Greg Corso (l) and Jack Kerouac (r). Credit: Wikiemedia Commons

In the Oct. 17, 1959 issue of America, a small sidebar can be found among the editorials, titled simply: “Crucifix on a Chain.” It is, all things considered, one of the more surprising entries in the magazine’s 117-year history. Here it is in full:

… but my poet friend Gregory Corso opened his shirt and took out a silver crucifix that was hanging from a chain and said “Wear this and wear it outside your shirt and don’t comb your hair!” so I spent several days around San Francisco going around with him and others like that, to parties, arties [sic], parts, jam sessions, bars, poetry readings, churches … and finally on the third day Mademoiselle magazine wanted to take pictures of us all so I posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix, and all … and the only publication which later did not erase the crucifix from my breast … was the New York Times, therefore the New York Times is as beat as I am, and I’m glad I’ve got a friend. I mean it sincerely. God bless the New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something distasteful. As a matter of fact, who’s really beat around here, I mean if you wanta [sic] talk of Beat as “beat down” the people who erased the crucifix are really the “beat down” ones and not the New York Times, myself, and Gregory Corso the poet. I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it. I am sure no priest would’ve condemned me for wearing the crucifix outside my shirt everywhere and no matter where I went, even to have my picture taken by Mademoiselle. So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels? 

-Jack Kerouac in Encounter, August, 1959

The excerpt was from an article by Kerouac, whose star was fully in the ascendant after the appearance of his novel On The Road two years before, that had appeared in Encounter a month before and purported to give the background to the newly popular Beat movement. Truth be told, even the Encounter article (titled “Beatific”) was a rehash of a Kerouac essay that had appeared in Playboy even earlier that summer, “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” but the editors of America were hardly going to quote from Playboy. (As it turns out, they had longstanding beef with Hugh Hefner anyway.) But the incident in question was a real one.

The pictures taken by a Mademoiselle photographer in September 1956 for a story on “The Lively Arts in San Francisco” were of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and the aforementioned Gregory Corso. They were used in a number of contexts over the next two years, including for a closely cropped image of Kerouac on the dust jacket of On The Road in September 1957. As related in the excerpt above, Kerouac had been given the crucifix to wear by Corso, a fellow Beat poet. 

The crucifix is indeed missing from that dust jacket photo (though because it was cropped out, not airbrushed away). The New York Times, however, did run a larger version with the crucifix clearly visible on Sept. 1, 1957, alongside a roundup of “Nine Tellers Of New Tales.” (The full review of On The Road, published a few days later, was accompanied by the cropped dust jacket photo: no crucifix.)

Why such a fuss about a photo? And why was America running an excerpt from Kerouac at all? The editors in general had found little common cause, literary or otherwise, with the “beat generation,” and even Kerouac’s more conventional 1950 novel, The Town and the City, had been given a negative review in the magazine by a young priest named Gerard S. Sloyan in 1950 (Yes, that Gerard S. Sloyan!). “Large sections of the book,” Father Sloyan wrote, “are like mid-Merton with no monastery in sight; the licks hotter, the company less reputable.” Of Kerouac, he wrote, “his critical worth is negligible.”

After the release of On The Road in 1957, reviewer Francis X. Connolly wrote in the magazine that Kerouac “can yell louder than a small army of bleating Britishers,” adding that the novel “chases most of the deadly and deadening sins for thrills and kicks. If this book is a forerunner of a new literary generation, we may well begin to get ready for a shoal of mindless books.” 

But the excerpt made something else clear—that Kerouac, and Corso too, were clearly Catholics. 

Kerouac had made the point himself at various times and places, including in his 1960 book of essays, Lonesome Traveler, where he described himself as “not a ‘beat’ at all, but a strange solitary Catholic mystic” who “always considered writing my duty on earth, and the preachment of universal kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice.” And despite Kerouac’s famous identification with forms of Buddhism and other Eastern religions, his imagination remained Catholic—and not just in his novels, full as they are with images of saints and shrines and the Virgin Mary. Decades after Kerouac’s death from alcoholism in 1969, the historian and author Douglas Brinkley (who edited Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954) wrote that “when I edited his diaries, really almost every page, he drew a crucifix or a prayer to God, or asking Christ for forgiveness.”

Corso was in some ways harder for the editors to claim, by that point anyway. Considered one of the original “Beat poets” (though he was somewhat younger than Kerouac, Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs), Corso published plays, novels and many well-regarded books of poetry during a rough-and-tumble life marked by struggles with drugs and alcohol. Born Nunzio Corso (Gregory was his confirmation name), he had spent much of his youth in and out of foster homes and jails; he later told Kerouac that his most important possession in those years had been his baptismal certificate, “the only thing that really meant something to me I guess.” 

At the same time, Corso was hardly a conventional Catholic, and years after he gave Kerouac the crucifix mentioned above, he expressed some regret for the action, saying that “later on in life, of course, I looked on the cross as a heavy weight. Somebody died on it so I really didn’t like it.” However, Corso acknowledged that he still wore a cross himself that held a relic of St. Francis of Assisi. He wrote in a 1958 letter to Kerouac that “I don’t regret my Catholic upbringing. There is something in me that is still very Catholic, I think it’s that only-we-see-the-face-of-God conceit.”

Corso lived to be 70, dying in 2001 as “the last of the Beats.” (Little-known fact: The angry investor who jumps up in “Godfather III” to say that Michael Corleone “has got the map of Sicily on his face”? It’s Gregory Corso). Kerouac would not enjoy such length of years: Just 12 years after On The Road was published, he died at the age of 47 in 1969. His funeral Mass was celebrated in his hometown of Lowell by a priest he had known all his life, Armand Morissette, O.M.I. His obituary in The New York Times by Joseph Lelyveld closed on a note that would have pleased America’s editors a decade before:

“I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic,” he said last month. He showed the interviewer a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, “You know who painted that? Me.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Sagrada Familia: The Chains,” by Rachel Lott. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.