On the Road

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. Written in three weeks on one continuous scroll of paper in 1951, the book revolutionized literature in America and made the "Beat Generation" a household word. I first read the book back in about 1985 or so, and I remember my co-worker at the time saw the book in my hands and asked, "Isn't that a little dated?" Of course, great writing is never dated, and I can't imagine what she would think if she knew I was rereading it now, but I don't care. This book is terrific.

For those who don't know, On the Road is about Kerouac's alter-ego, Sal Paradise, a veteran and would-be writer who lives with his aunt in Paterson, New Jersey. He runs with a crowd of disaffected youth in New York City who would one day be known as Beats. Some of them became quite famous, particularly Allen Ginsberg, who in the book is called Carlo Marx. Sal meets a charismatic wild man named Dean Moriarty (who was based on Neal Cassady), who lives in Denver. Sal is inspired to hitchhike across the country to visit him. He doesn't get off to such a good start, hitching in the rain near Bear Mountain and unable to find a ride. He gives up and takes the bus to Chicago.

The book follows Sal through four major trips: that trip to Denver, and eventually on to San Francisco and then Southern California, where he falls in love with a Latina and ends up picking cotton; a trip across the south and eventually New Orleans to visit Old Bull Lee, who is based on beat hero William S. Burroughs; another trip to California and back with Dean, and then finally a drive down to Mexico, also with Dean. These trips are far more interesting than they would be today, as it is in the late forties and early fifties, when there was no interstate. Hitchhiking was common, unlike today, when no one in their right mind would hop into a car with a stranger.

Kerouac, who ended up a hopeless drunk, writes with incredibly clear and poignant enthusiasm. Sal and Dean and all their cohorts look on each trip as the ultimate adventure, with wide-eyed optimism and heart-tugging humanity. They look upon each person they meet as a new friend, without prejudice, and Sal seems to be self-aware of his life unspooling as some sort of romance. Consider this passage: "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed and burgundy red, the color of love and Spanish mysteries."

The allure of the road is very American, perhaps because since our founding everyone has been pushing on to someplace better, usually westward. Also, the U.S. is a large country and most if it easily traversable by car, so after World War II, when the car culture really came into bloom, it was an irresistible notion to be able to hop in a car, on a bus, a train, or stick out your thumb, and be in a completely different climate in just a few days. "Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went" writes Kerouac as Sal, and who among us hasn't felt that at some time or another?

Now, On the Road does have dated aspects. Even though written only a few years after the events took place, it has an immediate sense of nostalgia, of a time lost that will never come back. Also, the depiction of women is hardly enlightened. Sal and Dean have that duality that enrages many women--they put women up on a pedestal, and long for the bliss of matrimony, yet run around with other women without too much thought. Dean, in particular, would make an interesting Dr. Phil show. During the course of the book he has three different wives, and bounces back and forth among them as if choosing neckties. Of course, why these women took him back is interesting, but perhaps that's because Dean is irresistible to either men or women. Kerouac puts it this way: "Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wraith to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again."

If you can get past the fact that these beats were not proto-feminists, you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. There are some memorable tales, such as their visit to a Mexican whorehouse, where they have the owner play Perez Prado records, their visits to jazz clubs, hearing George Shearing or Charlie Parker (Kerouac wrote brilliantly about music), the sense of community when the friends just stay up all night, drinking and bullshitting, and making you think about the friends had when you were young and anything seemed possible.

Kerouac and the Beats have had a lot of backlash. "That's not writing, that's typing," Truman Capote is supposed to have said about Kerouac. To that I say nonsense. Certainly as a movement it, like most movements, cannibalized itself and became self-indulgent twaddle, but not On the Road. It still shimmers as it did 50 years ago. It's not too many books that close in such a lovely fashion: "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be dropping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."