A Grown-Up Reads ‘On the Road’
As a young woman, I never read Kerouac’s “On the Road” — although it’s a book that most august male academics believe every young person should read. In various bookstores, I’d pick up the book, leaf through it, and didn’t see any compelling reason for me to read it. At that time, it appeared to me to be another book about the Great American Male Experience, and I had that one up to my eyeballs in high school honors English classes. I had enough of books where women were mothers or hookers, nurses or wives. I wanted to read books where women did things, had adventures, lived lives either equal to or more exciting than those of men.
My only literary respites in those days of my youth were Stephen King’s “Carrie,” the books of Judy Blume, and Anne Rice’s vampires. Kerouac was Just Another Male Author, along with Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald and Crane, stalwarts of the American High School Literary Canon. I knew his book wasn’t going to speak to me in any particular way, and there wasn’t any lesson of rebellion or cure for restlessness that I was going to get from his work.
I excelled in rebellion and restlessness was a way of life.
Later, I found that turning 50 would be a great cure for the restlessness of my youth and the great ameliorator of most of my rebellion (although not all of it.)
But I digress….
A couple of weeks ago, as I was taking one of my roaming trips among the book and gee-gaw displays in Barnes & Noble, I saw a table stacked with Penguin Classics, and among them was Kerouac’s “On The Road.”
“I really should read this,” I said to myself, remembering how much the Beats had influenced the New York punks of the 1980s, remembering, too, how much I enjoyed the many road trips I took before I turned 50.
As soon as I started reading, I immediately understood the world of Keroac, his friends Carlo Marx, Dean Moriarty, and Moriarty’s wife Mary Lou. They were young, restless, intelligent, and wanting more from life than the working class existence that lay ahead of them.
I could dig it.
As my mind followed the ramblings of Sal and Dean and Carlo and others in New Jersey and New York, then across the country to Denver and San Francisco, I saw crazy-fun incidents from my own life — late night parties, drunken and non-drunken foolishness in the streets, and so forth — merging like the images of a double exposed photograph. Had my life been as crazy as theirs? Did I actually manage to live a sort of Beat Bohemian existence, all while dealing with a crazy family, keeping a job, and building my first career?
I digress again.
By the middle of the book, it became clear that something was not right with Dean Moriarty. From what we now know of mental illness, Dean demonstrates classic manic states: talking and talking till the wee hours of the morning, some of it making sense, most of not; sexual compulsion leading to ruined relationships; a basic inability to settle down.
When things became too comfortable, he would jump up and hit the road. He was seized by some demon and would take off, on the road, searching for his bum-father, telling tales of his hardscrabble childhood, digging the cats laying down the beat, taking in the world the way only someone with a crazy mis-wired brain could manage.
He didn’t know he was living life to its fullest in the only way possible for someone in his state of mind.
He followed his compulsions, and Sal, who loved Dean fiercely like a long lost and then found brother, chronicles the times their journeys merged and created Experience.
When I mentioned on Facebook that I was reading “On the Road” a friend of mine commented that he found the characters “self-indulgent fools.” That’s ok. Youth is a time to be a self-indulgent fool. After that, life and all its attendant responsibilities and infirmities, kicks in and there’s no time left to be a self-indulgent fool.
Perhaps this is why “On the Road” has found its way into high school and college American Literature programs — although most young people hardly need a reason to be irresponsible, to party, and then to take that party on the road.
Then again, maybe today’s youth isn’t the youth of the 70s and 80s, and maybe they need the inspiration to be fools. Although I sincerely doubt it. Foolishness seems part of the youth experience. That is, if one is meant to be a fool in the first place.
By the time Sal and Dean and another friend, Stan, are on their journey to Mexico City, I begin to understand the deep love and concern that Sal feels for Dean, who is, as Sal often explains, “mad.”
We don’t tend to use the term “mad” in reference to someone who’s mentally ill, but it was a right and proper term to use back in their time. Perhaps even a respectable term. Certainly a term easy to understand without specificity.
Nowadays, we like to be specific. We like to say “I have depression” or “I’m bipolar” or “I suffer from social anxiety.” We have good, solid explanations for our madness, and in some cases, medications to calm our mad brains and help us function better in the world.
In their time, the time of Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and their doppelgangers Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, all they had was the madness, the frenzied music, and copious amounts of alcohol. Alcohol would contribute to the death of both Kerouac and Cassady.
As I read the final pages of the book, Sal settles down, while Dean remains trapped in his madness, wanting to do good, wanting to settle down, wanting in some ways to be like Sal — or at least to be able to live with, or near, Sal and his new wife Laura.
This isn’t possible. When they say their goodbyes, Sal is on his way to see Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall with his wife, his old friend Remi Bonceur (who is fresh back from his own road trips) and Remi’s girl. Dean needs a ride to Penn Station, but Remi, who’s provided the transportation for the concertgoers, refuses to give Dean a ride. Laura feels sad for Dean, whom she hardly knows, and Sal simply tells her, “He’ll be all right.”
Such a manly-man thing to say. Yet inside Sal feels both tenderness and sadness for Dean, who is lost within his madness and in the miles of landscape between New York and San Francisco, not knowing why he goes from place to place, from woman to woman, knowing after a while that he needs to go.
In this I’m reminded of my own Dean Moriarty ways, my restlessness that got me married and divorced and married and divorced again, and of my two close, longtime friends, Cathy and Ed, who watched me as I wound and unwound, and wound up again; as I went through marriages and off to college at 38, outrunning the hurtful days of my awful father and sad mother. The both of them provided strong, Sal Paradise-like friendships over the years, and concern for my welfare as I walked through what I see as some earth-bound outer circles of Dante’s Hell. “It’s okay,” I’d tell Cathy, “I’ll be all right. I’m like Persephone. I can walk through Hell pretty easily, and come out the other side. I live a charmed life, I guess.”
Truth be told, I’ve outlived Kerouac and Cassady, who both died before turning 50. I never descended into irredeemable, fatal alcoholism, and I’ve managed to settle down, in a manner of speaking. My own “madness” of depression and social anxiety are ameliorated through medication (thankfully) and a number of accumulated health issues like asthma, allergies and crazy digestive issues, not to mention simply getting older, has slowed me down enough so that I can actually read and understand “On the Road” in a way that, I believe, only adults who have lived out their foolish youth can fully appreciate and understand.
Had I read this when I was that mad, rebellious young woman, I don’t think it would have made much sense to me. What I know now, and what I didn’t know then, combine in memory to make “On the Road” perhaps one of my favorite books ever.
Yeah, now I can dig it. And I can relate. How about you?
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