On. . .  "On the Road"

"You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen lunatics have long joined the dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye."
               From "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac, The Viking Press 1958

The long awaited, Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation of "On the Road" directed by Walter Salles slated to open in Europe this spring and yet to receive a release date in the U.S. is bound to inspire comparison with the novel that made Kerouac the Beat Generation's signature writer.  When I reread his great classic in anticipation, I felt it described an experience that is 'gone'.

Premonitions of the vast bureaucratic conformity characterizing American life in the 50's were evident in Kerouac's  later work "The Dharma Bums".  The rise of an industrial military complex that spurred the rebellious social ferment of the 60's and the loss of natural space and privacy to powerful media interests that mark our times, were just beginning to manifest in the post-depression, post-war climate when Kerouac began his travels.

"On the Road" now stands as a testament to a `Lost America'.  Although he didn't set out to document his time, only write a novel as a chapter in his long series of autobiographical fiction, the book portrays an America he captured for generations after him.  At 24, Kerouac was a man coming of age with a psyche that could still conjure `The American Dream'.  In 1947 his free-wheeling travel cross-country - hitchhiking - hopping boxcars on midnight freights - camping on desolate hillsides - would now be curtailed, filmed with surveillance  and end in arrest.

Typed with spontaneous fervor on a long Teletype scroll in 1951 (published in 1957), "On the Road" portrays a country with untamed wilderness, an expanse of mountains, plains and riverbanks with no urban sprawl.  Star-studded skies sparkled free of satellites and rural characters were dignified by poverty and hard labor.  Before decades of conspicuous consumption, Kerouac could enjoy buying a pack of cigarettes, loaf of bread or gallon of gas for  roughly 20 cents. 

The novel tells the story of several road trips filled with fantastic adventures narrated by Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, that he enjoys solo or in the company of his rebellious buddy, Dean Moriarity (based on Neal Cassidy). Dean, the son of a wino, was a car thief, bigamist, pseudo-intellectual jailbird and existential charmer who could drive 90 miles an hour through city traffic without an accident. The book is populated with fictionalized versions of Kerouac's friends, some now literary giants - the dark realist Carol Marx was Allen Ginsberg and Old Bull Lee, a desperate heroine addict, was based on William Burroughs.

Kerouac's power as a writer in his first person narrative was drawn from his descriptive art that holds you in its grip and carries you full speed in the length of a paragraph taking you across landscapes - human emotions - or personal encounters that often end with surprising insight or humorous pitfalls.  Kerouac wasn't a snob with words -  making some up and slamming together incongruous images that never fail to capture an illusive truth or the full flavor or the moment.

"I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey,  and since all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over the West Coast."

When leaving New York City skyscrapers behind and hitting the road, we share his yearning for transcendent freedom . . .

"I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with fifty dollars in my pocket."

Describing a wee hour jazz session in a San Francisco club, we hear the wails between the lines. . .

"He just hauled back and stomped his foot and blew down a hoarse, baughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn, and blew high, wide and screaming through this air."

Describing Dean driving like a maniac, we watch in peril as . .  .

"Dean hurled the Plymouth head-on at the truck roaring our way, wobbled and hovered in front of it a moment, the truck driver's face growing gray before our eyes, the people in the back seat subsiding in gasps of horror, and swung away at the last moment."

In Kerouac's novels patterns emerge that he repeated in real life in different scenarios. He was given an opportunity - i.e., a football scholarship to Columbia - met up with some hardball authority (his coach) - quit - escaped - embarked on extensive travels or spiritual quest usually with a friend or in search for one - hung out in raving binges - faced a life trauma (i.e., a friend's suicide) and returned home to his mother or aunt for extensive episodes of introspection and writing.  He eventually became bored and set out to travel again.

Throughout Kerouac's writing, female characters are one dimensional - mirror images of one another who appear bi-coastally - as bitchy whores, angelic mothers or nagging housewives. They were never as influential on him as his buddies and only enflamed his imagination with carnal or maternal desires.  When I first read the novel in the 60s, it was impossible for me to identify from his perspective. At the time, I lived on the Lower East Side and visited Ginsberg's empty walk-up where he read poetry on the floor - went to loft screenings of Warhol films, drank beer at the Annex - but never met Kerouac. He was probably "On the Road". Now I appreciate him as an artist.

Looking back, Kerouac's life had elements of great tragedy as he paid the price for heavy drinking and drug use with an early death.  His `Beat' sensitivity that spanned the lower depths of suffering to the highest ecstasy of enlightenment took him on a journey to depravity.   But as his writing is at once sorrowful, yet filled with exuberance and joy, one can only wonder as Dean in "On the Road" . . .

"What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road.  It's any anywhere road for anybody, anyhow?"