Windblown World is a collection of the journals of Jack Kerouac from the years 1947 through 1954. This seven year span sees all different sides of Kerouac, but mostly portrays him as a self conscious, occasionally drunken, always depressive mortal human. It's unnerving to see this side of him, particularly when considering that Beatnik culture relies so heavily on glamorization and romanticization. Thus, this grounded, volatile and vulnerable vision of the great beatnik hero are at times shocking.
Not only does it show the "private" Jack Kerouac (yes, this is hard to rely on, the collection is published, so we have to assume that he is, at least at times, creating a persona). But we also get a workshop like look at Kerouac's famous "spontaneous prose" technique for writing.
From the April 1949 "Road Logs"
"Wrote 500 words - (more, actually, but making up for yesterday's miscalculated count.) I figure for the whole novel, right now, at 225,000 words. Some ways off eh?"
Some ways off? Holy s**t Jack! And just one day later on the 28th, you "at 4 in the morning wrote 500 words - again, with the admonition to 'Keep it moving.' Thank God for work!"
Yes, thank God for work indeed. Kerouac goes on to illustrate his working process, which can be easily summarized as sporadic. He also laments how lonely he is without companionship or his family, who he is waiting for to move out West with him. He says:
"I need my typewriter. NO furniture, no family, nothing. I can't understand all this delay. It took me 60 hours to get out here, and another 48 hours to get a house. It's taken them close to three weeks...and all I do is wait, wait, wait."
It's difficult to get a read on lines like this, is Jack trying to be funny? Or is he literally so crippled that he can't function without familial comforts? His other work would say otherwise. Sal Paradise, the Jack Kerouac of On the Road is an awful son/nephew to the family coffer that is seemingly nothing but a blank check and ticket back West. But, when you take into consideration books like "Visions of Gerard," which fictionalizes and romanticizes the death of Jack's older brother at a young age, readers see a very vulnerable Kerouac. Windblown World seems to further display him as a suffering man.
And journals from the early fifties only tip the iceberg.
He concludes Rain and Rivers journals with "I don't have to go to museums, I know what's there..." after pages of theorizing philosophy, religion and presumably, meaning. The Kerouac that Big Sur sees falling into alcoholism and deep depression is all together present here.
For a long time we have been trying to get inside the mind of Jack Kerouac. The metamorphosis he underwent, from unknown small time poet, to the definitive leader of a generation, the the crumbling, depressive alcoholic wasting away on the beach; the best we can do is track his feelings throughout his short career. He was indeed prolific and disturbed, but, he is still brilliant, often in these journals touching on vast, heavy and thick ideas about life.
It's just a shame he had to diminish. I wonder if the mysticism would be the same if Kerouac had rode out the later years of his life in a normal, less alcohol driven fashion?
Who knows?
Footnote: interesting to see a Beat work NOT edited by Ann Charters.
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