Jack Kerouac was born a hundred years ago on Saturday. In The Spectator World, Francesca Peacock argues that On the Road should hit the road:
Everyone knows the Beats: from Jack Kerouac to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, their influence has been undeniable, if not always delightful. And on March 12, their lodestar, Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old.
Kerouac became famous after the initial success of On the Road (1957), but his position as the apostle of beatnikery was not an easy one. He died aged forty-seven in 1969, after a lifetime of heavy drinking and a later-life of rebelling against his early countercultural fame. In the years before his death, he reaffirmed his near-Republican Catholicism, and had no time for the radical politics that had so consumed the movement.
If Kerouac was able to distance himself from the Beats, the rest of us have not been quite so lucky. On the Road regularly makes the lists of best American novels, while quotations from its scurrilous pages litter Tinder profiles and Instagram bios. The type of man who talks nothing but The Dharma Bums at a house party has become something of a meme in his invidious ubiquity. “It just really spoke to me, yah. I would give you my copy but my lousy ex-girlfriend has it.”
But if the premise of The Dharma Bums is a search for a Buddhist, spiritual meaning to life, On the Road lacks such a motive. Sex, drugs, more sex — but endless bop and jazz instead of rock ‘n’ roll.
But at UnHerd, Park MacDougald argues that Kerouac and On the Road were — and are — misunderstood:
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” behaviors he criticized, while constructing elaborate rationalizations 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”.
In National Review, Michael Washburn revisits Kerouac’s Satori in Paris, which, Washburn argues, is the “key” to his significance:
Written in a jaunty, Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, Satori in Paris conveys all the zest for living found in On the Road, even as it illuminates Kerouac’s fierce allegiance to the conservative, traditional, anti-Jacobin social order of the Vendée. The train he takes from Paris to Brest passes through Rennes, which may be the former capital of Brittany, but he does not consider it to be a city of the province, because, in 1793, it housed troops of the revolutionary republic whose mission was to quell the Vendée uprising and advance liberty, equality, fraternity.
The more time he spends wandering around Brest and talking to strangers in the street and in bars, the more he comes to love both the antediluvian character of the society to which he has returned and the impossibility of reconciling it with the modern, atheist, egalitarian order that demands conformity and slavish devotion to progressive ideals.
David Ulin argues that On the Road, like all of Kerouac’s work, is about suffering:
I was too young to understand that when I first read On the Road. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I was looking for something else. A model, I suppose, or a road map, a strategy for staking out my way of moving through the world. I was fifteen or sixteen and eager for an escape route, but the novel, it turned out, possessed a different point of view. Loss or sadness or the impossibility of transcendence, which Kerouac described as “the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach and which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm.”
How to sustain it, that point of ecstasy? The only answer is that you cannot. This is the tragedy or the fate — I often imagine them as the same thing — that Kerouac, or his fictional alter ego Sal Paradise, faces throughout the novel. This was the sentence he could not escape.
Something similar, of course, is true for all of us. Nothing lingers, nothing lasts. The frantic back-and-forth of On the Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, the search for kicks and experience, to borrow a Beat cliché: all of it is just deflection in the end.
Finally, Douglas Brinkley writes about the landscape of On the Road in the Wall Street Journal, and LitHub has posted a few items from the Kerouac archive, including two reader reports on the The Dharma Bums. Check them out.
In other news
Matthew J. Franck writes about the pleasures of used bookstores: “I’ve always been a sucker for used bookstores, and for any venue that features used books — indie bookstores selling both new and used books, public library sale rooms, you name it. On our honeymoon thirty years ago, my wife had to put up with my stopping at every used bookstore I spotted on Cape Cod — and there were quite a few then (whether there are still, I cannot say). On the way home to Virginia, our little Honda hatchback had so many books in the back that I was unable to use the interior rearview mirror.”
I didn’t read Franck’s column until this morning, but as fate would have it, I also wrote about books this weekend: Specifically, about receiving them in the mail.
Take a “walk” through ancient Rome in this video at Aeon.
Peter C. Baker writes about having his manuscript stolen:
At 2:47 p.m. on September 20, 2020, I received what appeared to be an innocuous e-mail from my literary agent, Chris. Could I send over the latest version of my unsold novel-in-progress as a Microsoft Word file? “I just realized,” the e-mail read, “that I only have it as a PDF.” It wasn’t like Chris to misplace things, but the situation didn’t seem implausible. People switch computers. In-boxes get gnarly. I found an old e-mail with the Word file attached and forwarded it along. At 3:44 p.m., another e-mail arrived: “Strange, I haven’t received anything now… can you resend please?” I re-forwarded the old e-mail with the Word file. At 4:03 p.m., I got another e-mail, which explained that Chris’s agency was in the process of switching servers, and perhaps this explained why my e-mails weren’t coming through. Could I try again, this time working around the problem by changing the .com suffix in Chris’s normal e-mail to .co?
Jeffrey Meyers reviews two biographies of Philip Roth — Blake Bailey’s now infamous one and Ira Nadel’s.
Archeologists find evidence of a “lost” continent linking Europe and Asia.
Joy Press writes about a succession fight at Scholastic, publisher of Harry Potter and Clifford: “When the CEO of Scholastic died suddenly last year, he left control of the family empire to a former colleague — his ex-girlfriend.”
John Burnside reviews Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King:
When the first volume of Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy appeared in 2019, it was quickly recognized as a masterly work of fantasy fiction, drawing comparisons with Tolkien, Angela Carter and Beowulf. Part quest narrative, part picaresque, Black Leopard, Red Wolf follows a man named Tracker as he weaves a trail through various lands, encountering a magical cast of shapeshifters, witches and powerbrokers in a seemingly never-ending search for a lost child. Yet, already in this first installment, Dark Star was showing signs of something more complex than is usually found in fantasy, a quality that, in terms of a world culture, distinguishes the great epics of history, in which cosmic sweep is married with lyric detail to convey what the poet John Koethe calls “the generic lives /We all lead, interchangeable, yet every one a story to itself /Whose truth lies in its style”. That humanist grounding is, perhaps, even more visible in this second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, where the narrative shifts from Tracker to the witch Sogolon, one of his many adversaries in the first book. Now, we not only get to see the initial quest from her perspective; we are also shifted into a different time frame, a new worldview that, in many ways, dwarfs that of the man who had seemed to be at the tale’s centre. It is a brilliant move, one that establishes a new vision for the trilogy as a whole.
