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Happy Birthday, On the Road

Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac published what it was to become an icon of American literature and a classic of the world: On the Road.
Perhaps its fame grew larger as it became to be considered the book par excellence of the beatnik movement, associating its name with the collective enterprise of a small but loud group of intellectuals who worked hard in re-defining the American reality of their generation.
As other movements had done before, the beatniks utilized literature in all its forms to reinvent the way you can tell a story; style and style innovations were the weapons of choice, the life of American youth and their search for “kicks”, the primal reason to do so.
Perhaps their predecessors, members of the ever so famous Lost Generation, who established themselves in Paris amid world turmoil, and dare to infringe the indisputable rigors of the literary methodology of the day, were a model to follow. But only when it came to break apart reality into hurting little pieces. The rest was all new.
Members of the beat group did not have a moral or amoral code to follow; they simply lived. Experiencing life as it came was the motto, with all that it entitled. Living fast, moving constantly, and trying everything. Social stances, political views, and spiritual needs were just another ingredient of life, and as such were taken and dealt with. This is not to say that they weren’t looking for something bigger than themselves, on the contrary. The search was so intense that in many occasions took them to places and crossroads they never expected. Because expectation requires planning, and living, when it becomes the only occupation you can possibly dedicate yourself to fulfill, does not leave you time for planning. And so the beatniks went about experiencing. Experiencing with drugs, with relationships, with the spiritual world, with the use of words.
On the Road and many, if not all of Kerouac’s works, is based on autobiographical information. His life and that of his friends is recounted in a story that is perfectly composed in its spontaneity. In fact Kerouac himself called his writing an exercise on spontaneous prose, a close relative of the stream of consciousness established earlier by members of the Lost Generation and the Bloomsbury group in England.
But there was art to it. In On the Road Kerouac has given us some of the most brilliantly descriptive passages of English literature. Kerouac was able to translate into the written word the excesses of feeling fast and without stopping. Gilbert Millstein in his review of On the Road written the same year of its publication, asserts to define such “sensory impressions” as an ongoing search for affirmation “still unfocused, still to be defined, unsystematic.”
It is precisely that candid sensibility toward the world around him that allowed Kerouac to create a most honest, uncompromising, genuine work of art that still inspires.
Gossip says, and it always says a lot, that Truman Capote, after reading Kerouac, commented as he liked to comment (as a decree or a dogma), that Kerouac work “…is not writing, it’s typing.” But we love Capote too, and the two of them were, maybe, a side of a coin in the American society that gave them material to write.
On the Road is the book that made Kerouac a public figure, much to his despair, and the beatnik movement a force within the intellectual circles of the country. For On the Road is an especially regional work; it is America in its crudest form. But it is also a universal tale: the tale of a generation searching for their niche amid the conflicts brought upon by war, and politics, and cultural values that need to be reviewed. It is after all, what every other great book is about: humankind and its struggles.
Kerouac died young, after years of battling alcoholism and the pursuit of spiritual life, two of the hardest battles a man can face.
His fellow beatniks went about their paths; some dying too, some growing on their genius, as Allen Ginsberg did, some retiring to a much more anonymous search.
Kerouac died when I was four years old. I met his book at an early age, prompted by my father to read them. I wish I had met him. Instead I met Allen Ginsberg. And that is not bad at all, the topic, perhaps, for another article.
On the year of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, I salute you Jack Kerouac. Cheers.