... with Patrick Kurp and Anthony Daniels, but I think we part ways On the Cult of Kerouac. The link to Daniels's piece isn't working, so I've only been able to read bits and pieces of what he has to say. I can't tell if he has read anything of Kerouac's other than On the Road. I happen to think - and plan on elaborating the point in print in the not too distant future - that it has been Kerouac's misfortune to be judged solely on the basis of On the Road. I think he wrote better books and, like any author, deserves to be judged on the basis of his best, not his most famous, work.
Update: Thanks to Dave Lull, I have read Daniels's piece and he does not seem to be familiar with any Kerouac other than On the Road. He also doesn't seem to consider that what he discerns in the book is precisely what Kerouac may have been trying to get across.
I'm with you on this one, Frank.
ReplyDeleteWhile it's perfectly natural to re-assess a writer's relevance during such an anniversary, it seems to have become almost fashionable to be dismissive of Kerouac. These are exactly the kinds of literary frashion games that I hate—mostly because they're inevitably negative. So maybe Kerouac didn't deserve all the praise heaped on him for the last 50 years? neither does he deserve to be heaped to the same extent with brickbats. He wasn't THAT bad a writer. Of course, part of it too has been a growing fashion I've been noticing of late to heap abuse on the Beats in general; perhaps that's part of the anti-counter-culture swing to the political right that's been going on for a decade or so now, played out in literature.
Hasving read most of Kerouac, I'd say he was capable of some real insight, one or three breathlessly good passages, the odd excellent poem or two, and so forth. A good average. I also agree with you that "On the Road," while an iconic, even talismanic, book, is not his best novel.
Maybe in 100 years Kerouac will be more objectively assessed, and I imagine his place will be somewhere in the middle of things, neither irredeemably bad nor worshipfully good, but just human.
The truth of the "cult" aspect of the book is that it HAS been an icon and talisman for a certain kind of restless, wandering freedom—a very American rootless restlessness, one might add. I've been semi-nomadic myself, and traveled extensively, so I can understand that aspect of it all.
While I enjoyed reading "On the Road," my appreciation of Kerouac - based just on that one work - would not be nearly as great as it as, after reading "The Subterraneans," "Dharma Bums," "Mexico City Blues," etc.
ReplyDeleteThe Anthony Daniels article in New Criterion, Another Side of Paradise, begins with a great yarn about a gray flannel suit, but then falters when he starts talking about Kerouac's book, specifically Dean Moriarty being a psychopath. The article then unwinds completely when he talks about the banality of Kerouac's writing, so much so, that the rest of the article, were it not for some terrific quotes from On the Road (each of which he puts down), would be absurd to finish with so many good reads of the book out there lately.
ReplyDeleteOn the psychopathology of Dean . . .
Daniels uses the term "psychopath" repeatedly to refer to Dean Moriarty. Earlier today, I was reading about those skinheads who beat homeless men to death with a baseball bat, and once cut a hand off a dead victim to display it at a party. Now, even these evil guys are probably not sociopaths--those who are so anti-social they have no relational or emotional bond with society. One would have no problem killing you, for instance--although, he may not. A sociopath will freak you out, not appall you. But, if Sal Paradise was hanging out with one, he was in mortal danger, and would have known it.
By throwing this word "psychopath" around, Anthony Daniels is refusing to look at the point, and seems to want no one else to either. What Kerouac wants us to consider comes from this--that Daniels quotes, as if he had sufficiently clouded the point --this excerpt from the voice of Sal:
Dean’s intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete as that of Old Bull Lee [that is to say William Burroughs], without the intellectualness. And his “criminality” was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long-prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for the joy rides).
Kerouac is showing how Sal is able to extract wisdom from Dean, and he is saying that it is important for us to see how to do this, by considering certain attributes. Kerouac uses the correct term, "criminality" (versus Daniel's "psychopath"). Dean's specific criminality was not one of sociopathology, according to the character and eyewitness Sal, nor was it even something that "sulked and sneered". Sal asks us, including the Anthony Daniels's who may criticize in later years, to consider this, that Dean's specific criminality "was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long-prophesied, long a-coming."
On the banality of Kerouac's writing . . .
Daniels attempts to make a point that Kerouac's writing is banal. He devises an experiment that he shares:
I mentioned the banality of the book to a young man who told me that he had thought it wonderful when he had read it a few years previously. I devised a test. He would open it and point to a passage at random, and I would read the passage out loud. He would then tell me whether he thought it was banal. Here is the passage:
"The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four Post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder."
His friend, in his randomness, selected the passage with the famous quote, "The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder." Yet Daniels suggest this is the banality of an adolescent's diary, not a quote from a literary classic.
There is an AP article circulating, about a marathon reading of On the Road in Lowell MA. Here is the Boston Herald link: Read baby, read: Lowell honors Kerouac with marathon reading of ’On the Road’. Here is an excerpt:
"When you read a book on your own, you hear your own voice," he said. "It’s instructive and moving to hear what it sounds like in someone else’s head."
Local actor Jerry Bisantz, who dressed as Keroauc in flannel and slacks for his reading, said hearing "On the Road" out loud brings out the "jazzy beat" in which Kerouac wrote it: "There’s a rhythm and a pulse to what he wrote," he said.
Bisantz puts his finger on what very well may by Daniels' problem in reading On the Road. He is not tuned into the rhythm, and is reading with his own voice. There is great rhythm in this passage, that would not be found in just any adolescent's diary:
"The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four Post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder."
Another quote from that AP article:
As he listened Wednesday to different voices begin a marathon reading of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road," Kerouac fan Frank Warner found each reader sparked a similar reaction.
"I found myself tapping my foot," Warner said. "You get the rhythm, you get the feel, you get the beat."
I can dig it.
Umm...at the risk of looking (and probably being) self-promoting, I think the best possible contribution I could make to this discussion would be in the form of a poem:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.poemeleon.org/gene-justice/
That's from the perspective of someone who very much fell in love with Kerouac, and was then strongly discouraged from maintaining the relationship when I entered the academy. I've been both deeply in love and in hate with both the man's writing and his legend, and--as is not untypical of me--I don't think either side of the debate can be dismissed entirely. For me, it's a matter of acknowledging a huge, if somewhat begrudged debt, much in the tradition of Pound addressing Whitman in his poem, "A Pact":
I make truce with you, Walt Whitman --
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root --
Let there be commerce between us.
I don't have Pound's eye for pith, so I can't claim to have accomplished the same thing, but, for what it's worth, the poem linked above is pretty much where I've come to rest.
Typo corrected in the AP story I quoted in the comment above:
ReplyDeleteAs he listened Wednesday to different voices begin a marathon reading of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road," Kerouac fan Frank Wagner found each reader sparked a similar reaction.
"I found myself tapping my foot," Wagner said. "You get the rhythm, you get the feel, you get the beat."
Note that it is Frank Wagner (not Warner). The typo correction noted here: San Francisco Chronicle: 'On the Road' Marathon Honors Kerouac
Yours,
Rus
Dharma Bums is a far superior novel.
ReplyDelete