In 1972, when I turned 21, I hitch-hiked out to San Francisco and spent time in beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore and read the days away in those decrepit chairs. Kerouac was a central figure, but I always felt he saw himself as a writer much more than a beatnick. He wrote some extraordinarily beautiful passages, and spent the end of his life in the Catholic faith of his youth.
1959 was kinda late for the Beats. They really started in the late Forties.
“Reading from a prepared text, Kerouac reflected on his beat beginnings:
It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?[6]
Kerouac’s address was later published as “The Origins of the Beat Generation” (Playboy, June 1959). In that article Kerouac noted how his original beatific philosophy had been ignored amid maneuvers by several pundits, among them Herb Caen, the San Francisco newspaperman, to alter Kerouac’s concept with jokes and jargon:
I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat”... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the “avatar” of all this.
In light of what he considered beat to mean and what beatnik had come to mean, he once observed to a reporter, “I’m not a beatnik, I’m a Catholic”, showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, “You know who painted that? Me.”
” Kerouac was a central figure, but I always felt he saw himself as a writer much more than a beatnick. He wrote some extraordinarily beautiful passages, and spent the end of his life in the Catholic faith of his youth.”
And Kerouac was a patriot who loved America ; unlike Ginsberg and Burroughs . In his final years he had nothing to do with them . He even called Ginsberg a Commie on Firing Line and Allen was in the audience , there to support Jack , who was , shall we say , slightly inebriated .