On the
day I bought On the Road I sat down after dinner in my rented room on
Federal Street and didn’t stir until I had read the novel in its
entirety.
Describing
the novel’s young and articulate, if often manic, characters,
narrator Sal Paradise, alias Jack Kerouac, says: “They rushed
down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had,
which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then
they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after
as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across
the stars...”
Imagine
the effect of this prose, indeed of a narrative in which Kerouac’s
people are racing from one corner of the country to the other in pursuit
of experiences I could only imagine, on a studious small town boy attending
a staid New England College. It was incendiary, to say the least. And
while I’d learned to play on piano the bebop that accompanied
Dean and Sal and their friends from New York to Denver, and from Denver
to San Francisco, LA and Mexico City, I had no idea that people like
them or their chronicler Kerouac existed.
As a
budding literary critic, I grasped the relationship between Kerouac’s
Beat Generation and the equally alienated Lost Generation of the 1920s
that Ernest Hemingway, one of my heroes, had described in The Sun Also
Rises, a novel that had as much impact on its era as Kerouac’s
had on mine. But the Beats were less after “kicks,” as their
critics alleged, than they were in search of transcendence in the face
of post-war materialism and Cold War anxiety. Asked by his friend, novelist
John Clellon Holmes, whose 1952 novel Go was really the first Beat novel,
to describe Beat sensibility, Kerouac replied:
“We
were a generation of furtives...with an inner knowledge there’s
no use flaunting on that level, a kind of beatness—I mean being
right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we
are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of
the world. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.”
I wish
I could tell you that after closing the covers of On the Road I dropped
out of college, like some of my friends did, traveling to San Francisco
in pursuit of the “subterranean” culture whose members Kerouac
characterized as “hip without being slick, they are intelligent
without being corny, they are intellectual as hell. . . without being
pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they
are very Christlike.” But I didn’t. As much as I may have
wished to go “on the road” literally and metaphorically,
I was committed to my studies, and afraid, I see now, of taking any
risks beyond the purely academic.
Nevertheless,
On the Road had a deep impact on me as a writer, an impact that reverberates
to this day, when I am no longer nineteen but approaching seventy. In
fact, when I put down the novel after my first reading, I picked it
up and started reading it all over again. Then I thought about it for
weeks, pondering its meaning on long solitary October walks down the
Mere Point Road in Brunswick, the red and yellow leaves accompanying
my mood of autumn melancholy.
For all
its surface elation, On the Road is at bottom a profoundly tragic book.
It’s a novel about a missing father who was never found, a childhood
never regained, a country whose innocence is forever lost. At the end
of Kerouac’s road, and Hemingway’s, too, instead of enlightenment
for Sal and his friends there is only the recognition of lost illusions
and inevitable death.
“I’m
writing this book because we’re all going to die,” Kerouac
said. “In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother
dead, my mother faraway. . . nothing here but my own tragic hands that
once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to
guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death.”
Like
much of our finest fiction—-U.S.A. and The
Great Gatsby come to mind—-On the Road
interrogates the fundamental American myth of success, the viability
of a life based on material values. For all their seeming irresponsibility,
Sal, Dean Moriarty (a character based on the legendary Neal Cassady),
and Carlo Marx (poet Allen Ginsberg), are committed to achieving a higher
consciousness and an authenticity of personhood and spiritual insight
that cut through the religious and political cant of Henry Luce’s
“American Century.”
For this
reason, more than for Sal or Dean or Carlo, who drank too much or took
drugs in order to “see God’s face,” who refused to
work nine-to-five jobs, and who flaunted conventions with their liberated
or inter-racial sexual expression--indeed, for the experimental brilliance
of Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose”—-On the Road
was viciously attacked by the established press and marginalized by
mainstream and academic critics. Literature, unlike politicians, tells
the truth; and sometimes the truths it reveals are unpleasant. Yet,
since its publication in 1957, On the Road has sold 3.5 million copies
in the United States alone and continues to sell more than 100,000 copies
a year. Like Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which was once
banned from the classroom, On the Road is now taught as an essential
American text.
Along
with On the Road, Kerouac published nine other novels. Perhaps the most
achieved in terms of structure, language and the poignant evocation
of his childhood in Lowell, are three books set in his hometown, Dr.
Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions ofGerard. Kerouac also wrote movingly
about growing up in Lowell in his first novel, The Town and the City
(1950) and his last book, the elegiac Vanity of Duluoz, published in
1968, a year before his death of alcoholism in St. Petersburg, Florida
at the age of 47. Kerouac was buried in Lowell on October 23, 1969.
As he wrote in On the Road, “I was going home
in October. Everybody goes home in October.”
Turning
the pages of this book again, I rediscover my youth in Kerouac’s
stunning prose and the unremitting energy of his narrative, both so
characteristically American. I see myself and my circle of friends,
all of us aspiring writers, electrified by a novel, which beckoned us
away from our textbooks, opening us to a world that lay beyond classrooms
and degrees, beyond jobs and the promise of suburban respectability.
In one way or another many of us eventually followed Kerouac’s
road to self-discovery; and that decision, in the words of another great
New England writer, “has made all the difference.”
