Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac

By Ian Scheffler, The New Yorker

08 September 13

ne night in early April, 1958, Joyce Glassman's doorbell rang and woke her. An aspiring novelist who worked as a secretary at a small publishing firm, Glassman lived in a tenement on East Thirteenth Street, in Manhattan. When she opened the door, she found Jack Kerouac, his face covered in blood. The two had met the year before, on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. In her memoir "Minor Characters," Glassman recalls Kerouac staggering inside, supported by the poet Gregory Corso. "Leave me alone," Kerouac moaned, as Glassman tried to wipe the blood from his face. He looked stunned.

In Glassman's telling, Kerouac and Corso had been barhopping in Greenwich Village. At Kettle of Fish, on MacDougal Street, a stranger accused Kerouac of insulting him. When Kerouac and Corso left the bar, the stranger and his friends surrounded them, and the man threw Kerouac to the ground and beat his head against the curb. (There are other versions of the story, but Kerouac's correspondence suggests that Glassman is mostly correct.)

Over Kerouac's protests, Glassman writes, she brought him to a nearby hospital. She was worried that he had a concussion. But, according to the doctors, Kerouac had suffered only cuts and bruises. He was given some medicine and a bandage on his forehead.

Within days, Kerouac began to suspect that he had been misdiagnosed. Less than a year later, in a letter to Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky that was later published by biographer Ann Charters, in one of her collections of his correspondence, he noted his "recent belligerent drunkenness," and said, "I just noticed today it all began last April right after that bum pounded my brain ... maybe I got brain damage, maybe once I was kind drunk, but now am brain-clogged drunk with the kindness valve clogged by injury."

Glassman, who has since taken the last name of her late husband, the abstract painter James Johnson, recently came to think that this incident might be more significant than she had previously imagined. While researching a biography of Kerouac several years ago, she became aware of reports of men whose lives had followed a trajectory like Kerouac's after the beating: a relentless decline marked by substance abuse, depression, and memory loss. Like Kerouac, who died at forty-seven in 1969, of an internal hemorrhage possibly brought on by alcoholism, many of these men had reached the pinnacle of their field only to implode in middle age. Like them, Johnson saw, Kerouac had suffered head trauma-and not once, but many times, for, in addition to a serious car accident in his teens, he'd spent years participating in the same activity that had landed most of them in the headlines: football.

Kerouac played his first down in the fall of 1935. He was thirteen. The game took place in a sandlot in Dracut, a suburb of Lowell, Massachusetts, his home town. There were no helmets, no referees, just two bands of scruffy kids tackling each other; a pair of men used a homemade chain to measure first downs. One end zone was marked by a pine tree, the other by a peg. Kerouac crossed the goal line, such as it was, nine times.

That, at least, is the account Kerouac gives in "Vanity of Duluoz," an autobiographical novel. Just as "On the Road" fictionalizes his adventures with Neal Cassady, the book dramatizes the years in which he traversed the gridiron. Along with "The Town and the City," his first novel, it stands as his only major writing about his football career, which lasted seven years and carried him from Lowell High School to Columbia University.

At times, the books make for a harrowing read. The worst moment occurs in an early chapter of "Vanity of Duluoz." Playing for Horace Mann, the prep school he attended for a year before matriculating at Columbia, Kerouac takes off on a long run. About to score, he feels a pull at the back of his neck-one of his opponents grabbing him by the shoulder pads and yanking him to the muddy turf. He loses consciousness. Once he wakes up, his coaches deem him fit to return to the game. Standing in the huddle, he asks himself, "What are we doing on this rainy field that tilts over in the earth, the earth is crooked, where am I? Who am I? What's all that?"

Earlier this year, I ventured into the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, in the New York Public Library, which houses the bulk of Kerouac's archive. I wanted to see if I could answer a question Johnson poses in her recent biography, "The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac": "Did the effects of cumulative damage to the brain over Jack's lifetime ... contribute to his deepening alcoholism and depression?"

If it were possible to examine Kerouac's brain, the question could, perhaps, be answered definitively. We could learn, for instance, if he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the progressive neurodegenerative disease that has been found, so far, in the brains of more than fifty former football players. Because C.T.E.'s symptoms overlap with those of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, it can be diagnosed only by autopsy, and Kerouac didn't leave his brain to science.

Still, he did leave his writing, which, along with the recollections of his friends and acquaintances, provides a certain amount of insight into his medical history. I assembled what I found about Kerouac's head injuries and decline into a dossier and sent it to a handful of experts on the subject.

"Kerouac had all of the symptoms of C.T.E.," Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and co-director of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, told me. "I don't think it's possible, especially since you cannot be certain about the presence of C.T.E. without examining somebody's brain, to other than speculate about whether he may have had some of his issues as a result of brain trauma. My gut feeling is he did."

Although Kerouac is known as the father of the Beat Generation, his youthful diaries treat nothing so passionately as sports. His first entry in 1938 notes the results of the Rose and Cotton Bowls, and offers predictions for the Santa Anita Derby, the Stanley Cup, and the World Series, among other contests.

Kerouac paid even more attention to his own participation in athletics. The winter months of his 1938 diary assiduously report his performance as a member of Lowell's varsity track-and-field squad. The summer months are filled with entries about baseball. Autumn brings dispatches from the football field, where he played running back. On Thanksgiving Day, 1938, Kerouac gleefully describes his role in defeating his school's rival, Lawrence High: he caught a short pass and plowed into the end zone, scoring the game's only touchdown.

The same diary records roughly fifty practices and ten games. Although he rarely left the bench in 1937, and probably never did in 1936, if he practiced regularly, he may have trotted onto the field more than a hundred and fifty times before leaving high school. Practices frequently included full-contact scrimmages.

The summer after high school found Kerouac in a celebratory mood. Frank Leahy and Lou Little, the head coaches of Boston College and Columbia University, respectively, had seen the touchdown he'd scored against Lawrence, and both had offered him a scholarship. But his happiness was marred by another head injury. On a road trip to Vermont, Kerouac and a friend were involved in a car accident, and he was hospitalized. Years later, in his journal, Kerouac would wonder if his mother had been right to ask if the accident had had a permanent effect on his head.

Kerouac ultimately played little football in college. In the fall of 1940, he came off the bench in the Columbia freshman squad's first game, an 18-7 loss to Rutgers; according to the Columbia Spectator, he "was probably the best back on the field." In his second outing, against St. Benedict's, a New Jersey prep school, he twisted his leg on a punt return. He writes in "Vanity of Duluoz" that he heard his leg snap. Nothing appeared amiss to the Columbia trainers, and he practiced for a week, limping around the field. X-rays finally revealed a broken bone.

Kerouac returned to the field the next fall, but didn't stay long. He got a job at a Hartford gas station and started writing fiction at night. After a stint in the Merchant Marine, he rejoined the Lions' roster in the fall of 1942. Then one day, he later told Neal Cassady, in a conversation transcribed in "Visions of Cody," another autobiographical novel, he decided to quit football for good. "I said to myself 'Scrimmage my ass ... I'm gonna sit here in this room and dig Beethoven, I'm gonna write noble words.' "

Cantu divides the symptoms of C.T.E. into three baskets: emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. The most prevalent symptom in the first basket is depression. The second is characterized by a decrease in impulse control, which can lead to aggressive behavior and foster substance abuse. The third includes symptoms like memory loss.

Kerouac became depressed and a heavy drinker before the long-term effects of his head injuries, if there were any, would likely have manifested. According to a recent study, C.T.E.'s symptoms typically appear eight to ten years after the incurrence of repetitive head trauma, and Kerouac was already drinking heavily and experiencing bouts of depression before he dropped out of Columbia.

Over time, though, his drinking and depression worsened. By the early nineteen-sixties, he had assumed the bloated appearance of an alcoholic. The lyricist Fran Landesman later recalled that he once told her why he drank so much: he wanted to drink himself to death. The acceleration of his decline was due in some measure, no doubt, to the publication of "On the Road," in 1957, which made him uncomfortably famous. But his condition could also have been aggravated by the long-term effects of the head injuries he'd incurred, on and off the football field.

As Kerouac's health deteriorated, he showed uncharacteristic signs of aggression. When Ann Charters, Kerouac's first biographer, visited his home in Hyannis, on Cape Cod, in 1966, his mother, Gabrielle, beckoned her to the wall. She lifted a calendar to reveal gouges in the plaster. "Jackie did that [with a knife] last week," Gabrielle said. "I was so frightened I didn't go to bed all night." It's unclear if Kerouac's outbursts were due entirely to his drinking or if head trauma played a role; both alcohol and C.T.E. lower the barriers to acting impulsively.

And while he was renowned for his ability to remember the details of his own life, over time Kerouac's memory began to falter. In 1951, when he was twenty-nine, he confided to his journal that he forgot one thing after another, and wondered if the car accident in Vermont had anything to do with it. In 1958, a few months after the beating, he wrote Johnson that he was giving up on a novel about his youth. "Events are so far back I don't remember any details any more and the details are the life of any story," he wrote. (Alcoholism, of course, can also impair the memory, and it's impossible to determine how much of Kerouac's memory loss was due to his drinking. "I don't know how you'd accurately assess it," Cantu said, "because the use of alcohol will obliterate those memories while he's under the influence.")

I also shared what I learned about Kerouac's head injuries and decline with Kevin Guskiewicz, who studies sports-related traumatic brain injuries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and whose work was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's article on football and dog-fighting in the magazine several years ago; Gary Small, a psychiatrist at U.C.L.A. who has made progress in detecting C.T.E. in living people; and Christopher Nowinski, a concussion activist and another co-director of the C.S.T.E., whom Ben McGrath wrote about in the magazine in 2011. (I also contacted Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who first identified C.T.E. in football players; he was not available to be interviewed.)

Like Cantu, they all remarked that Kerouac had a significant history of head trauma. "He's got a similar brain-trauma history to many of the former athletes that we've diagnosed with C.T.E.," Nowinski said. Small agreed. "He's got multiple, significant concussions," on and off the football field, "and even probably multiple, subconcussive injuries playing football.... It really fits that picture."

Cantu, Guskiewicz, Small, and Nowinski emphasized that we can only speculate if Kerouac had C.T.E. But, they noted, his head injuries could have contributed to his decline even if he didn't develop the disease. He could have suffered brain damage that changed his behavior, or post-concussion syndrome, which, in rare cases, prolongs concussion symptoms indefinitely.

"Does he have to have had C.T.E.?" Cantu asked. "No, but even just post-concussion syndrome, following his more serious head traumas, could have given him troubles with cognition, could have given him troubles with heightened depression, could have given him troubles with heightened impulsivity.... That could have been just post-concussion syndrome, and yet it could have been even beyond that-C.T.E. It's one of those things where, I mean, the symptoms are identical to what we see, and so I think it's impossible to say one way or the other."

In the Berg Collection, I found a short story that Kerouac wrote not long after his first season at Columbia. Told from the perspective of a kick returner as he waits for the ball and the other team thunders down the field, it conveys a deep ambivalence about the sport.

The story explicitly compares football to the Trojan War-on the first page, Kerouac scribbled to himself that Homeric valor was the theme of the piece. The protagonist's thoughts, which veer from picturing his death on the field to imagining the glory of a touchdown, bring to mind Achilles's choice in Homer's Iliad: if he reënters the battle, he will win everlasting glory but die young; if he abstains, he will live a long, healthy life but never be remembered. In a note appended to an alternate version of the story, Kerouac explained that its purpose was to correct the public perception of football players. They might seem unstoppable, but this is an illusion, he wrote. Football players are human: they run so fiercely because they're terrified.