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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Hot damn, you wanted a Dean Moriarty, someone mad to live, mad to burn, burn, burn while you rode alongside -- seatbelted 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

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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 re-reading “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 synch with his acolytes -- when he was still about moving fast with radio blaring and windows down.

-- Sven Birkerts

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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