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HOST) Recently, commentator Bill Mares revisted Jack Kerouac’s classic work, ON THE ROAD. Today, he ventures an assessment of the famous Beat poet and novelist.
(MARES) This fall marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac, one of the great troubadours of the American open road, He died of alcoholism at the age of 47 on October 21, 1969. Kerouac was more than a writer. He was one of the iconic founders of the Beat Generation with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Together, they scorned conventional morality and literary style in word and deed. In today’s phraseology, they pushed the envelope. Then they burned it – in a wildfire of sex, booze and drugs.
This spring, while riding a bus across a bleak and beautiful Patagonian prairie, I re-read his most famous book, the autobiographical novel ON THE ROAD. The landscape could almost have been the American West he tore across 60 years ago on four pell-mell trips.
Kerouac and various companions collected a series of wild experiences on those cross-country drives, then crashed in cold-water flats on both coasts, before tearing off again.
Financially, they lived on crumbs. Experientially, they dined like kings as they careened across America in drug-addled pursuit of immediate sensation and a hazy American dream.
The literary legend is that Kerouac wrote the book in three weeks, taping together sheets of drafting paper into a 120 feet long manuscript so that he wouldn’t have to change papers. Truman Capote scorned this as "not writing, but typing." But of course, in reality there was much preparation and editing.
Ever since his childhood in Lowell, Mass, where he grew up in a French Canadian-American family, Kerouac had wanted to be a writer.
Reviewers rightly call his style "exuberant." The images can be so rich, it’s like drinking butter. Listen to these marvelous phrases: "refreshing sleep with cobwebby dreams," "a strange witch-doctor face," the "big sigh of airbrakes,"
Crossing a bridge in Texas, he wrote, "Where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pin-point darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again."
Once in Denver, Kerouac went to the opera to hear Beethoven’s Fidelio, and got so "interested in it that I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story."
He penned besotted love notes to America and Americans. "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too big world."
The writings of Kerouac and the Beats were like graffiti painted on the walls of American respectability and self-importance, even though in the 1950’s, Kerouac could still marvel at a military parade in Washington. While by 1967, the spiritual descendents of the Beats – the Hippies – marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war.
As I finished the book, a remark from my very proper, very middle-class chemical engineer father flashed in my head, "There are only two things worth spending money on – travel and books." I want to believe Kerouac would have approved.
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Bill Mares on line at VPR-dot-net.