Like so many of Kerouac’s readers, I started with On the Road when I was in high school. I can still remember how the crazy, incantatory language in its pages gave me a rush that I’d never encountered before. It was a barbaric yawp of a book, a wild how of passion and despair that speaks eloquently to the adolescent heart. Like Catcher in the Rye and The Chocolate War, On the Road might best be considered one of the classics of juvenile rebellion.
From there I developed an interest in Allan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and other poets in the loose constellation of “Beat” writers. Though I also enjoyed the “approved” poets in the high school curriculum–Dickinson, Frost, Wordsworth, et al–there was something thrilling about the untamed and unsanctioned way the Beats laid everything bare. It seemed they could get away with anything, and reveled in their transgressions like I wished I could.
In 1988, I wrote my first big college research paper, on American bohemianism. The Beats, of course, figured prominently. Being young and foolish, I sent a copy of it to Joy Walsh, the editor of Moody Street Irregulars, expecting praise for my sharp insights. Instead, she sent me back a letter calling my work a retread of tired ideas, “the old bohemian Sturm und Drang,” and included a copy of her essay collection, A Testament in Brown. And that made me step back and take another look at the Beats, and especially at Kerouac.
In 1989, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities Young Scholars grant to research Kerouac from a different angle. Focusing on Tristessa, Visions of Gerard, and Dr. Sax, I put Kerouac in the context of Franco-American Catholicism. This time my touchstones were the puritanical theology of the Jansenists, and the rich if sometimes kitschy world of popular Catholicism, with its saints and weeping statues and ever-present divine. “I’m a Catholic, not a Beatnik,” Kerouac wrote toward the end of his life, and I believe that’s true: the tortured soul of his Dulouz cycle hinges on Kerouac’s complex relationship with Catholicism.
More than any other 20th century American writer, Kerouac has suffered from his fame. The depth and richness of his vision has been boiled down to a few powerful if cartoonish images: driving fast on long roads, drinking whiskey in derelict bars, fulminating against the bourgeois Leave It to Beaver post-war world.
All those things are there, in spades, but there’s a lot more to Kerouac than “Pull My Daisy” and “Route 66.” Especially powerful and compelling are the little boy obsessed with his dead brother, the working class hero who stands up for the little guy, and the child of immigrants at home in neither the Franco-American ghetto nor the broader American society. This site will look at some of these other facets of Kerouac, have a little fun with the received wisdom on the Beats, and explore some of the side roads off the highway.
I hope you enjoy the ride.
