In Defense of Kerouac : From the Altar of the Safe and Predictable to Life ‘On the Road’

Not long ago, Newsweek columnist George F. Will laid into Jack Kerouac, the author most noted for chronicling the Beat Generation.

Will, the Mr. Peepers of the political right, argued that the rebellion of Kerouac’s period, and the “sandbox radicalism” of the ‘60s that followed, was essentially the acting out of immature malcontents who have long since sold out to conformity, materialism and other aspects of mainstream American life.

“Respectability is the cruel fate of yesterday’s radicals, especially in the ‘80s,” Will concluded gleefully.

I can understand why Will would smirk at Kerouac. With his perfect bow tie and unsmiling demeanor, Will seems the most dour and emotionally constipated of our political commentators.

Kerouac--crazy, freewheeling, creative, troubled, unafraid to reveal his darkness along with his joy--must have threatened the hell out of young George.

I empathize: My own upbringing was at the altar of the safe and predictable.

But in 1969, I got a jolt. I read “On the Road.” It was a breakthrough for its time, and a catalyst that helped change my life.

In his diatribe against Kerouac, Will makes much of the “ ‘liberation’ from restraint” unleashed when the beats “hit the road,” linking it to the current drug and AIDS epidemics. He derides the ‘50s and ‘60s counterculture for reacting against the morality and conformity of the era.

Perhaps George and I saw different sides of the same coin. After my parents divorced and my mother remarried, I was raised in the most Republican of households, with a trim front lawn, American flag on holidays, church on Sundays, a leather strap for discipline. And behind the carefully cultivated facade festered physical abuse, virulent racism (the words nigger and kike were heard from sunup to bedtime) and psychological tyranny. Suburban Gothic, if you will.

Above all, we were raised to pursue the mainstream of American life--to behave, at all costs, normally.

Kerouac preached freedom--from rules that didn’t make sense, from emotional repression, elitism, hypocrisy, the worship of comfort and material goods. The freedom to discover the world, experience life, find out who we were--on our terms .

In the summer of ‘69, after reading Kerouac’s beat saga of the highways, “On the Road,” I quit my reporting job and went off with my buddy Bill to see America. We started out in Los Angeles with a drive-away--a monster Winnebago--rolling along Route 66 through the South. After that, it was strictly hitchhiking: A ride in a fancy convertible down the Florida coast, nights wandering New York’s dangerous but tantalizing East Village, jobs at a hotel on a lake in the Adirondacks. Our girlfriends there were maids--Bill’s a folk singer with long, dark hair, mine an earthy, freckled redhead with long braids who dropped a tab of LSD each morning before skipping off to do the cabins around the lake.

We all left our jobs the same day, thumbs out, with bedrolls, harmonicas and guitars. They wanted us to go with them to Woodstock, N.Y., where, they’d heard, a great rock concert was planned. We’d been there a couple weeks earlier so we declined. A week later, stuck in Boston, we read about Woodstock in the newspapers.

On the stormy Maine seashore, a soldier, about to ship out for Vietnam, put us up during a drunken, rage-filled night as he faced the specter of war. An ex-senator squired us through Rhode Island, telling political tales. In Vermont, an elderly farm couple fed us, then let us sleep in their barn. Next morning, a milkman gave us a lift in his milk truck.

Gone three months, we paid for a room only one night. America had been warm, generous, open-armed to us.

Back home, armed with more Kerouac (“Dharma Bums” was my favorite), I left for Mexico with another pal, surfboards wedged into my battered VW van. During five glorious months, I got inside my first “tube,” was attacked by sharks, thrown unjustly into jail, dug wells with Mexican laborers, slept with pigs, got drunk on home-made tequila, danced to mariachi music at a village wedding, hallucinated--legally--on peyote buttons, and never misbehaved.

When I returned, I founded a little “alternative” paper called Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach (still being published 18 years later), free-lanced, got behind causes that probably make George Will dyspeptic.

Yes, we were excessive, self-righteous, self-congratulatory, narcissistic, at times misguided. We also helped to end a war, expand human rights, and raised some warnings about backing corrupt and oppressive dictators, nuclear power, toxic wastes and a general disrespect for the planet--problems at a catastrophic stage today.

We also had a lot of fun.

Now, in my early 40s, I’m probably less adventurous, certainly less energetic. But I’m not the same person I was before I read “On the Road.”

George Will may feel smugly superior rejoicing in the negative and dismissing the importance of the late Mr. Kerouac.

Myself, I’m grateful for him.