“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” — Jack Kerouac

It’s his birthday today.

In Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe paints a pretty brutal picture of Jack Kerouac, at a party in New York, when the Hippie Bus rolled into town. (Robert Stone was also at that party. He describes it below.) Kerouac was cranky, sat on the couch, and drank beer. He just wasn’t into this “scene,” a scene he had helped … create? There was a wavering line from “The Beats” to the hippies, but something was lost in translation. (There’s home movie footage of this particular party, showing Kerouac on the couch, a thundercloud over his head.)

Reading On the Road, it is difficult for me sometimes to understand or “grok” the seismic impact it had on a generation.

“On the Road”, 1957, first edition

Please don’t misunderstand me. My words have nothing to do with the book, really. Or they do, inasmuch as it is a book so of its era – hell, it CREATED the era – that context in this case is decisive. And I need help with the context. I squinted at the book’s pages, trying to understand. I didn’t need to squint at the next-generation version, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That existed with or without said context.

My dad talked about On the Road to me. He gave me his perspective of someone who grooved to the book as a young man. And I trusted my father’s words. In the book, Kerouac gave an indelible image of a capable young man, saying “No” to what was expected of him, and in the Eisenhower-conformist era, much was expected. Post-War America was extremely conventional, as the country was solidified into a superpower, its wealth unimaginable, wealth that everyone felt, almost everyone’s standard of living was raised enormously. And with that came a Status Quo. What does it mean to say “No” to all that comfort? And go “on the road” and hang out with eccentrics and train-jumpers and the underclass, those who were also outside the mainstream? It was a CHOICE for Kerouac, who was a prep-school boy. And having it be a CHOICE as opposed to a NECESSITY is what gives the book its weird tone (at least in my opinion). There is a love affair with “the road”, that can only come from an outsider, who has a “way back” to the suburbs if he wanted it. The encounter with Dean Moriarty (i.e. Neal Cassady, the Muse to a generation … hell, two generations … he was ON the damn Hippie Bus) was a galvanizing homoerotic experience. Here was a man who walked the walk, who COULDN’T “fit in” if he tried. So there’s all that.

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac

Some of the adventures and parties in the book feel totally random, a privileged boy on an extended bender – but my father’s words and context helped me “get it.” The book went off like a BOMB in the culture. There’s one moment when Kerouac waxes poetic about the revelatory moment when he ate ice cream with his hands. I mean, this is … like … so what, dude? BUT: to maintain a sense of childlike playfulness in the era of The Man with the Grey Suit was, again, a revelation, and it showed a generation “the way”. Say “no” to the confines of career/wife/marriage/conformity. DON’T grow up. My father said that if he could have done it all over again, he would have taken some time off to bum around like Kerouac and his friends did. I never forgot him saying that. It was the only time my father said that maybe he had other worlds and lifetimes in his head.

And so I understand the impact, even though for me I can’t feel it. For me, books like this are important: books like this shift conversations, create entire scenes, and unintended consequences – like the Summer of Love for example – unfurl from its pages. There’s also the fact that all this opting-out is being done by a man, a man with the keys to the castle, a man who is within the citadel, saying NO to it. THAT’S powerful, particularly for men, who are basically encouraged to never have emotions, or express things, or daydream, or loll about, or do any of the things that make life worth living. These things cannot be dismissed, and it’s why I find all of those poorly written hot takes about why such-and-such is overrated to be STUPID. You – with your freedoms, your options, your taking-things-for-granted that other people had to fight for – have benefited from books like On the Road. Whether you like it or not. It helped blast open the wall, it provided alternatives. It was a road map (literally) on how to opt OUT of the great prosperity of the most successful nation on earth.

But the story, to me, on a larger scale is a sad one. Kerouac couldn’t go the distance. He was strictly about youth. He couldn’t tolerate middle age. He was the coolest dude to ever walk the earth for a brief shining period. When all those hippies showed up in New York, rolling into town in their hand-painted bus, getting naked en masse, doing acid, shaking tambourines … he withdrew into himself, he felt old, he felt out of touch. He hated everything. He did not live long after that.

From novelist James Salter’s gorgeous memoir Burning the Days: Recollection. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Lowell was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”.

It was the field on which I recall Kerouac, in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind… Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character…

Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck … I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the same level.

With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was THE TOWN AND THE CITY. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.

In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident – a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm – into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak.

Author Robert Stone said:

I was in the right place at the right time to see that [the Beats]. It started out with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when I was still in the navy. My mother recommended the book to me. I am probably the only person who had On the Road recommended to him by his mother. It is very hard to go back and think about what on the Road was saying to me. I pick it up now and all I can see is Neal Cassady. I got to know him. It was a wonderful rendering of him, but I don’t see much else in it Now it just reminds me of someboody writing on speed. That may be uncharitable, but frankly I find it very sentimental. As I say, I am not sure now what it was that moved me. I suppose there was that tradition of the American road. I can almost rmemeber what that was like… I didn’t know [Kerouac] well. And I didn’t travel on the bus. I saw the bus off and greeted the bus when it arrived on Riverside Drive. We went to a party where Kerouac and Ginsberg and Orlovsky and those guys were, and Kerouac was at his drunken worst. He was also very jealous of Neal, who had shifted his allegiance to Kesey. But Neal was pretty exhausted too. I saw some films taken on the bus – Neal looked like he was tired from trying to keep up with the limitless energy of all those kids. Anyway … Kerouac at that party was drunk and pissed off, a situation I understand very well. The first thing I ever said to him was, Hey, Jack, have you got a cigarette? And he said, I ain’t gonna give you no fucking cigarette, man, there’s a drugstore on the corner, you can go down there and buy a fucking pack of cigarettes, don’t ask me for cigarettes. That’s my Kerouac story.

In Rolling Thunder Revue, there’s a touching scene where Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit Kerouac’s grave, sit in the grass, and read poetry. Paying tribute to a man who had meant so much to both of them.

And here’s my review of Big Sur, the so-so film adaptation of Kerouac’s psychologically terrifying book, which sounds like it was written in the throes of delirium tremens.

 
 
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