Although it would be more in keeping with the subject to be pounding this column out on my old Underwood at breakneck speed in the wee small hours, big pile of benzedrine at my side, and bop records raging in my ears I, instead, find myself here at a computer keyboard on a bright Sunday morning, listening to Harmonia’s first album on CD, church bells sounding from the adjacent neighborhood. I’m a couple days past this magazine’s deadline and I’m struggling for the right words. I suppose this is as apt an illustration as possible of the gulf between the myth and the reality of Jack Kerouac’s work as I’m likely, unwitting though it may be, to present to you the reader.

 The popular image of Kerouac is of the wild bohemian hipster, unschooled and undisciplined, writing away for hours on end heedless of all things literary; an enfant terrible out to undermine American values and lure American youth into the dark netherworld of hard drugs, loose sex, and gang violence. It was widely believed that Kerouac’s books were basically How-To manuals of juvenile delinquency.  But anyone who has ever really read the man’s work knows better.

 Like most I first read Kerouac as a student. I had just recently had the rug pulled out from under me by my first encounter with the work of Richard Brautigan. That author opened wide a door I had hitherto only been vaguely aware even existed. Now I knew without a doubt there was a whole stream of literature that ran counter to what my schooling rather conservatively endorsed as the exemplars of truly great writing. Typically that meant 19th century, and often earlier, works of high moral purpose. Side note to that—looking at these books 15 years later (books by Hawthorne, Melville, et al.), I realize the presumed morality was actually grafted on by the Catholic school I attended because, honestly, there’s some truly freaky shit happening in those books; material weirder, darker, and much more suspect than anything committed to paper by Kerouac.

 I read much of On the Road sitting on the steps outside the principal’s office during my free periods. I remember experiencing a perverse joy at sitting there deeply immersed in an outlaw book while the authorities of my school worked behind closed doors at such oppressive enterprises as censoring the school literary magazine and determining whether a necktie made entirely out of wood was appropriate to the dress code. One day while walking to class with a copy of Naked Lunch under my arm, I was stopped by a teacher and admonished to hide the book in my bag lest I wanted to find myself in detention. These were profound lessons in the power of literature to unnerve authority.

 Most readers of Kerouac hit the big two, On the Road and The Dharma Bums, and pretty much stop there. These are easily Kerouac’s most accessible, reader-friendly novels. Tales of friends traveling the country reveling in the vast, and fast vanishing, American landscape and the Whitmanic poetic idiom with which they labored to capture it. As far as the sinister notion that Kerouac endorsed some kind of youth revolt, well, the pages of these books are practically stained with apple pie. As Kerouac wrote in the newly published scroll version of On the Road, “I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things.” What a radical! Won’t someone please think of the children and keep this book off of library shelves?

 Kerouac was a pretty conservative guy, albeit with left-leaning ideas regarding social democracy. All in all he was fairly apolitical, mostly despairing that the rapid changes in American culture, changes that he is often pointed to as having been partly responsible for, certainly in regard to youth culture as separate and hostile to the family, were replacing the America he cherished and, in his opinion, definitely not for the better.

 Where Kerouac was a radical, however, was in his prose. Books such as Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax quite knowingly took the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Sigmund Freud as literary antecedents and pushed even deeper into the consciousness of the author. Using the painterly technique of sketching, and the improvisatory nature of the jazz he loved, Kerouac plumbed vertically, rather than the standard horizontal style of writing, into consciousness, creating a sort of three dimensional model out of prose from the complex inner workings of the human mind. In truth this is the work, much more so than On the Road, for which Kerouac should be celebrated.

  To illustrate, here is a short excerpt from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”: 

 

 Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
 Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. (Complete Stories pp. 163-164)

 

Hemingway moves horizontally across Nick’s consciousness, skimming the vague surface of Nick as a character. The natural world that Nick observes is hard, definite. Hemingway concerns himself with the quantifiable.

 

Whereas from Kerouac’s Visions of Cody:

 

(I)t was in any case the great serious American pool hall night and Cody arrived on the scene bearing his original and sepulchral mind with him to make the pool hall the headquarters of the vast excitement of the early Denver days of his life becoming after awhile, a permanent musing figure before the green velvet of table number one where the intricate and almost metaphysical click and play of billiard balls became the background for his thoughts; till later the sight of a beautifully reverse-Englished cueball leaping back in the air, after a cannonading shot at another ball belted straight in, bam, when it takes three soft bounces and settles back on the green, became more than just the background for daylong daydreams, plans and schemes but the unutterable realization of the great interior joyful knowledge of the world that he was beginning to discover in his soul. (pp. 49)

 

Kerouac also deals in the tangible reality, instead of a stream full of fish. Kerouac delights in the pool hall, and yet he does more than simply acknowledge Cody’s surroundings. Kerouac uses the sights and sounds as a point of entrance for his vertical maneuver into his character, diving down into Cody’s interior life, the music of the language creating the architecture of Cody’s mind. This is the advancement for which Kerouac should be celebrated, not for giving rise to beatnik culture.

 

Another Sunday several years ago while visiting a friend in Boston, I made the journey to Lowell, Kerouac’s hometown, and visited the man’s grave. The town was quiet, closed down and snoring in the late morning. The occasional shop window displayed a Kerouac t-shirt or coffee mug. Glaringly missing from the commercial bric-a-brac were Kerouac’s books. It was sad that even here, the town that was the solid center of all of Kerouac’s work, it was the image rather than the work that got its due.

 

It set my mind at ease when I stumbled across Kerouac Park wherein you’ll find the finest tribute to his accomplishments. Eight giant granite slabs are arranged around this pleasant little square. Upon each slab are inscribed excerpts from Kerouac’s novels as well as quotes from Catholic and Buddhist doctrine. A much finer tribute than all of the t-shirts in the world.

Kristofer Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs. A book of his poems entitled “King Everything” was published in 2007 by Six Gallery Press and is available in local shops as well as at Amazon.com.