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From the Editor
Forty years
ago on October 21, 1969, the life of Jack Kerouac ended, and his hold
on
American letters became a lasting monument. One
might think 40 years is not enough time for a grey stone to become so
venerable.
After all, some said then, as they do now, that the man was near
illiterate,
always drunk and blundering into what Ginsberg would later call “bop
prosody” --
as an after-thought? Compared to the work
of sophisticated university-trained stylists of the latter part of the
century,
Capote was right in describing what he thought of Kerouac’s 1957 debut On
the Road – "That's not writing, that's typewriting." One long
scroll of
immediate stream of consciousness, the rhythm of the silly and
important, of
joy and sadness – of immediate satisfaction and loss, of the holy
yearning
everywhere, that’s on the road. For Kerouac, to "move" was like prayer
to take
us from where we are to somewhere else, where the pearl of all our
longing
could be found.
Anyway, that was then and this is now, and I wouldn't make a fuss about it except for the fact of how the book is still received in good old 2009 among the 19-20 year olds with us now.
Teaching this book in an American literature class, I guarantee you will see eyes light up like pop-wow fireworks in the sky – "...because the only people for me are the mad ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..." They are in your classrooms hanging onto their seats – but what's pulling at them with terrific force is a longing to be on the move, to be living madly on the road, too. The energy seated there is unnerving. I was fascinated to see what they saw in the pages supposedly dashed together in three weeks (first draft) of a book that would undergo many revisions (with the help of Malcolm Cowley at Viking) that it took six years to get published. Yet the lengthy wait from writer inception 1951 to the public inception 1957 did not alter the impact of the book, as it is not altered now some decades later.
The book is
a regular chronicle of friendly encounters, and open faces, and wide
open hopes
– this is what the students saw – a now and a now of living from music
to
party to sex, of going to the next town, the next place to find out
what was in
the world in the honest open – a fantastic raving of words playful and
fun to
read, just to see what happens next. They also liked it, the words, the
tale,
because it seemed "real" -- unedited, unshaped from the real.
"Authentic" to
use the fashionable word for what people do and what they seek.Yet they also saw the sad haunting that was Sal Paradise, that was Kerouac, that was and is the fearful under-current of living in America. In a land of so much, so much freedom, and then not to find the treasure seemed tragic to them. They noticed that for all of Kerouac's bursting across American possibility – in every moment gained from moving on, there was also something lost, something left behind. They liked this passage: "Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child, believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome, grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life." They also saw how difficult it would have been then to be On the Road as a woman, and they wondered if it would be any less problematic today, or chancy. They liked the risk in the book -- that, too, is what they long for -- a risk worth taking that may mean something as to who they are and what they believe.
And they
agreed with the book's critics, too -- "haphazard and chaotic" and not
as a
book should be as something organized and clear and purposeful.
Furthermore,
I'm not too sure how they liked the book's
inspiration Neal Cassady (oh lack a daddy) and how they thought about
his
physical blast of sex and words and doing and drugs and alcohol.
Cassady was a
dropout reform school ex-con son of a drunk who bounced from one bed to
the
next, but showed Kerouac a style of writing he would try to emulate in On the
Road. Kerouac enthusiastically admitted, "I got the idea
for the spontaneous style of On the
Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady
wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional … He
has
written better than I have." They thought this passage from the novel
got it right: "I was
beginning to get the bug like Dean [Neal Cassady]. He was simply a
youth
tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con man, he was
only
conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with
people who
would otherwise pay no attention to him."
Here
in
2009, many students still think the book is a great book and unlike
anything they have ever
read, rocked with joy and sadness, with hello and goodbye. It seems
there is
always another hello in the next generation of readers -- and they were
fond of reading this one: "What is
that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on
the plain
til you see their specks dispersing?
It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good by. But we lean
forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
Editor: Tom Douglass
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