Going On the Road never ends well. Credit: YouTube

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:
“Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. … My whole waking nature tells me that this sort of thing is not in my line. … I’m a son of Jehovah — I advance with trepidation towards the scowling elders, who seem to know about every one of my transgressions, and are going to punish me one way or the other.
Ginsberg replied, “the ‘remorse’ that you feel is avowedly exteriorized, you are afraid of … external consciousness of your fatal flaws”.
Ginsberg was perceptive. Where Kerouac’s young fans saw an early prophet of the Age of Aquarius Ginsberg saw the beat-down square, the bourgeois manqué fascinated by the bohemian underworld, yet wracked with guilt over his failure to live up to the traditional values passed down by his parents. Kerouac responded to this dilemma with narcissistic splitting, enthusiastically engaging in all of the “decadent” behaviours he criticised, while constructing elaborate rationalisations as to why he was, despite all outward appearances, different from and better than his friends. He could never really accept he wasn’t the innocent Catholic mama’s boy of his imagination, and lashed out at his friends for leading him into the temptation that was the only real subject of his art.
Even On the Road was a rejection less of “square” life than of the café society of Manhattan, with Neal Cassady as a “sideburned hero of the snowy West”, arriving to rescue Jack from what he described to Ginsberg as “la soiree d’idiocie”. As Kerouac writes early in the novel, “all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean [Neal] just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other”.
Kerouac never really resolved his love-hate relationship with the underground, and so when celebrity came, it was devastating. Traveling to Tangier prior to the publication of On the Road, he had bitterly predicted to his friends that he would “soon become a fad with ‘the mass of middleclass youth’”, according to biographer Ann Charters. He did, and to make matters worse, he was identified in the press with the figure of Dean/Neal, rather than his actual stand-in in the book, the more ambivalent Sal Paradise. Perpetually shy, Kerouac drank himself senseless to deal with the publicity. He was crowned “King of the Beats” and publishers rushed to claim his unpublished novels, but Kerouac believed himself misunderstood. He felt alienated from his young fans, and from the current of critical anti-Americanism he detected in the emerging student movement, the escape from which, for him, had been the whole point of On the Road.
Scarred by the experience of celebrity and worn out by years of hard living, Kerouac took the money from his sales and moved back in with his mother. In the last decade of his life, he sank into alcoholic paranoia, reading National Review, ranting to friends about Jews and Communists, and writing little of note aside from 1962’s Big Sur, a bleak chronicle of his own mental breakdown dashed out in a 10-day burst of clarity amid bouts of delirium tremens. In 1968, Kerouac appeared on a panel on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. The novelist, once known for his movie-star good looks, appeared drunk, bloated, and incoherent. A year later he was dead.
For someone with such a huge cultural impact at the time, Kerouac has few contemporary heirs (though plenty of writers, I presume, still drink to excess and sleep around). Sean Thor Conroe, the author of Fuccboi, is said to have tried and failed to walk across America — an eco-conscious spin on Kerouac’s hitchhiking — and alt-lit eminence Tao Lin has urged his readers to Leave Society.
But for all the talk today of an emerging “postwoke” art scene, today’s transgressives are the children of the culture birthed by the Sixties — a synthesis of what Kerouac called, in a 1957 essay, the “supercollosal bureaucratic totalitarian benevolent Big Brother structures” of postwar America with the permissive, therapeutic, spiritual-but-not-religious attitudes of the hippies. Kerouac’s tragedy was that, at the end of the day, he was a traditionalist Canuck whose search for the pure American experience helped usher in a culture that made people like him obsolete. He was both herald and victim of the biggest “vibe shift” of 20th-century America.
Kerouac tried to stay true to his own private rebellion, but it was one that led in circles. Gary Snyder, speaking in 1969, described On the Road as a tale of what happens to the cowboys when there’s nowhere left to roam: “What was intended to be done was that you should step forth into wild space; what you end up doing a hundred years later is driving back and forth in cars as fast as you can.” The only place to go at the end of the road is back where you started. For Kerouac, that was back at his mother’s house in Lowell, Massachusetts, drinking cheap whiskey out of a medicine bottle.
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Subscribe“Are you the Judean Peoples Front?”
‘Eff off! We’re the Peoples Front of Judea!”
Monty Python understood Gen Z et al 40 years before it happened.
The same thought occurred to me. Splitters!
The same thought occurred to me. Splitters!
“Are you the Judean Peoples Front?”
‘Eff off! We’re the Peoples Front of Judea!”
Monty Python understood Gen Z et al 40 years before it happened.
Fascinating, on so many levels, although i fully expect males who inhabit man-caves to baulk at this.
The seemingly permanent wry smile on Margaret Attwood’s face has had justice done to it by Kat Rosenfield. The ancient fear by society of women who no longer have sexual agency brings into focus a whole host of issues in the human psyche. I also wonder whether this plays into the obsession with trans women, i.e. a person who identifies as female but without the means of sexual reproduction.
Looking up the link to a term new to me, churail, also shows how different cultures (in this case, largely south-east asian) are haunted by females outside their control, as a shape-shifting spirit who can lure men to their doom.
The over-riding theme is one of the obsessive need for certainty. Perhaps it’s the case that the world has suddenly become too complex for adult brains, especially those still developing, to cope with. The need to categorise, to pigeon-hole writers and artists, to eschew (or simply fail to comprehend) nuance, may well be a reaction to this, emerging alongside the internet and the online world. Needing the security of one’s tribe therefore becomes a necessity, a survival strategy as old as humanity.
Many more avenues of thought derive from this, but i’m grateful to both Attwood and Rosenfield for their exploration which opens up those avenues, which seem to me to be both ancient and unprecedented. Now there’s a combination to be conjured with.
Thank-you for this comment, it adds extra depth to the article.
Edit: Good to see your courteous comment appreciated, after a raft of downvotes.
Courteous comment….
“males who inhabit man-caves”
“fear by society of women who no longer have sexual agency”
Courtesy is a word that has been mangled, like privilege, equality and racism among others.
Courteous comment….
“males who inhabit man-caves”
“fear by society of women who no longer have sexual agency”
Courtesy is a word that has been mangled, like privilege, equality and racism among others.
Edit: Good to see your courteous comment appreciated, after a raft of downvotes.
Great comment, but us old ladies still have sexual “agency” just no fertility. Some might say that gives us even more agency.
You’re absolutely right! Thanks for that correction.
I hope so
You’re absolutely right! Thanks for that correction.
I hope so
I think we’re in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown, brought on by our lack of understanding of how the modern technological world works. We can use the apps (maybe), but how many of us really understand what is going on inside the boxes of tricks we interact with? Very very few. This makes the insecurity terminal.
It’s ironic really, because our creative abilities have enabled us to free ourselves of most of the pressing problems of survival; perhaps there was a sweet spot where the average human could cope with (& have mastery over) all the new fangled inventions which improved our collective lot, but now the cyberbot nightmare begins ….
Life’s a b!tch ain’t it.
Kat – sounds to me like Atwood is playing it smart. Who could blame her or any other artist after seeing how JK Rowling has been treated.
“The over-riding theme is one of the obsessive need for certainty.”
Excellent insight.
RE: i.e. a person who identifies as female but without the means of sexual reproduction.
This is accurate but incomplete. It should be as follows: “a person who identifies as female but isn’t.
And what exactly is your problem with man-caves?
Thank-you for this comment, it adds extra depth to the article.
Great comment, but us old ladies still have sexual “agency” just no fertility. Some might say that gives us even more agency.
I think we’re in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown, brought on by our lack of understanding of how the modern technological world works. We can use the apps (maybe), but how many of us really understand what is going on inside the boxes of tricks we interact with? Very very few. This makes the insecurity terminal.
It’s ironic really, because our creative abilities have enabled us to free ourselves of most of the pressing problems of survival; perhaps there was a sweet spot where the average human could cope with (& have mastery over) all the new fangled inventions which improved our collective lot, but now the cyberbot nightmare begins ….
Life’s a b!tch ain’t it.
Kat – sounds to me like Atwood is playing it smart. Who could blame her or any other artist after seeing how JK Rowling has been treated.
“The over-riding theme is one of the obsessive need for certainty.”
Excellent insight.
RE: i.e. a person who identifies as female but without the means of sexual reproduction.
This is accurate but incomplete. It should be as follows: “a person who identifies as female but isn’t.
And what exactly is your problem with man-caves?
Fascinating, on so many levels, although i fully expect males who inhabit man-caves to baulk at this.
The seemingly permanent wry smile on Margaret Attwood’s face has had justice done to it by Kat Rosenfield. The ancient fear by society of women who no longer have sexual agency brings into focus a whole host of issues in the human psyche. I also wonder whether this plays into the obsession with trans women, i.e. a person who identifies as female but without the means of sexual reproduction.
Looking up the link to a term new to me, churail, also shows how different cultures (in this case, largely south-east asian) are haunted by females outside their control, as a shape-shifting spirit who can lure men to their doom.
The over-riding theme is one of the obsessive need for certainty. Perhaps it’s the case that the world has suddenly become too complex for adult brains, especially those still developing, to cope with. The need to categorise, to pigeon-hole writers and artists, to eschew (or simply fail to comprehend) nuance, may well be a reaction to this, emerging alongside the internet and the online world. Needing the security of one’s tribe therefore becomes a necessity, a survival strategy as old as humanity.
Many more avenues of thought derive from this, but i’m grateful to both Attwood and Rosenfield for their exploration which opens up those avenues, which seem to me to be both ancient and unprecedented. Now there’s a combination to be conjured with.
I am a fan of Atwood’s writing, but I’ve never thought of her as a feminist. In fact, I don’t think she’s ever liked feminists much. I also think she has a certain contempt for young attractive women, regardless of political persuasion. She tends to dehumanize her young female characters far more than any male writer I’ve read: pretty young women in her books are either passive & disposable, vicious & predatory, or empty headed fluff balls. It’s her older female characters who have all the complexity and strength. Perhaps Atwood developed a prejudice against young attractive women by working for so many years among college students.
Perhaps she’s jealous that they get more sex than she does.
like you would know.
like you would know.
Perhaps she’s jealous that they get more sex than she does.
I am a fan of Atwood’s writing, but I’ve never thought of her as a feminist. In fact, I don’t think she’s ever liked feminists much. I also think she has a certain contempt for young attractive women, regardless of political persuasion. She tends to dehumanize her young female characters far more than any male writer I’ve read: pretty young women in her books are either passive & disposable, vicious & predatory, or empty headed fluff balls. It’s her older female characters who have all the complexity and strength. Perhaps Atwood developed a prejudice against young attractive women by working for so many years among college students.
“The final twist in this sordid saga was like something out of a Philip Roth novel: the author … turned out to be a trans woman.”
Of course he was. .It would never occur to a biological women to identify with a piece of military hardware. It reminds me of a story a engineer colleague told me about his four children, who were all under eight at the time. He had three boys and one girl – she was second youngest. They were a family that eschewed toys which “re-enforced programed sexual identities”. So no toy guns and no dolls”. The were a STEM family 100% and all their toys were educational. One day he came home and found them in the backyard with their collection of dinosaur replicas. The three boys had arranged an army of them and equipped them with screwdrivers and pliers into armies which were having battles with each other. The girl had the largest dinosaur – a T-rex – in a basket wrapped up in a towel and was pretending it was a stroller she was pushing around.
Please tell me those dorky parents took the hint and got them a stroller, doll and a .99 cent bag of army men?
Sadly, no. I used to use the expression “helicopter mom” to describe their mother. But after listening to her tell of her intercessions – repeatedly – during their high school years to raise the rare A- to an A, often involving repeated teacher conferences and phone calls and sometimes visits to the Principal – I came to realize that “snowplow mom” was a much better description. We lost touch with them around the time she was trying to figure out how she could accompany her oldest along on his first job interview out of college. Oh – and it was Ivy League all the way.
You have upset me now after making me laugh.
But, one day she’ll understand she has no control and, God help us, her children will do precisely as they please
Sounds like “snowplow dad.” As a very engaged Mom with high standards & a big dose of 12 step prep work that taught me pre-parenting all about getting the f*** out of your kids way, I was frustrated and disappointed with the ongoing sexism by teachers, admins, and everyone else in projecting all sorts of stereotypes onto Mothers. I literally asked ONE class related question of my high achieving daughter’s school at the end of her Senior Year, and got grief. Her Dad and I learned that whatever issues we had with the school that our daughter couldn’t handle herself–we always encouraged her to self-advocate first–HE had to go in and talk to the teachers. In the 2010s, I as a Mother was immediately dismissed as a busybody, clueless, stage mother, when I was anything but. Frankly, my kids had three female teachers in particular who assumed that role much more than I did, attempting to “educate” me whenever I saw them at events as if I was pushing my kids when I wasn’t. They were hammers, w/ a library full of mediocre self-help books, in search of a nail, except that nail had to be a well-kempt blondish middle-aged woman with thriving kids, so these codependent, busy-body teachers could feel superior by projecting on us characteristics we didn’t have or failures we’d actually worked through years before. They enacted precisely the unreflective they were accusing me of, which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Helicopter Mom and Karen stereotypes overlap a great deal. Somehow the obviously much higher, almost suffocating IMO expectations I’ve seen in every Asian family I’ve met are celebrated as “cultural” for “Tiger Moms” (when we know the Dads are usually the most demanding), whereas if you’re of Northern European descent you can be the target of the midwit School of Education mob.
You have upset me now after making me laugh.
But, one day she’ll understand she has no control and, God help us, her children will do precisely as they please
Sounds like “snowplow dad.” As a very engaged Mom with high standards & a big dose of 12 step prep work that taught me pre-parenting all about getting the f*** out of your kids way, I was frustrated and disappointed with the ongoing sexism by teachers, admins, and everyone else in projecting all sorts of stereotypes onto Mothers. I literally asked ONE class related question of my high achieving daughter’s school at the end of her Senior Year, and got grief. Her Dad and I learned that whatever issues we had with the school that our daughter couldn’t handle herself–we always encouraged her to self-advocate first–HE had to go in and talk to the teachers. In the 2010s, I as a Mother was immediately dismissed as a busybody, clueless, stage mother, when I was anything but. Frankly, my kids had three female teachers in particular who assumed that role much more than I did, attempting to “educate” me whenever I saw them at events as if I was pushing my kids when I wasn’t. They were hammers, w/ a library full of mediocre self-help books, in search of a nail, except that nail had to be a well-kempt blondish middle-aged woman with thriving kids, so these codependent, busy-body teachers could feel superior by projecting on us characteristics we didn’t have or failures we’d actually worked through years before. They enacted precisely the unreflective they were accusing me of, which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Helicopter Mom and Karen stereotypes overlap a great deal. Somehow the obviously much higher, almost suffocating IMO expectations I’ve seen in every Asian family I’ve met are celebrated as “cultural” for “Tiger Moms” (when we know the Dads are usually the most demanding), whereas if you’re of Northern European descent you can be the target of the midwit School of Education mob.
Sadly, no. I used to use the expression “helicopter mom” to describe their mother. But after listening to her tell of her intercessions – repeatedly – during their high school years to raise the rare A- to an A, often involving repeated teacher conferences and phone calls and sometimes visits to the Principal – I came to realize that “snowplow mom” was a much better description. We lost touch with them around the time she was trying to figure out how she could accompany her oldest along on his first job interview out of college. Oh – and it was Ivy League all the way.
Great story.
It shows one thing for sure; parents have b****r all influence on their children
Please tell me those dorky parents took the hint and got them a stroller, doll and a .99 cent bag of army men?
Great story.
It shows one thing for sure; parents have b****r all influence on their children
“The final twist in this sordid saga was like something out of a Philip Roth novel: the author … turned out to be a trans woman.”
Of course he was. .It would never occur to a biological women to identify with a piece of military hardware. It reminds me of a story a engineer colleague told me about his four children, who were all under eight at the time. He had three boys and one girl – she was second youngest. They were a family that eschewed toys which “re-enforced programed sexual identities”. So no toy guns and no dolls”. The were a STEM family 100% and all their toys were educational. One day he came home and found them in the backyard with their collection of dinosaur replicas. The three boys had arranged an army of them and equipped them with screwdrivers and pliers into armies which were having battles with each other. The girl had the largest dinosaur – a T-rex – in a basket wrapped up in a towel and was pretending it was a stroller she was pushing around.
Any good writer, such as Atwood, will always resist any attempt to be dragooned by bright-eyed thought-bubblers. A good artist will remain true to doubt. As Camus says, “nothing is true which forces you to exclude”. People with beliefs and certainties are the antithesis of art, and are a plague on modern society. One should always disagree with the convinced, even when one agrees with them. It winds them up no end lol.
Any good writer, such as Atwood, will always resist any attempt to be dragooned by bright-eyed thought-bubblers. A good artist will remain true to doubt. As Camus says, “nothing is true which forces you to exclude”. People with beliefs and certainties are the antithesis of art, and are a plague on modern society. One should always disagree with the convinced, even when one agrees with them. It winds them up no end lol.
An interesting article on an interesting personality
An interesting article on an interesting personality
Great article and super comment from SM on one of the wisest published authors on the planet right now
Great article and super comment from SM on one of the wisest published authors on the planet right now
I’m not a big Atwood fan (I doubt many men are, though I recognize her talent). Nevertheless, I enjoyed this essay and found it somehow vaguely optimistic.
I’m not a big Atwood fan (I doubt many men are, though I recognize her talent). Nevertheless, I enjoyed this essay and found it somehow vaguely optimistic.
Atwood is making the point that instead of cancelling each other for our unconscious biases, why don’t we enlighten each other instead, try walking a mile in the other ones’ shoes.
Atwood is making the point that instead of cancelling each other for our unconscious biases, why don’t we enlighten each other instead, try walking a mile in the other ones’ shoes.
Great article. In the opening paragraph, I appreciate Rosenfield’s jab at those who fear they might: “accidentally engage with or, actually enjoy the creative product of a member of Team Bad”.
Fiction should always be allowed to engage with unfamiliar experience, and even empathize with people that are hard to look at, let alone embrace. Or at least resist heavy-handed villanization of imperfect, even contemptible people. Or make the bad guy farcically loathsome like Uriah Heep, Thomas Gradgrind, or Josiah Bounderby. Give the reader something to ponder and contend with, not binary sermonizing.
Can empathy only “hug down” now, in the direction of those considered outcasts or strangers–the “marginalized” and “voiceless” of nowadays parlance? Is it a breach of some newfangled, implied fictional contract to admit the nuance and complexity of real life into a story?
Gradgrind was not so terrible, he realised that he was wrong. Boundary, on the other hand, remained a git.
Fair point. Gradgrind was no M’Choakumchild, nor a Murdstone.
Fair point. Gradgrind was no M’Choakumchild, nor a Murdstone.
Gradgrind was not so terrible, he realised that he was wrong. Boundary, on the other hand, remained a git.
Great article. In the opening paragraph, I appreciate Rosenfield’s jab at those who fear they might: “accidentally engage with or, actually enjoy the creative product of a member of Team Bad”.
Fiction should always be allowed to engage with unfamiliar experience, and even empathize with people that are hard to look at, let alone embrace. Or at least resist heavy-handed villanization of imperfect, even contemptible people. Or make the bad guy farcically loathsome like Uriah Heep, Thomas Gradgrind, or Josiah Bounderby. Give the reader something to ponder and contend with, not binary sermonizing.
Can empathy only “hug down” now, in the direction of those considered outcasts or strangers–the “marginalized” and “voiceless” of nowadays parlance? Is it a breach of some newfangled, implied fictional contract to admit the nuance and complexity of real life into a story?
Sounds like a really interesting book. I hope my local library gets it.
Sounds like a really interesting book. I hope my local library gets it.
I avoid “straightforwardly instructive stories”. For me they must have at least one of “symbolism, irony, nuance” to be interesting. I also refuse to read anything that has a political message or has been put through a ‘sensitivity reader.’
A great article Kat, well written and making some excellent points about the (annoying) developments in understanding and evaluation fiction. Sigh.