Going On the Road never ends well. Credit: YouTube
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Jack Kerouac, who would have been 100 tomorrow, was the sort of male literary celebrity America doesn’t produce anymore. Shy and sensitive, ambitious to the point of megalomania (he often likened himself to Melville and Shakespeare), and an outrageous drunk, he was a mystic in love with the mythology of America, into which he attempted to write himself as a character. Adopted as a prophet by the Sixties counterculture, he ended his life as a grouchy reactionary, cursing the long-haired hippie kids who loved him.
To a degree almost unimaginable for today’s novelists, Kerouac paid his dues. In 1956, a year before the publication of On the Road, he was to all appearances a broken man. Nobody would take his books — On the Road had been stuck in publishing purgatory for five years, passed back and forth among editors who considered it unmarketable. He had one novel to his name, a commercial failure called The Town and the City, and a rucksack full of eccentric manuscripts. He was 35 years old.
Kerouac had spent most of the previous decade drifting between San Francisco, New York, Mexico City, and North Carolina, working odd jobs, dodging his ex-wife’s lawyers, wringing cash out of his mother and friends, and writing in a perpetual haze of marijuana, booze, Benzedrine, barbiturates, and morphine. In New York City, in 1953, he had spent a night as Gore Vidal’s lover; a few years later, he was telling friends that Joe McCarthy was right to attack the “Jews and fairies” who controlled the publishing world. To calm his desperation, this Catholic schoolboy studied the teachings of the Buddha, but he had trouble letting go of his ego. He bragged to his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, that when literary success finally came, he would go down in history for bringing tens of thousands of Americans to “the Way”. Mostly, he drank.
Then, seemingly overnight, Kerouac was a star. Encouraged by the electric reception of Ginsberg’s Howl after its first performance in 1955 and by the budding media interest in the so-called “Beat Generation”, Viking Press released On the Road in September 1957. Except for a positive early review in the New York Times, the critical reception was muted and often hostile. But the book was a sensation among the young readers who were just beginning to form the nucleus of the emerging counterculture. John Lennon read it as an art student in Liverpool; when a friend suggested he change the spelling of his band’s name, then the Beetles, in honour of the American movement, he immediately agreed.
On the Road was a breathless, barely fictionalised account of a series of road trips Kerouac had taken in the late Forties with his friend Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the book), a charming, exuberant con-man whose petty-criminal adventures became the basis of Kerouac’s narrative. The prose itself was full of speed, in both senses — reading it, even today, one gets the feeling of constant, propulsive action, as well as the teeth-grinding mania of all-night binges on amphetamines and coffee. Its politics were obscure, but Kerouac identified with the “beat” — the downtrodden, the hobos and bums and minorities who existed on the fringes of post-war America, free (so he thought) from the drudgery of careers and responsibilities. It was no wonder the hippies identified him as a kindred spirit.
Kerouac, however, resented the comparison. Politics had never been particularly important to him, but he was as much Q-Anon shaman as he was flower child. His own instincts were Catholic-conservative, as befitted the son of devout, petit-bourgeois Quebecois immigrants. He was patriotic, fiercely anti-Communist, frequently anti-Semitic (though many of his closest friends were Jews), and given to bouts of despair over his “lost dream of being a Real American Man”. Although an avid reader, he preferred football to philosophy, and generally mistrusted anything — Marxism, Zen Buddhism — that struck him as overly “critical” or “theoretical”. In a 1945 letter to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, irked by Ginsberg’s teasing at his “goyishe kopf”, or “gentile brain”, lashed out at their whole circle of New York intellectual friends:
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SubscribeGreat essay. I used to think the 60s was the best decade ever in America. I wished I was in my teens or twenties at that time so I could have lived the counterculture life and experienced all that naked optimism (and sang “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius” and believed it).
Now I view the 60s as the beginning of the rot that has mutated, sixty years later, into the modern progressive movement, the end point of narcissistic self-absorption. And I suppose, intentionally or not, Kerouac was its prophet.
The 60s (and the 50s before them) were times of optimism – despite the assassinations, terrorists, violent demonstrations etc.) but what seems sweet now, looking back, is how society still held together. There might be huge arguments at home (‘you’re not wearing THAT to church’) or at work (about issues like abortion) but somehow it still felt as if we were still one community. Young people were developing their own rebellious culture, but still went to church and visited the grandparents on weekends. In most cases youth still respected age – well, we didn’t have any money so options were limited!
Even music was a shared thing – Motown and pop music was fairly universally liked, but we would still be watching Peggy Lee on the Dean Martin show. People read the same paper and everyone watched Peyton Place on TV. I guess people who enjoyed the Black & White Minstrels weren’t buying Janis Joplin albums, but generally it seemed like new directions without the fragmentation we have now.
Black & White Minstrels Lives Matter!
Brilliant!
I think you are right about the 60s – however that decade also gave birth to lots of really great music and some excellent musicians
Ironic that he died in 1969, I don’t usually go in for turning point theories of history but this does seem to have been a genuine one, so much of importance happened. Woodstock, the moon landing, Vietnam, the Manson murders, etc etc And Altamont in December that year was perhaps “the day the music died”.
The chronicle of events that year is astonishing.
1969 – Wikipedia
I was there, wrote a novel about it: King of Soul
68 was pretty tumultuous as well. The assassinations, the Prague spring, Mai 68 in France, the siege of Chicago, and my very first real girlfriend at age 14.
Not to mention that there was a deadly pandemic in 1969 during which over 1 million people died. In our own more enlightened age, everyone at Woodstock would be properly masked as they rebelled against authority and rejected bourgeois social constraint.
The 60s and 70s were defining decades. Classic liberalism. Opening minds. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. All my brain and body need. Humour.
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
The author didn’t link to the interview in question – possibly intentionally – but, anyway, here it is, because, for me, it brings it all home >> https://youtu.be/oaBnIzY3R00
Would have appreciated more on this. I was going to say “who, at the time, would have seen this coming”. But perhaps WilliamBurroughs did!
What’s very striking about the world we live in now is that no one wants to feel “outside” society. Everyone, however strange, wants to be accepted. At one time outsider status, however phoney and short lived, was a badge of honour. Now no one seems to want to leave mummy’s caring arms.
It’s interesting how quickly Kerouac, the beatniks, hippies, etc, were absorbed by the Establishment, the Blob, the Man, or whatever you want to call it – epitomised (for me, anyway) by the fact that in 1994, On the Road was on the English Literature A Level syllabus.* I had to teach it…
*For non-British readers: A levels are the school-leaving exams for 18-year-olds.
A good writer IMHO. Try Dharma Bums.
Bukowski over Kerouac any day. Ginsberg could write poetry though.
Maybe he just got hooked on booze early on and died the long slow humiliating death of an alcoholic. It happens to plumbers and bank presidents as well.
Maybe he just got hooked on booze early on and died the long slow humiliating death of an alcoholic. It happens to plumbers and bank presidents as well.
I’ve never read ‘On the road’ – is it any good? I’ve always had the impression Kerouac was a bit of a mediocre Jim Morrison level writer, especially when compared to other American writers of the 20th century like Robinson Jeffers or Hemingway. Perhaps I’m being unfair?
It was required in the class on Intellectual History I took in college in the early 70’s. The teachers opinion was that it was somewhat adolescent and that Kerouac was one of those people who never really grew up.
I read it in the 1970’s in my early 20’s (to locate my opinion in time and space) and thought it was fun, engaging, a good read etc. definitely different than anything I’d read before (maybe a hint of this perspective was in the alienation of Holden Caufield). So, I recommend it, since it explained (more epitomized) the mindset of the hipster generation (fast, furious and with a modicum of poetry, especially the last paragraph)
For a publication whose masthead claims to stand apart from the herd, this essay is yet another ironic proof of its conformity to the Generation of ’68 in matters of the arts. You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel and I’m not going to tell you what the barrel contained when it was full.
Kerouac, Ginsburg, Rexroth, Bukowski and that lot — reading their “work” is most unsatisfying for anyone looking for wisdom, for beauty, for literary competence, for command of form, etc. A box of Rice Krispies is more nourishing reading than these hype-merchants and loser-whiners who want to drag you into their mud and who fail miserably to enlighten — because they had discovered nothing but the broken world which they reveled in.
Why not an essay on a real writer — who is still alive — with great gifts and an understanding of language and form unparalleled by all but a few, such as Joseph O’Connor?
A tragedy, right up there with Death of a Salesman . . .
Death of a Libertine.