This book tells the story of Gerard, Jack Kerouac’s older brother, who died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine, when Kerouac himself was only four. Through childhood memories, he portrays Gerard as an almost saintly figure — gentle, forgiving, deeply connected to nature and to God. He also paints a vivid picture of his parents and family life during those difficult years. The story of this little boy’s illness and death is deeply moving, but the book is also heavily infused with religious reflections, which occupy a large part of the narrative and shape the family’s daily life. As someone unfamiliar with Kerouac’s writing, I sometimes found the reading a little dense and demanding, despite the emotional strength of the story.
“I brought him on earth, in my womb, the Virgin Mary help me!—in my womb, with pain—I gave him his milk!—I took care of him—I stood at his bedside—I bought him presents on Christmas, I made him little costumes Halloween—I’d make his nice oatmeal he loves so much in the mornings!—I’d listen to his little stories, I examined his little pictures he drew—I did everything in my power to make his little life contented—inside me, outside me, and returned to the earth!“ wails my mother realizing the utter hopeless loss of life and death, the completely defeated conditionality and partiality of it, the pure mess it entails, yet people go on hoping and hoping—“I did everything,” she sobs with handkerchief to face, in the bedroom, as the Bradleys, Aunt Pauline, her sister, come in, from New Hampshire, “and it didnt work—he died any how—They took him off to Heaven!—They didnt leave him with me!—Gerard, my little Gerard!”
“Calm yourself, poor Ange, you’ve suffered so.” “I haventsuffered like he did, that’s what breaks my heart!” and she yells that and they all know she really means it, she’s had her fill of the injustice of it, a little lame boy dying without hope—“It’s that that’s tearing my heart out and breaking my head in two!”
“Ange, Ange, poor sensitive heart!” weeps gentle Aunt Marie at her shoulder.
Nin and I are sobbing horribly in bed side by side to hear these pitiful wracks of clack talk coming from our own human mother, the softness of her arms all gashed now in the steely proposition Death—“I’ll never be able to wipe that from my memory!”