ShareThisI spent quite a lot of years not reading Jack Kerouac.
In 2007, when the 50th anniversary of "On the Road" arrived, I kept this up. As I saw it, men dominated American literature for many years after World War II. Women were welcome mainly as admirers, and only insofar as they were willing to sit back and shut up.
I put in my time with Hemingway, Mailer and Updike; with Cheever, Roth and Bellow. But how much Bad Boy stuff, really, was I obliged to slog through?
Then, on a rainy day in July, I found myself in a small bookstore in Minnesota, and desperate for something to read. It was either "On the Road" or "100 Bratwurst Places to Visit Before You Die." I went with Kerouac. He was born in Lowell, Mass., to French-Canadian parents; attended Columbia to play football but never finished; took some trips across the country that became the basis for "On the Road"; and drank himself to death at 47.
Along the way, Kerouac ground out several books, but it was "On the Road," his second novel, that made him famous. He was crowned unofficial king of the Beat Generation, an identity he alternately embraced and shunned. He loathed the youth revolution of the '60s, even though he was often assigned paternity.
Kerouac's book inspired a generation of cross-country journeys, along with calls home for money. For a long time, everyone had a battered copy of "On the Road" with them. But by the 1970s, fewer young travelers knew where the original impulse had come from. "Driving cross-country" was just in the American grain.
"On the Road" took form around Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady, a restless misfit born to an alcoholic father in Denver. In the book, Cassady becomes the logorrheic Dean Moriarty, whose sexual entanglements, fast driving and inability to stay put organize what there is of a plot.
With little formal schooling, Cassady had come east hoping to become a writer. He took up with a group that included Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs as well as Kerouac. With his strange talk and tuning-fork intensity, he seems to have dazzled practically everyone, or so Kerouac would have us believe.
It is difficult to reproduce magnetic personalities on the page, though, and Cassady/Moriarty will not seduce every reader. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you have ever obsessed helplessly over someone, it can be comforting to know that at least you never had to get over Neal Cassady.
Today, Dean Moriarty too easily reads as an undiagnosed case of manic-depressive illness. Then, too, enough drugs and alcohol are consumed in "On the Road" to suggest he just needed a month at Hazelden. (The story that Kerouac drafted "On the Road" in a three-week Benzedrine-and-coffee jag is apparently all true except for the Benzedrine.)
In some respects, I found exactly the book I feared. The women in "On the Road" are treated horrendously, particularly by the unquenchable Moriarty. As the action moves from New York to Denver to San Francisco and back, he beds two women at once; dumps one to marry another; divorces; and remarries. Along the way, he spawns several children who mainly become their mothers' problems. (Among the lesser female characters maltreated by the rolling frat party is the fabulously named Galatea Dunkel.)
In real life, Cassady married three times, as did Kerouac.
One of Kerouac's girlfriends, Joyce Johnson, was herself a writer, but a marginalized one. The title of one of her memoirs, "Minor Characters," says everything about women writers of the Beat Generation.
In her novels, Johnson tried to depict what it was like for a woman to embrace the bohemian life of 1950s New York, including the unmarried sex. She wound up in greater demand for trying to explain Kerouac.
Somehow, Kerouac the man took hold of the American imagination, and it made his achievement as a writer secondary.
"On the Road" is sustained by the headlong quality of its prose, though its emotionalism is probably best experienced young. Kerouac was riding Thomas Wolfe's wave of youthful longing. And Wolfe (who likewise should be read early) set down some of the least processed emotion in American literature. Many of the book's moments are very funny. But more of it is sad.
Why, in the Cold War era, did we end up with these men who just wanted to be together, or left alone to fish? Why the misogyny that turned up like some garish backyard bloom almost the day Rosie the Riveter left the airplane factory for good?
"On the Road" is a tale of disconnection and inverted quest. Make its impetus Dean Moriarty's lost father, if you like (the search for him is barely more than gestural). Or make it the guilty upbringing that marked a waning Victorianism. (In the end, Kerouac moved in with his mother in Florida.)
What lingers is a feeling: Maybe the one that comes as you pull out of the driveway, leaving someone, always, behind.
(M.J. Andersen is a member of The Providence Journal's editorial board.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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