On the Road to Cooperstown
Times sure have changed at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Last week, the hall -- which, two years ago, canceled a screening of the film “Bull Durham” because of actor Tim Robbins’ antiwar politics -- opened its doors to another anti-establishment icon, the Beat Generation’s Jack Kerouac, or more accurately, his bobble-head doll. Created in 2003 as a promotion for Kerouac’s hometown minor league team, the Lowell (Mass.) Spinners, the doll offers a surprisingly accurate image of the author in his benzedrine-popping, cross-country-driving prime. There he is, in rough pants and a work shirt, clutching a notebook and pencil, as if ready to crank out some spontaneous baseball prose. He is, apparently, the first literary figure (sportswriters don’t count) ever to be honored by the hall.
At first glance, this creates some cognitive dissonance, the so-called King of the Beats enshrined in the citadel of the national pastime, the epitome of cool meeting the seventh-inning stretch. Or maybe it’s the last step in the mainstreaming of the counterculture, proof that, no matter how iconoclastic you are, society will always draw you in.
That’s a familiar story when it comes to the Beats, who have walked a line between revolution and co-optation ever since Allen Ginsberg gathered his fellow poets for a 1956 Mademoiselle photo shoot. Over the ensuing half-century, Kerouac has been used to market everything from tourism to khakis; during the 1995 exhibit “Beat Culture and the New America” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the gift shop stocked bongo-shaped salt and pepper shakers and pencils stamped with the author’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Once an outsider, Kerouac became a pop culture idol, an emblem to be bought and sold. It’s a journey that arrives at an unlikely endpoint in the permanent collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
There are mitigating factors, however. Baseball has long been a source of inspiration for writers, from Walt Whitman to Philip Roth, and Kerouac is no exception. Briefly a sportswriter at the Lowell Sun, he was an athlete before he turned to literature, attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. As a child, he invented a fantasy baseball league of eight teams and, using a deck of cards, played full 154-game schedules, recording statistics and standings neatly in a notebook.
More to the point, he was a particularly American sort of counterculture hero, the product of a Massachusetts mill town and its French-Canadian working class. At the heart of his writing is a mythic sense of this country as a land of possibility: “So in America,” he intoned at the end of “On the Road,” “when the sun goes down ... 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.” For every bohemian ideal he came to signify -- his embrace of Buddhism, his “first thought, best thought” aesthetic -- there was a corresponding middle-class sensibility; he lived with his mother until the day he died. Late in life, he turned virulently conservative, reviling the hippies and the radicals of the late 1960s, speaking out in favor of the Vietnam War.
That’s an unexpected aspect of Kerouac’s personality, and it undercuts his rebel myth. But there’s a flip side even to this -- in Whitman’s phrase, he contained multitudes. The same is true of America, of course, and even of baseball, which, the Hall of Fame insists, represents a metaphor for how we live. In recent years, the sport has symbolized our dark side, with steroid scandals and $100-million contracts, hype and stadium sweetheart deals. But what the Kerouac bobble-head doll suggests is a more positive connection: an inclusive sense of who we are.
Yes, Kerouac helped spark a social insurgency, and in the process changed the status quo. But none of that is un-American; in fact, it’s as American as, well, a baseball game.
Who are we? What do we stand for? Is there really room here for a wide array of ideas and attitudes, from the conventional to the avant-garde? These are important questions, especially now, as public discourse revolves around contentious issues of national identity. And that makes it all the more fitting, I think, to see Kerouac in the Hall of Fame.
David L. Ulin is the author of “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith” (Viking, 2004)
