I never met Jack Kerouac but he influenced my life, at least for a time. When I was young, I was convinced that I was Beat, and Jack was the guy who described what that meant for me and countless other young guys in the fifties. But it didn't take me long to discover that I wasn't cut out for life on the road, at least as described by Kerouac, and was just playing at what for Jack was very real.
Jack was a merchant seaman during World War II while I was a stateside soldier at the end of the Korean War. My escape from the realities of postwar life was courtesy of Uncle Sam. Actually that was how most young males of those times tested themselves and their wanderlust. We went off for adventure but always under the protection of our great uncle who provided `three hots and a cot' wherever we wandered, usually with travel vouchers and meal tickets in hand when it was off the reservation. I was a Beatnik alright, but on training wheels.
Returning from the great adventure, I found myself in college in Boston where my friends and I resumed our wild lives as Beat intellectuals - with clean sheets and hot meals provided by Mom. You could term my escapades `Jack light'. We went to bars and coffee shops and listened to the deep poetry of guys many of whom had yet to learn the rudiments of form - but they could howl. Nightly, we got wasted on Schlitz; if anyone was getting stoned in the modern sense of the term, I had no clue. We only knew that trumpet players were `dope fiends' who got all the girls.
I read On the Road while in college and found it inspiring but not to the point that I took off for San Francisco or New Orleans, but in reaction to Jack's words my friend Charlie Coulter and I planned in great detail our trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego - on motor scooters no less. Jack talked about going down there but never got past Mexico City. Take that you wimp Kerouac! Of course like most everyone we simply fantasized our wild adventures. Charlie became a teacher and I a bureaucrat, not very Beat outcomes.
With the recent buzz about Jack due to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road came the usual arguments about Jack and the Beatniks. Friends (the mostly Franco - American message board hosted by Juliana L'Heureux up in Maine) got into the act because of Jack's ethnicity and his origins in the FA community in Lowell, MA.
Lots of the friends commented on Jack, his work, and his place in American letters; these evaluations ran the gamut from star to all time loser. But as major outlets joined the argument, I began to remember that I had been a trainee under Jack and really should have some comment on the man and his books, especially On the Road. But that was a problem since I had hardly even thought about being Beat for half a century. There seemed little to do but the unthinkable, I'd read the darn book again before commenting. That's not the way we pundits ordinarily do business; the usual is to opine and then, only in extremis, look into a subject.
At the beginning let me stipulate what most people assume about the Beatniks; they were pursuing individual freedom. But one has to put the movement in proper context. Jack was born in 1922, grew up in the Great Depression and had no time to come of age before being sucked into the vortex of the war.
Everything about the Beats was a reaction to the times as all around them absolutes swirled. While I was too young to feel the push of the right, even in America there was a large fascist movement that had all the answers. Communism with its `from each according to his means to each according to his needs' struck a great chord in American leftist intellectual circles during the hard times of the thirties, and, while the government and its believers found this to be an anathema, our alliance with the Soviets during the war put somewhat of a damper on open criticism of that system until Joe McCarthy and his ilk came along in the fifties. All of the movements called for lock step adherence.
So too, Jack was raised and continued to live in the world of Franco American solidarity and Catholicism and, like many returning from the war, was undergoing a crisis of personal belief. So as the older Beats came of age, they were faced with the obvious question of should they believe their own senses or all of the institutions in the world peddling their own brands of the truth.
After the war, many college campuses, including (and perhaps especially) Columbia, became the gathering places of thousands of young people seeking other ways of viewing reality. At the center of the Beat movement were Jack, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, the leading writers of the Beat movement, and the rest is history.
Before getting into On the Road, I have to tell you that I dropped out of the Beat generation even before finishing college. Thoreau's Walden provided me with a far more rational view of how an individual could seek freedom and described a far more responsible way of reintegrating one's self into society without having to give up questioning either authority or buying into the absolute systems competing for adherents on campus. I also discovered Existentialism which somehow melded with Transcendentalism to get me out of school and into the real world, leaving Jack Kerouac behind forever - at least until this exercise brought him back for me.
Now for the main event; I picked up a paperback copy of On the Road last week and, in the old man's sense, was simply unable to put it down until it was completed. As a young fellow, I wouldn't have eaten or slept until it was devoured whole (I was Beat, you know), but now these and other necessities intervened and it took me several days to get to the end of the journey.
As a child, Jack spoke French (the FA joual dialect) as his first language. While he knew English early on, it is simply amazing to me how fluidly and marvelously he handled the language. Only Conrad comes to mind as a writer who could write in a tongue not his first with such facility.
The narrative of On the Road grabs you by the throat and will not let you put the book down. Jack is a master of describing not only his travels and the passing scene but the joy and agony of being free. The sheer ecstasy of a Pacific sunset is countered by the horrible demoralizing reality of being broke, cold, wet and dead tired without a place to flop or anything to eat. You just have to read on.
Of course there are universally known technical problems with the novel; it has virtually no discernable plot, the characters do not grow and any epiphanies are so minor as to be hardly noticed. It appears not to be fiction at all but rather simply a travelogue in which an ever changing cast of characters (aside from Dean and Sal, the two road runners) zoom aimlessly from east to west, north to south and all kinds of mixes and matches thereof. Surprisingly, I found the dialogue to be quite weak; Kerouac's ear just wasn't the equal of his visual descriptive powers. None the less, I reject Truman Capote's characterization that Jack's work wasn't writing but rather `typing.' On the contrary, this is very entertaining and enlightening material.
Beat is clearly described even if it is not defined in the novel. There can be no doubt that Jack is able to share with us the longings and the feeling of freedom that he and his pals sought and encountered on their great adventures. There is not a hint of prejudice in them; race, creed or national origin meant nothing if a slob they met was remotely Beat; of course if he wasn't, he better watch his wallet. That, of course, is what made the book the great Beat source for our generation and which still draws the young in droves.
But the warts of the movement (and on Jack) are even more glaring. To be Beat was to be a guy. Women are simply to be hedonistically used and chucked aside; they were fine when cooperative and supportive (in every sense) but to be ignored and abandoned when they start acting contrary or possessive. And it was a given to never ever listen to a word of what the heck they were talking about or what was bugging them.
Personal responsibility - surely you jest. Need to go to a dive and hear some bop? Steal a darn car and run the wheels off of it. Food, liquor, money, gas: same darn thing, smash and grab as desired. Need a place to sleep - flop on anything soft. Need to explain something away - lie. This is hardly the behavior on which to found a real society.
This is a book to be read by boys readying to leave the nest and surely before they select a major in college - and for those reliving their youth to consider the what might have beens. It is a fantasy of what life might be like if you wanted to ride a motorbike from Nome to Tierra del Fuego. But, since Jack and Neal - the real live pilgrims - and their buddies and those they met on the road already did it for us with the successes and failures perfectly described by this wonderful writer, it's time to settle on business, computer science or marketing as a major.
I haven't thought about Charlie Coulter for many years but after this bladder busting near all nighter of a read wondered for one wild instant if, despite the passage of more than five decades, we could possibly pull off our mad swim (How else would you cross the water?) of the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego where we'd gaze on Cape Horn. Maybe I'll call him; maybe he's still Beat.
When we get to Santiago, how does it go? "Buenos noches, bonita senorita. Wanna see the end of the world with couple of nice old Gringos? Hop on, Babe." Close enough for a pair of Beats. "Roll on!"
Darn right I could have been Beat - if I wanted, but I wanted a government job - far more exciting, you know.
Way to go, Jack.
I wonder what we're having for dinner. I'll check with her as soon as I finish my list of chores.
