As we approach Sept. 5, the 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal Beat Generation novel “On the Road,” a number of publishers are gearing up to release books by and about author Jack Kerouac, who has been dead almost 40 years. Expect there to be celebrations and fanfare, as well as critics and journalists reaching every which way to try to explain why “On the Road” is relevant to our world today.
But the truth is, “On the Road” was never a topical novel. It cruises along, gaining momentum from generation to generation — having reached annual sales of 100,000 copies in English, with translations in nearly 40 languages — as politics and culture change drastically around it. It’s well to remember that when people — mostly young people — started reading Kerouac’s novel in droves, the young men wore leather jackets and their hair in a D.A. a la Fonzie, the most important technological advance was the hot rod, and the chief international crisis was the closing of the Suez Canal.
The reason this novel has endured while tens of thousands of others came and went has a lot more to do with the perennial human bases it touches: two friends who get each other through their worst times; the down-and-out fellow whom people want to help succeed; the immigrant trying to get a piece of the American dream; the loser who wins by following his own dream.
Writer Phil Cousineau, now in his mid-50s and a protege of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s, once told me a story about the first time he read Kerouac. In 1975, a year after graduating from the University of Detroit with a journalism degree, he was in London working a number of odd jobs to avoid returning to the U.S. Parents, girlfriend and all the voices of conscience in his life urged him to take a reporter’s job in Detroit, lest he end up a bum. His agony of decision only grew worse when he was offered the opportunity to travel from England to Greece and Egypt.
On Cousineau’s last day of work in London, his boss handed him a copy of “On the Road.” He told Cousineau the book would help him decide what to do. That night, Cousineau devoured the entire book, and the next day he left for Greece. Since that time, Cousineau has published more than 20 books and written more than 15 documentary-film scripts. He told me one night, “Kerouac saved my soul.”
I asked what he meant.
“Jack Kerouac gave me the courage of my convictions, that I wasn’t running away from anything. Instead, I was running toward something, my destiny as a writer.”
In early 1951, Kerouac was known as a conventional young novelist after the model of Thomas Wolfe. Having come from a working-class French-Canadian family in Lowell, Mass., and attended Columbia University for a couple of years on a football scholarship, he had published one long bildungsroman, “The Town and the City,” the saga of a large New England family uprooted and permanently scattered by World War II. The book had gotten generally positive reviews but had sold only a few hundred copies. Few in the literary world expected to see anything more of note from him, and it was rumored that he had a bad drinking problem.
But in Kerouac’s head at the time was the desire to write about a fast-talking, womanizing young car thief from Denver named Neal Cassady, whom he had met in New York when Cassady was on the run with a 16-year-old wife and yet another stolen car, and whom Kerouac, entranced, had followed across the country to San Francisco and back several times. Kerouac’s problem was that he had tried and failed several times to stuff Cassady into a traditional Wolfean novel, and he was at a loss as to how to get this wild man on paper.
Then Cassady gave Kerouac the answer in a supposedly 40,000-word letter. Cassady had manically, breathlessly scribbled the first-person tale of his endless girl-chasing, seductions, escapes from angry boyfriends and husbands, scrapes with the law and crazed adventures on the edges of homelessness, destitution and hard-core criminality in Denver.
Kerouac suddenly realized he could tell the story of what had happened with him and Cassady and all their mad adventures across America just as they had happened, using real names and real-life situations. Kerouac was one of the world’s fastest typists. He was also a great fan of bebop and wanted to “blow” long solo riffs with words. His only problem was the interruptions to change sheets in the typewriter. He solved that problem by taping together long sheets of art paper into a roll about 120 feet long, which, as Kerouac typed on it, reminded him of the unrolling of the white line down the middle of the highway.
The result, typed day and night on cup after cup of coffee over a 20-day stretch in April 1951, was the roll manuscript of “On the Road.” Remarkably, what Kerouac typed and what finally got published in 1957 do not differ much. The major differences are a few large cuts, the rearrangement of a few passages, and the addition of individual lines here and there to sharpen and expand descriptions. And yes, there is one other significant difference: Kerouac was writing, among other things, about sex, drugs and jazz (not rock ‘n’ roll), and he used a lot of words that were excised or replaced with euphemisms in the published book and that still can’t be printed in a family newspaper.
Kerouac unrolled the manuscript in Robert Giroux’s office at Harcourt, Brace, only to have his former editor rebuff him with the question, “How can I edit this thing, Jack?” Eventually Kerouac retyped the roll onto conventional-size pages, but it was still rejected everywhere.
When “On the Road” was finally published in 1957, it was heralded by Gilbert Millstein in a weekday New York Times review as “an authentic work of art” and the “testament of the ‘Beat Generation.’ ” But the Sunday New York Times review was a lot less positive. In later reviews, Kerouac was called, among other things, “a spokesman for thugs” and “a black spot on America.”
Critics focused on the hedonism, lawbreaking and reckless use of other people by Cassady, called Dean Moriarty in the book. “On the Road” was called a “bible of hipsters,” and at one point it was marketed by publishers as “the riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs, by the drop-out who started it all.” Kerouac was called “the King of the Beats,” and later the “father” of both the beatniks and the hippies. Some claimed that in the 1960s, “On the Road” became a virtual guidebook to the countercultural revolution.
By today’s standards, even the most “riotous” sex scenes are quite tame, with the lights going down and the sheets getting pulled up before bare flesh can even be glimpsed. As for its potential as a guidebook to revolution, it has about as much relevance to the current political scene as “The Communist Manifesto.”
What so many readers find in “On the Road” are a wealth of human truths told in a spoken language that hasn’t changed all that much since Kerouac’s day. When the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, sees a fat old man dealing cards in Butte, Mont., he says the old man “made me cry thinking of my father.” When Dean raps on and on during an all-night drive about how he finds God everywhere, Sal says, “He was out of his mind with real belief.” When Sal loses faith in Dean and his ex-wife, Marylou, both of whom have betrayed him, he says a hasty goodbye to them at the bus station, telling us:
“They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again, and we didn’t care.”
“On the Road” is filled with thousands of such situations that it is impossible not to identify with. Kerouac writes not about the rich and powerful but about ordinary, working-class people, and sometimes those even below them — the homeless, the hobos and junkies, the outcasts of society — but he writes about them in a way that makes you care about them and root for their eventual triumph.
Amy Haders, who was born in the 1960s and didn’t read “On the Road” until three years ago, said:
“You get to know Sal pretty quickly and he’s so likable, though kind of quiet and humble. . . . You want him to be happy, and you want him to get ‘there,’ get drunk, get laid and move on and never run out of money.”
Nicole Henares, a San Francisco poet in her early 30s, told me the sex — or lack of it — in “On the Road” hardly interested her at all. She’s of the Andalusian stock that settled the Big Sur region of California and has faced challenges to her ethnicity all her life. She said she read Kerouac for the “subtext” of how a child of French-Canadian immigrants demanded respect on his own terms from mainstream society.
It would be hard to find anything in literature more authentic than Kerouac’s compassion for the poor and suffering; anything more alluring than his insistence on personal freedom; or anything more hopeful than his clarion call for absolute personal honesty.
I would bet a lot of money that people will be reading Kerouac for a long time to come.
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Forthcoming books by or about Jack Kerouac
On the Road: The Original Scroll
By Jack Kerouac, Viking, $24.95
On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
By Jack Kerouac, Viking, $24.95
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Classics, $18 paper
Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of ‘On the Road’ (They’re Not What You Think)
By John Leland, Viking, $23.95
Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960
Edited by Douglas Brinkley, The Library of America, $35
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Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac,” will give a public presentation on Kerouac to honor the 50th anniversary of “On the Road” at Columbia College Chicago on Sept. 18. He taught a course in Beat writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1980s.
