 Jack Kerouac, author
of Vanity of Dulouz, tracks the early years of his adolescence
from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the football fields
of Horace Mann prep school and onto Columbia State College, New
York. Kerouac first titled Vanity of Dulouz "An Adventurous
Education, 1935-1946," and later referred to it as "The
Legend of Dulouz," taking that as the family name. Kerouac
recounts his teen-age years from the perspective of an adult,
who fills the pages of this autobiography with countless thoughts
and memories as if they were infinite stars in a sky.
Influenced in his early teen-age years by his father, and what
his father wanted for his son, Kerouac finds himself while commencing
his studies at Horace Mann and starts cultivating a determination
to become a writer. He takes the reader from his New England
upbringing through New York subways, late nights walking home
over the Brooklyn Bridge, and Columbia's football fields.
Becoming fed up with Columbia and its "Ivy League standards,"
Kerouac decides to join the Navy and sails into war, in the sub-infested
waters of the Atlantic.
Kerouac soon finds that he isn't cut out for service on a Navy
destroyer. He objects to following the rules of his commanding
officers, and he would rather spend his time writing, and reading
his favorite author, Thomas Woolfe. Because of his insubordination
as a deckhand, Kerouac is taken to the Newport, Rhode Island,
Naval Base to be psychologically analyzed and is suspected of
being a Communist. Kerouac's father decides to visit his son
at Newport.
Korea describes the meeting with his father. "Then here
comes my pa, Emil A Dulouz, fat, puffing on a cigar, pushing
admirals aside, comes up to my bedside and yells 'Good boy, tell
that goddam Roosevelt and his ugly wife where to get off! All
a bunch of Communists. The Germans should not be our enemies
but our allies. This is a war for the Marxist Communist Jews
and you are a victim of the whole plot. Would I were old enough,
I would join the NMU and sail with you, go down, be bombed, I
don't care, I am a descendant of great seamen. You tell these
empty-headed admirals you're doing the right thing,' and with
this, and while being overheard by said admirals, he stomped
out, fuming on his cigar and took the train back to Lowell."
The relationship between Kerouac and his father was strained
when he quit Columbia and went into the Navy. When Emil finally
dies of colon cancer, he makes Kerouac swear at his deathbed
above anything else to take care of his mother. When Emil dies,
Kerouac goes on to explain the Vanity of Dulouz. "So, I
went home and, in the general Vanity of Dulouz, I decided to
become a writer, write a huge novel explaining everything to
everybody, try to keep my father alive and happy, while Ma worked
in the shoe factory, the year 1946 now, and make a 'go' at it."
Kerouac goes on at the end of the novel and indicates to the
reader, "I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets
of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked through 1,183
pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped,
hallelujah'd, went on, did everything you're supposed to do in
life. But nothing ever came of it. No 'generation' is 'new.'
There's 'nothing new under the sun.' 'All is vanity.'"
Vanity of Dulouz is written in a spontaneous writing style
that's interrupted with the interjected thoughts of the author.
At times these thoughts don't have a point of direction, and
trail off into another direction altogether. The novel resembles
more of a personal journal, or someone's poetry than an autobiography.
It could be said then, that Vanity of Dulouz is poetry
of life. The despair of what Kerouac feels at the time speaks
to the reader, drawing one from page to page.
Sometimes I found Kerouac's style of writing wild; there are
very few grammatical rules he follows, as if he intends to write
in a sloppy manner. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the novel with its
deep characterizations, and from time to time I could relate
to the ideas that the author expresses, even though I thought
Kerouac severely ruined the chances he had at Columbia.
At the end of the novel, I saw the point of the title. Kerouac
let his youthful vanity get in the way of aspiring to his goals
of being a famous writer. Ultimately it would be his own vanity
that would lead to several divorces, abandoning his daughter,
alcoholism, and finally his own death.
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