Solitude becomes beautiful in Jack Kerouac’s ‘Desolation Angels’

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Freelance writer Sherwood Karl Magus B. Kaufman , 27, is a graduate of Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), and worked as a journalist from 2000 to 2004, covering the Senate, Comelec and AFP. His other hobbies are blogging and "learning how to play guitar like Kirk Hammet."

The moon is a piece of me – Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Jack Kerouac. Just the mere mention of his name is enough for me to raise the proverbial wine jug in a glorious drunken salutation that can last from sunup to sundown. Good ol’ Jack. Though the world is full of brilliant authors, very few of them can write about the zest, wonder, sadness, and humor of young life more interestingly than this Lowell, Massachusett, native. And for doing so he became the unwitting spokesman of many confused and dissatisfied youngsters all over the world, past and present. (The L.A. Times once called him "a prophet to everyone but himself.") His works – glaring examples of what he called "spontaneous prose" – epitomize the fun and excesses of the 1950s. His books are considered influential both in their simplicity and madness, though frowned upon by conservative literary experts because of their topics and the manner in which they were written.

Kerouac is more popularly known for penning On the Road, which is deemed as the Bible of the so-called Beat Generation, a period in American literature popular for its spontaneity and notoriety. However, it is through the lesser-known Desolation Angels that he elevated himself, to me, anyway, as a personal hero. I remember rainy mornings and stormy midnights, with me snug in my room, oblivious to the world, reading this book and feeling that little twitch in the heart that comes when you bump into a work of art that gloriously speaks of what you are feeling at the moment. Granted, I discovered this book when I wasn’t having the grandest of days. For the first time in my life I was out of work. I was miserable, stone-broke, and my morale was in the gutter, being swept away by rainwater.

There’s little ecstasy to be had in Desolation Angels, as it is full of Kerouac’s reflections on solitude, starting with his solitary two-month stay atop Desolation Peak in Mt. Baker National Forest in Washington State as a forest watchman, which comprises the first part of the book. The sorry, mundane, day-by-day accounts of that fire-watching experience, recalled and written in Mexico City in 1956, sets the cheerless tone for the rest of Desolation Angels. Reading it, one can’t help but be touched by the "desolation" he describes:

So now in my dirty torn clothes I’m a bum in the high Cascades and all I’ve got for a kitchen is this crazy battered stove with cracked stovepipe rust – stuffed yea, at the ceiling, with old burlap to keep the rats of night out – days long ago when I could have simply walked up, and kiss either my mother and my father and say, "I like you because someday I’ll be an old bum in desolation and I’ll be alone and sad’."

In the second part, penned in 1961, Kerouac takes us drinking in the backwater pubs of Mexico City, London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Tangiers with his friends. He shares his reflections on Buddhism, Christianity, communism, life, love, the generation he accidentally created, and even On the Road. The reflections are usually sad and confused, hinting of a destitute man grappling to live and love in a world lost in emptiness and desolation. In one part of the book Kerouac watches a waitress in a bar and tells her entire life story in snapshot events that underlie the sad look in her eyes. In one part he tells of a memorable bus ride with his mom and a bottle of wine.

As any Kerouac junkie would tell you, his rambling is addictive. His words, sentences and paragraphs hum with energy, passion and enthusiasm. His idiosyncratic style, his sheer vibrancy and prodigious expressive skill are strangely infectious, influential, even grimly exciting: you can’t look away even if he’s chronicling another stage in his descent into alcoholism and terminal despair. Misery loves company, I guess, because we become swept up in his world of drunks, travel, solitude and musings about life. But most significantly we see ourselves in the characters, which, incidentally, are all based on Kerouac’s real-life buddies.

In the semi-autobiographical Desolation Angels, Kerouac writes as Jack Duluoz, a dreamy humanist charging through life with the aim of a blind rhino. Kerouac’s friends are here as well. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl, appears as Irwin Garden, whose optimism contrasts with Jack’s essentially sad nature. There’s Naked Lunch author William Burroughs as Bull Hubbard, a philosophical misanthrope in self-exile in Tangiers; and Gregory Corso as Raphael Urso, a streetkid with a poet’s soul and in whom Kerouac’s quintessential sadness and isolation is recognized. Salvador Dali, the noted surrealist painter, also makes an appearance.

In Desolation Angels joy and despair hook up and become one. As we identify with Kerouac’s optimism about spending a long time alone in the wilderness, we see his growing despondency and desperate need for human company – away from a malevolent wilderness and into the familiar bars of the skid row areas of Seattle and San Francisco.

And then there is also his flirtation with Buddhism (chronicled in detail in The Dharma Bums). Though he is passionate in his curiosity and fascination with this Oriental religion, one can still sense his deep-rooted Catholic sensibility coming through: the desperate need for a sense of redemption and the obsession with the comforting figure of the mother/Virgin Mary. What Kerouac seemed to really want was to be young and fresh and innocent again, his prodigious memory unaffected by alcohol, his tremendous sense of optimism and sheer enthusiasm sweeping away all the terrible realities of the real world. If anything, such ambiguity just made him all the more human.

Desolation Angels lacks the adventure of On the Road. Nevertheless, it is still brilliant and poetic despite its decidedly cheerless tone. By the end of the book you can already sense the beginning of Kerouac’s psychosis and alcoholism that would eventually lead to his death in 1969 at the age of 47.