On the Road to Nowhere – Frank McNally on being too old to read Jack Kerouac

Speaking of Brittany, as we were the other day (June 1st), reminds me that this year is the centenary of the birth of Jack Kerouac, a man with deep roots in those parts. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in March 1922, he was descended from French-Canadians who were in turn descended from French Celts.

In the same corner of Brittany that houses the hermitage of St Ronan (subject of Wednesday’s diary), there is even a hamlet called Kerouac, to which the writer’s distant forebears must be traceable. Mind you, he prided himself on having even more distant forebears in Ireland, of which more later.

Back in January, with the anniversary impending, I decided that this year I would finally get around to reading On the Road, one of those supposed literary classics that had hitherto escaped me.

When I still hadn’t made it past page 1 by early April, I even brought it with me on a trip to Boston, thinking that for a more profound encounter with the memoir, I would read some of it in his native state; perhaps in Lowell itself, to which a detour was vaguely planned.

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The detour plan subsequently withered in the face of the frowns that invaded the brows of several Bostonians I mentioned it to, who doubted whether, from the many potential side-trips available, Kerouac’s birthplace – in a tough industrial town well off the tourist trail – was worth it.

But in any case, I had overestimated the time that would be available during an International Flann O’Brien Conference, as I also underestimated the hangover that would follow it. Lowell remained unexplored, as did my copy of On The Road, which stayed in the suitcase throughout.

Then, somewhere since, I read the notorious put-down by Truman Capote, who once said of Kerouac’s jazz-style compositions, committed to paper in a frenzy of spontaneity and left unrevised: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” And I also saw Capote’s even more damning verdict: “The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is re-read him at 38.”

Ouch. Having not Kerouac a first time before that age, I may be a bit late starting now. But perhaps that explains why, despite several attempts, I have yet to reach page 2 of On the Road.

There are books you should definitely not revisit in middle age, I know from experience. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is one.

When I first read that, at about 23, I was swept away by the romance of the hero’s adventures blowing up fascist-held bridges in civil war Spain while having earth-moving sex with a beautiful republican called Maria. But when I re-read it a few years ago, either I or the novel had aged badly.

How deprived I am for not having experienced On the Road at the right time may be debatable, however. I’m indebted to one long-time fan, David Barnett, who writing in the Guardian for the centenary, included this public health warning:

“Kerouac’s works often make it onto the list of red-flag books that, if you see on the shelf of a man you are dating, you should run a mile. The consensus seems to be that Kerouac is a thing for callow youths, to be grown out of, to be reassessed in maturity and found wanting.”

On the other hand, having first devoured On the Road at 21 and made a pilgrimage to Lowell at 25, both in the early 1990s, Barnett was still a believer. So who knows? Maybe I’ll succumb to Kerouac’s charms yet.

In the meantime, on the matter of his Hiberno-Breton origins, he once claimed the surname was “related to the old Irish name, Kerwick”, which he said was a corruption of a Cornish name meaning “the language of water”.

And speaking of water, in his last novel, Vanity of Duluoz – written before he drank himself to death aged 47– he gave his autobiographical protagonist a near-mystical vision of Ireland as seen from a merchant marine ship en route to Liverpool during the Second world war:

“n the left you could see cliffs of Scotland, on the right flat green meadows of Ireland itself with thatched huts and cows. Imagine having a thatched hut right by the sea! A farm by the sea! I stood there crying, my eyes were pouring tears, I said to myself ‘Ireland? Can it be? James Joyce’s country?’ But also way back I remembered what my father and my uncles had always told me, that we were descendants of Cornish Celts who had come to Cornwall from Ireland in the olden days long before Jesus and the calendar they start Him from. Keroauc’h being, they said, an ancient Gaelic name. The cry was always ‘Cornwall, Cornwall, from Ireland, and then Brittany’.”