Viking edition 1957. Penguin edition 2019
Matt Theado
J
ack Kerouac’s novel On the Road is one of the most important novels in American literature. Kerouac’s tale of cross-country treks, jazz joints, and midnight meditations has been continuously in print since its publication by Viking Press in 1957. It began as a bestseller that altered the culture in which it appeared and has since achieved the status of an iconic work. It’s status hasn’t stopped some critics, professional and amateur alike, from denigrating the book and its writer. Some readers attack On the Road and its author for what they see as white privilege, sexism, and homophobia. It’s insufficient to shrug and say that people in the late 1940s adhered to values different from today’s or that Kerouac was a “man of his time.” These are important social criticisms that should be dealt with in depth. In this essay, though, I’d like to deal with another category of criticism put forth by those who disparage Kerouac as incapable of producing a well-crafted sentence, let alone quality literature. They assume that Kerouac accidentally or luckily produced a novel that affected millions of readers around the world. On a television broadcast in 1959, writer Truman Capote carped that Kerouac’s work wasn’t writing, it was typewriting, a pithy epithet that dogs Kerouac’s reputation to this day.
Goodreads, a popular online site for book enthusiasts, allows readers to share reviews. Here are a few recent comments critical of Kerouac’s writing skill in On the Road:
“Kerouac . . . produced some of the most painfully bad and inconsequential prose of the 20th century. Or any century.”
“As literary art, stylistically, the book is pretty bad.”
“He could not understand structure and the unwritten rules of writing. It’s incoherent . . .”
Maybe these readers do not appreciate the episodic narrative. In his 2016 book Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory, Hassan Melehy writes, “Kerouac’s technique persuades many readers that he has no technique, that he’s simply relating experience in unmediated fashion. This quality accounts for much of his appeal, not to mention much of the disparagement that his work continues to garner.” Maybe these readers have been influenced by the decades of critical abuse heaped on Kerouac. Columbia professor Ann Douglas wrote in The New York Times that Kerouac’s work “was greeted by a barrage of incomprehension and vilification almost unparalleled in American letters. . . . Critics attacked him as untalented, anti-intellectual, [and] un-American.” Professors Melehy and Douglas find great value in his work; they and millions of readers are not wrong. Kerouac knew what he was doing when he composed On the Road. He had dedicated years to learning techniques of writing: how to render characters, design scenes, and order events. He relied on his training, his talent, and his intuition in creating the narrative of On the Road. Not only did he construct grammatically correct sentences, he organized the events of the narrative in an effective and coherent order.
Before we can make sense of On the Road’s textual organization, we should clarify what that text is and what it is not. Kerouac developed his prose style over time. His first novel is The Town and the City, written from 1946 through 1949 and published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. It’s a sprawling family saga in the style of Thomas Wolfe that treats the stories of the fictional Martin family episodically in the way that large family novels typically unfold. Kerouac drew on Thomas Wolfe’s novels such as Look Homeward, Angel and on literary structures he had learned as a Columbia University student starting in 1940. The processes of composing The Town and the City clarified his sense of novel construction; he worked from notes, produced drafts, and made revisions. He worked closely with his editor, Robert Giroux, to construct a standard (rather than experimental or avantgarde) novel that satisfied the commercial parameters of American publishing. Even before The Town and the City was published, he was already working on the novel that would become On the Road. He wrote his early drafts in the same style as The Town and the City. Soon he decided that this style was insufficient to convey the atmosphere, energy, and chaotic joy his road material called for.
Frustrated by various attempts that faltered in fits and starts, he dropped his efforts to invent fictional characters and contrived scenes. Instead, he typed his road story in three weeks in April 1951, setting down on paper a narrative based on his own adventures. He used the real names of his friends and selected among their activities the materials he thought most appropriate for his story. Kerouac was an expert typist; he typed quickly and accurately. Having to stop every couple of minutes to roll in new sheets of paper interrupted his narrative flow. His solution to this problem is now part of Kerouac’s legend but also exacerbates the criticism of his writing. In order to avoid the frequent interruptions, he rolled long sheets of paper into the typewriter. He had found these sheets when he moved into a friend’s apartment; they varied in length from three-and-a-half meters to more than five meters. After filling them with text, he taped them together to form a 36-meter-long scroll. More than any other novel, American or otherwise, On the Road is associated with its typescript. It is one of-a-kind highway of single-space typing that runs without a break down the length of a paper so long it has rarely been unfurled in its entirety. Everyone knows Kerouac typed it in three weeks. The typing marathon on unusual paper led critics to make unwarranted assumptions. He must have been careless. He must have been hopped up on Benzedrine. He must have produced stream-of-consciousness gibberish. His speed typing must have caused him to go on without regard for form. When typed up double-spaced on sheets of standard typing paper the text comes to fewer than 350 pages, not unusual for a novel submission. Kerouac typed approximately 120,000 words in twenty-one days. That comes to an average of 5,715 words per day. How fast did he write? Let’s put it this way: If you can type twenty words per minute, you could replicate Kerouac’s twenty-one-day word count while typing fewer than five hours per day. A five-hour workday is hardly onerous. Although a legend has accrued around the scroll typescript, the task of its production is scarcely Herculean, nor does it indicate that Kerouac was some kind of mad typist, lost in rapture, hammering out gibberish. He insisted to his closest friends that he used nothing stronger than coffee, not the much-ballyhooed Benzedrine, during his typing sessions. He was a professional writer at work.
He accomplished another personal innovation in that typing session: his first extended use of first-person narrator. His text is a straightforward, grammatically correct, traditionally outlined form of storytelling. He relied on notes, journals, letters, and plot charts. He was enthusiastic about the results largely because he wrote in first person and used his friends’ real names and actions. He felt he had come closer to conveying the felt sense of the story in his rapidly produced draft –that is, he truthfully captured the events and emotions of the story instead of laboring over it for years. As he wrote to a friend, “went fast because road is fast.” He believed the narrative’s freshness, its straight-ahead storytelling, and its honest reporting of lived events transcended the crafted quality of fictional constructions. He discovered freshness, directness, and honesty as essential values in composition, as opposed to fictionalized characters and scenes crafted for invented situations. Robert Giroux was less enthusiastic. Even though Kerouac retyped the novel onto separate sheets for submission, Harcourt Brace rejected the novel. Kerouac was stung, but rather than retreat to the methods of revising and editing as he had for The Town and the City, he doubled down, pushing himself to develop a modern prose style that was radically different from anything he – or anyone – had written before. His conviction that he would not regress to traditional approaches to narrative prose was largely responsible for publishers’ rejecting his work for the next six years.
Thus began the second distinct period of Kerouac’s writing development. The first, as we have seen, involves his understanding of sentence construction, paragraph construction, chapter building, and novel publishing that suited the literary marketplace and that he modeled on writers such as Thomas Wolfe, resulting in The Town and the City. In composing On the Road, Kerouac brought innovation to his composition technique by writing from the experiences of his life, conveying his thoughts and feelings directly rather than filtered through the perspectives of fictional characters. On the Road spans the old prose style and what he was about to discover as his new prose style. The second period of his literary development began after he completed the typescript scroll of On the Road. He embarked on a new way of writing within months. This new version features his breakthrough modern prose style, influenced by the spontaneity of modern jazz, particularly bebop as it developed in the late 1940s, and his own genius as a writer. This new modern prose he dubbed spontaneous prose. From this point forward he determined to write only in his new spontaneous prose method, vowing he would be more honest to himself as an artist by not giving in to the commercial temptations of writing adventure stories, but instead committing himself to writing spontaneously and in complex multi-layered forms. Kerouac wrote to his friends that the scroll version of On the Road was too “horizontal,” and he wished to add verticality, that is, layers of depth. The best description and analysis of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose is Tim Hunt’s 2014 book, The Textuality of Soul-Work: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose. Hunt explains that Kerouac’s breakthrough came with his shift in perception of writing as a medium. Kerouac reimagined writing as a process rather than a means for recording process. Hunt concludes that in spontaneous prose, Kerouac performed writing as if it were the music, not the notation for music.
It is Kerouac’s spontaneous prose that likely leads many readers and critics to conclude that he could not write grammatically. He demonstrated conclusively in his first two novels that he could conceive, draft, compose, revise, and publish grammatical prose. He believed as an artist he needed to move beyond those forms. Because his spontaneous prose was a new form of written expression, it was not understood by many readers as an artistic breakthrough style. Because Kerouac is famous for writing about fast cars, drinking, marijuana, and late-night conversations, many readers assume Kerouac’s lifestyle subverted his composition method. They suppose he was writing quickly and carelessly, in a slapdash devil-may-care manner. He was not. I suggest we read Kerouac’s spontaneous prose novels (Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, Maggie Cassidy, for starters) in the way that we might listen to modern jazz performances by John Coltrane or Charlie Parker. That is, we should give a benefit of the doubt to the artist long enough to appreciate that he is delivering his artistic expression on his own terms which may be different from our expectations.
As we’ve now established, Kerouac did not write in spontaneous prose when he composed On the Road. Because he is known by the public generally for two things — On the Road and spontaneous prose — readers conflate these and suffer the misapprehension that when they read On the Road, they are reading spontaneous prose. They are not. We may see On the Road as a bridge between his Thomas Wolfe influenced family saga novel The Town and the City that preceded it and the spontaneous prose novels that followed it, but nonetheless On the Road is a novel composed and published in exhilarating though traditional American prose.
Even people who acknowledge On the Road’s significance sometimes don’t know what they’re looking at. Penguin, who for decades has held the publishing rights to most Kerouac books, is celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Kerouac’s birth by publishing a Clothbound Classic edition of On the Road. A Penguin press agent who should know better gushes in a Press Release that On the Road “is written in Kerouac’s now legendary, grammar-free ‘spontaneous prose.’” It is not spontaneous prose. Nor is it “grammar-free,” whatever that means. I assume that “grammar-free” means non-grammatical, a label that cannot be applied to On the Road. No contemporary reviewers criticized On the Road as grammatically flawed. Quite the contrary: the first major review in The New York Times lauded Kerouac’s skill as a writer, claiming that his writing on jazz “has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style or technical virtuosity.” Among other reviews that came out in the month of the book’s publication, the New York Post stated flatly, “Kerouac is a talented writer,” and the New York Herald Tribune was concise: “Mr. Kerouac can write.” No reviewers called out grammatical errors because there are none. Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road as we know it, the 36-meter-long scroll typescript, has remarkably few errors, grammatical or typographical. Contrary to rumors, Viking editors made few changes to the typescript Kerouac submitted that affected the structure or grammar of the sentences beyond mechanical house-styling, such as the insertion of commas. Kerouac’s writing in On the Road is not merely poetic or lyrical or high-flying, as various commenters label it. It is also clear, controlled, and grammatically correct.
I’d like to go a step further in ascribing the term grammatical to On the Road. The novel relies on a grammar of narrative. Consider the novel’s opening sentence:
“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.”
This sentence presents two events in reverse chronological order. Sal Paradise, the narrator, announces that he met Dean and then lets the reader know this event occurred after he and his wife had split up. A story (either actual or invented) is the basis for all narratives, or else they are not narratives. In Sal’s story, the narrator split up with his wife and shortly after that met Dean. The opening sentence of the narrative prioritizes meeting Dean by mentioning it first. Although the narrator relegates the split up with his wife to a prepositional phrase where grammatically it is secondary in importance to meeting Dean, he nonetheless prioritizes the split up by building it into the first line of the novel. The decision to foreground his split up with his wife initiates the bookending of the novel, which concludes with the narrator settling down again in a domestic situation on the novel’s final page. The narrator’s on-the-road adventures begin only after he is freed from his home life and conclude when he settles down at the end of the novel. In addition, the verb “met” contrasts directly with “split up”: a coming together, a breaking apart.
The opening line presents an example of the grammar of narrative. Gérard Genette, in his book Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Cornell UP 1980, transl. Jane E. Lewin), outlines a structuralist method for narrative analysis. Genette’s goal, as Jonathan Culler points out in the introduction, is “to develop a poetics which would stand to literature as linguistics stands to language.” Culler clarifies that such a poetics would not serve to interpret a work’s meaning, but rather would provide analysis of how it means. Genette points out that readers rely on the text at hand to receive a story. Whether this story is “true” or whether it is an invention of the author’s imagination, the story is by nature a series of events that occur chronologically. Genette refers to the telling of that story as narrative. A narrative might present the story’s events nonchronologically, might repeat events that occurred once, might draw out events that occurred quickly, and so on. The ordering of the story’s events affects how readers receive information and how they glean the importance of the story. In the example of On the Road’s opening line, Sal emphasizes the meeting with Dean before hinting that his split-up with his wife set the stage for the significance of this meeting. When he meets Dean, Sal is recently single, emotionally distraught, freed from responsibility to maintain a household, and seeking a redemptive adventure. Genette studies the relationships between the story’s chronology and the narrative’s order. For Kerouac, the story is the goings-on of Sal (Kerouac’s alter ego), Dean (based on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady), and their friends; the narrative is the text. For most readers, this is a published edition of the book. Genette proposes another layer of narrative, which he calls narrating. Narrating is “the producing narrative action”; in the case of On the Road, narrating refers to Kerouac’s acts of typing. If we wish to learn about the story, what Sal and Dean’s real-life counterparts did, then we have plenty of Kerouac and Cassady’s letters, journals, photographs, and historical records we might consult. If we wish to know more about the narrating, how Kerouac wrote the text, we likewise have materials are our disposal: journals, interviews, and the documentary evidence of the typescripts. My goal in this essay is to examine the narrative, specifically the first paragraph, to establish that Kerouac understood either intuitively or as a result of practice how to effectively organize the order of events. That is, in addition to recognizing his ability to write grammatical sentences, which we can determine easily enough with grammar-check software, we will also acknowledge his ability to construct the narrative grammatically, or structurally, in a way that led to the novel’s success.
Here are the narrative’s first five sentences
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.
Following Genette’s model, I’ll assign a letter for each event in the narrative, A through F.
A) I first met Dean
B) my wife and I split up
C) I had just gotten over a serious illness
D) With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road
E) I’d often dreamed of going West
F) Dean . . . was born on the road
Here is the order in which those events occurred in the story:
1) Dean . . . was born on the road
2) I’d often dreamed of going West
3) my wife and I split up
4) I had just gotten over a serious illness
5) I first met Dean.
6) With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road
If Kerouac had organized his narrative chronologically, he would have started with Dean’s birth in 1926 since that is the story’s first event. He chose not to begin with “all that David Copperfield crap,” as Holden Caulfield puts it in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Holden’s phrase “if you want to know the truth” is a casual figure of speech, but it operates literally, too. He implies that if readers want to know the truth of his story, then he will have to choose the events and order his narrative in ways that he deems most effective, rather than adhering to a chronology that begins at the beginning of the story.
For simplicity, we’ll consider Sal (the narrator) rather than Kerouac (the author) as the organizer of the narrative. Sal’s a writer, after all. He justifies his road adventures in part because he seeks material for his writing. Sal reorders the events of his story as outlined here, with letters representing the narrative and numbers representing the story:
A-5, B-3, C-4, D-6, E-2, F-1
As we’ve noted, this narrative order prioritizes Sal’s meeting with Dean. The narrative’s middle sentences (C and D) convey that Sal has been sick, and more than sick: Sal feels that everything is dead. The very next sentence (E) heralds Dean’s entry that changes the direction of Sal’s life, “the part of life you could call my life on the road.” This phrase incorporates the novel’s title, establishing beyond doubt the significance of Dean’s entry to the narrative. Sal reports Dean’s birth last in this section, authenticating Dean’s aptness as a road guide who can accompany Sal to the West where he’s long dreamed of going.
The narrative’s first paragraph continues:
First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
Note how Sal establishes Dean’s mythical status: “first reports of him,” “shrouded in mystery,” “the news came,” “there was talk.” For Sal, Dean is a larger-than-life figure, an iconic cowboy of the American West who arrives to save Sal from his depression. These phrases set up the reader’s sense of Dean as an impending force who will compel Sal (and the reader?) to an enthusiastic engagement with the present moment. What features of Sal’s prose reveal his narrative stance? For one thing, the perception that Dean “naively and sweetly” sought Chad’s counsel is Sal’s interpretation. Sal does not include the text of the letters, so readers must take his word for it that Dean tendered his request in sweet and naive terms. Only for Sal and his New York friends is Dean “shrouded in mystery.” Dean would not have been a mystery to Chad or to his friends in the West.
There is another way that Sal’s narration suggests a narrative stance. Sal inserts a comment from his present moment of writing, the moment Genette would designate as narrating: “This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today . . .” By positioning himself as a narrator who is narrating this story in the present, Sal establishes the entirety of the story’s timespan, from Dean’s birth in 1926 to Sal’s current moment of narrating. By bringing readers from the past (“I first met Dean”) into the moment of his act of narrating, he authenticates his claim that Dean has changed over time, contrasting the past tense Dean was and the present tense he is. The story is in the past: Sal is narrating in the present, and from his vantage point he contrasts past Dean and present Dean. At the same time, Sal’s narrating perspective creates a separate Sal: the Sal who met Dean some years ago and the Sal who is currently narrating. The present Sal knows things that the past Sal does not. Genette cites Marcel Proust scholar Leo Spitzer, who distinguished the “narrating I” and the “narrated I.” Genette points out that in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu these distinct narrative voices are separated “by a difference in age and experience that authorizes the former to treat the latter with a sort of condescending or ironic superiority.” Sal narrates his own story, tracing the steps that character Sal experiences but that narrating Sal already knows. He is not discovering the plot as it unfolds on the typing paper; he is recalling a story that he knows well. His options in narrating are not to determine what happened, but how and in what order to relate those happenings. There’s an additional, deeper level of awareness: narrating Sal knows not only the facts of the story that character Sal is ignorant of, he knows more of the truth that past Sal seeks and has been approaching but has not yet achieved. We can visualize a set of concentric rings, with Kerouac on the outside as the controlling author, within which Sal as narrator constructs the narrative of Sal as character. Early in the narrative, Sal declares that one justification for writing his story is “the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.” Consider that shift in verb tense. Narrating Sal already knows that the redemptive experiences that character Sal hoped were to come for him are worthy of narrating. That is, narrating Sal is evaluating the things that character Sal doesn’t yet know about in his temporal present of the story.
Sal manages a similarly complex bit of storytelling magic with the first lines of speech in the novel. He reports Dean’s offstage monologue to Marylou: “All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: ‘Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville reformatory . . .’” At this point in the story, Sal can’t have known what Dean told Marylou because Sal hasn’t met them yet. Dean reveals his manic devotion to introspection in his speech to Marylou, but the narrator cannot have heard it. Where did he get it? It could only have come from narrating Sal who either had been told by Dean what he said to Marylou or had invented it for purposes of characterization. What does this conjuration tell us about the situation of the narrator? Does it make Sal an omniscient narrator? An unreliable one? Sal completes his report of Dean’s speech to Marylou by saying Dean delivered it “in the way that he had in those early days.” Again, narrating Sal is imbuing these early scenes from his sadder-but-wiser perspective, establishing a narrative voice to let readers know (even as they are meeting Dean for the first time) that Dean is no longer like this. Genette addresses this kind of narrator and narrative stance in his analysis of Proust’s narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu: occasionally a first-person narrator slips into the role of an omniscient narrator. When Kerouac typed the scroll typescript, he used the real names of his friends, so of course his first-person narrator was named Jack. Kerouac was writing the events of his own life, and thus could access his current knowledge at all levels of the story. He changed the names when he retyped the text, and the most significant change involved the change from Jack to Sal. Why is this significant? Because with this change Kerouac separated the controlling author (Jack typing the novel) from the first-person narrator (Sal telling the story). All of Jack’s memories and the information he gleaned from Neal’s letters and conversations were available to him. Sal is privy only the information that can be justified in the novel. For Sal to know something, he must provide some clue regarding how he came to know it. The fact that Sal can quote Dean’s speech for which he was not present reveals that Sal is an operative for Jack in the novel. The novel traces the narrowing of the gap between Sal and Jack until on the final page, they achieve unity. Sal becomes Jack and knows everything Jack knows. The novel ends in Jack’s present moment as he types the sentences about the sun going down over America. This trajectory toward narrator / writer unity prefigures Kerouac’s development of spontaneous prose, a development that wholly frees from him from limitations to the narrator’s novelistic perspective. In Visions of Cody and other spontaneous prose texts, Kerouac freely moves from narrating a story to performing the story, actively (that is, spontaneously) writing thoughts as they occur to him, without limitations imposed by a traditional first-person character.
Kerouac At McDarrah’s Apartment Dec 1959. Courtesy: getty images
Kerouac did not compose On the Road by happenstance or accident. He relied on the craft to which he had dedicated himself for years. He claimed to have written a million words by the time he was eighteen years old. He tallied words of his daily production the same way he had calculated his batting average when he was a high school sports star. He wrote journals about his progress on his novels. Kerouac was a professional writer who risked commercial failure because he was also an artist who would not sell out for commercial gain. He also believed that readers would eventually come around to appreciating his technique. Many have, many haven’t, but the fault isn’t with Kerouac’s ability to write grammatically effective sentences or narratives. He was accomplished at both.
How have Kerouac’s reputation and his literary achievements fared over time? For starters, a Facebook group dedicated to Jack Kerouac and administrated by British Kerouac scholar Dave Moore boasts of over 8,600 members. The community is remarkably active with contributions from around the world. In addition, the 100th anniversary of Kerouac’s birth on March 12, 2022, shows the degree to which he and his writing are appreciated. Numerous events, large and small, testify to the significance of his reputation. Novelist Joyce Johnson, who was Kerouac’s girlfriend in 1957 when On the Road made him famous, wrote an essay titled “Jack Kerouac’s Journey” in The New York Review of Books to guage his achievement. Johnson recalled that On the Road had been the most difficult book for Kerouac to write. The composition moved from darkness to light: “a young man trying to lift himself out of a pessimistic mood after a debilitating illness takes a road trip across America that he hopes will reinvigorate him . . .” In addition to her essay in NYRB, Johnson was one of nine guests to appear in City Lights Book Store’s online presentation, “Still Outside: Kerouac @ 100: An Appreciation of Jack Kerouac’s Unique Contribution to American Literature.” Other guests included Kerouac biographer Ann Charters and Kerouac scholars Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Ann Douglas, Tim Hunt, Hassan Melehy and Regina Weinreich. Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, holds an annual event that took on additional significance in the centennial year of Kerouac’s birth, as it expanded to include numerous commemorative events including the exhibition of the scroll typescript. The New York Public Library exhibited an installation of Kerouac material from their archives. Kerouac died in 1969 in St Petersburg, Florida. His final home was opened to visitors as part of a series of art-and-poetry events. San Francisco, the destination of Kerouac’s first cross-country trip, is the home of the Beat Museum in North Beach, which hosted centenary events as well. At the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, NFL football team owner and Americana collector Jim Irsay hosted a Kerouac birthday party that included literary, movie, music celebrities, and the On the Road typescript scroll which Irsay bought at auction in 2002.
The hoopla surrounding Kerouac’s 100th birthday testifies to the culture’s ongoing embrace of his iconic image as a writer who came to his success the hard way, by honing his craft, not selling out, and most of all, keeping to his own path. In some ways, that path is still his alone. This is not to say that other writers don’t struggle to create and propagate artistic literary styles. Many do. But other writers have not in any great numbers emulated Kerouac’s achievement in spontaneous prose. There may be writers who have absorbed Kerouac’s principles, which he laid out in a “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” and “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” but there is not a notable coterie of writers who persist in writing in this way beyond the years of immediate influence in the late 1950s. Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, houses a creative writing program called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics that emphasizes spontaneous writing at its core. I suspect that Kerouac’s spontaneous prose technique has influenced many people who write in their own journals to open themselves up to the moment of composition, to write honestly without regard to standard prose, yet while these journals may be enormously important to the writers, they do not find a readership in the public. Kerouac’s first item in “Belief & Technique”: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” The 24th item in his list merges the process of writing with one’s self-perception: “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.” Kerouac’s honesty in his writing and sincerity in his voice give many readers the impression that he is communicating with them intimately. I feel that way.
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Matt Theado is a professor of American Cultural Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies. He is the president of the Beat Studies Association and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan.
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