On The Road Intro

On The Road…

From “INTRODUCTION”

Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, September 4, 1957, Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, a young writer he was living with, left her apartment on the Upper West Side in New York City to wait at a newsstand at Sixty-sixth Street and Broadway for the next day’s New York Times to come off the delivery truck. Kerouac had been alerted by his publisher that his novel On the Road would be reviewed in that issue, and so they bought the first copy of the Times they could pull from the stack. Standing under a street lamp, they turned the pages until they found the column ‘Books of the Times. The reviewer was Gilbert Millstein, and he had written:

On the Road is the second novel by Jack Kerouac, and its publication is a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in any age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion… [The novel is] the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’ and whose principal avatar he is. 

NYT

Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation.

Kerouac and Johnson took their copy of the newspaper to the dim light of a booth in a neighborhood bar and read the review over and over. Jack kept shaking his head, she remembered later in her memoir

Minor Characters, ‘as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was.’ Finally they returned to her apartment to go to sleep.

As Joyce recalled, Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life.

The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.’ What the reporters wanted from Kerouac the next day, and demanded of him for the rest of his life, were explanations of ‘Beat,’ not interviews about his writing. He had published a book that the Village Voice reviewer called ‘a rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these times.’ Two weeks before, Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems had been the subject of a widely publicized obscenity trial in San Francisco that had not yet been decided; then in October, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Ginsberg’s poetry had

“redeeming social importance.’ Ginsberg had dedicated Howl to his friends Carl Solomon, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning his poem with the line, often quoted by the press,

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. The Beat Generation was news, and Kerouac had been officially dubbed its chief incarnation in human form.

— In On the Road Kerouac had supposedly defined a new generation, and he was besieged with questions about the life-style he had described in his novel. The reporters didn’t care who he was, or how long he’d been working on his book, or what he was trying to do as a writer.

At first Kerouac’s standard response to their questions – delivered, as Joyce Johnson remembered, with ‘weirdlyk courteous patience – was to define the term ‘Beat,’ which he’d first heard more than a decade before, used by a Times Square hustler named Herbert Huncke to describe a state of exalted exhaustion, but which was also linked in Jack’s mind to a Catholic beatific vision, the direct knowledge of God enjoyed by the blessed in heaven. This line of thought was obscure to most interviewers, who wanted a glib quote rather than a religious derivation of a hip slang term.

Kerouac’s explanation that he’d been on the road for seven years but had needed only three weeks to write his novel didn’t help the situation, either. When Kerouac was featured on the Steve Allen show as a best-selling author, Allen quipped that he would have preferred to spend three weeks on the road and seven years writing the book, instead of the way Jack had done it. Kerouac’s boast that he’d created the original On the Road manuscript nonstop in a three-week burst of writing prompted author Truman Capote to sneer, ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing.’ Kerouac finally complained, Wasn’t there a time when American writers were let alone by personality mongers and publicity monsters?’ The media response was so unrelenting that another generation would grow up before Kerouac was accepted as a serious writer with a unique prose style as well as a compelling vision of life. On the Road became an American classic long before he did.

Kerouac was thirty-five years old when On the Road was published, and later it would seem he had spent the first part of his career trying to write the book and get it published, and the rest of his life trying to live it down. One problem was that he was supposedly the spokesman for a new generation. The other problem was that his portrait of ‘Dean Moriarty’ in the novel was so exhilarating that reporters expected him to live up to its image, despite his insistence that he was the character ‘Sal Paradise,’ who had ‘shambled after’ Dean in their cross-country trips.

Interviewers weren’t interested in ‘Sal Paradise’ or in Kerouac’s life as a writer between his trips on the road. They put down their pencils when he told them he came from a French-Canadian family; they turned a deaf ear when he said that he loved America because it had opened its doors to his immigrant parents; they thought he was kidding when he tried to explain that he wasn’t ‘beat’ but a strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic, and that he wouldn’t have been able to write as much as he did if he didn’t live ‘a kind of monastic life’ at home with his mother most of the time. None of this sounded as exciting as Moriarty’s exuberant personality or the emergence of a Beat Generation. Yet what the publication of On the Road signified was much more enduring than newspaper headlines. Years after Kerouac had struggled to find a personal voice, he had finally been heard.

Introduction On The Road vii-ix