By Myles Ludwig
Too old to be lost, too young to be found, we were caught between the bohemians and the Beats when Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published in 1957. With Walter Salles’ movie version of the novel now opening in Palm Beach County, it seems appropriate to recall the book and how important it was to my generation.
On its face, the novel is a rambling, long-winded tale of a kind of multi-year Spring Break road trip fueled by the high-spirited Brownian motion of bebop, which had liberated jazz, marijuana, which had liberated a little slice of the subconscious, and as much sex as possible.
But it was so much more than a novel, a hardbound package of pages and type. It was our freak flag.
The story traversed an early post-war America from one coast to the other, leaving a long tail that carried along the riffs of Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Dizzy, Ornette, and Yusef Lateef (now 92 and still wailing). It sent my generation howling into the long night of the late 1950s, propelling us into in the psychedelic ’60s and coming to an abrupt halt at the corner of discotheque and decadence and the 1969 death of the Beat Generation daddy in St. Petersburg.
Kerouac was the Herodotus of Cold War America, an America flailing in the chaotic wake of World War II, but trying to chill out. Literature had an important place in the culture and writers, serious writers, had been stomping along the path blazed by the chroniclers of the Lost Generation ― Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos. Then came the war stories of Mailer and Jones and Heller and then, the new, city-rooted suburbanists like Salinger, Cheever, O’Hara and later Updike, Malamud, Bellow and Roth.
These names have largely been Kindleized and e-blurred in the collective cultural memory of America, but On The Road ― sputtered out in a 1951 three-week burst of what Kerouac called “spontaneous writing” and typed on a 120-ft. roll of taped- together tracing paper ― had grabbed the American literary world by the throat and gave it as good a shaking as any poor Abu Ghraib prisoner ever got.
Kerouac acknowledged his debt to the writers of the Lost Generation, but On the Road owed a lot to Joyce. It was a controversial book. It symbolized what came to be called the Generation Gap. Truman Capote, arch prince of the mannered elite, dismissed it, calling it not writing, but typing. On the other hand, The New York Times called it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” Time magazine called it a “barbaric yawp of a book … a kind of literary James Dean.”
Kerouac understated its impact, saying, “Dean (the nom de novel of the real culture hustler Neal Cassady) and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”
The rascally, unruly prose of the late Hunter Thompson and the post-modern literature of today ― Houellebecq, Wallace, Franzen, et al. ― these are the wayward children of Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Gysin, Ferlinghetti and, of course, Allen Ginsberg: distracted, afflicted with logorrhea, and loving irony for irony’s sake.
Movies are the literature of today, so it’s appropriate that Kerouac’s book was filmed in a faux-verité style that approximated his herky-jerky prose. But for me, the movie, when I saw it on a very cold night in December in New York, put a discomforting aesthetic and intellectual distance between me and an important part of my romanticized past. I wondered what it meant and why it was so important. I thought about it.
For my generation, On the Road dropped out of the sky and into our laps at just the right moment in our adolescence. We were doing our job, the job of every new generation, rebelling against the zeitgeist of our parents ― even if we couldn’t precisely articulate it. In the motorcycle movie classic, The Wild One, Marlon Brando’s leader-of-the-pack character, asked what he was rebelling against, answered: “What’ve you got?”
This was our parent’s America: narcissistic, naïve and segregated, anti-Semitic, ideologically bigoted and frightened by Marxism, scourged by Joe McCarthy, battered by TV sitcoms that enshrined the platitudes of the past. This America was cosseted in tickly-tacky suburbs gloating over our peacetime prosperity while feminism and civil rights simmered inside the social skin.
The CIA self-righteously meddled in Central and Latin America and the Middle East, and a bumbling Eisenhower stumbled into the morass of Indochina to bail out the French, a move that sank us in the Vietnam swamp (though his farewell warning against the military-industrial complex was prescient; cf. Iraq). This was the America of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (the unvarnished Mad Men), Peyton Place, A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Lonely Crowd. Of homophobia and the dubious virtues of conformity. JFK and the murder of the New Frontier were yet to come.
Man, we hated this America and we loved it. We were teenagers. We were proud of our rebellion. We rejected conformity. We were daring in our own small way. I went to the Newport Jazz Festival with my friend Richard who could play Three Blind Mice on the baritone sax, which he took up in hommage to Gerry Mulligan. We went with a few guys from our neighborhood, slept on the beach, drank Thunderbird and booed Chuck Berry when he drove by in a Cadillac with a Continental kit on the back. We were snobs in our rebellion. We thought the Kingston Trio was avant garde and watched Playboy After Dark on TV.
If you were a Kerouac guy (or Team Jack in today’s teenage parlance, which pedestals Kristen Stewart, who trips cutely but vapidly through the movie’s mise-en-scène), you were cool. It was the line in the sand, the clear division between cool and square. I remember cigarette breaks with my friend John behind the classrooms at Cheshire Academy, quoting Kerouac with admiration.
John and I used to go to Greenwich Village on some weekends. I wore sneakers which his mother disapproved of when his parents took us to a swank club to see Jonah Jones. We drank Calvados to taste and toast Erich Maria Remarque and hung out at John Mitchell’s Gaslight where Hugh Romney spouted anti-establishment free verse before he became Wavy Gravy, the leading cultural clown (yes, the ice cream was named in his honor), part of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters and caregiver-in-chief at Woodstock. Kerouac’s paragon of unfettered freedom from self, the legendary borderline psychotic Neal Cassady, drove the Panksters bus.
The folk music scene was just coming into focus and the West Village was dotted with anti-Starbucks coffeehouses where people dressed in the black drag and berets they attributed to the fashion of the French existentialists. Bob Dylan, who said of the book, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,” couldn’t get on stage at my friend David’s Café Wha, but played his first professional gig at Gerde’s Folk City where he’d meet Joan Baez and debut Blowin’ in the Wind, the song that made his rep.
I remember a drunken Kris Kristofferson, dressed in Jim Morrison black leathers, shouting into the night at the Black Cat ―a version of the himself he later played in Streisand’s remake of A Star Is Born. The last time I saw Allen Ginsberg, he was a rotund smiling Buddha squeezing harmonies out of a harmonium in an East Village church and omming everyone with good wishes. Mazel tov.
Few of us from that time, those culture wars, are still alive, so far. Richard, John, David, we’re still here, though most of our heroic symbols are gone. Some others were folded into Andy Warhol’s deck of jokers, many of whom never made it through the last hand. Paul Krassner, who introduced to us to social satire in The Realist, went on to edit Hustler, a magazine that is a satire of itself.
As I was bundling up against the New York cold in the lobby of the theater that night, I overheard a college-age girl ask a gray-haired guy, her father, how he liked the movie. He said, “I didn’t get it. I never read the book.” Unasked, but driven by some inner need, I took it upon myself to deliver a brief lecture on the book and the Beat Generation to him. He, his daughter and his wife were appreciative. I was surprised by my own ability to articulate something so evanescent. Saying it made me feel young again. The opposite of what I expected.
But it taught me that our present job is to make sense of our past.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.