Move, move, move! (Thoughts on Kerouac)
Dear H,
On the Road is proof that a literary canon is only as good as the people who picked it. We have lots of gems, too, of course, in the "must-read" lists and curricula for high-schoolers; but not all readers are wise, or tasteful, or can even read above a tenth-grade level, so the field is full of landmines, and after hitting a couple you start to tread carefully.
Being careful has its dangers too. It makes you ready to give up at the first signs of idiocy, or boredom — a sensitivity which almost kept me from Steinbeck. But if you carry on too long with a bad book you feel empty, cheated, and angry. Why is it so high on so many lists? Is America full of morons?*
Take this too far and you end up questioning your questions. You might wonder if you’re too picky, for instance; or whether it’s just a matter of taste. But then you wonder, what if it isn't? Doesn’t each book have a vibe? Isn’t each vibe a reflection of a soul? Isn’t the way we arrange words a reflection of our minds? Isn’t the gist of a book a preferred set of life-or-death virtues? And if someone tells you great books are bad and shitty books are good, doesn’t this imply shitty things about the man?
I asked myself all these questions reading Kerouac. His language in On The Road is colorful and solid and highly readable, for the most part; but it gets flowery fast, and when it gets flowery it gets corny. And it contains “big ideas” so teenaged and half-baked and stale** that I wonder how any adult could enjoy it. One of the most highlighted passages in the book reads,
they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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 everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
And if that wasn’t painful enough, consider the last passage of the book, probably the worst finale in the entire world.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
Anyway, On The Road is the story of a fully-grown World War 2 era man roaming aimlessly around the country, getting trashed with speed freaks, living in squalor in homes he won't own, skipping on sleep, barely holding down bad jobs, and writing to his aunt for money. The money was used to keep roaming, and if you do a Google search on Kerouac, you’ll find the partying eventually killed him. His friends lived in filthy houses, stole cigarettes and gasoline from family-owned businesses, abused and cheated on their wives, drove 80 miles an hour on the wrong side of the freeway, used speed and heroin and all kinds of pills, and thought reading the Marquis de Sade was “real learning.” Almost all the dialogue is corny. Almost all the big ideas are stupid.
One poignant example of both:
Ed was in the back seat; Marylou and Dean and I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodness and joy of life. Dean suddenly became tender. “Now dammit, look here, all of you, we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING. Am I right?”
There’s a time and a place for this kind of thinking, of course, and it's somewhere between puberty and your first stint in jail. As such I hated the book because I’ve been in his shoes and it felt gross so I grew out of it and never looked back. Adulthood isn’t hitting the age of eighteen. It’s realizing many things in life aren’t worth chasing and replacing them with things that are. But On the Road never showcases any grown-ups. He writes,
We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
— a clown-shoes philosophy, since moving for the sake of moving is the best way to end up in “confusion and nonsense.” Which in turn necessitates more moving.
Moving is of course the one thing you do when you can’t be happy where you are: a change of scenery, of people, of activities that makes you forget, momentarily, who you are — and what you lack. And all the while you drink. The drinking numbs your pain, and the constant traveling (and if you can’t afford traveling, partying) keeps you distracted. Kerouac lived for both. He died because he drank too much because he was trying to escape himself and couldn’t go back to his Catholic parents. He would have made a great Instagram account. It would have made a lot of stupid women jealous.
Kerouac tried to look like he was “living,” but the book doesn’t feel happy. He has all the craziness and none of the hilarity of Hunter S. Thompson. He writes, pathetically,
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas [NOTE: ?] of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
So stands the modern godless Westerner: no soul to measure his life by the higher things; no guts to just man up and blow his brains out.
Yours,
-J
P.S. When I say godly I don’t mean just sensible, or well-behaved, or even Christian. I mean whether we believe God exists, and He loves us, and He’s here with us right now. An idea that colors all your other ideas.
When God is in the picture you’re free to tackle the whole universe, and the general trajectory is up. Everything you touch can be an adventure and pregnant with meaning, even if believers are in rival sects with opposite gists. A godly mindset (in the Jewish sense) is always constructive and wholesome. But when God is gone the same few subjects come up, over and over again — sex and suffering and sensation**** and death — and the general trajectory is down.
People with a godly mindset recommend writers full of light and life — Tolkien, Tolstoy, Lewis, Chesterton, Shakespeare — even Steinbeck, for what he brings to the table. But when you’re broken and you have no future, and the only things you recognize as “real” are sad things or sensations, and nobody’s watching you from Up There, and you don’t have any family to lean on or children to live for, and you don’t know what to do with your life so you move, move, move, and you wonder whether knowing would make any difference anyway, you idolize and recommend Kerouac*****.
*I once had a friend say, “when I hear a movie is the number one movie in the country, it doesn’t make me want to see the movie. It makes me want to leave the country.”
**How can Kerouac feel so crazy and stale? As Theodore Dalrymple put it, sensations never strike the same place twice. Americans already did the Beat Generation seventy years ago, and we’ve gone a long way in the wrong direction since.
Eighty years ago “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” had people up in arms. Now shocking your parents takes real ingenuity, and ten year-olds star as drag queens, and we cut off our balls, and watch tv shows about real cannibals and serial killers. The line you cross today always means another line, further down the sewer, tomorrow. The only way to stop it is to offend in the other direction — by raising the bar again, b-----g up “artists,” and putting them in jail. And I admit there are errors made in both directions.
There’s no such thing as a “free society” where people are free to do as they please. There's no dividing line between “people who get offended” and “free people.” There’s a society cleaning itself up and a society eating itself alive. You can go one direction or the other, but you can never stay in the same place.
I would add here that the child inside of you who felt shock and disgust may be gone forever after seeing and doing too many horrible things. But you can always keep him alive in somebody else, and it’s your duty to keep him alive, to some degree, in somebody else. Especially when that "somebody else” is somebody you made.
Making somebody else is in itself a restoration of innocence — and even beyond this an establishment of real human feelings you may never have experienced before*****, and thus which never had a chance to be tarnished.
So maybe you crossed too many lines. Maybe you turned against everything beautiful from your childhood and filled your brain with filth and had your heart ripped out of your chest and screwed around the block looking for salvation. Maybe you’ve felt dirty for so long it doesn’t faze you anymore. But the moment you make somebody, you feel again — you know what clean means again because you know what you lost and you see it right in front of you, reincarnated. And you cry hard because you know what's being felt, and what could very well be lost, and you want to keep it for them, and you know that you can't.
**Kerouac was a degenerate because he was naive — an innocence he shared, in many cases, with the people around him.
There’s one part of On the Road where a stranger with two trucks is going across the country with all his goods and his family and needs someone to drive one of the trucks. And Kerouac the random hitchhiker drives it for him: a blind trust between strangers which is almost impossible to imagine, these days, and which goes to show how good Americans used to be. Kerouac had a germ of this goodness in him too, and you can feel it.
My original theory on Kerouac, sixty pages into the book, was that he was a good, honest kid with life and spunk and he became a soldier and the war got to him. There was an extreme order and lack of freedom in the midst of extreme carnage and chaos, and when he got out, he didn’t know what to do with himself. But I was wrong.
According to the national archives,
Kerouac enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve (then called the U.S. Naval Reserve) during World War II. But he never left the United States, never saw action, and never even completed basic training.
In all, he lasted 10 days of boot camp before being referred first to the sick bay and then the psychiatric ward for 67 days. Kerouac’s extensive medical and psychiatric evaluations produced both a large file and the conclusion that he was "unfit for service."
The National Review, strangely enough, claims Kerouac as a die-hard conservative — meaning an anti-Communist, anti-liberal, anti-hippie, pro-American ultra-Catholic. If this is the case it happened after On The Road was written; and the book isn’t what it appears to be, but a portrait of a young man chasing what he can’t find — the first steps to a real conversion he had little idea was coming. Does this make it a celebration of degeneracy, as the literati claim it to be? Or is it an artistic snapshot of a real-life prodigal son before he comes home?
Kerouac hated that On the Road became a favorite with Beatniks and Hippies; a turn of events that puts him in the class of Nietzsche — who said Germans were stupid and praised Jews and still ended up in the backpacks of stormtroopers.
****Existentialism is the (boring) philosophy of the godless, and Camus sums up existentialists more perfectly than anyone else. From the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus:
THERE is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
A remarkable statement, not only because it puts suicide front and center, but because it proved that once you decided to go on living, he had no idea where to go with it. He could have picked questions like Seneca or Montaigne about what to build, or why to love, or how to raise kids, or be a great friend. But the existentialists tell you life is meaningless, so kill yourself — or if that fails, play games!
I mentioned above that modern man doesn’t have the balls to blow his own brains out, but he does. Hunter S Thompson and Hemingway both beat Kerouac to it — and we find life is worth living after all, but only so long as you’ve got your youth, and all the beauty and spunk that dies with it. Aging is the worst thing that can happen to an “it girl.” Aging is the best thing that can happen to a Christian. The “it girl” gets pried away from everything she holds dear. The Christian loses all the distractions, and not only gets closer to God, but gets a clearer view of Him. Both the “it girl” and the Christian want to get out of here, of course; but with one of them it’s out of hope, and with the other it’s despair.
The godless say I hope I die before I get old. The godly say gray hair is the crown of the aged. The rock star dies a shadow of his former self. The Christian’s shadow melts away — and he meets his God the best he’s ever been.
*****How did American lit avoid the label degenerate? Not because we weren’t, but because the French beat us to it, and they did it way worse. Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, a novel from the 30’s that the cover itself describes as “one of the greatest novels of the 20th century” and “Teeming with disease, misanthropy, and dark comedy,” can be found with many quotes such as this:
My conclusion was that if the Germans were to come and pillage, massacre, and burn everything in sight, the hotel, the fritters, Lola [note: this is his girlfriend], the Tuileries, the cabinet ministers, their little boyfriends, the Coupole, the Louvre, the department stores, if they were to swoop down on the city and unleash the wrath of God and the fires of hell on this putrid carnival, to which nothing in the way of sordidness could possibly be added, I would have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You don’t lose much when the landlord’s house burns down. Another landlord will always turn up, unless it’s the same one, German or French, English or Chinese, to collect the rent … In marks or francs? What difference does it make, seeing you’ve got to pay …
Proof that degeneracy can be relative, and that if someone’s already beaten you to the bottom, you can come out with your reputation intact.
******Parenthood can make you more likely to kill someone than ever before. This happens when a parent thinks his kids are in danger. But parenthood can also make you take killing more seriously. Before parenthood you might have just been killing another person — a so-what affair when you don't see them in connection with anybody else. But after having children you’ll be killing somebody's son, or father. As they say, everybody is somebody to somebody. You just don’t feel it until parenthood.
The fortunate thing is, the likelihood you’ll have to kill somebody to protect your children is small; probably a once-in-a-lifetime event, or at worst case a war. But seeing strangers as somebody’s kid, or somebody's dad, will affect the way you go about your whole life. A kid is almost incapable of seeing things this way. An old man has a hard time seeing anything else.
Is there another instance, other than having children, where a dirty, jaded man can feel clean again? I would argue yes, and a real religious conversion — a rethinking of yourself and God and the world and putting on a new persona — can have an equally serious effect. And the longer you put on Christ the more whole you feel again. You're not shocked at the world, maybe, but you're offended — and the offense is life, because it means you hold something dear again.
one of your best essays yet...
I think the Celine passage doesn't sound degenerate, only miserable and hateful.