So did that granddaddy of all most-frequently-shoplifted-by-stoners novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I didn’t used to understand what all the Kerouac alterna-celebrity hype was all about. I’d read On the Road and some of his other books; but the rambling odes to young-adult wild oat sowing failed to inspire awe in me.
Sure, he’d lived an adventurous life (until he became a bloated drunken burnout). But I’ve never given a damn about a writer’s gossip life, only about his/her actual writing.
(Hence, I’m not the best person to share your worshipful odes to the lowlife legends of Kesey, Bukowski, Nin, and especially “Hunter.” Talk to me after you’ve read their works.)
Then I attended the Kerouac monologue bio-play at the old Velvet Elvis theater. Soon thereafter, I discovered Kerouac’s Playboy essay, “Origins of the Beat Generation.”
Suddenly, it all made sense.
Kerouac, I learned, was reared in Boston to Quebecois parents.
Kerouac’s beat dichotomy of hipsters vs. squares was really the great Canadian dichotomy of earthy Quebeckers vs. stuffy Ontarians!
With that revelation, I understood. Kerouac’s works were only partly romans a clef about himself and his friends. They were mostly rambling, improvised love songs to the people, places, and things he loved, to the America of hot jazz, R&B (not its teenybopper dilution as rock n’ roll), blue jeans, the long lonesome highway, drinkin’, whorin’, and all your educated-straight-white-male pleasures.
All this is a prelude to David Mills’s Guardian essay contrasting Kerouac, Wm. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.
Mills’s premise: Like certain later cultural scenes, folks who happened to be in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily make the same stuff.
The gay Ginsberg and the then-closeted gay Burroughs, Mills claims, had a lot more at stake in their personal revolts against Eisenhower/squaresville America.
Burroughs, the most formalistically-minded artiste of the three, was particularly able to hold his philosophical and aesthetic principles as the society around him churned.
But Mills believes Kerouac, the meat-and-potatoes straight guy who’d documented the adventures of his more overtly freaky friends, came to feel left behind, or even betrayed, as the Beat worldview was commercialized into hippie-dippie hedonism. All this led, at least indirectly, to his drink-sodden premature demise in 1969. Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, remained resolute and active into the 1990s.
As an old college radio new-waver, I heartily preferred Burroughs’s staccato rhythms and imaginative dystopian fantasies.
The latter-day Ginsberg? Those amateur performances of giddy song-poems lauding the allure of underage boys? Not my idea of significant art.
That leaves Kerouac. Many have superficially adored his works. I superficially dismissed it. I’ve since learned to appreciate it, and its evocation of a world that had already passed by the time On the Road came out.
