The first picture in this post is (as best as I can determine) a photo of Jack Kerouac from around the middle of the 1950s when he was in his mid-30s.
The picture was likely taken just before or after he spent three months as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Pacific North-West, having come under the (mostly positive) influence of Gary Snyder with his love of Zen and the wilderness and the call of the High Sierra.
You can find Kerouac's various descriptions of that solitary time in The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels and Lonesome Traveller.
The next set of pictures date from approximately ten years later, just before Jack's addiction to alcohol finally destroyed him, his hemorrhaging esophageal varices leaving him to choke and drown in his own blood.
Ten years, give or take. It's a shocking decline.
There is also video testimony to this alcoholic decline. You can compare the drunk but still handsome, fit Kerouac who appeared the Steve Allen Show in 1959 with the bloated pisswreck who disgraced himself on The Firing Line with William F Buckley in 1968.
These documents speak for themselves, and so there is little need for me to say anything further.
Perhaps I'll just finish with an admonition from TS Eliot, lightly amended for effect: Gentile or Jew, O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Kerouac, who was once as handsome and tall as you.
P. Julian
16 July 2018
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