Odd Man Out

My first thought was oh no, not another article about Jack Kerouac. This one is in the New Yorker and is by Joyce Johnson, who has written well on many subjects, including Kerouac, her romantic partner in the late 1950s and her longtime friend. He’s been dead since 1969, and his life and work have been picked over by a million critics but…

I devoured the article anyway, looking for new minutiae about the On the Road author, a moody guy with working-class roots who was hyped as a rebel against mid-20th century conformity and used decades after his death as a sales tool for the Gap (“Kerouac wore khakis”) and other corporations. He alienated straight-arrow types and appealed to contrarians, foes of the status quo, artists and academics, avant-garde musicians, hardcore outliers, parttime bohemians —

“And aimless, no-account bums like you,” my rowdy neighbor Swamp Rabbit said.

I tried to explain my conflicted feelings. Kerouac, only 47 when he died, was a poetic visionary, a sentimental bloviator, a keen observer of social history in the making, a pathetic victim of America’s celebrity culture. I can’t think of another author I’ve read and changed my mind about so often over the years.

Swamp Rabbit snickered. “You ain’t changed your mind. You badmouth Kerouac for becoming a drunken slob, but you still think he’s cool.”

Swamp Rabbit, a slob himself, reminded me that I still own dog-eared copies of On the Road, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels and a half-dozen other Kerouac novels, and works by or about William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other writers often lumped together with Kerouac as exemplars of the Beat Generation, a term that describes young men who felt beat down and disillusioned by the pervasive materialism of post-World War II American culture.

Kerouac was the Beat who clicked with the public and became what the media now calls a countercultural icon. He was on “The Tonight Show” with Steve Allen and in glossy magazines, and his cross-country adventures with the legendary Neal Cassidy inspired “Route 66,” a TV series about two young guys on an endless road trip, looking for the American Dream or the meaning of life or something. Kerouac epitomized the spontaneity that often distinguished the Beats from more conventional writers. He didn’t rely on plots or outlines but rather on his lyrical, open-ended depictions of life as he lived it.

Swamp Rabbit was laughing again. “Your big words don’t fool me. You like them Beats because they were into sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, like you.”

I told him it was sex, drugs and bebop jazz in their case. Kerouac, a Charlie Parker fan, called his writing style “spontaneous bop prosody.” He identified with outliers as diverse as Whitman and Dostoevsky and sought spiritual enlightenment through his reading and writing. He wasn’t a dilletante or a fake.

“Unlike some people I could name,” Swamp Rabbit said.

I gave him a dirty look. He asked if I’d learned anything from Johnson’s article.

“Only that the Beats should have treated women better, and that Kerouac’s best writing still reminds me of what it feels like to be young and free.”

“Free from what?” he said.

He’s my neighbor but I couldn’t resist: “From guys like you who are dead already but don’t know it.”

Footnote: Kerouac read his poetry on a bunch of audio recordings with Steve Allen on piano. Allen was the Steven Colbert of his era, except that he didn’t get thrown off TV for being a liberal.

Another: Kerouac came close to suing the producers of “Route 66” and the Chevrolet car company for stealing “the characters and theme” of On the Road.