A Few Thoughts

No writing notes today, just some ruminations on a fairly famous writer.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person of my generation (I was born in 1952) who has never read Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I know that this is undoubtedly not true but whenever I speak to one of my other writer friends or just people of my age who read a lot, it seems that if the subject of Kerouac comes up, they've read him.

I began thinking of Kerouac yesterday while doing my laundry. The laundromat I was in had an old issue of Smithsonian magazine (September 2007) in which there was a piece about Kerouac written by Joyce Johnson who, at the time On the Road was published, had a relationship with Kerouac. He was an interesting character. He achieved astounding literary fame and then retreated from the literary life and his friends. Not long after his famous book was published he moved into a home in Northport, New York (not too far from Huntington, NY where I once worked in a bookstore) to care for his mother. He was also hiding from his celebrity status. It's strange that so many successful authors have done this, J.D. Salinger being the name that immediately comes to mind. Kerouac also drank heavily and passed away on October 21, 1969 from an internal hemorrhage which was the end result of the cirrhosis he had developed. He was living in St. Petersburg, FL at the time of his death.

Kerouac's story makes me wonder about the nature of the creative process and how it relates to the personality of the writer. In what part of the personality does creativity come from and what makes someone retreat from literary success, or any other kind of creative success, after it is achieved? I don't have anything to add in terms of understanding this process, at the moment, or Kerouac. I should just go ahead and read him. I'll start with On the Road and move on to Dharma Bums from there.

Bill Browning, Atlanta, GA, Sunday, 7 March 2010.