Last week, a great deal of bookchat was being generated by the 50th anniversary of On The Road (although five years ago, Jack Kerouac’s 80th birthday got scarcely a mention anywhere.) Numerous essays appeared on Arts & Letters Daily.com, and in various periodicals and newspaper book review sections. A new book about Kerouac, Why Kerouac Matters, by John Leland, is getting a lot of attention. The "original scroll" of On The Road has been published and is available at Amazon.com. (For those few out there who haven't heard the story, Kerouac wrote an early draft of this novel in a caffeine-fueled three week outburst, in one long paragraph, on a 125-foot continuous "scroll" made of sheets of paper taped together so that he wouldn't have to be interrupted changing sheets of paper in his typewriter. In 2002, the "original scroll" was auctioned off for close to $2 million.)
I myself have been re-reading On The Road and The Dharma Bums before lights-out for nearly two months now. Both are definitely “light” reading, so un-demanding of the attention span that they’re acceptable for the post-cocktail hour, unlike, say Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, which also sits on my nightstand but requires a clearer head.
One of the Kerouac retrospectives I’ve read this week was couched in the form of a review of Leland's new book by Anthony Daniels which appeared in The New Criterion . I usually agree with what I read in The New Criterion, but not this time. Daniels’ piece was a sniffy, schoolmarmish dismissal of Kerouac as a poor writer and a stubbornly immature person who refused to grow up.
Well, first of all, didn’t we have that debate 50 years ago when the book first appeared? John Updike created Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run as an answer to Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. And Rabbit, Run was published in 1960, when Eisenhower was still president.
As for Kerouac’s being a “poor writer,” he was a poor writer in the same sense that Thelonious Monk was a poor pianist, and with the same end in mind, a freeformish, improvisational feel meant to recreate the rhythms of jazz, which Kerouac and his friends saw as emblematical of their era in the same way that fox-trots were to Fitzgerald’s. If Kerouac’s prose is sometimes “banal,” well, so what? Monk deliberately hit wrong notes for effect. I’ll go along with Daniel on only one point, that Kerouac’s prose in On The Road set a bad precedent, in that it convinced the younger generation that unformed, spontaneous spilling-of-your-feelings on paper equalled good writing. Even when I was in college, 18 years after On The Road was published, kids were still justifying their bad poetry by saying “It expressed how I felt.” Kerouac had a lot to do with that.
But other writers can also be accused of setting bad precedents, including, if you ask me, Eliot and Joyce. It was thanks largely to them that we got stuck with academia’s little ongoing tumor, what Gore Vidal called “the U-novel.” The U-novel is the novel that’s written not to be read, but to be studied. Ulysses and The Waste Land stand at the font of that, and therefore can also be said to have set “bad precedents.”
But Daniels also goes to great lengths in trashing the characters of On The Road for their failure to be upstanding, middle-class citizens. Dean Moriarty is a rogue through-and-through, Daniels argues, and therefore we must also adjudge Kerouac’s book a failure because he never brings that out. Sal Paradise admires and is willingly led by Moriarty through adventure after adventure, usually of a rather sordid kind, until he finally becomes disillusioned when Moriarty abandons him in Mexico. Up until that point Sal has been enraptured with Dean to the point of accompanying him all over the North American continent in one crazy high-speed drive after another. Sal never seems to notice that Dean’s past and present behavior is almost uniformly immoral: he lies, cheats, steals, abuses women and never expresses a twinge of remorse for any of it.
He is, in short, a criminal and not much else, the fact that he can quote Schopenhauer notwithstanding, and Daniels finds it shocking, shocking that Kerouac’s Sal Paradise keeps resolutely ignoring the obvious truth about Moriarty's character, preferring instead to hang upon Dean’s ongoing, often not-very-coherent blather as if it were a string of wisdom’s shiniest pearls.
But Daniels utterly misses the point. On The Road stands firmly in the same tradition that generated not-too-factual folk songs about Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Dean Moriarty is the romantic outlaw type, compelling to the somewhat mousier Sal Paradise precisely because of his amoral behavior, his restlessness and his seemingly-boundless energy. Sal is fascinated by Dean because he’s the embodiment of an energy-charged dark side that many of us have, but in most of us never gains the upper hand.
In Dean the energy and the darkness are everything, and Sal is “riding the whirlwind,” as I once mentioned in an Internet-based discussion of precisely this same book. To Sal, who would like to be more adventurous than he is, hanging out with Dean is like taking a long, thrill-packed roller-coaster ride. And as we all know, adrenaline can be addictive.
Is Sal uncritical of Dean? Yes, of course, at least until the moment of truth in Mexico City when Dean goes off and leaves him sick and alone. But that has to be expected. Sal, a stand-in for Jack Kerouac, represents the artist gaining experience that he will later try and transform into art, as well as the young man trying to figure out how to live and also how not to. In that sense the novel is a bildungsroman, despite Daniels’ sneering at that very notion.
Daniels dismisses Kerouac because Sal fails to learn any moral lessons from hanging out with Dean outside of his discovery that he longs for a traditional family life after all, the conclusion Sal reaches at the end of the book. What Daniels doesn’t seem to get, or misses, is that the artistic temperament is, for better or worse, essentially egotistical. To Sal, Dean is grist for his mill. If Sal fails to criticize Dean for stealing cars and stealing gas and lying and beating his women, it’s because, for the moment anyway, Sal is not prepared to take a critical look at Dean. He’s absorbed in the experience of being around Dean, which will result later in a book called On The Road.
He has this idea in mind even if he doesn’t consciously acknowledge it. In other words, Sal is experiencing Dean for the sake of the experience itself. One might level the accusation at On The Road that Sal’s experience of Dean didn’t get enough processing, that the book should have had a more traditional dynamic in which Sal gradually comes to realize what a scoundrel Dean is, and that he most decidedly does not want to be like Dean. But that would rob the book of its essential energy, the rifflike feeling of the tumbling recollections, not always accurate, the feel of watching a home movie perhaps sloppily edited but moving rapidly from scene to scene in an attempt to recreate the feel of constant motion, of restlessness, that has made On The Road a compelling read for two generations.
I’ve read On The Road perhaps five times in the past 30 years, and I don’t read it for any moral lessons it might teach me. Even when I was young, I never viewed it as a blueprint for how to live. I read it, and still enjoy it, as a snapshot of another era, pre-interstate highway, when in towns and villages across America you could get a hamburger, a milkshake and fries for 85¢, hitchhiking was still a safe way to travel and jazz blared from car radios on two-lane highways in the middle of the night. And yes, I read it the way many of us read Huckleberry Finn when we were young, to play furtively with the fantasy of chucking it all and floating downriver on a raft.
Okay, so this might dovetail with Daniels’ assertion that the importance of On The Road is sociological, not literary. At the right place and time, the two things sometimes converge. Certainly The Sun Also Rises , with which some critics drew parallels when On The Road appeared, and In Cold Blood which appeared a few years later, are almost as important as sociology as they are as novels. Those books are classics. This one is, too, even if its characters are neither of them exemplars of how to behave. Sal could honestly say, along with Christopher Isherwood’s doppelgaenger in Goodbye To Berlin, “I am a camera.” Cameras aren't role models, but there is something to be said for them.
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