newcritics

nation’s capital ascends over
trees colored for my dream
along yr highway life

Kerouac is dead at 47
on radio
and McCartney alive
(we lost)
-Jim Carroll, from Highway Report

It’s amazing that 50 years after it’s publication, On the Road remains a book that can create controversy. Its reception to this day is like the concert hall reception that 70 year old works by the Viennese atonalists receive, sandwiched, as they inevitably are, between easier to listen to warhorses by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven–polite but muted applause; confused, dislocated stares; and, from some quarters, just plain anger.

But unlike the music of Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg–Kerouac’s writing, and On the Road in particular, has not only become canonical but its influence has seeped so deeply into American letters that we hardly recognize it anymore.

That influence–in part obscured by the mythmaking of Kerouac’s biggest literary boosters (Allen Ginsburg, in particular)–comes into clearer focus in reading the recently published original scroll draft of On the Road, a text that should replace the expurgated, as-published original on college syllabi. In his introduction to the scroll edition–in which names are not fictionalized, on which Eisenhower era restrictions regarding sex talk have been lifted and from which death has lifted the shrouds of potential libel–English novelist Howard Cunnell makes a convincing case that “On the Road is the non-fiction novel, ten years early.”

In fact the book, and Kerouac’s entire oeuvre, set the standard for the vaguely countercultural memoirists (see James Frey) whose work today are among the few literary books that sell, straddling, as they do, the lines between pop and art, between fact and fiction, between lit and pulp. It’s been easiest for commentators to latch onto the political and cultural aspects of On the Road, but even those have been obscured by the cultural tumult of the 1960s that On the Road is mistakenly seen as having helped to launch.

It must be remembered that On the Road, although composed in the first years of the 1950s, is a tale of the 1940s. After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American book it most closely resembles is Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. When, early in the book’s slow, first section, Kerouac draws the contrast between his peers among the upstanding, boolah boolah Ivy Leaguers drinking beer and singing Sweet Adeline in the years before putting shoulder to the wheel in flannel suits and gray offices and his anti-heroes Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsburg–whose criminal delinquency, holy drug ecstasies and omnivorous sexual “perversity” he celebrates–he’s not calling for a cultural revolution. He’s recognizing 20 years early the emergence of a new America in the period immediately after WWII. (Kerouac hung out at the Times Square Bar with the junkies and homosexuals, including mentor William Burroughs who was interviewed by Alfred Kinsey there.)

When of Cassady and Ginsburg he writes: They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining it’s not self-fulfilling prophecy but keen social observation. Within 20 years their America would be ours, although it would be nearly a decade before Kerouac’s words saw the light of day. If Kerouac observes his underclass criminal anti-heroes with Genet-like romanticism, well, so be it.

What seems to hang up commentators the most about Kerouac is his work’s literary merit. The first hang up is On the Road’s status as a novel. There’s no doubt that On the Road was a deliberate, and in the end successful, attempt to abandon the old fashioned canonical notion of the European novel. Kerouac had been through Columbia University instruction on Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert. He had written and published The Town and the City, a carefully composed, well reviewed novel in the recognizable style of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. If anything history has validated Kerouac’s concept.

In his exceptional essay introducing the 1973 anthology The New Journalism (unfortunately out of print), Tom Wolfe wrote that by mid-century, literary novelists had abandoned the kind of social observation and realism once the provenance of men of letters, opening the door for Wolfe and his peers in the new journalism. Times called for a new form that blurred the lines between reportage and literature, Wolfe argued 25 years after Kerouac had already gotten there. Getting hung up on the question of On the Road’s status as a novel is like getting hung up on the lines between fact and fiction in In Cold Blood–an academic question that the works’ art make moot.

The second hang up is Kerouac’s style. Part of the beef–famously and succinctly summarized in Capote’s quip about typing, not writing–has to do with the mythmaking surrounding Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody.” The idea of blowing improvised choruses–an idea Kerouac borrowed from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who Kerouac hung around to watch at Minton’s in the 1940s, long before Diz and Bird were sainted–was, no doubt, an affront to those who cherish literary composition etched with immaculate care. But it was a prescient approach just right for the times to come. The barbarians WERE at the gates. They spoke with different voices. Keeping the crayons inside the lines of the coloring book no longer made sense, though it would take the culture another decade to catch up with Jack, who brought the music of long lined American blank verse (a line that begins with Walt Whitman) into American prose.

In a sense it’s unfortunate that On the Road is still cited as the exemplar of Kerouac’s “new thing” approach. It was, after all, his first attempt to write in a new style and hardly his most successful. For my money the best of Kerouac is to be found in the pulpy magical realism of Doctor Sax, the infinite regret of Tristessa (a brief memoir of an affair with a morphine addicted Mexican whore composed in two of the tiny, flip top notebooks Kerouac carried in his breast pocket), and of course the 242 chorus of Mexico City Blues, whose Buddhist-themed poetry is the pinnacle of Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody.

It helps to hear Kerouac, at least it helped for me. I cut my teeth on the Beats, devouring almost all that had been written by Ginsburg, Burroughs and Ferlinghetti before graduating from high school. But it wasn’t until I heard Kerouac read when I was in college that I could read Kerouac for myself–first hearing the voiceover soundtrack to the Robert Frank’s short film Pull My Daisy, later the albums Kerouac cut in the 1950s and most especially the appearance with Steve Allen in 1959 in which Kerouac confounded the ending passage of On the Road with the famous vision sequence from Visions of Cody (Kerouac’s experimental novel, a kind of shadow version of On the Road written immediately after On the Road).

At he junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.

Here’s Kerouac on Steve Allen: