Fifty Years After Sal and Dean

Jack Kerouac's famous iconoclastic book, On The Road was already some thirteen or fourteen years old and the events described in it another decade older, when I first laid my eyes on it . The Beat generation, whose sensibilities were shaped by jazz, poetry and mind altering drugs was nearing middle age and the Hippie movement had entered the second half of its psychedelic existence. Coming of age at the edge of those socially and politically turbulent times, my friends and I experienced from afar smatterings of what is now popularly called the Baby Boom culture in America. Politics and youth culture in the US were in turmoil. The Vietnam War was raging; Richard Nixon was fully in control in the White House; Allen Ginsberg was still howling; Hunter Thomson was blazing trails with his alcohol fueled Gonzo journalism; newsmen hounded politicians like quarries rather than act as their meek mouthpieces; Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury and Flower Power rocked and rolled as fabulous swirling images on movie and television screens, in music lyrics and amidst the pages of post WWII protest literature. (Real life was more mundane of course, as my American contemporaries have later assured me.) Film makers, poets and authors the world over, including in India, were boldly breaking out of the "classic" mold to shock, entertain and change social paradigm. Unbelievable though it was then, the buttoned down regime of Ronald Reagan was a mere decade away in the future

In India, where I grew up, things were different but not entirely placid. Drugs and sex were not what most young people indulged in freely. But the domestic political scene was interesting and identification with global causes popular. The war in Vietnam, close to home, was a rallying cry against American imperialism (Mera naam, tera naam, Vietnam, Vietnam - roughly translated to mean, "We are all Vietnamese now.") at student protests.  Bus burnings, sit-ins, college closings and massive student-labor joint rallies were products of radical campus politics. The home grown violent Marxist uprising in pockets of rural and urban India  had Gandhian elders scratching their heads and tearing their hair. A major war with Pakistan, followed by the creation of Bangladesh changed how we thought of our neighborhood, at least temporarily. The streets of Indian cities were awash with long haired Americans and Europeans ostensibly looking for "peace," but mostly there to shop for cheap drugs and spurious spirituality. Life for the majority of young Indians was mostly unremarkable - revolving around home, school and friends . But we were acutely aware of things unfolding around us - through real life happenings, books, movies, music and animated discussions at the university coffee house.

It was a time of ferment and experimentation and voices were raised. The screaming voices are quiet now. The rebellious generation has entered staid middle age and for the most part is thriving within the very system it once despised. Philosophically, those tumultous decades have left an indelible mark on the world - in race and gender relations, civic engagement, political activism, openness and introspection in public discourse and in teaching us to walk in someone else's battered shoes. But the riotous popular culture of the 1960s and 70s, for the most part is pretty much a faded memory. What survives and still manages to enthrall, is the amazing and everlasting quality of the music it spawned. Baby Boomer literature on the other hand, has a mixed record. Not all that was considered groundbreaking then, has withstood the test of time well. Books that had fueled temporary intoxication haven't gone away altogether - some have just lost their iconic and prophetic patina.* Confronting their own mortality, Baby Boomers have begun to look back in nostalgia at the remarkable culture that once ruled their lives. 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of On The Road, the book, which for many best symbolized a time of upheaval, changing mores and a new world order (or so they had hoped).  It is fruitless to try and describe Kerouac's book - it quite defies description. So I won't attempt a formal review. Although I read it a long time ago, I remember feeling  disconcerted and not very impressed by the frenetic stream of consciousness story telling, punctuated by the occasional touching innocence and interesting turn of the phrase. May be I am (was) too unimaginative. But for some reason, I did not connect emotionally to Kerouac's fast, furious and self destructive journey to nowhere, unlike the purpose driven (though not terribly good) "Motorcycle Diaries" which I read many years later. 

My coolness towards On The Road was not because I did not know anyone like Salvadore Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego in the book) or Dean Moriarty (Neil Cassady, the hellion friend and mentor of Kerouac) and therefore couldn't identify with them. In my relatively carefree and happy youth, I also didn't have first hand knowledge of anyone who had lived through the methodical madness depicted by Joseph Heller, the brooding isolation of Salinger, the cold blooded sexuality of Henry Miller or the rationally unreal world of Vonnegut  (authors I read around the same time). Yet nothing came in the way of my enjoyment of the works of those authors. Kerouac's autobiographical fiction on the other hand, was populated by characters I DID NOT particularly want to know. There was too much self-conscious spontaneity, alcoholic insanity, brutal casualness and no compensatory literary charm about the whole adventure. Getting high on life?  Perhaps that's what it was for Sal and Dean. But what a crashing downer it was for me.  A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on what exactly bothered me about Kerouac's book. Now I know. It was like reading a stranger's self absorbed and not wholly interesting blog.

(*A while ago, I wrote a post about my second impressions of books that I had read in my youth and revisited at an older age. It was a mixed reaction. Some favorites managed to charm a second time, others lost their shine under the glare of a mature perspective.)

There was a lengthy commentary by David Gates on Kerouac and the 50th birthday of On The Road in the last issue of Newsweek. (Gates casts a kind eye on Kerouac.  I tend to agree more with the supercilious Truman Capote.)

Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" gets the full 50th anniversary treatment next month, and both cheerleaders and hand-wringers acknowledge that it radically changed American culture—somehow or other. True, the National Quiet Desperation Index has only risen since 1957, and if the book's exaltation of junker cars and diner food had really taken hold, we'd have fewer SUVs and fast-food franchises. But "On the Road" showed, and continues to show, generations of young readers a more intense, more passionate—and more closely examined—life. Some who've busted out to live it themselves died on the streets. Others have refreshed the American sensibility, in music, art, fashion, or in simply learning to kick back and take pleasure in pleasure. This book has stayed, as one of its early readers would say, forever young....

America's archetypal literary joyride might be the saddest novel you'll ever read. If you're young enough, "On the Road" can be a liberating, life-changing blast of energy. But its brief yawps of pure joy and pleasure simply add piquancy to the general lamentation. Near the end of the novel, an apparition with long white hair (maybe a vision, maybe a crazed wanderer) gives Sal the Word: "Go moan for man." He didn't say Go man go....

But Viking has the real goods—not just "On the Road" itself but the hitherto-unpublished "scroll manuscript," a 1951 draft that Kerouac typed without a paragraph break on thin drawing paper (not Teletype paper) taped together in a single 120-foot roll, powered by coffee (not by Benzedrine). Kerouac was then a writer with a forgotten first novel ("The Town and the City") who wanted a nonstop, unpaginated flow appropriate both to his convictions about spontaneous composition and to the narrative itself.

It wasn't a publicity stunt, but it helped create the legend anyway: the manic genius pounding away, bug-eyed and sweating, channeling a masterwork out of nowhere and everywhere, only to have it neutered and normalized by repressive editors in New York. (Though not so neutered and normalized that hipsters refused to read it.)...

Kerouac greatly improved the book's most-quoted passage: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles across the night." Or so the scroll has it. The published version goes on: " ... like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' " This is Kerouac finding his true voice and true subject: beyond the trite Roman candles to the explosion, the spiders, the stars—and then the deflationary exhalation. If only he'd lost the "fabulous."....

In the novel conjured up out of Kerouac's words and young readers' wishes—does anybody over 21 read it anymore?—Sal Paradise simply liberates himself from his aunt's cozy home, lights out for the territory and finds himself. (Forget the God part.) If Sal can do it, so can they. After half a century, they still try, though they have to find their territory: Kerouac's was vanishing, from America and from his own miserable life, by the time his book came out. Some of these seekers revel in what they find out there, and in there. But Kerouac knew that wasn't the end of the story.

Comments

[Amardeep]

A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on what exactly bothered me about Kerouac's book. Now I know. It was like reading a stranger's self absorbed and not wholly interesting blog.

Nice comparison!

[Lester Hunt]

Yes, the blogger comparison is apt. Jack was a blogger-before-his-time. But I think Capote's famous put-down, "That's not writing, that's typing," suggests he was taken in by Jack's self-myth, that this book just gushed out of him spontaneously. Such things are impossible. For one thing, he had gotten a lot of practice writing before this book supposedly gushed out, so he was building on a lot of earlier hard work. Plus, it was based on notebooks he kept while the depicted events were transpiring. For better or worse, OTR is a work of art.

[Ruchira Paul]

Lester, I am aware of the copious notes Kerouac took before he wrote (typed) anything. Which is why the myth around that long scroll of paper rolling out of his typewriter during one frenzied session of writing was such a hoax. I didn't even know about that at the time I read OTR but still I found Kerouac's "spontaneous" style somewhat contrived.

I am glad that you found the book more satisfying than I did. You are probably in the majority on this one. But we all have our favorite "most overrated book." For you it was Catch 22, for me it is OTR. :-)