. . . The novel by Jack Kerouac that seems somehow to speak for whole generations of people, whole ripples and movements of society, regardless of time and place. America has changed – how much? – since the 1950s and yet here we are, still reading On the Road and all the rest. Or are we? Surely poor old “Reluctant King of the Beats” Kerouac didn’t have the last word on countercultural travel writing – or on spontaneous prose? But I know I’ve been craving it, anyway. A wild, free-wheeling, disturbing, hilarious tragedy of a book. At times it can be frustrating, too; he can be a frustrating author (I’ll say that no matter how many times I’ve linked to him in these pages) . . . !
Where and when did it begin? I started hitch-hiking and reading poetry (and attempting to write it) at around the same time, and someone told me I had better read Kerouac! How right they were. Most of my friends at the time had never even heard of him, had never heard of the Beats, and so I tried to educate myself. I went out and bought the big Portable Beat Reader and devoured it from cover to cover. No idea what was going on half the time. Next, inspired by Kerouac’s thoughts on both technique and spontaneity in writing, I went straight to On the Road.
It’s a book that gets around, that seems to travel as much as its characters do! You can find it occasionally in used bookstores; there are always new editions being printed and sold in the nicest literature sections in town. I was once given a ratty old dog-eared copy of the book on a Greyhound bus, of all places. It was a late-night conversation with an older French-Canadian guy, who perked up when I mentioned Kerouac: he recited the first two or three paragraphs from memory, then gave me his own dusty backpack copy! “Don’t worry about it,” he said, when I protested, “I give this book away all the time.”
But why am I writing about On the Road in the first place? Why is a Canadian in the 2000’s so hung up on an American writer from the 1950’s? . . . For one thing, I’m about to embark on a long cross-country road trip of my own, probably 24 hours of driving one way, from the Okanagan Valley in southern British Columbia into the province of Manitoba . . .
(Here is an informative place to start if you want to read up on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.)
