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Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)

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Jack Kerouac's novel, "On the Road" is not any where near the literary standards of say, "The Great Gatsby" or "Sister Carrie", yet it is a very interesting work. This reviewer has read and reread it over the fifty years since it was published and always found it enlightening.

To its credit, John Leland's book about this novel actually makes reading the novel more enjoyable. The virtue of Leland's critical essay is not so much that it breaks new ground, but that it ties the observations made by many critics and scholars over the years about the novel into coherent themes that underlie the action (or inaction) described in the novel. One of Leland's most interesting points is that Kerouac internalized the middle class values of the thirties and forties and was really out of touch with the post-WWII U.S. and especially the materialism and conformity that characterized the fifties. At the same time, he could not relate to the so-called "beat generation", that claimed him as its founder. (Allen Ginsberg, by contrast, was flexible enough to wade wholeheartedly into both the "beat" and latter Hippie movements.) In the end Kerouac was very much a man out of time and place most of his life. He tried to accept and reject the values that were part of him and his so called road novels on one level represent his search for what he really was.

Some of Leland's other observations are somewhat more dubious and a few are down right loopy. Also Leland notes in passing, but does not build on the sexual ambiguity that was part of Kerouac's life and certainly at odds with his middle class value system. Indeed all the models for leading characters in "On the Road" were sexually ambivalent whose behaviors ran counter to middle class standards and norms. And yet even Neil Cassady (Dean Moriarty), as social critic Paul Goodman observed, tried to conform to middle class standards by marrying and divorcing the women he was continually seducing.

Leland has provided a good think piece on what can best be described as semi-autobiographical novel whose main subjects (Kerouac/Cassady) had only a shaky hold on their real identities.

Like his previous book "Hip: The History" journalist John Leland grapples with elusive concepts. In "Hip" he tries to define that nebulous term and makes a lively engaging argument.

In "Why Kerouac Matters" he tries to define the reasons that Jack Kerouac's work held and still holds a strong place in the canon of significant 20th Century literature. He points out that similarly successful work by some of Kerouac's contemporaries are now mere curiousities and not really widely read anymore. And he ventures to do some really creative literary analysis.

Leland does not have the depth and rigor of a thorough academic study but he does not purport to be definitive and his arguments are lively, thought provoking, well researched and well reasoned. He seems to like to tackle somewhat nebulous ideas and I think he is very successful.

As an introduction to Kerouac and for the seasoned Kerouac devotee there is a great deal to be said for this slim but succint and fascinating volume.

Kudos Mr. Leland.

Leland's book (published by Kerouac's Viking) is very well grounded in fact and is quite scholarly. Leland's credentials as the NY Times neo-Beatnik/Hippie reporter gave him the edge on this and unfortunatley his conclusions -- that Kerouac really was a conservative square -- longing for conservative "family values" -- are controversial. His sub rosa inspiration he freely admits is of all things the evangelical tome "The Purpose Driven Life". Leland is quite accurate in his recounting facts and events of Kerouac's writing of "On The Road." Most of his conclusions, however, are looney tunes, but admittedly, are good debate material. The title of the book, however, is an insult to all Kerouac readers -- "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think.)" While it MATTERS very little what I think of Leland and his arrogance, his premise that nobody but him knows the "real" Kerouac is disgusting and vain and egocentric. Why choose such an ornery title? Are we all idiots, Mr. Leland? Are you the crusader to bring the holy grail to us? I think I know what "On The Road" is about. Please don't tell me or millions of others that they do not. And why was the "Original Scroll" version not mentioned in the copyright acknowlegments although you freely quoted from it and other books? Somethinng to do with Sampas, the "estate" and the coming arrival of Douglas Brinkley as the "definitive" biographer?

From the original publishers blurb: "Leland examines
the lessons that Paradise absorbs and dispenses on his novelistic journey to manhood, and how those lessons- about work and money, love and sex, art and holiness-still reverberate today. He shows how On the Road is a primer for male friendship and the cultivation of traditional family values, and contends that the stereotype of the two wild and crazy guys obscures the novel's core themes..."
>

I learned a lot from Jack - like I was always
scared to do a back-flip off a board into the
swimming pool as a kid, like Jack and
probably from him I conquered my fear the
easy way, starting waist deep in the water
and step by step, gradually working myself
up to back-diving off second board. I know
he relates that in one of his books.
But as for tips on "work and money" and "the
cultivation of traditional family values".....

work - he rightly hated it (it restricted his
creativity)

money - he enjoyed spending it, and ended up
near to being in debt, (I think he might have
bought his mum a house, which was great!).

as for the third 'virtue' - pull the other one,
you make him sound like a prospective
David Cameron supporter. Jack loved his
parents' family, envied Neal's family, but could
never sustain that 'man of the house' position
himself, happy to get under mum and Stella's
wings at the end.

And who would have him any other way?
Are you telling us that those of us who have
screwed up work-wise, money-wise and family-
wise can't have our patron saint? When we
sit crying in the pub at night thinking of our
broken relationships, lost chances, wrong
choices, work drudgery, lonelyness, are you
telling me that we can't console ourselves
with the thought that the world may hate us,
but we've got the greatest writer of all time
on our side?

Al of "Beat_Happening" website/group/thread.

Titles like "Why Kerouac Matters," usually suggest the opposite is true.

Author John Leland seems to argue as much in this fascinating dissection of the great saint's canonical, 'On the Road."

The book's subtitle is, "The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)," and as such, Leland has given the classic a read like no other and assembled incontrovertible evidence to support his surprising assertions.

His book attempts to grab by the horns a long-standing dilemma that, "Readers have always had a problem with Kerouac in that he had very traditional values, while living at odds with them."

Essentially, Leland argues that readers have gotten Kerouac wrong. That, rather than a paean to drinking, whoring, and experience-chasing embodied in Dean Moriarity's (Neal Cassady) star turn, "On the Road" is alternately a map to maturity, a yearning for family, and a search for God manifested in its lower-keyed narrator, Sal Paradise (Kerouac).

"Contrary to its rebel rep," he asserts, "'On the Road' is not about being Peter Pan; it is about becoming an adult. Its story is powerful and singularly gloomy...but good."

In the end, the hippies and Easy Riders of the '60s who adopted "On the Road' as a movement's manifesto and guide to living, were not Kerouac's favorite people.

Anybody who has seen the writer's drunken appearance on William Buckley's "Firing Line" can't help but be struck by the contempt he displayed toward his erstwhile disciples in a dressing down of hippie leader Ed Sanders with the words, "You like drawing attention to yourselves, don't you?"

Although right-wing thinkers such as Buckley used Kerouac as foil in debunking the dreams of his own ideological offspring, Leland says they did not take him seriously and saw the same "parlor act" many others did during his boozy and rapid descent.

Nonetheless, Leland's understanding of Kerouac is that of a profoundly conservative man trying to cut his way through modernity's tangle in a search for the eternal things.

Kerouac he writes, "had always been conservative -- a blue-collar son, Catholic, a veteran of the merchant marine and (briefly) the Navy."

For all its pot-smoking, drinking, petty-thievery and promiscuity, "On the Road," Leland observes, "[E]nds with Sal sober, at peace, ensconced in domestic life with a new flame named Laura, a great beauty who offers him cocoa and a home in her loft."

Quite originally, he sees the arc of Kerouc's novel as a love story that starts with his aunt and ends up with a New York girl.

For all Kerouac's sensitivity and awareness, Leland seems to suggest the author was either resistant or unaware of the seismic social shifts occurring in post-war America; an unwitting agent of change.

"Kerouac had become like his father or Neal's, a relic of a working class that did not fit into the collegiate counterculture," writes Leland.

The writer, we are reminded in "Why Kerouac Matters," was not born into the suburban privilege of those who became his unwanted acolytes. He was the product of a New England factory town and a working class guy whose brother died young and father not long before "On the Road" was written.

Leland says: "The son of a printer, he put great stock in words as a material product, dutifully recording in his journal how many he produced in any given day as if he were laying bricks or clearing acres...He clung to an antiquated standard that measured a man by how much he produced, not how much he consumed."

So why the three-tome fascination with the crazy Cassady, Kerouac's muse?

Leland suggests that Neil is good for a time in Sal's life, just as Kerouac notes in his reading of "On the Road" for The Steve Allen Show, back in the '50s: "We're still great friends, we just have to move onto later phases of our life."

That's clear for those who stick with Kerouac and move beyond "On the Road" to something like "The Dharma Bums," which takes the placid oriental scholar, poet and pacifist Garry Snyder as basis for its protagonist Japhy Ryder and proffers more settled, pure, even sweet lessons.

And Leland ensures that Cassady's history is not frozen in the frame of Kerouac's most famous effort.

He quotes Bob Weir, guitarist of the Grateful Dead, who knew Neal in the 1960s through an association with The Merry Pranksters, saying "On the Road" captured "the budding Cassady but never caught him in full bloom. He amounted to a whole lot more than Kerouac was ever around to document."

And so why does Kerouac matter when he was essentially reactionary; a religious guy whose "teachings" were taken out of context if not completely misunderstood?

Leland says that Kerouac, in Sal's clothing, "navigates distinct paths through the men's worlds of work, money and friendship; the domestic turf of love, sex and family; the artist's realm of storytelling, improvisation and rhythm; and the spiritual world of revelation and redemption. His lessons in all four areas remain relevant today -- any reader picking up the book for the first time can apply them to questions that are as new to him or her as they were to Sal."

You don't have to take Leland's word for it. He walks you through each "world," and in marvelous fashion, discoursing on America's socio-political evolution, drawing upon C. Wright Mills' "White Collar" to explain Kerouac's fall between the gaps of a national transition from factory work to office horror.

He melds this understanding with a detailed familiarity of popular culture, tabs each music to its own time, and draws a conclusion about what it all means.

For example, Leland perceives parallels in the evolution of jazz from the madness and rule-breaking of bop to the West Coast "cool" jazz pioneered by Miles Davis.

"Though cool or West Coast jazz became a swank soundtrack for collegiate swingers and bohemians the folks who read Kerouac's books -- Sal clings to the wilder sounds that came before. He sees the advent of cool like the arrival of the postwar middle class, steadily pushing out the cowboys and hoboes and bluesmen and prophets that he loves."

Leland correctly notes that "On the Road" begins with "career counseling and a lecture on the Protestant work ethic," as Sal expresses doubts about Moriarity's request that Paradise teach him to write. "[A]nd after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict."

For the benefit of aspiring scribes, Leland observes just a little further on that, "The Paradise Career Plan boils down to a few time-honored principles: Work hard, live poor, travel light. And when in doubt, let your aunt cover your rent."

That's funny. Many have noted, critically, that Neal and Jack or Sal and Dean are hardly the fearless adventurers their legacy suggests, because throughout "On the Road" Sal/Jack often hits up his aunt for money to get them out scrapes.

But we must remember that "On the Road" is a tale of youthful adventure, not middle-aged tourism and remember, too, how the world makes allowances for the young, gives them a pass.

Leland addresses a facet of Kerouac's literature that most try to read right through on their way to the next beer-soused roadhouse party: religion.

Allen Ginsberg, whom Leland considers the crafter behind the media-generated image of Kerouac, noted that, "Everybody expected him to be a rebel and an idiot and angry, and he wasn't that at all. He was a suffering Buddhist who understood a great deal and was able to live with his mother. That's not a rebel."

In circles where he has been most popular, secular literary ones, Kerouac's religious talk has been mostly viewed as a product of his inner turmoil and considered, "uncool," Leland notes.

But the author put religion at the top of his list of concerns.

"To anyone who would listen, Kerouac professed that he and his friends constituted 'the Second Religiousness that Oswald Spengler prophesied for the West,' citing as evidence their 'beatific' [beat] indifference to things that are Caesar's...a tiredness of that, and a yearning for, a regret for, the transcendent value, or 'God,' again."

Leland sees a greater affinity between evangelical Billy Graham, than say, the counterculture hippies who spurned his deeper religiousness in favor of, "his license to handcraft his own belief system, not the beliefs he chose."

As for Graham, "Like Kerouac...he stressed earthshaking individual conversion experiences rather than intellectual engagement or study. 'Billy Graham is very hip,' Kerouac told an interviewer. 'What's Graham say, 'I'm going to turn out spiritual babies'? That's Beatness. But he doesn't know it. The Beat Generation has no interest in politics, only mysticism, that's their religion. It's kids standing on the street and talking about the end of the world."

All of which, Leland asserts, lands Kerouac's legacy less with Woodstock than with Christian rock and Rick Warren, the guy who will bless President Barack Obama's inauguration.

"Why Kerouac Matters" is a delightful read, a careful and novel consideration of the writer, yet Leland might have stopped before his chapter, "Sal Paradise and the Lessons Unlearned," which makes a case as to why Kerouac doesn't matter.

The Beat author, he observes, has been studied more for "how he lived or how he wrote, not what he wrote. And most pop writing has focused on his contribution to the counterculture he rued. Any claims for the book's cultural impact and historical importance have relied little on its literary virtues."

Writers who want to adopt his style, Leland concludes, will fail to have their work taken seriously by the literary establishment while "a 21-year old applying to a writing program is as ill-advised to cite Jack Kerouac as an influence as O. Henry or H.P. Lovecraft."

Which, of course, begs the question of whether a Kerowackian would/should be interested in having their rough edges smoothed in exchange for a masters at some academic reading redoubt in the first place.

We think not, but thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It seems to me that people either love or hate Jack Kerouac. I have always considered him to be a writer's writer: brilliant, accessible and entertaining. John Leland has done a wonderful job of seperating Kerouac from the characters in 'On the Road.' Leland is brilliant in his own right; he answers so many questions in such a satisfying way. After reading "Why Kerouac Matters," I had to re-read "On the Road." Because of Leland's book, I enjoyed Kerouac's work even more this time around. "Why Kerouac Matters" is an excellent book. I recommend it for all readers--not just those who love Kerouac.

Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac blasted out of the cultural mode of WWII into wide-open uncensored music and sex. Eclectic feelings poured out of the music and virginity was shrugged off. America was about to become be-bop. Was it all a reaction to the Great Depression and then World War II?