Fathers

"Leo Kerouac was sicker than ever and it was apparent to Jack and memere that he wouldn’t live long. He was in pain, irritable and cantankerous. Every two weeks the doctor climbed the stairs to the apartment to drain his stomach of fluids, and Jack would hear his father in the kitchen wincing and groaning, and then weeping as the doctor left. There was no more talk about Jack throwing his life away. Leo made him promise he’d always take care of memere whatever else he did, and Jack promised.

Leo Kerouac died in the spring of 1946. Jack and his mother followed his hearse to the family cemetery in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he was buried. When they returned to the still apartment in Ozone Park, memere did her spring house cleaning and went back to work at the shoe factory. As before with the death of his older brother Gerald, Jack was overcome with grief and a sense of personal loss. It seemed to him, as he forced himself to pick up the outlines for his projected novel, that death was the greatest mystery, the greatest theme for literature. Grimly he settled down to write the novel he had planned earlier in the year. He had taken Thomas Wolfe as a model, but his book was really written for his father, to prove to the memory of Leo Kerouac that Jack could write a book that would sell, that he could be a creative writer.

Jack had failed to fulfil his father’s dreams of seeing him a football champion, a success at college and a hero in the Navy. At each one of Jack’s failures, Leo Kerouac had supported him, confronting the Columbia football coach and the Navy psychiatrists as though his Ti Jack could do no wrong. But privately, at home, the arguments had raged between father and son. Jack felt that Leo had never believed in his promise as a creative writer, so he would prove himself there where everything else had gone awry." (pp.53-4)

Kerouac – A Biography by Ann Charters

Ann Charters, London: 1973, Andre Deutsch Limited.

Jack's original beginning to On the Road was about his father:


"I first met Neal not long after my father died... I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it had something to do with my father's death and my awful feeling that everything was dead."

On the Road

He changed it so it was about his first wife; a woman he had married to get bail after being an accessory to a murder.

"Kerouac would remember [his father] as a dynamic, jovial hustler.... 'I see now his true soul, which is like mine - life means nothing to him,' Jack once observed. In the Kerouacs' divided household, Jack sided with his mother against his father, accepting her judgement that Leo was 'a drunkard and didn't... give a shit.' " (p.12)

Subterranean Kerouac

Ellis Amburn, New York, 1998

People who vanish out of your life can becoming dominating characters. They put pressure on your personality and the way you act. Kerouac's father and Neal's father both seem to be looming presences in the background of On the Road. Even though it is Kerouac's mother who is often talked about, Kerouac's father can not be discounted as a major force in his life.

I come across this photo and wonder: What's he looking at? What's he thinking? After the shutter clicked what did he do, where did he go?