That’s Not Writing, or Typing, It’s Driving - And in Circles
I have my own dreams of the open road. But although I dream them all with a literary finish—-not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures—my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people’s driving.
Travels With Charley
As for Kerouac…
Well, Kerouac.
I read On the Road
Since I was already pretty adept at dialog, I’d decided that what I needed the most practice in was turning what I’d seen prose. I needed to learn to be descriptive, I thought, so I spent a lot of time typing out descriptions. I wanted an audience though, so I put all my descriptions into letters. My friends became resigned to receiving 15 and 20 page letters from me. Typed. Single-spaced. I didn’t keep copies of my letters but I’m pretty sure that taken together they amounted to a proto-blog, a disorganized, unedited, rambling mix of politics, book reports, romanticized reminiscences, anecdotes that didn’t adhere strictly to the facts, self-conscious snippets of prose poems I couldn’t bring myself to think of as prose poems and so never shaped into anything, and logs of that part of my day that wasn’t spent typing up my letters, which, since I didn’t sleep much, included a lot of time watching old movies late into the night, which I dutifully reviewed for my friends who I was sure were dying to know what I thought of My Darling Clementine and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
All this typing, it wasn’t writing, had an underlying message.
"I’m dying of loneliness here. Come save me."
Every now and then one of my friends, usually Nora, sometimes Meg, and when she was in the country Cathy, would try to save me. And of course I would type up their attempts to save me and send them off in letters to other friends.
I didn’t always stick to the facts.
I don’t stick to the facts even now. I just changed all their names.
Sharon, the friend I most wanted to come save me, knew better and kept her distance.
I wrote about her anyway.
Although I didn’t recognize it, what I was doing in my self-referential, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing letters was writing—typing—the first draft of my own On the Road and so you might think that when I read the book I slapped my forehead and said, This is what I should be doing!
I didn’t. I don’t think it even occurred to me that there was anything in what I was typing remotely like what Kerouac had written in On the Road.
It wasn’t the case, though, that I was fixating on the most obvious differences, that I was nowheres near close to Mexico City, jail, the merchant marine, or San Francisco. I spent a lot of time in New York City, but not Kerouac’s New York City, which I’m sure I was convinced was as dead as Peter Stuyvesant’s. But I was a long way from Joyce’s Dublin, Conrad’s Malaysia, and Graham Greene’s Africa, and that didn’t stop me from thinking I could learn a few tricks from Dubliners
I just didn’t like the book.
Dean Moriarty—Neal Cassady—was a bore and Sal Paradise was a drip.
I was disappointed…in myself. I "knew" On the Road
I was a savvy enough reader to understand that I was being unfair to the book. I was judging it against my expectations and not on its own terms. But I was expecting, and I needed to read, a book that was a dream of the open road, which is to say a book about escape, and On the Road is a book about being trapped.
The point keeps getting made again and again throughout the novel: No matter where you go, there you are. There being stuck inside your own self.
On the Road isn’t about being on the road, it’s about being in the car and not looking out but looking up, into the rear view mirror, and seeing the same damn face looking back every time.
Since I was already spending far too much time looking in a symbolic mirror in hopes of finding somebody else more interesting looking back and not enjoying it at all, it’s no wonder On the Road didn’t strike me as a useful literary model.
Ten or so years later, when I was teaching and looking around for books and authors to put on my reading lists, I decided to give Kerouac another chance and I picked up On the Road again, and The Subterraneans
And they all had as one of their themes the same unattractive (to me) theme as I saw in my first reading of On the Road, Kerouac’s self-disgust and his wishing that he was another, more interesting, happier, or at least more well-adjusted, man.
The trouble is that what makes the men Kerouac wishes he were interesting at all is the work they produced on their own, and so it’s more profitable and enjoyable to read their books and their poems, listen to their music and look at their paintings, than it is to read Kerouac’s extensive chronicling of his man-crushes on them.
In an essay on On The Road in the New Yorker, Drive, He Wrote, Louis Menand looks at this theme as it appears in On the Road in a more sympathetic light:
Satire and polemic are, on some level, defensive. It’s possible that
something about the Beats simply made people uncomfortable. For the
nineteen-fifties images of the Beatâ€â€Partisan Review’s bohemian
nihilist and Hollywood’s hip hedonistâ€â€are almost complete inversions of
the character types represented in “On the Road.†The book is not about
hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists,
rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the
nineteen-sixties. And the book is not an anti-intellectual celebration
of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It’s a sad and
somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity,
and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other
guys…The car is also a male space. The women who end up being driven in
(never driving) the car are either shared by the guys (Marylou, for
example, whom Dean hands off to Sal, as Cassady handed off LuAnne to
Kerouac) or abandoned (as happens to the character Galatea Dunkel, and
as happened to her real-life counterpart, Helen Hinkle). But the car is
not an erotic space. Driving is a way for men to be together without
the need to answer questions about why they want to be together.
(Drinking is another way for men to be together, and there is a lot of
drinking in “On the Road.†There is a lot of drinking, period.) In this
sense, “On the Road†is a little like another sensational road novel of
the time: Humbert and Lolita drive obsessively back and forth across
the continent because that is the only public way for them to be
together. As long as they’re driving, they’re not doing anything they
shouldn’t be doing.But maybe we should not understand the sexual themes in “On the
Road†too quickly. Maybe the best thing to say about those themes is
that they are murky and underrealized, not entirely within the author’s
control. Sal has a crush on Dean, in the way that attractive but
insecure men can form attachments to gregarious and self-confident men.
Sal gets close to women vicariously by being closer to Dean than Dean’s
women are (until he, too, gets dumped, in Mexico City). This is
perfectly consistent with the “Ocean’s Eleven†genre of buddy stories:
there is always a dame, but the real bond is between Brad and George.
They have something with each other that neither could have, or would
care to have, with a woman.
Menand also sees that On the Road is not about being on the road. The road isn’t taking Sal and Neal and the various women they pick up and drop off anywhere. They all want to go somewhere, but they can’t get there because the road they want to take to get there doesn’t exist anymore, it’s lost in the past, recoverable only through memories and regrets, and the point becomes simply being in the car and being on the way to somewhere:
Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Roadâ€Â
today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book
about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In
1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of
intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million
registered vehicles. When “On the Road†came out, there was roughly the
same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and
trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had
been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the
phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to
hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of
Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads
“Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,†few people would dream of taking that road
even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And
they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there
are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than
there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred
million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little
romance left in long car rides.In fact, the characters in “On
the Road†spend as short a time on the road as they can. They’re not
interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is
essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they
run into, because they’re always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of
the book takes place in cities, particularly New York, Denver, and San
Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even
there, the characters are always rushing around.The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore,
are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding
car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is
coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions
and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived
patched-together existences and men wandered the countryâ€â€Ã¢â‚¬Å“ramblin’
round,†in the Guthrie songâ€â€following the seasons in search of work.
Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,†taken between 1955 and
1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year
later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they
are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar
affluence and consumerism.The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the
certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and
crazy joyridersâ€â€the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict fatherâ€â€is
dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the
people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go
or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the
literary man’s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely,
lostâ€â€beat. “There ain’t no flowers there,†says a girl whom Sal
Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by
suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. “I want to go to
New York. I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go to but
Cheyenne and ain’t nothin in Cheyenne.†“Ain’t nothin in New York,†Sal
says. “Hell there ain’t,†she says. She wants to get in the car, too.
Nothing worth staying at home for. Nothing in their destinations that make them worth the drive or worth sticking around in once they get there. Nothing to see out the windows or stopping along the way to explore because all that’s worth seeing and exploring has vanished. Nothing to do then but drive.
On the Road is one of the most claustrophobic and static novels not written by a French existentialist.
Menand clearly admires On the Road much more than I do, but he sees the book’s importance as being primarily biographical and historical not literary. He doesn’t try to argue that On the Road is a great American novel. He does point out that it’s a better written book than is sometimes thought. It’s the stuff of literary legend how Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road on one long roll of paper in a frenzied and caffeine-(not drug)-fueled three weeks. That’s not why Truman Capote dismissed On the Road as typing not writing though. Kerouac may have banged out the first draft in a blur, but he took his time with the following drafts, polishing and revising the book over the course of ten years. Kerouac, says Menand, made a deliberate aesthetic choice in shaping On the Road that his one hundred and twenty-five foot page of paper helped him achieve:
He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary
possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to
this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same
theory. “I do this, I do that†is how he described them.) The scroll
was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way
of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep
down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a
self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and
make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.
Capote was probably refering to Kerouac’s "this-happened-and-then-that-happened" approach to his subject. But he might just as well have been referring to something else. On the Road is a written book. But it is not an imagined one.
I mentioned Joyce and Conrad and Greene earlier as writers I was reading for the first time around the same time as I read On the Road. Coincidentally, all three of them, like Kerouac, drew heavily on their experiences and personal biographies in their fiction.
But unlike Kerouac, the other three managed to see and re-create their experiences as having shape and meaning apart from their original sources. Kerouac worked hard at not letting that happen to his stories. I don’t think Capote was right, On the Road isn’t just typing, it is writing, but in the end it’s a particular kind of writing. It’s journalism with a get out of the facts free card attached.
Conrad, Greene, and Joyce aren’t American writers, of course, and I think it’s best when comparing Kerouac to other writers to see him as part of the American grain. Menand mentions Hemingway, Pynchon, Updike, and, not as oddly as it might seem, Nabokov—after all, Lolita
Gee, no women. What a shocker.
But the American writer who always springs to mind whenever I think about Kerouac preceded him on the road, although he didn’t go very far down it, by a century, his fellow Massachusettsan, Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau is another one who took himself as his main subject. But unlike Kerouac he was never tempted to write up his adventures as fiction and, as cranky as he could be, and as unforgiving, he was basically a cheerful man who got a kick out of other people, even if he didn’t always like them very much. He was egocentric, but not self-absorbed, and so he was a more active and more objective observer. Makes him more entertaining and more informative company. Thoreau famously traveled extensively in Concord. He got up to Maine too, and over to Cape Cod, but mainly he stayed at home. Kerouac went back and forth across the continent several times. But of the two of them Thoreau did travel. He got away. On his short hikes and lazy canoe trips, in his bean patch, and during one night in jail, he managed to escape. From himself and from his demons.
Kerouac went a long way to get nowhere.
This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of On the Road and Tom Watson salutes it by taking a more Thoreauvian position and celebrating the pleasures of Staying Put.
Cross-posted at my place.
Your turn: What reputedly great book have you read that disappointed you?
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Along with the rest of the world I have a cold, so, casting caution to the winds (knowing I can later recant and blame it on the cold) I will jump right in with a response to your final question:
This past year I decided that I would finally read "Moby-Dick" , a book which I had tried to read a couple of times before many years before but never finished. I was fired up by a long appreciation of Melville I had just read in the New York Review of Books. I bought a great-looking hardback edition and set to work.
Oh, God, I hated that book. I'm not saying it's not a classic, but I just found it so verbose, so obvious, so horribly dull, and yet I forced myself to plow through it to the end. I was totalIy rooting for the whale, and I was never so happy to see the entire cast of a book (save tedious Ishmael) finally bumped off.
If we're talking about reputedly great plays in the same category, for me, hands down, it's "The Iceman Cometh".
Litterateurs of the world, please don't hate me, I have a cold.
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Getting back to "On the Road", here's something from Proust:
"The only true voyage...would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is..."
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Lance to answer your question - Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Dunno why, perhaps the translation.
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I can't say "On the Road" ever disappointed me. When I first read it, at age 17 or so, it revved me up so much that I literally walked out to the expressway that cuts through Chicago, put out my thumb, and spent the next few years bumming around North America, reading the entire Kerouac canon. I haven't gone back to it since, but I obviously remember it fondly.
I am wary of reading "On the Road" again, for fear it would drive home the fact of how much I've aged. I suspect it is a book best read in adolescence, when all you can see is yourself. As Kerouac's later work showed (painfully), he was utterly trapped in his head and desperately lonely. Again, a good book for adolescence.
You want a reputedly great book that disappoints? "The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford. Yuk.
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If you want some other Melville to check out try The Confidence Man--his most underrated, most modern, and in the end, perhaps his greatest novel (I know, I'm the only one who thinks that, but what the hell...another one I re-read every coupla years). For short stuff try "Benito Cereno." I still don't know why they teach Bartelby and Billy Budd to high schoolers when they could teach Benito Cereno.
Kerouac, well, I adore Kerouac too--he also, clearly a Melvillian. I like his Buddhist poetry best, but try Doctor Sax or the original scroll draft of OTR if you're going back to re-read.
Manny, Watson loves Richard Ford, I'll leave him to defend the man.
BTW, the most fun I ever had in my life was a week at the Naropa Institute in Boulder celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of On the Road w/ Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Abbey Hoffeman, Ted Berrigan, Ken Babbs, and more. A fantastic time was had by all, and I learned a lot about writing too. What a hang.
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I have a lovely mint condition exact reprint of the original edition of On The Road. It is in mint condition because I have started it several times, but never found interesting enough to continue.
Burroughs is the only Beat era guy I like and I like him a lot. Some of that probably has to do with his reading voice. Once I heard him read his stuff, I couldn't read it without hearing him.
Finally, I was almost physically repelled by Delillo's Underworld and, while I liked Richard Power's Gain a good deal, I spit out The Echo Maker like sour wine. Usually, though, surprise comes for me when I really like something, not the other way round.
And apparently, Dan's White Whale is a certain Frenchman. To paraphrase Jan Brady, "Marcel, Marcel, Marcel..."
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Someone reading Dickens to me in the jungle for all eternity wouldn't be half the torture of someone playing the Gilbert & Sullivan oeuvre over and over.
One more note on OTR, ol' Lancerooni...although I love your trope of OTR as a static novel, I don't think it's wholly accurate.
It's circular, no doubt, begins in NY mourning for a dead father and ends in NY mourning for a father never found. And Dean is something of a static character, but Sal emerges from a classical journey to conquer death (Sal and Dean as Gilgamesh and Inkidu) with an acceptence of death and a kind of spiritual growth from the dead feelings of the earliest pages to a kind of heart broken super empathy for life in the universe. If the narrative is linear and meandering, well, it's a road story and that's the way the road goes.
Furthermore, although it's outside the text in the wilder Visions of Cody, Sal/Jack emerges with a kind of mission and meaning to his life--go moan for man--and, in the end, conquers death, the way all writers do, by recording and preserving the stories of the people and places he sees around him (I wrote the book because we're all gonna die).
I think the myths surrounding the book's composition (and btw, given the evidence of the recently published scroll, the efforts to turn the spew into a more formal novel only made the book more stiff and stilted, not better) overshadow the stuff that happens in the book itself. Yeah, it's about Jack/Sal, in fact Jack, as one of America's most Catholic writers, was forever composing Augustinian confessions. But I've always been a sucker for those.
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Kobo Abe, Raymond Chandler, Aldous Huxley, John O'Hara, John Dos Passos, Nelson Algren, Humphrey Cobb (Paths of Glory is the only book he wrote and it is great), JG Ballard to name a few off the top of my head.