“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his blood.” Once, when starting a novel, Beat writer Jack Kerouac took this Nietzsche saying literally, and, in the words of Paul Maher Jr., “to its extreme by cutting his finger and smearing the word BLOOD in blood on its title page.” Maher’s biography, “Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time,” is a story of extremes, because its subject was a man of extremes.

Maher, who lives in Lubec, knows the lay of this land. In 2004 his book, “Kerouac: His Life and Work” appeared to great acclaim. At the time, American composer, David Amram, said, “He (Maher) has written a truly definitive portrait, done with a purity of intent that shines through each page,” while Vanity Fair urged, “Tune in, all you desolation angels and dharma bums, and turn on to Paul Maher’s jazzy bio of Kerouac.”

Local review

“Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time”

By Paul Maher Jr.

Lyons Press

Hardcover, 318 pages

$34.95

“Becoming Kerouac” more deeply explores the writer’s life from 1949, when Kerouac left his home in Lowell, Massachusetts, through 1957, just before his life-changing (both for himself and the world) novel, “On the Road,” was published. Or, in Maher’s words, Kerouac’s “creative trajectory to a fully evolved author of his era.” A trajectory of repetitive cycles of writing, travel, alcohol and drug binging, and forming, and rapidly dissolving, relationships with friends and lovers. But mostly, of writing.

The trajectory began at Columbia University, which Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to a Franco-American family, attended on a soon-to-be-lost football scholarship. Here, Kerouac met future Beat luminaries, William Burroughs, who turned him onto drugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who stoked his love for literature. He also met, through another Columbia friend, the crazy bisexual poet Neal Cassady, who inspired Kerouac’s view of life and provided inspiration for Dean Moriarty, one of the main characters in “On the Road.”

Cassady was essential as a role model for what Kerouac thought of as a vital authentic life, but also, Maher contends, for Kerouac’s development as a writer. Cassady and Kerouac wrote many letters, including at some point, a letter that blew Kerouac’s mind: “Jack had found the first ingredient for his writing breakthrough,” Maher writes. “The thirteen-thousand-word letter was a rambling scattershot narrative that assaulted its reader with reckless verbosity.”

Kerouac’s friendships, though fraught, usually fared better than his relationships with women. He was a terrible lover and/or mate. Kerouac’s second wife, Joan Haverty, “was a mere sexual convenience for Jack,” according to Maher. When she told him she was pregnant, he denied the child was his and abandoned her.

Maher argues that for Kerouac, “All women . . . fell short of his birth mother. He was afflicted with what Jung defines as ‘Don Juanism,’ when a man ‘unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets’ . . . .”

The thing is, Kerouac knew this. Burroughs had done some amateur psychoanalysis of Kerouac. His conclusion: “ . . . Kerouac was too reliant on his mother and ultimately she would emotionally strangle him as he got older.”

Yet when he died at age 47 from an alcoholic hemorrhage, he was living with her. His mother Gabrielle both smothered Kerouac with attention and manipulated his emotions. When Kerouac was 4, his elder brother, Gerard, had died and the younger boy “assumed the survivor’s guilt and was sometimes made to believe that the wrong son had died when his mother was deep in her cups,” Mahler writes.

What redeems Kerouac’s life is the work he passionately devoted himself to. Kerouac left us his masterpiece, “On the Road,” but also enough other classic work to fill four Library of America volumes. A very religious man who oscillated between Catholicism and Buddhism and who always felt shame at his inability to live either faith, Kerouac, in Maher’s words, tried “to imbue the commonplace with holy reverence.”

The text of “Becoming Kerouac” can be a bit confusing as to time and setting. Perhaps Maher is occasionally trying to convey the confusion of Kerouac’s life by confusing the reader. But overall I enjoyed the book very much. Kerouac fans will love this deep dive into eight years of his life.

According to Maher, Kerouac, a founding member of the Beat movement, defined “Beat” in two ways: “the Times Square junkie slang of being reduced to one’s essentials” but also “beatific.” “In this sense, beat captured the holiness of being among the oppressed . . . .” That was the faith Kerouac could and did live.

Frank Freeman is a poet and book reviewer who writes from Saco.