Jack Kerouac: King Of The Beats by Barry Miles

Author  : Barry Miles
Title : Jack Kerouac: King Of The Beats
Published : 1998
Publisher : Virgin Books
Pages : 416
Genre : Biography

     In conformist 1950's America, Jack Kerouac's On the Road was greeted with both delirium and dismay, but in Kerouac's hunt for the big experience and his longing for greatness, he has inspired each successive generation. Jack Kerouac is now an icon, and this provocative and intimate portrait of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers, reveals a man full of contradictions, rarely at peace with himself. Barry Miles, friend, and official biographer of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs provides a meticulously researched exploration of the complex man and extraordinary writer whose creative mishmash of joyous incoherence, drug-induced ecstasy, genuine mysticism, and constant craving has persuaded so many to take to the road.

     My Relationship with Kerouac started a great many years ago. On a dusty shelf, I came across a copy of On The Road. As a teenage boy, it was something I devoured hole looking into every corner for its secrets and its endless sense of freedom and adventure. Over the years I have gone back to it many times to reread. I think at this point I have read it more times than any other. But my feelings towards it have changed a great deal since I first opened that book. No longer seeing so much of the freedom and more is a wanton disregard for those people's lives he destroys along the way. How all it really cares for is his own kicks. But this is no just a one book affair with me. I have a shelf full of his works. And yes you can see how his views on the world and people did change but for me, there is always a selfish undercurrent attributed to his work.  This is not to say they are bad, between Kerouac and his friends the defined an era and they have a place in the world they are for want of a better word problematic in the gaze of the modern world. 

     I picked up this book because after all these years of only caring about the stories I thought maybe it was time to peel back the cover and see what the man himself was really like. It has to be said I was aware of Kerouac's reputation or at least some of it. I suppose he is one of those writers that has a myth wrapped around him as this amazingly crazy genius who found true freedom in running around America as it was with not a care in the world. What Miles does is show me the real man for better or worse, and having finished this book there was defiantly a lot of worse. I think there is a reason that not only in his books but to a greater extent in real life he was always on the move. Never staying in one place too long. While you may get spun a yard about his reasons for all this it strikes me that he was a man running away from himself. He could never seem to cope with whop he was and in doing so treated those around him with a great deal of contempt. He is someone i at least had always imagined sitting down and having a drink and talking into the wee hours with. But now I feel that I probably would have gotten annoyed with him far before the sun came up. 

     Much like all of us Kerouac is a complicated person, I think that as a body of work it stands on its own two legs Giving us insight into a time and place that has moved on but maybe not changed all that much. They still exist but have morphed into something new after all the Bro culture is not all that different from the beats. Especially in its views on women and where they fit into there world view. There also Jack's views on race which I feel many would find hard to stomach into to days climate. And yes we can say that it was a different time that people's views than where stretched by the Geopolitical climate. Are we in fact just letting them of all too easy for people who can't defend themselves? Maybe but it does not make it any easier to stomach. I think that it is a good thing that Miles doesn't shy away from this in telling the story of Kerouac. While you can see the respect he has for the stories Kerouac told he is not to idolize him. He wants to show all of us that this is a very human man with all the faults in tow. And while he doesn't cover the hole of Jack's life he gave me plenty to digest. 

     What this book does is strips away the great myth of the Beat king and gives you the scared and frighten man who spent his life running from not only himself but the fame his books brought. Never finding a place he could truly be free always fighting everyone and everything. It is a book that I think has shown me a great deal in an easy way to digest. So should you wish to go looking for the very real man? For better or worse this book will tick all those boxes.