On the Road with Jack Kerouac
This is the starting point for “On the Road”, written in 1951 but published only in 1957. It’s considered the masterpiece of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the Canadian-American poet and novelist responsible for bringing to literature the dynamics of jazz: the fluidity of the style, the improvised-like way of writing, the fast and direct connection of ideas, the spoken language brought to paper.
Well, that’s the academical analysis of his works — I had to try that for myself!
Plot Summary
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| Jack Kerouac |
As chapters go by, we get closer to the characters, specially Sal Paradise (first-person narrator) and Dean Moriarty, his best friend. Together, they give us a nice overview of the Forties in the USA. Music, cars, roads, girls, drugs, temporary bad-paid jobs, alcohol, hitchhiking, well, there is plenty of interesting themes unrolling here. Sal and Dean meet lots of unusual persons, from truck drivers to petty criminals, from queers to midgets. Their trip is all time frantic and crazy, powered by amphetamines, alcohol and other drugs...
That’s what makes this book so pleasant — the fast pace of the plot, the diversity of elements and, of course, Kerouac’s jazzy style.
Audiobook
Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
Reading this book was a marvelous experience. I loved it and recommend it a lot. It was wonderful to join the “gang” through their journey. The way Kerouac writes gives the exact sensation of something that goes way too fast, irresistibly dangerous... It was also an opportunity to revive events from the recent American experience, and how the “beat generation” influenced and was influenced by what happened during the 40’s and 50’s.
Dean Moriarty
I’ve got no doubt: Dean Moriarty is the one and only mythical hero of this book. Always wired to 220 volts, in the West he “had spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library”. Furious, careless, impulsive, unpredictable, well-humoured, often drunk, always frank. Dean lives the moment, enjoy every single experience at its maximum. He makes people feel good at his presence, but also acts as a total jerk with his ex-girlfriends, his ex-wives and his children...
In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long-distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean's second baby, the result of a few nights' rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever.
Dean is so crazy and uncommon that some of his performances look like grim prophecies....
Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
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1949 Hudson, similar to the car Dean spent all his savings to buy.... (picture from Hageman Motorcars - www.hagemanmotorcars.com) |
Anyway, Sal Paradise also shows some weirdness of manners. He has his moments too, and there wouldn’t be better place to him to behave like that...
There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar John I took out the gun and said, "Eh? Eh? What's that you say?" He bolted. I've never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone.
Money in the Forties
It’s strange to see in the book such small amounts of money as thirty-five cents for a movie ticket, or a comfortable little suite in a motel for four dollars... When Dean got what he called a nice job, it was four hundred dollars a month. We get a little lost, we don’t know whether they were total beggars or just common people trying to make a living.
Looking at consumer price indexes, goods price tables and inflation theories, I found some interesting material (mainly in Wikipedia), which compare prices and minimum wages along the last decades. In www.fintrend.com, the Inflation Calculator points a cumulative total of more than 800% of inflation from 1947 to 2011 (nominal prices nowadays are around nine times higher than they were in Sal Paradise’s time). Minimum wage (today set at $7.25 per hour), was around 75 cents per hour in the early 50’s, which means a ratio of about 10 times.
Conclusion... We need to multiply the numbers by nine or ten to get a notion of their present value. That’s not the ultimate algorithm, but it gives us an idea.
So, after considering inflation and all those econometric models, I agree that it was quite a punch in the stomach to be fined twenty-five dollars (40’s values, as in the book) after being stopped by the cops for driving the wrong way and above the speed limit...
Jazz
Jazz spreads wide along the whole plot. There is plenty of memorable passages: Dean Moriarty completely mesmerized, sweating and swearing insanely, one time during George Shearing’s concert in New York, another time at a Slim Gaillard performance in San Francisco. Both artists are legends of jazz, peculiar as all characters of the story. Shearing passed away just some months ago, by the age of 91. Gaillard was famous for his humorous performances, always mixed with improvisations conducted in his invented “vout” language, as well as for playing the piano with his hands upside-down. Besides them, other artists take part in their journey. Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, playing “The Hunt”, for example, became the sound-track of the Sal-Dean-Marylou-trio love games in New York...
Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, "Sal, God has arrived.". I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, "There ain't nothin left after that."
Inspiration sources
“On the Road” is, of course, auto-biographic. More than that, the book was written under the same insane rhythm that characterizes it. It’s said that Kerouac wrote the novel in three weeks, typing unstoppably onto a 120-foot roll of a kind of teletype paper. This roll is, indeed, a work of art, in exhibition at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Massachusetts. The “official” edition of the book (published in 1957) was edited and shortened by Kerouac and his editors, so it doesn’t correspond exactly to the original work. The main characters, anyway, represent Kerouac (Sal Paradise) and his friends (Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty, Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx, besides many others).
The beat generation
Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg were “like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.” It couldn’t exist a better way to refer to them...
The great questionings
Kerouac also finds time to be profound, although enigmatic (but surely intense), about something that will always be the mystery of existence, that weird urge to be attracted to the center of the black-hole, to the unknown. He couldn’t understand who could be that Arabian figure that pursued him across the desert. Absolute beauty typed on paper:
"Who is this?" said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn't it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind. I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we're all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then.
Why, Dean, why?
Neal Cassady (Dean) was probably the most controversial and enigmatic friend of Kerouac’s. We cannot know for sure that the story was completely faithful to their experiences, but we may enjoy the perception Kerouac had of him — a con-man, who acted like that to “get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him”.
At the end of their trip to Mexico, after developing a dysentery accompanied by fever and all that comes along with it, Sal is left behind by Dean. Well, could it be different? Dean Moriarty must go on...
When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. "Okay, old Dean, I'll say nothing."
Alcohol, Benzedrine and other stuff
The American-Mexican integration party starts with all family and friends smoking that chimney — “Instantly we were all high. The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly like the beach at Acapulco”. Sal and Dean try to talk to the Mexicans, but their languages keep them away from eachother. Only the common idiom of dope gather them together...
The party then evolves to a feast in a whorehouse, a mambo bar full of teenagers (and some underage girls too), which sounds like, well, those episodes of sexual tourism we got used to see in Latin America... This is extra-powered, of course, by the value of the American dollars. Their new Mexican friend, Victor, worries when he sees the bill (over three hundred pesos), but Sal doesn’t give a damn: “I didn't know the value of Mexican money; for all I knew I had a million pesos.” Well, is there worse temptation than having more money than you need...?
Kerouac also mentions an amazingly funny episode when Dean smoked “bad green” — uncured marijuana, according to their jargon — and got totally hallucinated, going from “technicolor visions” to paralysis and horrible nightmares...
As it’s quite usual, dope experiences can be violently comic. That reminded me “A Scanner Darkly”, from Phillip Dick, when Robert Arctor’s friends talk insanely about anything, building hilarious theories on the most banal trivialities.
"For years I've an idea to develop a dog into a super thief who'd go into these guys' rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I'd train him to take nothing but green money; I'd make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly possible way, I'd train him to take only twenties." Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked about that dog for weeks.
Well, there are not so many references to the amphetamines in the book, but how could Dean drive a 1947 Cadillac Limousine all night long above 100 mph through precarious roads, with a dirty bandage in his hand (yes, he broke his thumb after punching his ex-wife Marylou in the face...) and talking incessantly? It would have been difficult to do without some chemical help...
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The 1947 Cadillac Limousine, similar to the one Dean and Sal took at the travel bureau in Denver to go to Chicago. (source: WebShots.com) (more picture of the photographer here: http://community.webshots.com/user/jacksnell707) |
The last chapter of the story is also intriguing. Kerouac describes a handicapped Dean Moriarty. “He couldn't talk any more. He hopped and laughed, he stuttered and fluttered his hands and said, "Ah-ah-you must listen to hear." We listened, all ears. But he forgot what he wanted to say.” This is not the only moment in the book in which it happens. Would have it been consequence of drug abuse? Well, Kerouac finishes the book repeating that, while so many things happen, he still thinks of Dean Moriarty.
What we know about the biography of Neal Cassady (Dean in the novel) is that he had long and constant experiences with all sorts of drugs. Even the reason of his premature death at the age of 42, although uncertain, is probably related to an overdose of barbiturates.
Jack Kerouac’s life was also considerably short. He died in 1969, at the age of 47, in consequence of cirrhosis, the result of alcohol abuse.
The original Scroll
Now I’m keen on getting the Viking Press 2007 Edition of “On the Road: the Original Scroll”, which is the integral version of the story. The main characters are presented with their real names (not the nick names of Sal, Dean, Carlo etc. created for the “official” edition published in 1957). Besides that, this new edition brings all those parts of the book that were cut off to make the 1957 version more polite and less graphic...
— Dig that book, Sal, dig it!
Rogerio Maciel
April, 2011.
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