on Earth. And that was a trick he managed with admirable ease, moving between the loftiest visions and their most down-to-earth and prosaic implementation. This combination of mysticism and matter-of-factness made him one of those rare individuals who felt at home in almost any environment.

His body was neat and wiry, and he used neat and economical movements. His well-groomed appearance was mirrored in his cool and classic way of dressing, good posture, fine bone structure and animated expression. Physically, he possessed good stamina. He tended to look younger than he really was, all the way through into his later years. He was an intelligent, bold thinker who was attracted to new and avant-garde ideas. His mental application might have been slightly erratic, but it was often brilliant. He detested being pigeonholed or categorized. He hated being told what to think, as intellectual independence was vitally important to him. He loved to talk and to travel, so with his able to combine these two in her job as an author, he was happy. He needed to have a fair degree of variety and change within his job, and the aspect of travel may have satisfied this. In whatever job he would have done, he would always have been the perpetual student, as long as the subject was interesting enough. He was easy-going, frank and optimistic. It was quite easy for him to meet people halfway, and he was always willing to listen to others’ problems and try to help them out. He was eager for close personal relationships, so he tended to have a wide circle of friends. Self-indulgence could be a problem for him, as could laziness and conceit in relationships. He tended to be impatient with superficial details, preferring large-scale situations, and he disliked being tied down by obligations over which he had little control. He believed that fair play, justice, tact and diplomacy were all extremely important. He was meant to learn a lot from relationships in his life through the way he handled them, and through issues of compromise. Sheer self-control was the key to gaining control over any disequilibrium, indecisiveness and emotional inhibitions in his life.

He was part of a generation gifted with original and unusual artistic talents, highly imaginative, secretive and visionary. As a member of this generation, he felt uncomfortable facing reality, finding the world a difficult place to survive in. He preferred to seek meaning in new forms of mysticism, religion and ideals. The unknown and the taboo appealed to him, because he wanted to have the freedom to explore and think for himself. He was part of a very artistically talented and creative generation that wanted to escape from the demands of the world around them into a world of excitement and glamour. Members of this generation loved the theater and the cinema, in fact, any sort of creative self-expression. They also believed in the rights of any individual to express themselves. This generation was both idealistic and romantic, selfish and individualistic. Kerouac embodied all of these Leo Neptunian ideals. Also, as a member of the Leo Neptune generation, he experienced and fully embraced changes in sexual mores and attitudes, changing the way people approached the whole issue of romantic relationships. Changes were also experienced in the relationships between parents and children, with the ties becoming looser. Was part of a generation known for its devastating social upheavals concerning home and family. The whole general pattern of family life experiences enormous changes and upheavals; as a Cancer Plutonian, this aspect is highlighted with Kerouac’s father becoming an alcoholic after losing his business as well as disappointing the family by dropping out of Columbia and hanging out with a subversive crowd.

Love/sex life: His sexual nature was almost too fragile for real life. He was so sensitive and emotionally vulnerable that almost everything he did in his love life had the potential of leaving him deeply hurt and uncertain. For this reason he looked for strong willed partners who promised to protect him or at least provide a measure of consistency in his volatile erotic life. Oddly enough, even though he was by far the most changeable and restless lover of this type, he was also the most likely candidate for an enduring and stable relationship. Despite the fact that his approach to sex was essentially passive, no one should have taken his easy-going erotic nature for granted. He was a very unpredictable lover, always capable of shooting off in a new direction or answering the call to a new adventure. Thanks to his undeniable sexual allure, trouble had a way of finding him even when he seemed most sedate and under control. He was a hypocrite because he expected and deeply needed loyalty and steadfastness from his lover but his constancy was never quite as certain. Kerouac is celebrated as the grand master of the free and easy “Beat” generation but his personal life was fairly conventional. He bumbled his way in and out of two short marriages and, despite numerous sexual encounters with prostitutes and other women, he was generally shy and passive in his dealings with the opposite sex. Through it all, the most important relationship in is life remained his friendship with another Mars in Sagittarius lover, Neal Cassady who, as the hero of On the Road, represented Kerouac’s ideal of freedom and defiance of convention.

minor asteroids and points:

North Node: Libra

Lilith: Pisces

Vertex: Aquarius

Fortune: Pisces

East Point: Virgo

His North Node in Libra dictated that he needed to move away from a tendency to see the world only in terms of himself, and develop a more outward-looking view. It would have been good if he took other people’s needs and desires into consideration to a greater degree. His Lilith in Pisces was a powerful muse in his life as an innovative male thinker; he was dangerously attracted to women who were natural born mystics and cultivated their own myth. His Vertex in Aquarius, 6th house dictated that he yearned for completion of himself through the highest ideal of friendship. Hidden in the inner recesses of his soul were desires for a union that would impact the world in an almost utopian sense. There was a yearning for each act of intimacy to reflect a conviction of how all relationships should be in order for the world to be a better place.There was no place for exhibitions of jealousy with him. If his lover joined him in his lofty dreams, they had a companion for life. He had an attitude of duty, obligation and sacrifice when it came to heartfelt interactions. He tended to become hypochondriacal or martyristic to get the love so desperately wanted. There was a need for others to appreciate the sincerity of his intentions, to the daily tasks he executed in a conscientious and caring way and for others to know that his actions, no matter how routine they may have seemed, were based on devoted love.

His Part of Fortune in Pisces and Part of Spirit in Virgo dictated that his destiny lay in cultivating compassion, faith and his imagination. He was able to transcend limits. He would find success by concentrating on higher ideals and helping others. His destiny and happiness come from following the path indicated by his intuition. His soul’s purpose asked him to clear away issues from the past in a dispassionate way and develop tolerance. He felt spiritual connections and the spark of the divine when he was able to bring order out of chaos. East Point in Virgo dictated that he was most likely to personally identify with the need to work and to be pragmatic. He needed early responsibilities (which were within his capabilities). He tended to feel guilty when not working, as if he should be contributing in some way. He was generally identified with his work (“I am what I do.”) and with a performance orientation. If carried too far, this led to excessive self-criticism. When done in moderation, he was simply very practical and realistic, usually worked hard and saw life and himself clearly.

elemental dominance:

water

earth

He had high sensitivity and elevation through feelings. His heart and his emotions were his driving forces, and he couldn’t do anything on earth if he didn’t feel a strong effective charge. He needed to love in order to understand, and to feel in order to take action, which caused a certain vulnerability which he should (and often did) fight against. He was a practical, reliable man and could provide structure and protection. He was oriented toward practical experience and thought in terms doing rather than thinking, feeling, or imagining. Could be materialistic, unimaginative, and resistant to change. But at his best, he provided the practical resources, analysis, and leadership to make dreams come true.

modality dominance:

mutable

He wasn’t particularly interested in spearheading new ventures or dealing with the day-to-day challenges of organization and management. He excelled at performing tasks and producing outcomes. He was flexible and liked to finish things. Was also likely undependable, lacking in initiative, and disorganized. Had an itchy restlessness and an unwillingness to buckle down to the task at hand. Probably had a chronic inability to commit—to a job, a relationship, or even to a set of values.

house dominants:

1st

6th

7th

His personality, disposition and temperament was highlighted in his life. The manner in which he expressed himself and the way he approached other people was also highlighted. The way he approached new situations and circumstances contributed to show how he set about his life’s goals. The general state of his health is also shown, as well as his early childhood experiences defining the rest of his life. His workplace in respect to his colleagues, and the type of work he did as well as his attitude to it was emphasized in his life. His everyday life and routine and the way he handled it was highlighted. How he went about being of service to others in a practical way, and the way he adjusted to necessities of mundane existence is a theme in his life. Also, how he aspired to refine and better himself was of importance as well. His attitude towards partnerships with other people was emphasized in his life, whether on a personal or on a business level. It also revealed his marriage partner. It indicated how he dealt with other people and how his relationships with others affected him. Also had the propensity to attract enemies, and the effect that they had on his life was an issue.

planet dominants:

Moon

Mars

Mercury

He was defined by her inner world; by his emotional reactions to situations, how emotions flow through him, motivating and compelling him—or limiting him and holding him back. He held great capacity to become a part of the whole rather than attempting to master the parts. He wanted to become whatever it was that he sought. He was aggressive, individualistic and had a high sexual drive. He believed in action and took action. His survival instinct was strong. He wanted to take himself to the limit—and then surpass that limit, which he often did. He ultimately refused to compromise his integrity by following another’s agenda. He likely didn’t compare himself to other people and didn’t want to dominate or be dominated. He simply wanted to be free to follow his own path, whatever it was. He was intelligent, mentally quick, and had excellent verbal acuity. He dealt in terms of logic and reasoning. It is likely that he was left-brained. He was restless, craves movement, newness, and the bright hope of undiscovered terrains.

sign dominants:

Virgo

Pisces

Sagittarius

He was a discriminating, attractive, thorough, scientific, hygienic, humane, scientific woman and had the highest standards. His attention to detail was second to none and he had a deeply penetrative and investigative mind. He needs to explore his world through his emotions. He felt things so deeply that quite often he became a kind of psychic sponge, absorbing the emotions of people around him. As such, he gravitated toward the arts, in general, to theater and film specifically. He could be ambivalent and indecisive simply because he was so impressionable. He also tended to be moody because he felt the very height of joy and the utter depths of despair. Love and romance were essential for him. These fulfilled him emotionally, and he generally flourished within stable relationships. He sought the truth, expressed it as he saw it—and didn’t care if anyone else agreed with him. He saw the large picture of any issue and couldn’t be bothered with the mundane details. He was always outspoken and likely couldn’t understand why other people weren’t as candid. After all, what was there to hide? He loved his freedom and chafed at any restrictions.

Read more about him under the cut.

Famed writer Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. A thriving mill town in the mid-19th century, Lowell had become, by the time of Jack Kerouac's birth, a down-and-out burg where unemployment and heavy drinking prevailed. Kerouac's parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were immigrants from Quebec, Canada; Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school. Leo Kerouac owned his own print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown Lowell, and Gabrielle Kerouac, known to her children as Memere, was a homemaker. Kerouac later described the family's home life: "My father comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes [his] 1920s vest, and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and butter, and with the kiddies and the good wife." Jack Kerouac endured a childhood tragedy in the summer of 1926, when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of 9. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac's writing is full of vivid memories of attending church as a child: "From the open door of the church warm and golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could be heard."

Kerouac's two favorite childhood pastimes were reading and sports. He devoured all the 10-cent fiction magazines available at the local stores, and he also excelled at football, basketball and track. Although Kerouac dreamed of becoming a novelist and writing the "great American novel," it was sports, not writing, that Kerouac viewed as his ticket to a secure future. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Kerouac family suffered from financial difficulties, and Kerouac's father turned to alcohol and gambling to cope. His mother took a job at a local shoe factory to boost the family income, but, in 1936, the Merrimack River flooded its banks and destroyed Leo Kerouac's print shop, sending him into a spiral of worsening alcoholism and condemning the family to poverty. Kerouac, who was, by that time, a star running back on the Lowell High School football team, saw football as his ticket to a college scholarship, which in turn might allow him to secure a good job and save his family's finances.

Upon graduating from high school in 1939, Kerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but first he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. So, at the age of 17, Kerouac packed his bags and moved to New York City, where he was immediately awed by the limitless new experiences of big city life. Of the many wonderful new things Kerouac discovered in New York, and perhaps the most influential on his life, was jazz. He described the feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: "Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place." It was also during his year at Horace Mann that Kerouac first began writing seriously. He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record, and published short stories in the school's literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly.

The following year, in 1940, Kerouac began his freshman year as a football player and aspiring writer at Columbia University. However, he broke his leg in one of his first games and was relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season. Although his leg had healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. He spent the next year working odd jobs and trying to figure out what to make of his life. He spent a few months pumping gas in Hartford, Connecticut. Then he hopped a bus to Washington, D.C., and worked on a construction crew building the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Eventually Kerouac decided to join the military to fight for his country in World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1943, but was honorably discharged after only 10 days of service for what his medical report described as "strong schizoid trends." After his discharge from the Marines, Kerouac returned to New York City and fell in with a group of friends that would eventually define a literary movement. He befriended Allen Ginsberg, a Columbia student, and William Burroughs, another college dropout and aspiring writer. Together, these three friends would go on to become the leaders of the Beat Generation of writers.

Living in New York in the late 1940s, Kerouac wrote his first novel, Town and City, a highly autobiographical tale about the intersection of small town family values and the excitement of city life. The novel was published in 1950 with the help of Ginsberg's Columbia professors, and although the well-reviewed book earned Kerouac a modicum of recognition, it did not make him famous.

Another of Kerouac's New York friends in the late 1940s was Neal Cassady; the two took several cross-country road trips to Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and even Mexico City. These trips provided the inspiration for Kerouac's next and greatest novel, On the Road, a barely fictionalized account of these road trips packed with sex, drugs and jazz. Kerouac's writing of On the Road in 1951 is the stuff of legend: He wrote the entire novel over one three-week bender of frenzied composition, on a single scroll of paper that was 120 feet long. Like most legends, the story of the whirlwind composition of On the Road is part fact and part fiction. Kerouac did, in fact, write the novel on a single scroll in three weeks, but he had also spent several years making notes in preparation for this literary outburst. Kerouac termed this style of writing "spontaneous prose" and compared it to the improvisation of his beloved jazz musicians. Revision, he believed, was akin to lying and detracted from the ability of prose to capture the truth of a moment. However, publishers dismissed Kerouac's single-scroll manuscript, and the novel remained unpublished for six years. When it was finally published in 1957, On the Road became an instant classic, bolstered by a review in The New York Times that proclaimed, "Just as, more than any other novel of the '20s, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the 'Lost Generation,' so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the 'Beat Generation'." As Kerouac's girlfriend at the time, Joyce Johnson, put it, "Jack went to bed obscure and woke up famous."

In the six years that passed between the composition and publication of On the Road, Kerouac traveled extensively; experimented with Buddhism; and wrote many novels that went unpublished at the time. His next published novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), described Kerouac's clumsy steps toward spiritual enlightenment on a mountain climb with friend Gary Snyder, a Zen poet. Dharma was followed that same year by the novel The Subterraneans, and in 1959, Kerouac published three novels: Dr. Sax, Mexico City Blues and Maggie Cassidy. Kerouac's most famous later novels include Book of Dreams (1961), Big Sur (1962), Visions of Gerard (1963) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Kerouac also wrote poetry in his later years, composing mostly long-form free verse as well as his own version of the Japanese haiku form. Additionally, Kerouac released several albums of spoken word poetry during his lifetime.

Despite maintaining a prolific pace of publishing and writing, Kerouac was never able to cope with the fame he achieved after On the Road, and his life soon devolved into a blur of drunkenness and drug addiction. He married Edie Parker in 1944, but their marriage ended in divorce after only a few months. In 1950, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, who gave birth to his only daughter, Jan Kerouac, but this second marriage also ended in divorce after less than a year. Kerouac married Stella Sampas, who was also from Lowell, in 1966. He died from an abdominal hemorrhage three years later, on October 21, 1969, at the age of 47, in St. Petersburg, Florida. (x)

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