Fifty years after the publication of On the Road, James Liddyassesses Jack Kerouac's literary reconfiguration of the American landscape and his lyrical links between Ireland and the US
The anniversaries are piling up quickly for the Beat writers of the 1950s and 1960s whose work created vital new distinctions in aesthetics and culture. The middle part of the 1950s was the nexus for the best and most dynamic publishing of the writers who came out of the blue in post-second World War America. They challenged the conformity heralded by the shift to the suburbs and the Cold War right-wing surge personified by the rise of senator Joseph McCarthy.
In particular, the novelist Jack Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg, comrades in arms, came on the world stage to reacquaint readers with the old holiness of the imagination signalled here by free expression and spontaneity. The impact of their first major work filled a vacuum caused by a change in cultural norms that was the result of the second World War. The emergence of Kerouac and Ginsberg as potential world magicians triggered an urge for experiment and defiance that marked two decades.
Ginsberg's reading of Howlat the famous Gallery 6 in San Francisco is commonly accepted as inaugurating the Beat movement on October 7th, 1955. It was shortly afterwards brought out by Ferlinghetti's City Lights imprint.
Kerouac's On the Roadwas published by Viking 50 years ago today, with a blurb by its editor Malcolm Cowley invoking Hemingway and the Lost Generation. The Lost Generation always had an autumnal feeling; the Beats feel like spring excess.
More than the 1920s writers or other Beats, Kerouac had "writing soul". His advice "burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars" described his characters capering on the American highways.
Kerouac had little idea his words would be epochal, that he would reconfigure the American landscape in literature. He captured the warmth of people who lived and worked that landscape in molten, flamboyant language in a manner that had not been done before. Gilbert Millstein's strongly favourable review in the New York Timeswas published on the same day the book appeared. Within a month, On the Road was on the bestseller list. It is not surprising that all his books are in print. Viking will publish an anniversary edition of On the Roadthis year, and will also be publishing in book form the original scroll version of the work. The Library of America will include it in a collection of Kerouac's "road novels". The book captured the world; its rhythms were universal in their reach.
Marlon Brando wanted to make a film about Neal Cassady, the central figure of the novel; Warner Brothers made an offer for it. The book roared through all sections of society, despite some negative reviews, was praised by many in the art communities and taken up by Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, David Amram, David Bowie and Jim Morrison.
Kerouac has been a constant reference in music by singers such as Tom Waits and Willie Nelson and bands such as the 10,000 Maniacs, the Beastie Boys and Morphine.
The effect took some time to reach Ireland, but to take two examples, Patrick Kavanagh said in 1965 in Evanston, Illinois: "In fact I would say the only people in America that are alive are men like Jack Kerouac. On the Roadis an excellent book, one of my favourite books about America." And in his poem, To Jack Kerouac, Cathal Ó Searcaigh apostrophised the author, "I didn't see Min a'Leagha or Fana Bhuí then, but the plains of Nebraska and the grassy lands of Iowa/And when the blues came it wasn't the Bealtaine Road that beckoned but a highway stretching across America" (translation by Sara Berkeley).
In the current issue of the Nation, Jonah Raskin notes both the 50th anniversary of On the Roadand the centennial of Jack London's The Road. London's volume describes the down-and-outs of America's industrial age, a sort of romantic but realistic Orwellian narrative.
Kerouac's opus takes a path through a continent where many incomes are rising to middle-class levels and the media controls a mass market. Like London, Kerouac became disillusioned, but his reaction was a spiritual one; he expounded on the "Beatitude" root of the term "Beat" and advocated dropping out of society and its materialisms.
Mike Wallace asked Kerouac on TV: "This Beat generation is a 'seeking generation' . . . what are you looking for?" The response: "God. I want God to show his face." Kerouac viewed writing not as a profession but as an act of faith in a confession where he would be both the joyful and the melancholy penitent. Increasingly, he turned more obviously to religion, to both his original Catholicism and Buddhism. Ginsberg wrote: "As Jack grew older, in despair and lacking the means to calm his mind and let go of the suffering, he tended more and more to grasp at the Cross . . . seeing himself on the Cross and finally conceiving of himself as crucified." His identity, however, was always flexible: as Ginsberg said, "He could be a sophisticated litterateur or an old drunk alternatively."
Kerouac was proud of On the Roadbut he preferred Visions of Codyor Doctor Sax. Personally, I like the middle-to-late period of Tristessa, Visions of Gerardand Big Surwhere the form is shorter and more integrated with images and poetic language. On the Road achieved primary myth; it gave a new description of the mobile, state-savvy, going west, male-bonding, American hero who is also a romantic goof in the person of Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady). It is an inclusive book, extending the range of American autobiography in perceptive ways to west coast city inhabitants, Bohemians, working-class people and Mexicans.
Kerouac's hotly composed scenes of modern jazz in San Francisco are superb, "Holy flowers floating in the air were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America." Note those holy flowers! The book is intended as a gospel. Ihab Hassan has written on the Beat novel: "Its gospel is a gospel of wonder and love." Kerouac's penchant for self-revelation, increasingly relevant to his career, focused on religious consciousness. This return to God-language was paradoxically accompanied by a reawakening of the possibilities of Dionysian revelry.
The latter was part of the Beat canon, a gift to society described by Leslie Fiedler as "the last, mad efflorescence of the dreams of utopian sex". Spin-offs from the Kerouac legend continue. Examples include a Beat Week at Barnes & Noble in Minneapolis: Monday, a Naked Lunch special; Tuesday, Spontaneous Prose (readings from Beat authors); Wednesday, Live Performance (jazz), Thursday, Coffee House Open Poetry; Friday Brave New Workshop Performance" (dramatic riffs on Beat writers).
Beat courses are now more common on campuses. Hofstra University offered a course in 1992: An American Odyssey: Art and Culture across America, costing $3,450 (€2,530) in tuition; 29 Beat cities for six credits. The bus driver dressed like Buffalo Bill and was "something of a 1990s refugee from the 1960s world of Easy Rider".
In 2004 the first draft of On the Road, written on a scroll that rolls over 120 feet of paper smudged with editing marks, began a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries. It had been bought by Indiana Colts owner Jim Irsay for $2.43 million (€1.78 million), the largest price ever paid for a literary manuscript. When it arrived at Marquette University in Milwaukee, local poets (including this writer) welcomed it with readings in the campus stone cold chapel of Joan of Arc. Before this event, for a number of years in Milwaukee, the novel was read from start to finish in a tavern on Jack's birthday.
There exists a number of interesting connections between Kerouac and Ireland (I am indebted to the poet Michael Begnal for this research). In Vanity of Duluoz, a late novel, Kerouac recalls his glimpse of Ireland from a merchant marine ship during the second World War: "I stood there crying, my eyes pouring tears, I said to myself 'Ireland? Can it be? James Joyce's country?'. "
In a letter in 1952 to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac wrote of On the Road, "It is like Ulyssesand should be treated with the same gravity." There has been, of late, critical speculation that the Celtic oral tradition was involved in Kerouac's storytelling skills and strongly efficient memory.
Kerouac was impressed and a little influenced by Finnegans Wake. In Big Sur, one of the most probing and devastating accounts of alcoholism ever published, the protagonist listens to and attempts to decipher the sounds of the sea - Joyce's last project idea. The novel Maggie Cassidygives an account of a high-school affair with an Irish-American girl that invokes lyric images of Ireland but, typically for an American of that period, they are also sentimental: "The dark flowing enriched heart-Irish as peat, dark as Kilkenny night, sorcerous as elf, red-lipped as red-rubied morn on the Irish sea on the east coast . . . bringing tears to my eyes to be an Irishman too and lost and sunk inside her for ever . . .".
Kerouac could specially envision the heart of the US because his imagination was seized there by impulses he explored. However, one should also recall his devotion to and evocation of Mexico in On the Roadand Tristessa. His writing about that country was always poignant and beautiful. William Burroughs, the most articulate member of the Generation, says it best: "Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote."
• On the Road, The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac, the uncensored transcript of Kerouac's novel, was published in hardback this week as a Penguin Classic to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication
• James Liddy is a poet and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he has been teaching Kerouac's work for the past 40 years
