It’s the end of summer as I write this, and it feels like it. The baseball season’s winding down, and though last year’s heroes may have escaped the cellar, and this year’s version of Cinderella has kept things interesting, it’s pretty clear nobody’s going to win anything. Vacations are over, school has begun, and everyone I know seems to be getting sick again–with late-summer colds, or fall colds, or the flu, or their jobs, husbands, wives, kids, lovers, or their lack of them. We keep reminding each other that we’ll be better again tomorrow, next week, as soon as the rain stops, or starts, the temperature gets a little warmer, or cooler. Then things are better for a few days, and we think we’re through with it. And then we’re not.
Oh, come on, I hear some of my serious literary friends (not to mention my wife) say, you can’t be serious. So juvenile, they all agree, this paean to sensuality, with its accumulation of debauchery–sex, drugs, jazz, the promise of more, always more, down the endless road. Its spirit is the very essence of adolescence, the curiosity and hunger for experience that drives its explorations.
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Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s heroes, were constantly running away from all ideas of family, from anything we’d call responsibility. At one point, just before they’re about to leave for another night of “kicks,” one of the women they’ve collected berates Moriarty for his irresponsibility, his selfishness, his complete inconsideration of all but himself. And her point is well-taken. Moriarty’s self-involvement seems obvious and characteristically adolescent. It’s probably not too much to say that “family” is the glue that holds our whole civilization together, and that family’s survival depends upon our growing beyond the pursuit of sensual pleasures, the pursuit that seems Dean’s raison d’etre, as he leaves wives, girlfriends, and illegitimate children in his wake.
But the attitudes that will alienate, if not offend, some don’t obscure On the Road’s real energy and attraction, and its real point. For much as the book’s Dionysian celebration makes it attractive to men, and especially to men who might be chafing at the mortal pressures of “older,” it is the connection with deeper truths, the mythological resonances the book evokes, that make it a candidate for larger significance.
Those years are long gone, we know, but much as we might be tempted to shelve On the Road as historical artifact, it keeps breathing. A whole new generation is keeping the book in print–an “anniversary edition” came out in 1987, colleges and universities are offering courses in Beat-generation literature, and the revival, if that’s what it is, of interest in Kerouac and his compatriots isn’t just historical curiosity. Young people have never been noted for that, most of them anyway. The fact is, the forces that wanted to ignore or suppress the book’s radical, oppositional view in 1957 (helping, not incidentally, to make it a best-seller then) still exist and have resurfaced in new versions and with renewed power.
