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Enfant terrible, a unique individual, jazz lover and a poet; this book, was written when Jack Kerouac was thirty-six years old. He was at the forefront of the Beat Generation in California in the fifties, through to his death in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

I kept on telling myself this is not my kind of book and I’m not enjoying myself but who was I trying to kid. Yes, it’s “raw in thought�� but spirituality flows throughout, even though the catholic faith is viewed through the eyes of (Zen) Buddhism.

I have no doubt that Kerouac's own unique background, i.e. the “gene pool��, was responsible for bringing to life an individual who loved company, but who could also be more than content to spend time on his own, thinking about nature and the wonders of our planet. I can so readily equate to this fact.

It was interesting to read that Kerouac's parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were immigrants from Quebec, Canada; and that Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school.

The first paragraph in the introduction to the book could not have been quoted better as to how I came to arrive at my own views about Jack Kerouac:

“When Gary Snyder, the Zen poet immortalized as ‘Japhy Ryder�� in The Dharma Bums, first met Jack Kerouac in San Francisco in the fall of 1955, he sensed about him ‘a palpable aura of fame and death�� ��.

This is indeed a “magical mystery tour�� which accesses the innermost recesses of this author’s inquisitive, stimulating but also soul-searching mind and, dare I say it, an individual who was frequently inebriated. This “mystery�� is shown in Ray Smith’s (I believe this is Jack Kerouac himself) life, who makes massive treks (3,000 miles) across the United States; his adventures passing through Mexico, back into the US, and then taken by a trucker (Beaudry was his name) back into Mexico; who offered to give him a ride if in exchange he could show the trucker hot spots such as the Mexican whore houses. Ray went along with this as it was all part and parcel of his journey to Rocky Mount, North Carolina where he was planning to spend Christmas with his mother.

�� Roll up, roll up for the magical mystery tour, step right this way.
Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour��
Roll up (and) that’s an invitation up for the mystery tour.
Roll up to make a reservation, roll up for the mystery tour.
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away.��

This work had the most profound effect on me both emotionally and spiritually, and with the spectacular suicide of Rosie, caused me to sink to quite a low level of despondency within myself.

Ray was happy in San Francisco and had gone over “to Rosie’s place to see Cody and Rosie.�� Cody was worried about her: “She says she wrote out a list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then tried to flush them down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in the toilet and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess…she’s nuts.��

Believing that she and her friends were all done for, Rosie slashes her wrists and was taken care of, however, she had obviously made up her mind what she had to do because she returns home and dramatically states to Ray:

“This is my last night on earth�� and indeed her suicide was truly spectacular.

Ray was always a worry for his friends. This is shown with Japhy’s concerns about his friend’s drinking habits just before he goes off to Japan.

�� ‘You’re just drinking too much all the time, I don’t see how you’re even going to gain enlightenment and stay out of the mountains, you’ll always be coming down the hill spending your bean money on wine and finally you’ll end up lying in the street in the rain, dead drunk, and then they’ll take you away and you’ll have to be reborn a teetotalin bartender to atone for your karma.��

Ray immediately thought, “He was really sad about it, and worried about me, and I just went on drinking.��

Ray also considered himself a “religious wanderer��, who loved to meditate:

“One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there for a long time without biting and then went away without biting.��

There’s humor (yodeling whilst hiking up the Matterhorn with Japhy and Henry Morley, whom Ray found mad and also boring; still the poets were having a great time); wistfulness (Japhy and his meditation: his “Bodhisattvas), sexual expression with free love, depression, beauty, all pervade this book. Knowing though that Ray was partial to his alcohol, I wondered what “spiritual�� state he was in when he was writing this.

Thinking about this work brings to mind a reporter I once knew in Fleet Street, London. He best reporting was always achieved after he’d had a “liquid lunch�� and the words just poured like “pearls from heaven��. Unfortunately, this literary genius ended with an early demise.

So in conclusion, we have here a highly religious (Catholicism) man, who had a joy for life, poetry and (Zen) Buddhism. It was this religion that was the bedrock of all his ideas; be it in nature, thoughts, friends, families and all the wonders of our universe. So what compelled such a talented individual to cross the final boundary and relentlessly slide and fall towards his own self-afflicted decline to the inevitable, leading to such an early death in his forties? Was the devil within him, I wonder.

Due to this I must read his first book, “On the Road�� but I’ve been told that it’s not as good as Kerouac’s second. Well I’ll judge that for myself. It was such a pleasure for me reading this book and such a cause for reflection of our own lives.