Kerouac Day

For at least 16 of its 50 years On the Road has been a part of my life, and I’m glad of it, even as he has gone in and out of fashion. There has been a fair bit of hoopla about today’s 50th anniversary of the book’s publication – much of it has been pretty dismal, mawkish stuff about finding enlightenment on the great American road with a saxophone bleating in the background (a phenomenon discussed very well here and here).

When Olga was in New York last month I asked her to bring back a copy because I’d left my famous, weather-beaten copy in storage back home. I just reread it for the first time in a long while, and it was a very interesting experience. It is a work of art that stands the test of time better than I expected. Jack Kerouac has not been well-served by the critics who only saw a social phenomenon, nor by his passionate fans who could not separate the man and his life from his work.

A book like this becomes a sort of thermometer. When you are young and your life is stretched ahead of you the whole thing means something very different when you are no longer. So I found all kinds of surprising things as I read it. Somehow, when you are young, you read the sadness and loneliness that runs strongly through the book in a dismissive, romantic way. Now, I was surprised how a major theme of the book is really frustration and disappointment. All this talk about the novel being about “freedom” is either wishful thinking or rot.

And certainly, forget about Kerouac as the “voice of a generation,” whether for the beats or the hippies or slackers. Time and time again it has been proved that any critic who traffics in such nonsense is fit to be ignored. As a historical document, I think On the Road’s appeal is incredibly limited – it is not about a postwar generation struggling against conformity. That is merely the usual thoughtless stereotypes about the 1950s to which Baby Boomers cling to make dancing around in the mud at Woodstock like an idiot a matter of great historical necessity. And please forget about the book as a celebration of hedonism, the first foretaste of the Me Generation, an invitation to generations of slackers to shirk responsibility and hit the road. And spare me the clever asides about how a writer whose work is about “rebellion” against “conformity” has posthumously been used to sell Gap khakis.

Simply, it is indeed a celebration of America, and what it means to be American. It is about trying to tell a story in a new and bracing way. And it is about friendship, and how strange and exciting it is when you meet the right kind of person.

And there are a lot of important things that are completely forgotten in the Kerouac myth. At the heart of it all is a boy whose family originally hailed from Brittany and arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts by way of Riviere-de-Loup in Quebec. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac grew up in a tight Quebec-American ghetto, and didn’t even begin to learn English until he was six and they introduced it at the parochial school he attended. He grew up speaking joual, the French patois spoken in Quebec that is what French would sound like without the grammarian glare of the Academie Francaise. So as an immigrant, he saw America as a newcomer would – as Saul Bellow would, for example – and as someone from an oral culture with a deep spoken word tradition, he had a very consciously artless, stream-of-consciousness approach to language (“Did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, defray its rhythmic thought impact?” he asked in a 1968 Paris Review interview.)

Most writers, if they are being honest, just want to be liked. But the kind of big-time celebrity eludes most, and it is perhaps better that way. Devoted fans hobble your career and define you after you’ve died. When celebrities talk about what your work means to them, and teenagers carry around dog-eared copies of your work for a few years, and booksellers have to hide your book near the cash register to discourage shoplifters, you aren’t writing the narrative of your own life anymore. After the hipsters and the hippies got a hold of him, the myths became their own thing. It is infinitely more romantic to imagine him churning out On the Road in a coffee and benzedrine fugue on that famous 120-foot scroll now touring the country than to remember the subsequent revisions his editors put him through, or the countless drafts and sketches he had written before.

Kerouac broke under the pressure of fame, becoming something of a hermit, clinging to his mother, and in a few short years became little different than any other alcoholic from his old neighborhood in Lowell. Indeed, he was more Archie Bunker than Timothy Leary when he appeared on William F. Buckley’s television show in 1968 to explain in a drunken slur that the Vietnam War was actually conspiracy between the north and south Vietnamese – “who are cousins,” he helpfully noted – to get American Jeeps.

By then the myth had completely outstripped the man, and whether or not that will continue remains to be seen. The book can seem a bit mawkish, especially now when most prose is polished, and most dreams of literary stardom are more modest. For some, it is more an historical document rather than a work of art, especially after irony and sarcasm became the default position of hipsters everywhere.

And here is one more thing to keep in mind, that no matter how closely the life informed the work, they are really separate things. I personally think in my heart that Kerouac was a decent guy, and there is enough anecdotal evidence from friends and fellow-travelers to suggest that Kerouac was a plain decent guy. But when it comes to the work, it just doesn’t matter.

I think about Kerouac’s peculiar relationship with poet Frank O’Hara. They shared a number of close friends – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers – and yet they did not get along. It is easy to see why considering their personalities. Kerouac was a painfully shy working class guy, insecure around well-educated people, and prone to getting dangerously drunk to offset his shyness, especially when he was in New York. O’Hara was the quintessential cosmopolitan, a complete creature of New York and its catty gossip and hierarchies, and likely to start an anecdote about what Jack said to Barney at Joan’s place in Southampton the other night and end with a quip about Darius Milhaud. Their relationship got off to all sorts of bad starts. Once a drunken Kerouac stumbled into one of O’Hara’s readings and, for whatever reason, began heckling him, shouting “you’re ruining American poetry, Frank.” To which Frank retorted, “that’s more than you ever did for it.”

But Frank had some good words for a few of Kerouac’s books. Not surprising, both were interested in finding a new way of spontaneously expressing observations and emotions, though in wildly different ways. Word got around their very small circle about what Frank had said, and one night, at the legendary Cedar Tavern on University Place in the Village Kerouac spotted Frank and went over. “What’s the matter Frank, I thought you didn’t like me?” Kerouac asked. “I don’t like you,” Frank replied. “I like your prose.” Kerouac was reportedly very happy with this response.