a decent whore

"Kerouac named his narrator after misreading a line in a 1947 Ginsberg poem. "Sad paradise it is I imitate / And fallen angels whose wings are sighs." The sadness in Ginsberg's line proved prophetic. After writing his scroll draft, Kerouac spent the next six years producing manuscripts that no publisher wanted, shuttling between temporary homes with no money or professional recognition, his marriage ruined and his former athletic vigor mocked by phlebitis in his legs. On one trip, he was reduced to eating grass. "What have I got?" he wrote to Holmes in 1952. "I'm 30 years old, broke, my wife hates me and is trying to have me jailed, I have a daughter I'll never see, my mother after all this time and work and worry and hopes is STILL working her ass off in a shoe shop; I have not a cent in my pocket for a decent whore." His wings, truly were sighs.

He had no way of knowing that success would be worse.

He never benefited from the lessons of  Sal Paradise. The stable family life that Sal plotted out eluded Kerouac. Sal's visions brought Kerouac no buffer for his daily struggles. As Kerouac got older, the gap between On the Road's ideals of manhood and the life he led only widened. Like Sal, he was ambitious in his dreams but passive in his follow-through. Both looked for redemption to come from the outside, like lightning in a clear sky. In the end, Kerouac was as remote from Sal as Sal was from his mad ones, a passive observer of the swirl he helped to create.

In the time it took On the Road to reach print, the nature of public life changed in ways for which Kerouac was constitutionally unsuited. The television set, a novelty when he started his travels, had infiltrated seven million homes by 1957, expanding the reach and demands of celebrity. Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and James Dean had galvanized the public around a particular image of sexy, brooding, inarticulate youth. While Kerouac's manuscript languished, the country experienced fast food, Playboy, hot rods, Alan Freed, Brown v. Board of Education, the Marlboro Man and an economic explosion entirely at odds with the book's skid row mysticism. "Never has a whole people spent so much money on so many expensive things in such an easy way as Americans are doing today," crowed Fortune magazine in 1956. The book's bop saints had become the public face of heroin addiction; Charlie Parker died on Kerouac's birthday.

(...)

The writer and critic David Gates, describing his ambivalent love affair with the Beats, noted recently that their influence can be found almost everywhere today except in contemporary literature. "Among novelists," Gates wrote, "Kerouac and Burroughs may be honored as role models of American cussedness, as familiar spirits, as Promethean innovators, as visionaries who lived on enviably intimate terms with their imaginations. But relatively few people actually want to write like any of  them, and few of those few will have their work taken seriously by whatever's left of the literary establishment. A 21-year-old applying to a writing program is as ill-advised to cite Jack Kerouac as an influence as O. Henry or H.P.Lovecraft".

(...)

He spend his last day at home, October 19, 1969, in front of the television in St. Petersburg, in a house with a  fake brick façade, amid the embers of a third marriage, to Stella Sampas, a Lowell friend he married so she'd take care of his mother. He'd been beaten and arrested in a bar the month before, and had a Kennedy half-dollar taped over his navel to keep in his hernia. By then the public had lost interest in his steady stream of books, passing him a mantle of neglect once worn by Melville, who was commemorated at his death as a "Once Popular Author." Seated in front of The Galloping Gourmet with notes for a future novel, he began vomiting blood. He died in the hospital on October 21 of hemorrhaging esophageal varices, after twenty-six blood infusions. He was forty-seven.

- -
em Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of on the Road (They're Not What You Think).
aqui.

também não é um livro fantástico, mas tem cor.