Kerouac's Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction

Introduction

lvii Introduction Jack Kerouac is hardly a neglected writer. His novels are in print. There are now three biographies. One can find rock song odes to "Kerouac," and Hollywood will soon issue its first portrayal. But what all this interest points to is Kerouac's ambiguous status. Were Kerouac a truly popular writer, there would be no film and no songs. The readers of a best-selling writer like Arthur Hailey do not care to know the details of his personal life. Were Kerouac actually taken seriously as a writer, there would be some kind of serious discussion of Kerouac's writing instead of all this interest in the athlete-hobo-artist. As things stand now, the criticism one can find typically treats Kerouac only symptomatically by looking at his work as an example of one social trend or another. There is no denying that Kerouac was a colorful and compelling individual, but as John Clellon Holmes, novelist and friend of Kerouac, asserts, the fascination with Kerouac the figure has left Kerouac "heir" to the same "neglect" that once befell Melville as a "'writer of boys' sea storiesl'" and Whitman as the "author of '0 Captain, My lviii Kerouac's Crooked Road Captain."'l The public infatuation with Kerouac has yet to subside enough for us to reach the situation we now have with F. Scott Fitzgerald where some are free to enjoy Fitzgerald 's rather unfortunate life and others to consider the work. It may be true that the cult of Fitzgerald would have died out were he not also a good writer~ but the works would still be read had Fitzgerald led the dullest of lives and survived to ninety. This study, then, begins from the premise that Kerouac's writing is neglected even though he himself is not, and it attempts to look earefully at two key texts: On the Road, the basis of whatever reputation Kerouac currently has, and Visions oj Cody, which I take to be the ultimate basis of Kerouac's claims as a writer. Several matters complicate a study of these two works. First, On the Road is a book that almost everyone assumes they know whether they have read it or not. The controversy over it and the so-called Beat Generation in 1957 and the year or two following fixed the image of Kerouac as a kind of literary James Dean and fixed most readers' attitudes toward the book as well. Typically On the Road is seen as naive autobiography, controversial best-seller of little merit, or as "inspired" testament, a harbinger of a new confessional literature free of past constraints on form and subject matter.2 These three approaches actually share a similar sense of the novel. They begin from the story that the book was the product of only three weeks of impetuous work in the spring of 1951 and see this as proof of the book's transparency. Those who view On the Road as naive autobiography identify Kerouac with the narrator Sal Paradise, conclude that the book reports events without reflection, and reduce it to the mores of a particular bohemia. The second group deals with the book as a pop culture artifact. Oddly, the third group also treats On the Road as subliterary. By elevating the book to the status of testament for a new generation, these readers in effect claim that the book is a product of a communal consciousness and lix Introduction insist that the book advocates a way of life. All three senses of the book rule out the possibility that Kerouac might have been dealing with his material critically or in a spirit of literary exploration. These views must simply be ignored. A significant study could be done of the reasons for the distortions of On the R'Oad by its proponents and opponents, but that would deflect attention from the text itself which is a much more conventional, skillful, 'and literarily significant work than is commonly assumed. On the R'Oad complicates a fresh reading of Kerouac in another way as well. The book is widely assumed to be Kerouac's best piece of work and his most representative, but this is not the case. On the R'Oad does reflect concerns that were part of Kerouac's writing throughout his life, but it was written before Kerouac had established either the voice or approach to structure that characterizes...