This is chronologically the first novel in jack
kerouac’s fictionalized autobiography, “The Duluoz Legend.” It takes place between 1922 and
1926, the first four years of Kerouac’s life, and recounts his memories of his brother Gerard. In 1926
Kerouac’s brother Gerard died at the age of nine
after two years of suffering from rheumatic fever.
Charles E. Jarvis writes, “Though Kerouac, in his
‘on the road’ existence, met many meaningful people, the most significant relationship of his life was
with his brother, Gerard.” Other scholars debate
whether or not Kerouac’s relationship with Gerard
was the most significant, but few doubt that his
romanticization of this relationship was not central to his understanding of himself. Kerouac wrote
Visions of Gerard in early 1956 while staying at his
sister’s home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He
had just returned from the West Coast where he
had met fellow Buddhists gary snyder and philip
whalen and witnessed the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. He had also seen death:
Natalie Jackson’s suicide abruptly ended a season
of camaraderie among the Beats. After hitchhiking
back to North Carolina, Kerouac arrived just as his
mother received the news that her stepmother had
died. She left to attend the funeral, and Kerouac’s
sister’s family also left for vacation in Florida.
These two deaths may well have sent Kerouac back
to the memories of his brother’s death as he sat
alone in the Rocky Mountain cabin and wrote for
15 days, using Benzedrine and smoking marijuana.
Ellis Amburn writes, “Tightly focused on the final
year of Gerard’s life, 1925, and drawn from nothing but dim, dewy memories of Jack’s fourth year,
Mémêre’s [his mother’s] stories, and a few old letters of Leo’s [his father’s], Visions of Gerard would
probably never have been written had Mémêre not
gone to New York to attend a funeral. . . . With
its jewel-like clarity and sure, unimpeded narrative line, Visions of Gerard is as pure and distilled
as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. . . . [Kerouac] achieved in Gerard a kind of requiem mass in
novel form, and often called it his favorite work.”
The style of the book is “windblown and
Shakespearian,” says Kerouac in a letter to carolyn cassady: “Enough to make Shakespeare raise
an eyebrow.” In fact, he had been reading Henry
V just before writing the book, but there are also
echoes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear and probably numerous other Shakespeare borrowings in the
book. Still, Shakespeare’s influence is not as profound as the influence that Buddhist thought was
exerting on Kerouac at this time. His experiences
in San Francisco had sharpened his already keen
understanding of Buddhist thought; he had completed writing the fascinating spiritual autobiography some of tHe dHarma and at Gary Snyder’s
suggestion had written his own sutra, The Scripture
of the Golden Eternity. Now as he faced his brother’s death, he projected Buddhist thought onto the
“saint” Gerard. In fact Gerard comes to stand in a
line of holy men who learn from suffering that suffering is caused by craving for life and that we can
end suffering by realizing that life is an illusion and
that eternal happiness is already before us. The
book thus demonstrates through the life and death
of Gerard the first three of the Four Noble Truths of
Buddha: All life is sorrowful, the cause of suffering
is ignorant craving, and the suppression of suffering
can be achieved. Recalling this family tragedy puts
Kerouac’s Buddhist belief that “all is illusion” to
the test. Among others, Malcolm Cowley felt that
the Buddhism in the book jarred with the Catholic,
French-Canadian background of the novel, and at
one point, Kerouac even agreed to change all of the
Buddhist references to Catholic ones (he evidently
saw them as basically interchangeable).
The publication of Kerouac’s letters in 1995
revealed a fascinating record of Kerouac’s first attempts at writing about his brother. In a December
28, 1950, letter to neal cassady, which Kerouac
calls a “full confession of my life,” Kerouac tells
him that he cannot understand his life story unless he knows that his brother Gerard had, literally,
been a saint—“and that explains all.” He recounts
the hagiographic stories of Gerard and the birds
and of Gerard and the mouse. He also explores
the resentment that he felt for his brother, who,
as an invalid, received much more attention than
young Kerouac did. A key scene in this letter and
in Visions of Gerard takes place when Gerard slaps
his young brother for knocking over a giant ferris wheel that he had constructed with his erector
set. Later, undergoing amateur psychoanalysis with
william s. burroughs, Kerouac revealed that he
continued to hold a grudge against his brother for
this offense and also felt guilt because of the happiness that he felt when his brother died. The letter
also reveals that Kerouac’s pre-Buddhist thoughts
about his brother and post-Buddhist writing of the
novel about him are essentially in line.
Gerard shows uncommon tenderness for
animals and for less-fortunate children, bringing
one boy home for supper because he knew that
he was hungry. Gerard’s frail health allowed him
to instinctively know that, above all, one must
“Practice Kindness”—the central precept of Buddhism but also key in Christian thought, as well.
Through Gerard, Kerouac sees that the world is
an illusion and a dream that is already over. Kerouac writes that Gerard finds a mouse in a trap,
brings it home, and bandages its wounded leg.
Unfortunately, the Kerouacs’ cat has less sympathy for the wounded mouse and eats it. Gerard, in
great seriousness, lectures the cat, saying, “We’ll
never go to heaven if we go on eating each other
and destroying each other.” The incident must be
understood in light of the first directive of Buddhism, “Cause the least harm.” Kerouac’s mother
told the story of Gerard and the cat many times,
recalling the speech that the boy made to the cat
in fond detail. Kerouac creates a similar scene of
compassion for a mouse in The dHarma Bums
and desolation anGels. Gerard’s saintliness is
also revealed in the fact that birds come to the
windowsill of his sick room. Still, he despairs that
they will not sit in his hands because they know
that little boys kill birds sometimes. Gerard cannot comprehend a God who made human beings who are mean. Kerouac’s fictionalization of
his brother’s inner life turns Gerard into a young
Buddha. Asks the narrator, “[W]ho will be the
human being who will ever be able to deliver the
world from its idea of itself that it actually exists
in this crystal ball of the mind? One meek little
Gerard. . . .” Yet the book is not straightforward
hagiography. Even Gerard sins. At confession,
Gerard admits to pushing a boy who knocked
down a card house that he had built, to looking
at another boy’s penis as they stood at the urinal,
and to lying about having studied a Bible lesson
even though he already knew the lesson from previous study. Kerouac also does not dwell exclusively on Gerard’s sufferings and says that he has
his “holidays.” When Gerard falls asleep at school,
he dreams that he sees the Virgin Mary who tells
him that they have been looking for him and
then transports him to heaven. Before he can see
heaven in any detail, a nun awakens him. He describes his dream to the nun and to his classmates,
and they are deeply impressed. His message to
them is similar to Kerouac’s belief, at times, that
we are always in heaven already but do not know
it. Gerard often sounds like Kerouac in this novel.
Gerard thinks to himself, “And me, big nut, I can’t
explain what they’re dying to know.” Eventually,
Kerouac thinks that his mother must undoubtedly
love the saintlike Gerard more than she loves him.
Though Gerard is the principal character in
the book, his father, Emil, takes second place of
importance. Emil has business and health problems
and must also endure watching his firstborn slowly
die. Kerouac must acknowledge that the realities
of making a living and of backbreaking work are
quite real. Emil is portrayed as capable of being a
“tragic philosopher,” and this quality of mind links
him to Gerard. Emil escapes from the death watch
in his home on the pretext that he has extra work
to do with his assistant Manuel. The two men hit
the road in Manuel’s sidecar motorcycle and end
up playing cards with some old vaudevillians in
downtown Lowell. Legend has it in the Kerouac
family that Leo Kerouac met W. C. Fields a time
or two and that they played poker together. Fields
is a key father figure for the Beats. Here, under the
name Old Bull Balloon, he is, as john clellon
holmes called him, his generation’s Dutch Uncle,
but Old Bull is also something of a Buddha figure
as well. After he and Emil get drunk, Bull reflects
Kerouac’s Buddhist philosophy by saying, “It’s a
dream, lads, it’s a dream.” The book runs the hard-
est reality—Gerard’s impending death—up against
Buddhism’s “all is illusion” and tests the spiritual
comfort that is (or is not) provided by such a view.
The drunken, darkly comic philosophizing of Emil
and Bull reflects Shakespeare’s influence on Kerouac at this time.
The scene shifts from the pool hall to the
death room of Gerard, who is entering his last days.
Kerouac declares the subject of his book: “death is
the only decent subject, since it marks the end of
illusion and delusion.” Gerard instinctively knows
the illusion of reality and practices “nothing.” He
advises Ti Jean to be kind and says that when he
struck him the other morning, he did not know
what he was doing. The four-year-old Ti Jean, Kerouac, cannot understand the grief that was going
on around him and even makes fun of his uncle’s
hysterical crying. Gerard dies, and the nuns take
down his secret last words, whispered to them.
Ti Jean continues to act perversely in the face of
death and runs excitedly down the street to tell his
father that “Gerard est mort!” What he wants to
tell his father is that he believes that Gerard will
return, stronger than ever. Before the funeral, while
the body is in view, he has a vision that all of the
grief which he witnesses exists only in the mind.
At the house, where relative and friends gather, he
tries to communicate this as well as a four year old
can, but he is sent upstairs because he is acting too
“gleeful.” Gerard’s death, Kerouac says, marks the
beginning of his ambition to be a writer. All that
he has written, he says, he has done in his memory
and in an attempt to explain Gerard’s saintliness.
The formal funeral attracts lines of curious schoolchildren and a host of nuns and priests who believe
that Gerard was a saint. Kerouac undercuts the
solemnity with his version of Shakespeare’s comic
gravediggers, a painter and a plasterer, who speculate callously on the identity of the corpse. Individual readers will have to decide how much solace
Kerouac’s Buddhism actually provided him in the
remembering of this story, for he does not end the
book on any note of glory.
Kerouac thought that this book may well have
been his best, and he expressed this in letters to
Snyder and Carolyn Cassady. The critics disagreed.
When the book was finally published seven years
after it was written, they lambasted Kerouac for
writing what they thought was a lachrymose book
that tugged at the heartstrings of the reader—in
other words, a cheaply emotional, sentimental
book. Kerouac was reportedly more distressed with
these negative reviews than with any other reviews
that he received in his career.
Bibliography
Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of
Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Jarvis, Charles E. Visions of Kerouac: A Biography. Lowell,
Mass.: Ithaca Press, 1974.
Rob Johnson