On the Road narrates the travels of its author, Jack Kerouac (called Sal Paradise in the book), his friend Neil Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in the book) and their friends as they bounce around the North American continent in the late 1940s, like a 12-rail snooker shot. Sal is the drifter and dreamer; Moriarty is the hustler and jailhouse aristocrat, and neither demonstrates much in the way of goal-oriented behavior beyond hipster enthusiasm in the quest for fun, girls, adventure, beatitude and eating that old white line. Kerouac transforms his narrative of their travels into the last great hymn to America as a giant landscape you can feel on the surface your skin, that means something magical and tolerates whatever the heart can imagine. It is also the longest book ever written in a rush of unrelenting kindness, without a trace of malice. Over the years, Kerouac has served up his America, as if upon a platter, to thousands upon thousands of young Americans, myself among them. He has sent them out into the drift and into the night with enough generosity to keep them fairly safe.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of On the Road’s first publication. This means I read it for the first time 50 years ago, when I was in my mid-teens. I bought the book off the rack, in hardcover, because we were a transient family and the title On the Road seemed to promise some insight into that peculiar gift and affliction. I remember every detail of my reading the book: the upstairs bedroom of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, the dusty scuffs that the black-cloth cover of the book acquired in the process of my reading it; the weave of the tumbled sheets upon which I wrestled with Kerouac’s language, the shadows cast by my reading lamp on the flowered wallpaper and the creak of my footsteps on the chilly hardwood floor as I walked from the bed where I was reading to the bathroom, where I continued to read.
The book didn’t change my life, thank God. It did something better than that by confirming my life as it was. It made me feel breathless and weightless, as if the world were expanding and I was being blown through it like a bubble. It made my own world make a kind of sense and bestowed upon my restless parents a kind of hipster nobility—so I did not read the book again for 15 years. I was afraid that it would not live up to itself. Other authors—Sartre, Hermann Hesse and Rilke—had let me down upon re-reading. They made me feel like an idiot for my original enthusiasm, so I held off on On the Road. When I did read it again, in my early 30s, I was a professional writer myself, and it was like being hit by a truck. It was so much better than I ever would have imagined that I wanted to cry. Today, I regard On the Road as one of those mysterious icons that renew themselves with every reading, like a candle that burns a different color every time you light it. Tristram Shandy and Under the Volcano fall into this category, but not much else.
On the lighter side, Kerouac’s book also has some cultural parallels with the movie This Is Spinal Tap, and perhaps I am demeaning Kerouac by this comparison, but Spinal Tap and On the Road get what they set out to get absolutely right. Spinal Tap is the single work of art in any medium that nails the heart of rock and roll for those of us who played it—nails it with so much precision that it’s hard to sort your memory of the film from your memory of your life. (I, too, have wandered in the underground labyrinth of the Agora in Cleveland. I, too, have perused astrological charts prepared by girls who are “with the band.”) The same may be said of On the Road. It rides with you down every road you travel like an aura, indistinguishable from fact.
What ties Spinal Tap together with On the Road most profoundly, however, is that they both get sadder every time you read the book or see the movie. The first experience is pure joy, absolute, stunning recognition. With each subsequent experience the truth gets tougher; there is more rage in the lunacy and outrageousness. The folly of vanity and demented hope becomes more excruciating. The intensity of the transient pleasure burns like a sparkler in your gut. Today, five times through it, On the Road is the saddest, most loving and candid book in the world. So loving and candid that I feel tentative even writing about it. The book meant so much to Kerouac—was so much of Kerouac—that he hardly wrote a decent word after other people started writing about it. Thankfully, it took seven years to get On the Road published, and, during these years, Kerouac produced a parade of speed-crazed masterpieces full of lowbrow ecstasy.
During its long life, On the Road has had its seasons. In the first 10 years of its public vogue, it was a skyrocket that announced the future of everything. In its second decade, it was an “old school” skyrocket, a Charlie Parker/John Coltrane skyrocket that was mostly read by musicians in vans and buses out on the midnight highway. For my musician friends, it had the aura of an ancestral text, an American Odyssey whose innocence one had to touch to keep the faith. Everyone who did the road read On the Road—from Waylon Jennings to Jeff Beck to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Mott the Hoople. Then, around 1980, On the Road’s enthusiasts divided into two schools: University littérateurs, by this time, had come to “appreciate Kerouac’s oracular voice,” and outlaw homosexuals, like Robert Mapplethorpe and John Rechy, had recognized, in the haunted relationship of Sal and Dean, America’s first great gay love story. They passed the book around. It lived.
About 10 years ago, I uncovered a fourth wave. I taught the book in a graduate art-theory seminar, and all the tough guys hated it. They thought the characters were lazy and self-absorbed. The gay guys hated it, too, because the characters were so disorganized and unfocused on their career options. The young women in the class, however, loved it all. I could see the light in their eyes and the promise behind it. They got it, and I was amazed. Here is one of the major “boy books” in the history of American literature, and these young women were identifying with it, not with the women, who were kind of wussy, but with the tonalities, the tempos and the ever-receding ephemeral grail.
Somehow, somewhere in the depths of Kerouac’s tangled sexuality, I think he would have been happy about this—happy that he had written a book for all seasons and all sexes, too. Now, as Auden said of Yeats, Kerouac has become his admirers, and anyone who wants to be a writer, or wants to read a writer or just touch the pure gift, should read On the Road because Kerouac, like Dickens (and almost no one else) can make it float and go. There is, I can assure you, a vast difference between works that are written quickly and those that read quickly. Kerouac could do both. He was never as fast at writing as he said he was, but he could drive the words on. He can lift them up off the hard scrabble of the crusty world so they float on this little cushion of joy as they hurtle forward. And no matter how sad or horrendous the events being narrated might be, that cushion of joy is still there, like a clear stream running over pebbles. That’s writing. The rest is just telling the story, and nobody remembers the story of On the Road. They remember the trip.
On The Road: 50th
Anniversary Edition
Jack Kerouac
Viking Adult, $24.95