Newspaper Page Text
CHRISTIE S OF NEW YORK
to generations of would-be hipsters and tortured young poets.
Reading On the Road is something of a rite of passage to anyone
aspiring to Depth (for young neoconservatives that's Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead, but the principle's the same) and the book is
used as shorthand for lazy TV writers to illustrate a Deep Character,
like Luke Perry on "Beverly Hills, 90210," whose character would
read Kerouac with a vaguely constipated look that denoted his
existential angst.
Kerouac would have hated Luke Perry. Though On the Road
brought him fame after years of toiling in obscurity, he abhorred
the sins committed by his fans. He had no love or patience for
B eat legend has it that when it came time for Jack Kerouac
to write On the Road in 1951, he mounted a roll of butcher's
paper and fed it into his typewriter so as not to lose his mo
mentum changing pages. When it was done, he then walked into
his publisher's offices with the roll and dropped it onto his editor's
desk. This is only partially true. He did have a roll of paper, 120
sheets of typing paper taped together,
but the novel wasn't done in one draft.
Kerouac, a relentless rewriter, put his
novel through at least six drafts before
turning in what would have been a very
neat and polished manuscript. But the
legend is a good one as legends go, and
for Kerouac, myth was always at least as
important as reality.
Wednesday, Sept. 5 marked the 50th
anniversary of the release of On the
Road, Kerouac's paean to finding one
self on the open highways of postwar
America. It wasn't his first novel (that
was The Town and the City) or his favor
ite (he always claimed it was Visions of
Gerard), and certainly not his best {The
Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Desolation
Angels are all better), but On the Road
was the book that made his reputation
as a novelist and a countercultural hero
beatniks and, like Dylan and Morrison and Cobain, utterly rejected
the "voice of a generation" label that so many people tried to
hang on him. For all the wild jazz and world travel and Buddhism
and heroin-fueled poetry that occupied him, Kerouac was always
rather conservative in his politics and homebound in his habits,
with a dependence on his mother that Elvis would have envied.
Fans who confuse On the Road with
Kerouac's life miss the point of both:
Kerouac was a novelist who drew on
his experiences for his fiction, not a
memoirist with a gift for renaming
his friends. Certainly there is an Allen
Ginsberg character (Carlo Marx) and a
William Burroughs character (old Bull
Lee) and plenty of other ancillary char
acters based on the circles in which
Kerouac ran, but we only knew this years
after the fact, once the Beats had been
recognized and given their collective
name.
Dispensing with everything that
On the Road is not, what remains is
the novel which, flawed as it is, still
has power to excite the imagination
and draws favorable comparisons with
Kerouac's forerunners and contempo
raries. It has touches of Steinbeck's
scope and Fitzgerald's sense of its time,
Whitman's lyricism and Thoreau's spiritu
alism. This is not hyperbole but intent,
Kerouac penning an extensive valentine
to all his literary heroes, a would-be
Bloomsbury poet in a fast car. His he
roes, the maniacal con-man Dean Moriarty (a thinly disguised
Neal Cassady) and the thoughtful, eager Sal Paradise (a stand-
in for Kerouac himself), crisscross the nation as it begins to
shake off the last vestiges of the war and discover its newfound
identity as the ultimate consumer. Although it's too early yet
to see the direction the republic will take, a sense of inevitable
and irreversible change hangs in the air above the sweeping
vistas of the farmland, plains and deserts that roll by the open
windows, God's country under new ownership.
As Dean and Sal move from place to place, getting by on
odd jobs and old girlfriends, drinking buddies and flophouses,
Dean is looking for kicks, new adventures and adrenalin rushes,
a hyperactive man-child leaving a swath of destruction behind
him. Sal Paradise, as his name suggests, is looking for grace, a
touch of the divine that he believes can be found on the open
road but comes to realize lies within himself. Dean's refusal and
Sal's urgent need to grow up put them at odds with each other,
one seeking ihe divine in the world while the other plays with
matches.
If the true meaning of "apocalypse" is "revelation," On the
Road is intended to be the first postwar American apocalyptic
novel, Kerouac trying urgently to reinvent the wheel through
his themes and his prose, done primarily in a style he liked to
call "spontaneous bop prosody," an attempt to express himself
in the frenetic, winding idiom of improvisational jazz, as in the
most oft-quoted passage from the novel:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of every
thing at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a
commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yel
low roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...
The style, with its relentless momentum, often dilutes the
substance af the book. Truman Capote famously sniffed, "That's
not writing, it's typing," and the criticism is not entirely inval
id, but it is overly harsh. Kerouac's novel is a novel of excess, in
its language and its themes, but it succeeds throrjh sheer am
bition and balls. It pulls off the rare feat of being of its time and
ahead of it, continuing to fire the imaginations of young dreamers
and old wanderers a half-century later.
In commemoration of the anniversary, a new hardcover edi
tion of On the Road is in bookstores, as well as a new transcript of
the original scroll (both Viking Adult, 2007). The latter is recom
mended for Beat scholars only—there are no paragraph breaks and
typos are rampant; spare yourself the headache—but the former is
still worth getting. Bumps and all, it remains a wild ride.
John G. Nettles
' Buffos L
Southwcst
Cate
k the place
to be every
Tbcidayt
COLDUIGU.
DANKena
II In Town Houses
3 or 4
Bedroom Plans
$178,900 - $199,900
Turn onto Barber Street, about a
mile down turn right onto
Athens Ave. (8 Houses)
Or 3 houses: Closer to ARMC
and Ogelthorpe Ave.
Kelly Wiedower • 706-254-3250
www.AthensMove.com
Hawbwiq&i& f Ftejcck Puca
& Uegeiwiian Fwui »
e«t +
jCate
plight!
Haui Opm tit
4cutt ^
Ftiday &
S atuiday
Oat Bat
9»BocW
GUI CentiticaleA And T-Skitto Fat Sah
2S9 U/eat Utaluxgfauc Sheet • 706-548-9175
See Us OxCtKe At U>UXU.C£OCK£'D.US
WWW.
flagpole
.com
that’s awesome!
WINORUSW
"Pan” for wins* at su»* __
Southwest Cafe
49% OFF
(ACTUALLY 1/9 PRICE)
WING BASKETS
(BASKET SIZES: 10,16, 94, 48)
TUESDAY - ALL DAY
"T* 1 $1.00 OFF TERRAPIN! T " w,r|
-»/ TUESDAY - ALL DAY - *
196 Alps Rd., Suite 49 • Athens
DELIVERY or TAKE OUT: 706-354-6655
NEWS & FEATURES I ARTS & EVENTS I MOVIES I MUSIC I COMICS & ADVICE I CLASSIFIEDS
SEPTEMBER 12,2007 • FLAGPOLE.COM 9