Kids that steal books are cool kids

ONE


He complained to his friends that his only readers were the kids who stole his books from stores.

(p.286)

I went to the library yesterday to get books by Kerouac. There weren’t any on the shelf. I looked them up on the catalogue and the catalogue said that they were all kept at the desk. I went to the desk and asked for a book by Kerouac. The young girl behind the counter said “which one,” and then went and got the book I asked for. She went to a set of shelves groaning with Kerouac, picked out my book and handed it to me. “Why?” I asked. She sort of looked at me and then said: “Everybody steals them”. I was so surprised I forgot to look at the shelf of books-people-want-to-steal and see what other knick-able authors I should be reading.

Kerouac was right. His only readers were kids who stole his books (and former kids reliving their youth). Critics, well, they rarely liked Kerouac it would seem.

John Ciardi took him apart in Saturday Review, Robert Brustein went after him in ‘The Cult of Unthink’ in Horizon, John Updike parodied his style in a short story for the New Yorker, Truman Capote attacked him on David Susskind’s TV program by saying that what Kerouac did wasn’t writing at all, ‘it’s typing’.

(p.287)

Which seems mean, but then Kerouac’s books weren’t written for Bobby Bumstein, and John Uptight, and Fakeman, and you wonder why Kerouac let himself be hurt by them in pointless interviews and silly lectures.

Weschler shouted ‘We have to fight for peace’ (eternal quote) and Jack looked at him in exasperation, said ‘What? Don’t you realise that doesn’t make sense?’ or something like that; then sat down silent but with Weschler’s hat on his head. Weschler got mad and angrily demanded his hat back; as if Jack were a barbarian just like he dreamed, taking his hat!

Hunter College debate, 6 November, 1958 (p.275)

Kerouac was shy and anxious and got drunk to protect himself before interviews. Critics in newspapers hammered him. Former poetic acquaintances mocked his poems in newspapers.

People who are disparaging about your creative efforts are especially hurtful. They can be hurtful by returning your work unmarked without comment, and they can be hurtful by returning it heavily annotated and by never ceasing in their diatribe of feedback. It is a hard, hard thing to maintain friendship and be a critic, and you should always have the right to refuse to read your friend’s books, squibs or half-baked ideas.

If the critics were dangerous then so were the fans.

They tended to drive their cars more recklessly when he was with them, as if he was ‘Dean Moriarty’, and not the Kerouac who hated to drive and whom I had once seen crouching on the floor of a car, in a panic, during a drunken six-hour dash from New York to Provincetown. They plied him with drinks, they created parties around him, they doubled the disorder in the hopes of catching his eye, and so never glimpsed the Kerouac who once confessed to me, ‘You know what I’m thinking when I’m in the midst of all that – the uproar, the boozing, the wildness? I’m always thinking, What am I doing here? Is this the way I’m supposed to feel?

(John Clellon Holmes, p.276)

Remember this is all 1956-1958. We are in a time that is just getting the hang of new words like “rock ’n’ roll”. The world described by Kerouac is pretty wild by today’s standards. Imagine it in the days when Elvis shocked the world by twitching his hips.

The young people who responded to the book, who read it not as ‘literature’ but as an adventure, recognized that Kerouac was on their side, the side of youth and freedom, riding with Cassady over American highways chasing after the great American adventure – freedom and open spaces, the chance to be yourself, to be free. Kerouac hadn’t offered any real alternative to the conformity of twentieth-century industrial America. He ducked the problems of the 1950s such as the Bomb, the pressures of the Organisation Man, McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee. He offered instead a vision of freedom, a return to a solipsistic world of childhood, to an irresponsibility so complete that no other world could ever intrude for long. If he’d started across America too late to join up with the wagon trains, the cowboys roaming the range, the I.W.W. organisers or the Dust Bowl refugees, he’d nevertheless carried on with their uncompromising search for freedom, for the chance to see if a better life couldn’t be found by moving on, for the great American dream.

(pp.264-5)

The Great American Dream sounds about as vague as the: it-means-what ever-you-want-it-to-mean, oxymoron called Pakeha Identity.


TWO


I had always believed that the myth of On the Road went something like this: Jack meets up with a crazy guy called Neal and they whiz around America; Jack types it all up in a week high on drugs; the book gets published; Jack becomes an overnight sensation.

Jack first met Neal and started doing road trips in 1946/47 and On the Road was published in 1956. The famous three week “that’s not writing it’s typing” version (1951) was not his first or last draft of a book that it took him years to write. It was the break-through draft of course, the draft where Kerouac freed himself and discovered something he would come to call spontaneous prose; the style of prose that he became (in)famous for. By the time On the Road was actually published Jack had written something like eleven unpublished books which he lugged around in a rucksack when he went on the road.

The months right before success hit Kerouac with a cobblestone right and a left hook sort of summed up those ten years. His last job before being “discovered” was sitting up in a hut on Desolation Peak for two months watching for fires in complete isolation. At that time he wrote this about himself:

Take another look at me to get the story better (now I’m getting drunk): - I’m a widow’s son, at the time she is living with relatives, penniless… I’m 34, regular looking, but in my jeans and eerie outfits people are scared to look at me because I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside of an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day – Walking thru towns in the middle of America I got stared at weirdly – I was bound to live my own way … I was also a notorious wino who exploded anywhere anytime he got drunk – My friends in San Francisco said I was a Zen Lunatic, at least a Drunken Lunatic, yet sat with me in moonlight fields drinking and singing … I was an Ambitious Paranoid – Nothing could stop me writing big books of prose and poetry for nothing, that is, with no hope of ever having them published.

(pp.250-1)

After his stint in isolation Kerouac headed for Mexico stopping by Neal’s house on the way, but

he became restless with what he thought was a serene family life with the children, the swimming pool, the pizza pies and the never-ending TV quiz shows and advertisements.

(p.249)

This is a surprising picture of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady considering what we usually think:

Kerouac presented such a compelling portrait of Neal Cassady [in On the Road] that his image fashioned the life style of a generation of young readers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. In the pages of On the Road, Cassady emerged as an archetypal American hero.

(p.262)

Actually this version of Neal Cassady did fashion the life style of a generation – the generation in the majority – the generation who got jobs, settled down, and watched TV.

Once in Mexico Kerouac called on his friend Allen Ginsberg to come and join him, and Allen and his entourage did, also stopping at Neal’s.

After spending the night at Neal’s, where Gregory had a nightmare about eggs and couldn’t face breakfast, the four of them, Allen, Gregory, Peter and Peter’s brother Lafcadio, went on to Los Angeles.

(p.252)

(The only reason I included that quote was because of the egg nightmare.)

There was a slow-building feeling of expectation now for this haphazard bunch of writers. Ginsberg’s Howl readings were getting more of a following; Kerouac’s On the Road was moving towards actually being published. Finally it seemed that this group of no-good bums who had been talking themselves up for a decade were going to make it. They went from Mexico, to New York, to Tangiers, to New York. Kerouac was characteristically moody and depressed. He drank; he isolated himself. Back in America Kerouac went with his mother to Berkley. It was there that his publisher sent the first box of books called On the Road.

Memere had gone to the store and Jack was completely alone in their shabby apartment. Holding the books in his hands for the first time, he looked up as ‘a golden light’ appeared in the porch door. It was Neal, dropping by with his old girl Luanne and two other friends. In Desolation Angels, Jack described the scene, a moment in his life that haunted him forever:

We all stare at one another in the golden light. Not a sound. I’m also caught redhanded (as we all grin) with a copy of Road in my hands even before I’ve looked at it for the first time! I automatically hand one to [Neal] who is after all the hero of the poor crazy sad book…

Kerouac felt guilty, almost like a thief, with the book in his hands, but he felt even worse after Cassady looked at it. ‘When [Neal] said goodbye to all of us that day he for the first time in our lives failed to look me a goodbye in the eye but looked away shifty-like – I couldn’t understand it and still don’t – I knew something was bound to be wrong and it turned out very wrong…’

(p.260)

When I first read On the Road I thought it was the beginning of an amazing story.

It was the end.

Almost all of Kerouac’s brilliance, restlessness and poetry were spent by the time On the Road was published, and much of the time until his death was spent publishing back catalogue. Before America turned its attention on him Kerouac was free; afterwards he was the best-selling author of On the Road and he was in a cage explaining what BEAT meant. Pointless. You may as well steal your opponent’s hat, you may as well laugh out loud at the man who has nightmares about eggs.


All page references are to:
Kerouac: A biography by Ann Charters
Andre Deutsch, London, 1974