The ‘Road’ much traveled

JACK KEROUAC’S “On the Road” has been iconic since it appeared Sept. 5, 1957. A roman à clef about the author’s cross-country adventures (as Sal Paradise) with friend Neal Cassady, known in the book as Dean Moriarty, the novel was begun in the late 1940s and completed, famously, in April 1951, in a three-week writing marathon on a 120-foot scroll.

Several new books commemorate the novel’s 50th anniversary, including “Road Novels 1957-1960,” edited by Douglas Brinkley (Library of America: 864 pp., $35); “Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of ‘On the Road’ (They’re Not What You Think)” by John Leland (Viking: 206 pp., $23.95); and the first publication of Kerouac’s unedited “scroll manuscript,” “On the Road: The Original Scroll” (Viking: 408 pp., $25.95). Book Review asked a variety of writers (including Cassady’s widow, Carolyn, and novelist Joyce Johnson, who once dated Kerouac) for their thoughts on why the novel still resonates.

When I was a teenager, I got about halfway through “On the Road,” but the section where Kerouac takes up with Terry, a Latina living in a migrant-labor camp, is where I stopped. I knew this wasn’t my story; I identified with Terry instead of the narrator or his drifter-dude friends.

Years passed. Or decades. A friend memorized the last long meandering sentence of “On the Road” and recited it marvelously for me one day. So I forgave Kerouac, picked the book up again and got all the way to that flashing finale. Kerouac cursed us with both a new version of the Huck Finn fantasy that a man’s destiny is to keep on moving (or fleeing) and the novice writer delusion that the spontaneous effusions of a pure soul are lyric manna, rather than raw material at best. He worked hard to create his language, and it is beautiful at times, daring to yearn for something incandescent, overwhelming, transcendent, miraculous and sweet. Even if he’s a creep about Terry.

– Rebecca Solnit

“Who can comprehend it, the vast tableland of America?” asked Norman Mailer in “The Naked and the Dead,” and Kerouac, perhaps not comprehending but moving through, crisscrossed the country just as the first concrete was being poured for the interstates. I read “On the Road” in Philadelphia at 16, still in my parent’s house, all night until bleary at 3 a.m., I finished, exhilarated, ready to get on the road myself.

A decade later, I found myself teaching the novel for the first time. Now, the questions seemed more obvious: Was Kerouac a romanticist of race, stereotyping peoples just as rigidly as those who hated them? And wasn’t a lot of writing really over the top? But after all the carping and dissection, the energy remained and the way it inspired this city boy to travel and love America and its mad ones stays with me still.

– Leo Braudy

When I began researching my biography of Jack Kerouac, “Memory Babe,” in 1977, there was no college in the country that offered a course in Kerouac’s work. Thirty years later, Kerouac has been canonized as one of the major American writers of the 20th century. And yet, while his books earn millions of dollars in 40 different languages, it is important to remember that he was shunned by the commercial publishing establishment – and mainstream society – for almost his entire life. Moreover, he wrote to celebrate a brotherhood of all men, especially the poor, the down-and-out and all those labeled losers and failures. I think he would have a hard time accepting that his name and literary works have become a “name brand.”

– Gerald Nicosia

I never insert a roll of paper towels into its holder without imagining the novel I might type across the length of it, and I never start driving a long downward hill without wishing I were Dean Moriarty and willing to turn off the engine. The first argues excess, the second conservation, and Kerouac seems an emblem of both. Few writers were so profligate and cautious, so ready to stake their all on a throw and then to throw it again.

– Nicholas Delbanco

My first husband and I were managing a tenement to get through grad school. Stabbings were not unheard of. The rent would be paid sometimes with bills wet with blood. Mornings, after my daughter was safe in the Salvation Army nursery school, I’d walk to the downtown library to study Old English and the 18th century novel. One day I got up, went over to the shelf of new fiction and picked up “On the Road.” When I got to that first car-parking scene – the one where Dean zipped around the lot, making the most mundane job into extraordinary high art – I jumped up and started zooming around. I literally couldn’t contain my excitement. Hopeless people could be transformed. Anything could be art, if you did it well enough and loved it enough. I was 27. I couldn’t even drive yet. But I would!

– Carolyn See

My zealously churlish response: At the acme of his celebrity, I thought Kerouac a purveyor of frenzied fakery, of pseudo-mystical junk; and I do not depart now from the intelligent judgment of my youth. Nowadays, “On the Road” can perhaps count as a document of a sentimental overwrought underdone subliterate zonked-out shamanistic onanistic fool-ridden era, when saccharine blockheads posed as transcendent Blake-heads, when stupor was mistaken for Buddha … . but what the hell, let it count for any old thing! – as long as you don’t call it literature.

– Cynthia Ozick

Before I’d say “On the Road” is the most overrated American novel ever, I’d have to reconsider “The Recognitions,” which is something I’m not gonna do, though I’m confident Gaddis’ prose isn’t nearly as sloppy.

Late Faulkner, late Hemingway, late Toni Morrison (so far), and 86% of Don DeLillo are at least as bad as Kerouac was on his best day. True, there are stretches of “Moby Dick” twice as long as “On the Road” but not half as good, which is saying something.

– James McManus

I was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend when “On the Road” came out. I was 21, writing my first novel and supporting myself as a secretary.

Jack might not have been in New York on his publication day if I hadn’t wired him $30 for bus fare from Orlando, Fla. Around midnight on Sept. 5, we walked to a newsstand to read the review in the New York Times – the one that compared Jack to Hemingway and hailed him as the “avatar” of the Beat Generation. I was excited; Jack was strangely subdued. He was shy and introverted, worn down by the difficulties of his life.

Jack exhorted me to go on the road as part of my education. My education turned out to be becoming a witness to Jack’s fame. I soon learned the price of losing one’s anonymity; “I don’t know who I am anymore!” Jack said to me that fall, besieged by avid fans and the equally avid press.

“Take care of this man,” one of Jack’s editors said to me, after an interview during which Jack consumed a large amount of alcohol. He was the first person I ever tried to take care of – and all my care wouldn’t be enough. That was another lesson I had to learn – and the hardest one, the one that finally made me a grown-up.

– Joyce Johnson

I dropped out of college after reading “On the Road” and dashed my parents’ hopes for the first doctor or lawyer in the family. I was 18. I found my old Boy Scout backpack in the garage and started out On My Road, north and south across California, east to Texas, south to my father’s Mexico, further south to my mother’s El Salvador. Had that copy of the book with me for years. At the end, I started scrawling my own prosody in the yellowed, tearing margin, the beginnings of my great search in language. I also emulated my sad Catholic hero in all the typical sad Catholic ways, and for that I will be paying the rest of my life.

The myth of Jack writing the book in one mad fit of automatic writing was crucially important. Dump it down on the page like Pollack’s paint. I can do that, I said to myself. So I started writing, and didn’t stop.

– Rubén Martínez

I’d just won a Houghton Mifflin prize for a novel-in-being and hadn’t a clue how to get started. I’d published nothing and was living in a foggy, alien and chillingly cold London. A magazine sent me Kerouac’s book to review – my first real piece of writing. My brain said this was a load of slushy adolescent codswallop, but my heart said, Whoa! Amazing! Kerouac’s pace and rhythm were irresistible. He was beckoning me to a fantasy America: male, adrenaline-pumped, celebratory and elegiac at the same time. I didn’t believe a word of it, but what mattered was the headlong joy of the writing, the near-suicidal narrative propulsion. It’s what I’d been waiting for.

– Clancy Sigal

Fifteenth-century English boarding-school, boys in black gowns (long before Harry Potter chic), Latin hymns on Sundays and gray medieval walls: How could we not get high, day after day, on long and heady gulps of Kerouac? The shine, the golden promise of America – or, you might as well call it, innocence; the joy, the simple exhilaration of movement; boyhood wanderings turned into a creed, a permanent revolution.

I pick up “On the Road” today, and it can seem very distant. And then, just when I write it off as the American Journey to the East, I read a heart-shaking novel like Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” and see that headlong urge for going – Cassady giving Emily Dickinson the ride of her life. “On the Road” will never die, if only because it moves people to rebel against their future selves – and then to look back on it as on a childhood picture book. Out of it come Bruce Springsteen, much of Bob Dylan, Wim Wenders, Johnny Depp: the best of young America itself.

– Pico Iyer

“On the Road” is one of the earliest “nonfiction novels” in 20th century American literature. Kerouac believed that his autobiographical style would become a “new trend,” and authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr and Tom Wolfe followed his example to create a vividly personal style of reportage that reflected the unparalleled turbulence and splintering within American society.

Writing with an open heart, Kerouac gives us the United States at a turning point in its history. The richest nation on Earth in the late 1940s, America is captured on the pages of “On the Road” as a sad paradise. Kerouac hits the road to discover what’s at the heart of the country – racism, homophobia, gender stereotyping, urban sprawl, migrant labor exploitation and an insane preoccupation with guns and power. We recognize the country immediately: After 50 years, it’s still where we live.

– Ann Charters

When I first read “On the Road,” I was about 20, and I inhaled it, pure pleasure. Decades later, I taught it to undergraduates and was surprised that they were not more impressed (while swallowing my own doubts). In my 40s, I was asked to participate in a marathon reading of the book, and my selection struck me as unconsciously patronizing of the folk Kerouac met on route. Deeply embarrassed at its naiveté and foolish yearning, I did a quick reread of the novel and saw I could never get enjoyment from it again; either I had outgrown it or had gotten too sclerotic to take it seriously. Now, I honor Kerouac as someone in the 20th century tradition of meditative fiction, the mental ravers like Céline, Beckett, Sebald, Bernhardt and Bolano.

– Phillip Lopate

Jack Kerouac began to write “On the Road” in my home in San Francisco on my college typewriter. He called it “Visions of Neal,” and he would read bits to Neal and me as he went along. He later wrote it on the long scroll in New York. Parts of it became other books, parts of it “On the Road.”

– Carolyn Cassady

Of the beloved books every to-be English major reads – “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “A Confederacy of Dunces” – “On the Road” was the only one that betrayed me.

My love for the book has to do with the wanderlust of slipping into Sal Paradise’s shoes – a pair of huaraches in which he travels America’s raw roads. My name being Salvador, having watched my grandfather repair the leather of my own huaraches, I found myself prone to seduction by the legendary Beat scroll.

But as Kerouac’s alter ego heads west, he follows “little Mexican girls” with a lecherous gaze and encounters Mexicans forever stalling work. For a book so often championed as a manifesto against materialism, “On the Road” is more a reflection of our current economic model, exploiting and belittling Latinos while claiming America as the land of open skies and unbridled freedom.

– Salvador Plascencia

I first heard about Jack Kerouac from Seymour Krim, who was my writing teacher at Columbia University in 1964. But it wasn’t until I read “Pic,” the novel Kerouac wrote in the voice of a 10-year-old black boy from North Carolina, that I got hipped to the game.

“Pic,” I believe, is the key to “On the Road.” It also has to do with a road trip across America. Since the narrator – a Negro speaking dialect – was clearly not Kerouac, the little book taught him distance, pace and rhythm. Like Huckleberry Finn, the character of Pic is free from the constraints of the literate white world. He is the precursor to the Kerouacian hero.

– Cecil Brown

I was naively obsessed with Kerouac and “On the Road” in my teens and early 20s. I would seek out bookshops for translations and first editions. I built up quite a collection, including a rare first printing of “The Town and the City.” I visited Big Sur and his home in Lowell, Mass.

Kerouac glamorized the writing life but put literary success within easy reach. He had evidently achieved fame and wealth after only three weeks of “spontaneous bop prosody.” He also looked good in a lumberjack shirt. Three weeks? I could do that. I could wear a working man’s shirt.

I read “On the Road” again two years ago when I was in Iowa City teaching at the Writers’ Workshop. The re-encounter was a disappointment, of course. Kerouac’s vocabulary seemed cloying and narrow. The book was sexist, sentimental and self-aggrandizing. I sold my collection of Kerouac editions soon after and made a guilty profit of several thousand pounds.

I still, however, wear the shirts.

– Jim Crace

My first year at college, I hooked up with a young woman from Lowell, Mass., Kerouac’s hometown. When I asked her about the genius-madman behind “On the Road,” she told me he was “just this older guy who still lived with his mother and mowed her lawn.”

My love and awe for “On the Road” were inversely proportional to my shock and disappointment over the fact that its author was basically a mama’s boy. While this did not diminish the impact the book had on me, it did teach a valuable lesson about life and literature. There is a reason novels are called novels. It’s because they’re fiction. This, however, only makes me love Kerouac more.

– Jerry Stahl

I still have the copy of “On the Road” the mother of my friend Mary Sanger gave me when I was in high school, but now it’s held together by rubber bands. Back then (circa 1961), I used to write Kerouac letters he never answered. I imagined him young and on fire, black curls falling across his forehead and a switchman’s timetable under his arm. I couldn’t possibly have imagined him a middle-aged drunk living with his mother in Florida, “undergoing his own crucifixion” as Allen Ginsberg once explained it, the odd man out of the generation he named.

– Lewis MacAdams

It’s practically impossible to convey the excitement “On the Road” sparked when it first appeared. I was making the awkward shift from home and neighborhood life in Detroit to college life in Ann Arbor, Mich., and we kids – any of us who had half a brain – knew things weren’t right. At any moment, the world could go up in a nuclear flame. You got the idea of how important it was to pack as much living into life as you could.

The white hipster wanderers of Kerouac’s road show reassured us that you could still live a little. That his characters worshiped Lester Young and Slim Gaillard but saw blacks, Mexicans, Asians and Indians as noble savages didn’t sit well with me. But I learned a lot about writing, which I was urgently in need of learning then. Too young to be a beatnik and ultimately too sensible to become a hippie, I went to Jack Kerouac University the way Charlie Parker said he’d attended Lester Young University. It was from him that I learned to lean and plunge into the sheer joy of poetry and storytelling on the page.

– Al Young

In 1957, I was discovering Conrad and Joyce, classical music and the Partisan Review; Kerouac was a closed book to me. Even after I fell in love with Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, Kerouac’s seemingly formless prose paled in comparison. While writing about Ginsberg in the late 1960s, I finally gave “On the Road” a chance; what had seemed shapeless began to look like an eruptive well of energy and flow. At a time when the culture demanded responsibility and restraint, the book made the lure of irresponsibility irresistible to young men. It still is, though our values have changed.

– Morris Dickstein

For all its hipster connotations, “On the Road” is ultimately a book about being un-hip. No surprise, really, that Sal’s first attempt to travel cross-country is thwarted by his own romantic naiveté and he winds up headed back on a bus full of schoolteachers. Nor should readers wonder why the characters’ enthusiasm is always just slightly disproportionate to what’s actually going on. “On the Road” is about trying to get out of New Jersey, about trying not to be boring, trying not to be bored. It is also about never entirely succeeding in these endeavors. Dean’s refrain to Sal may be an endless variation on his line “we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,” but one of life’s dirty secrets is that no one ever really does. “On the Road” knows that, even if its author didn’t.

– Meghan Daum

“On the Road” romped over American values and middle-class worries. Failure was an option, even a preference, success was living anarchically, and being anti-work, anti-puritanical was the real American occupation. Kerouac’s running, breathless sentences elongated the experience of joy; they were not polished and “muscular” like Mailer’s, not elegant and analytical like Bellow’s. They were meant to blow the reader away. With them, Kerouac reinvented the American western, full of space and room for exhilaration. His cowboy antiheroes’ adventures were comic and weird, not tragic, their angst lasting as long as a stop at a gas station. And the desire to make love, not war, registered profoundly in a newly awakening American consciousness.

– Lynne Tillman

It’s not hyperbolic to declare “On the Road” our own national post-World War II epic. Sketched in journal drafts in the late 1940s, when Harry Truman was president, the novel has survived Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis and the Great Society and the Reagan revolution and 9/11 to maintain cult status with young people while serving as a yardstick marker for baby boomers. It’s become almost an American religious book, with Kerouac asking “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

– Douglas Brinkley

Hot damn, you wanted a Dean Moriarty, someone mad to live, mad to burn, burn, burn while you rode alongside – seat-belted though; why take unnecessary risks, especially after seeing that driver’s-ed video on drunk driving – someone to eat up those holy back roads while you took frantic notes. But it turned out there were few genuine Moriartys out there, and when you finally found yours … a crazy sweet Wyoming poet who could talk all night and liked to drive his car into Dumpsters, it was actually a little scary – like the night there was some kind of dust-up and this dude wound up in jail and you had to raise cash to bail him out, writing checks for $20 at grocery stores all over town. And as you wrote your name over and over on all those checks, dutifully recording each in the register, you couldn’t help wondering whether Kerouac would have been a good writer if he hadn’t hung out with lunatics. Hmm.

– Jess Walter

Kerouac was 29 when he wrote “On the Road” and 36 when it was published. He wrote for his peers: grown men (mostly) who had been through military service, marriage, divorce, jail, institutions, crises of faith. Yet we entrust the book to 17-year-olds, for whom it is the Book of Dean, an irresistible call to adventure.

But if the novel has a life, we can revisit. At 29 or 36 (or any age that has a perspective), it is also the book of Sal, who follows Dean onto the road but gradually outgrows him, ending the novel off the road, older and wiser. Sal’s road is a penance, not an escape. He begins as a writer looking for a story and ends by receiving his writerly mission, from a grizzled prophet who tells him, “Go moan for man.” His response is this book, more mournful moan than rebel yell.

– John Leland

I think of D.H. Lawrence, his poem “Snake,” in which, remembering how he had thrown a log at a snake, the speaker declares, “And I have something to expiate; / A pettiness.” The lines came back to me recently after watching Kerouac on the old Steve Allen Show doing scatty spontaneous bop prosody from “On the Road.” Kerouac looks handsome, sneaky, young – and he’s good, getting his syncopation, clearly enjoying himself.

Wonderful, but staring into that warp, I found myself squirming, ashamed. Not of Kerouac, but of myself. I had loved “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums” so much, and I was hardly alone. We were all buying the wild Beat mythos. And maybe that was part of the problem – Kerouac belonged to a whole generation; he eventually made me feel like a cliché. Who can say?

All I know is that a few years later I turned on him. I created an occasion to write about rereading “On the Road,” and then I condescended to it. It’s one thing to feel you have outgrown a writer, quite another to use that to preen. That’s my Lawrence moment – the pettiness I want to expiate. Watching the young Kerouac, I feel I can almost get back to the time before he lost his sheen for me, before he slowly turned on himself to become the sad boozer so out of sync with his acolytes – when he was still about moving fast with radio blaring and windows down.

– Sven Birkerts

I read it in 1965, as a high school senior, expecting to be hit by the weight of this cool Beat book. I wasn’t. I read it in the decade of Dylan and the Beatles, and in its boozy, self-conscious, priapic posturing it seemed a boy’s book, as it does to this day. Its central conceit, Sal’s adoration of Dean, means that if you don’t dig Dean, the book is lost on you, and, frankly, Dean is very hard to dig if you’re a woman. He and Sal were supposed to be veterans of life and war, but even then they seemed like the same jerky males I knew in high school. That’s what “On the Road” taught me: You don’t leave the boys you went to high school with. You go through life with them. – Marianne Wiggins

I checked out my first copy of “On the Road” from my local public library. Surprisingly, there was one – a hardcover edition even. (In later years, you’d be hard-pressed to find even a paperback; they’d all been lifted.) I took it home and expected to fall hard for it. I was most likely 15 or 16 so was ready and open to something that pulled away boundaries. But for some reason, I didn’t feel pulled along. The book kept stopping and starting in my mind, an old jalopy in a tattered dust jacket. I remember feeling annoyed by the aimlessness. I took it back to the library not even halfway through and didn’t pick up another Kerouac book until I was in college. First, “The Subterraneans,” then “Big Sur” – and fell head over heels. There was something about the melancholy mixed in with the elation; this was a different Kerouac voice, it seemed. Things had happened; life had had its way with him.

I made a U-turn and went back to “On the Road” to see if I would have a different take now. This time it wasn’t the story that interested me, but what happened in those sentences. I was reading more for feeling rather than narrative, and very certainly not for a life “road map.” I was a woman so I wouldn’t find it here, I knew. Sal and Dean weren’t going to pass the keys to a “gone lovely” and they weren’t going to entertain her ideas about the world – and by that time, I’d already figured out I wanted to be behind the wheel. If anything, Kerouac gave me a sense of just that – what it took and what the toll could be along that road.

– Lynell George

Some people remember being blown away by “On the Road” when they were young but then find that it doesn’t stand up to mature scrutiny. My experience has been completely different. It gets better and better – the heartbreak more pronounced – with every rereading. I’m struck, now, by the perfect degree of authorial control. Any more and it would be self-stifling; any less and it would have ended up like the torrent of junk that came pouring in its wake.

– Geoff Dyer