In September 1968, just a year before he died, Jack Kerouac appeared on Firing Line, a talk show hosted by William F. Buckley jnr. Backstage he ran into Truman Capote, who in 1957 had famously dismissed the publication of On the Road with the sneer "That's not writing; it's typing." "Hello, you queer bastard," Kerouac began, before adding "You've been saying bad things about me, but I have nothing against you."
However, he did have something against Allen Ginsberg, who insisted on accompanying him to the studio. When Ginsberg, Kerouac and William Burroughs had first met on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the early 1940s, they'd evolved the Beat philosophy that was to make them famous and, mindful of that, the poet now pleaded with his old friend not to appear on this right-wing, hippie-hating programme. Kerouac, however, ignored him, seeing the show as a chance to publicly dissociate himself from Ginsberg's increasingly strident advocacy of social anarchy. After it was over, Ginsberg hugged him and whispered "Goodbye, drunken ghost."
And it was largely from drink that Kerouac died, at the age of 47, the following September - though the immediate cause was haemmorhaging from a beating he took in a Florida bar after he'd come to the defence of a drunken and disabled air force veteran. Yet if Ginsberg saw him as betraying in middle age his youthful Beat heritage, he had obviously misread his friend from the start, because Kerouac, a Catholic boy who retreated to the bosom of his mother whenever he could, had never really espoused the social and artistic non-conformism so fervently practised throughout their lives by both Ginsberg and Burroughs.
Indeed, On the Road is essentially a boy's book, full of the wishful and wistful heroworship that's the province of yearning boys and that's all-too-liable to be abandoned when manhood, with its attendant disillusionments, sets in.
It's a book about a dream, just as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book about a dream, yet though both of them involve journeys across America, Twain knew the difference between dream and reality and so his book is also a journey into America, whereas Kerouac's remains the record of an extended fantasy holiday from real life in the company of an idealised mentor (has there ever been a more romanticised character in fiction than the re-imagining of Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty?).
Yet it's a fantasy that's proved very potent both in American life and in much of the American literature, movies and music - especially the movies and music - that came after On the Road. Without it, would we have had such cinematic hymns to arrested male development as Easy Rider, True Romance, Kalifornia or Natural Born Killers, or such musical reveries as Highway 61 Revisited, Take It Easy and Born to Run? Grow wheels rather than grow up. Oh, and be a man - women, as saints or whores, are merely there to provide pleasure or solace.
KEROUAC had the right look, too, of course. The camera loved him, as it did James Dean and Marilyn Monroe - indeed, when we think of Dean and Monroe, the images that come immediately to mind are not derived from their movies, but rather from those irresistibly evocative black-and-white photo-shoots of the 1950s. And so it was with Kerouac, who was almost impossibly good-looking, unlike the weaselly Burroughs or the putty-featured Ginsberg. No wonder he got the lion's share of the media attention.
His achievement, such as it was, proved easier to assimilate, too. Ginsberg's general accessibility was limited by the fact that his chosen medium was verse, while Burroughs was altogether too dangerous a talent and too frightening a person for anyone but true believers to embrace.
And it's Kerouac who provides most of the interest in the curious anthology under review. It's curious because there seems no compelling reason for its existence - the works of the three men are widely available, there have been numerous studies of them individually and of their circle, and there are good Beat anthologies, too. So why the 72 essays and other pieces - many of them reprinted from Rolling Stone - that comprise this new book?
A few of the essays are genuinely interesting - notably Joyce Johnson on "Beat Queens: Women in Flux," Douglas Brinkley on "The American Journey of Jack Kerouac" and Anthony DeCurtis on "Spontaneity of Time: Why the Beats Have Lasted" - but most of the book is too much, not so much about too little, as about too little that's new.
I regret, too, that space wasn't found for the lyrics of Tom Waits's Jack and Neal, a song that conveys more of the spirit of a time now irretrievably past than any of the contributions here. And, weirdly, there's no mention at all of Easy Rider, that crudely self-indulgent but fascinating film which updated On the Road to 1969 with Captain America's final realisation that "we blew it".
Jack, who had long known this, himself finally blew it just as the movie came out. Never such innocence again.
John Boland is a poet and critic