By Stuart Mitchner

I drink because I want to make people respond wildly, be happy, enthusiastic…

—Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

One year ends and a new one’s looming, so get ready for “Auld Lang Syne,” toasts, laughter and tears, and remembering the friends you lost but never lose, like Jack Kerouac, born 100 years ago, March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Mass. Of all the writers I know and never knew, from Shakespeare to Salinger, Coleridge to Chekhov, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, who lived out his 47 years in the 20th century, is always good company, the writer most likely to make fast lifelong friends of readers like myself. On the scale of associations, no one else I know can go from New Year’s Eve parties dancing to Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon blowing “The Hunt” to the spire of Combray cathedral and Proust, “that old teahead of time” who “I love so much now that in the history of my affections he ranks with Wolfe & the man of the Karamazov darkness.” 

In his journal for November 13, 1951, Kerouac recalled the moment when “heaven punished me” for being drunk dancing “so crazily to Stravinsky that I tore my own shirt off.” The day before, he’d written, “I’m beginning to see my own tragedy. All I have to do is look in the mirror. The moment is coming when I must decide to go cold turkey on all alcohol. I just can’t restrain myself after a brew.” Ten days later and 18 years before his October 21, 1969 death from “massive internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis of the liver,” Kerouac stated his writer’s rational for alcoholic excess, that his drinking derived from his desire to make people “respond wildly, be happy, enthusiastic.” Yet it was the crowds of wildly happy, enthusiastic, privacy-invading fans that nearly drove him out of his mind and deeper into drink, a fate detailed in Big Sur (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1962).  more