randomWalks

Despite the reputation for self-indulgence that continues to cling to him, Kerouac was a reflective, vigilant artist who constantly, and consciously, strove to overcome his limitations -- the chief one being, as he saw it, his own self-critical temperament. ''I'm going to discover a way,'' he wrote, casting forward to ''On the Road'' while he was completing ''The Town and the City,'' ''of preserving the big rushing tremendousness in me and in all poets.'' One could call the effect he was after ''willed spontaneity.'' Verbal diarrhea it was not.

The journals show him evolving toward his ideal almost by the month. Released from his monastic labors in his mother's kitchen, the ascetic, introverted Kerouac took an abrasive dust bath in the real world and emerged a broader, stronger artist, who combined a mind for the transcendental with a feeling for the particular. ''But at the fireworks at Denver U. Stadium great crowds had been waiting since twilight, sleepy children and all; yet no sooner did the shots begin in the sky than these unhappy people trailed home before the show ended, as though they were too unhappy to see what they had waited for.'' This piercing sketch and others like it -- of a sandlot neighborhood baseball game, of a day spent riding horses in Colorado -- are the work of a soul that has settled into a body after floating free in the cosmos for too long.

NYT review of Windblown World, a new collection of Jack Kerouac's early journals.