Professor David Peimer
The Beat Generation, Part 1: Kerouac and the Poets

Professor David Peimer | The Beat Generation, Part 1: Kerouac and the Poets | 07.31.21

- So to all the South Africans and to all the Brits online, I really want to apologise that we interrupting, David and I. I apologise that we’re interrupting the Rugby. And I apologise to David. I just did that earlier, David.

• Thank you. Appreciate it.

• You are making a huge sacrifice by giving your presentation at this moment in time. And I know you would love to be watching the Rugby.

• No, this is always an amazing pleasure and love of mine, Wendy.

• Well, great. You are great. Thank you. And the success of Lockdown is really thanks to our faculty and to you and the other presenters, so thank you very much. So whenever you’re ready, I’m going to hand over to you. Well, I’m going to say to you as our chancellor. You’re the chancellor.

• Well, I love being the chancellor. It’s the best. You know, it’s the best position because you can sort of take my phone with me. It’s incredible. So thank you, David. And so whenever you’re ready, we are waiting for the Beat Generation. Thank you. Over to you.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• I think we can start. Okay, great. Thanks, Wendy. So I’m going to do today, look at the Beat Generation, but specifically Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, a little bit about his life, and then, of course, his great book, “On the Road”. And I’m going to look at one of the, well, a little bit of Ginsberg, but mainly, interestingly, for me, remarkable African American poet of the twenties, thirties, going through the war period, Langston Hughes and some of his poetry, which I think links to Kerouac. And you’ll see how link it through jazz music and how Langston Hughes, coming from an African American background of that era, links to jazz and the influence of jazz on Kerouac and the broader context.

So here’s the poet I’m going to look at a little bit more than the obvious ones of Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg, who I think would almost warrant a separate session. As Langston Hughes would in another way, but this, for me, more directly links in a perhaps slightly new way than Langston Hughes. I also want to look at what on earth was meant by the Beat Generation, what that phrase means, you know, where it came from, what it was, and my own personal opinion as to how we can make sense of it today, and what, I think, was the intention of Burroughs, William Burroughs, and Kerouac, and Ginsberg, and others at the time in terms of that meaning.

What’s really important for me before I go into a brief bio of Kerouac is, for me, he’s a child of the Great Depression, pre-Depression, and then Great Depression, and then the war. And I think that, for me, frames the narrative, the story of the fifties because it’s when it’s coming after, obviously, which is radically different to the sixties. And I’m going to talk about some of the tensions that Kerouac had with some of the, perhaps misunderstood, but some of the perceptions of the sixties generation towards the fifties and the Kerouac era. I’m not judging the sixties in the slightest ‘cause they were incredible. I just want to give a perspective from Kerouac’s position and from his life, a little bit of how he saw it, because by then, he was mostly forged and formed because I really believe it was the Great Depression, '20, the '29 Depression and the war that were far more fundamental to forging his character and his vision.

And the tensions inside him as a person and as a writer reflected in “On the Road” and his other work. I want to look at the question of, was he a naive romantic idealist? Was it just about a coming of age youth story that he’s really capturing? Is he just a sort of searcher for romantic freedom for a kind of spirituality? Is he a product of working class, middle class, tension between an endless restless search, not only in America but elsewhere, a restless search for meaning, for understanding, for belief compared to domestic urban life? All these questions for me get thrown up by Kerouac’s life and his writing very powerfully.

The other really important influence for me is when the fifties emerged after the war in the influence of his Catholic upbringing, his mother, very Catholic, and his Catholic upbringing. And what happened? A couple of things that are foundational that happened to his family in his life. And then, of course, the metaphor of the road, which is fairly obvious, but I do think it needs to be touched on. Okay, just a couple of phrases from Kerouac, 1922 to 1969. So he is 47 when he dies, towards the end of the sixties. So he is already 40 or almost 40, almost, when 1960 happens. That’s why I locate the childhood more in the Great Depression and then his teen years and early twenties in the war. And he was in the Merchant Marine and then he was in the US Navy during the war, a lot of his friends getting killed.

So it’s a very different era to the sixties, seventies and so on that he’s part of. This is from Kerouac, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” I just love that phrase because it’s not political, obviously. It’s almost like a yearning, a harking. For me, there’s a sense of almost Walt Whitman. There’s an old-fashioned American patriot inside Kerouac. the spirit of the individual, the spirit of freedom. I have my rights, and I’m not talking in a contemporary political sense. I’m talking in a profound mythical sense in terms of the birthing of America. That image, it’s a bit like the Marvin Gaye song, the African American singer, amazing. What’s going on? I’m sure many people know, but incredible, the music happening at the time. “Happiness consists in realising it is all a great strange dream.”

That’s an interesting concept for me and ideas in realising it’s all a great, it’s not a silly or stupid. It’s a great strange dream. Yes. Shakespeare life is better dreamed, et cetera. But it’s a great. I don’t think we can ignore what he’s trying to play with. And this, for me, is an echo Beckett. You can’t live in this world. There’s nowhere else to go. The irony, the wit, which is often I think not grasped with looking at people like Kerouac and many others, which I’ve spoken about with Beckett. Beckett’s line was, “You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.” And it’s so similar to Kerouac’s line, “You can’t live in this world, but there’s nowhere else to go.”

And I’m going to mention a few references to Beckett because they’re similar, obviously totally different in terms of Ireland, America, Beckett, you know, everything about his life, Irish being a writer in Paris and so on, living through the occupation in France. But they are both part of the war and post-war generation. They are both part of the Great Depression before that. And Kerouac comes from a very Catholic upbringing. And although Beckett wasn’t, nevertheless, of course, the Catholic influence in Ireland, my nose about it only too well. I don’t want to draw too many links. All I say is that they’re part of a similar generation in terms of a global perspective.

Then here, these are some images of Kerouac. I mean, handsome beyond belief. And what’s not really well known was that he was a superb athlete and in playing American football. And he got into Columbia on a football scholarship and that’s how he got to study at Columbia, where he later met Ginsberg and then William Burroughs and had a superb education in Columbia. I’m sure many people do know this about him, but just for us to be aware. Okay, and then later we’ll go on to “On the Road”. Yeah, we will start.

This is Kerouac and Ginsberg at Columbia. They are students. What are they? 20, 21, 22, has a young Ginsberg and a young Kerouac. The only one missing is Burroughs. And these three rarely gave the birth to what became known as the Beat Generation, which was Kerouac’s phrase. Okay, I’m going to come onto that. This year, one cannot get more classic or iconic than this image of Kerouac. Whether he got it from James Dean or James Dean got it from him, I don’t know, and many others. But the image of the fifties, the image of the rest is searching, seeking young American guy, and at the same time, clean cut all American boy, ex-athlete till he had a serious injury. And one of the reasons he started to study literature so much in writing was because he had a serious injury very young, and he couldn’t carry on playing football, American football. Okay.

So Kerouac comes from… I’m going to hold this for a moment and just go into a bit of his bio. He comes from French Canadian ancestry, and he’s raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. And he spoke French until the age of five and then only started learning English at the age of six, which is important when we come to a question of identity, in the jargon, multiple identities. During World War II, he was in the American Navy for a year and then in the Merchant Navy for the year before that, but all during the war. And many of his friends died in the war, not only in the Navy, but in Air Force, in infantry, et cetera. And that’s a profound effect on Kerouac. And a very important, obviously, this generation is so important for Kerouac and his ideas.

Then he also is part of, as I said, the Great Depression, which puts his family, I would say, very clearly, working class and really tough times as well. after the 28 crashed. Then the Catholic upbringing… Sorry, “On the Road” is published in 1957. During his life, he published 12 other novels, play, poetry. This guy wrote a hell of a lot, not only the one great hit, the one that’s so known around the world. And so 1957 is when it’s published, and he becomes very famous very quickly afterwards. He was always looking for it. He called a spontaneous prose, which is very influenced by James Joyce, the so-called stream of consciousness writing. And he spoke a lot about the influence of Joyce and the influence of Marcel Proust, who I’m going to give a talk on later in August, very influenced by Proust. 'Cause remember he studied at Columbia, really good education.

And he talks about it, studying Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Proust, so many of the others, the great writers of the past. And the spontaneous prose writing he was trying to achieve, and I’m going to link that to jazz, the structure of jazz later. He remained a Catholic and a conflicted Catholic all his life, and a search for spirituality coming from his Catholic, pretty strong Catholic upbringing, which his mother was very influential with. He went into Buddhism for a couple of years. And as everybody knows, drugs, not really hardcore drugs, but some drugs, dope and other things, and a lot of drinking, obviously, much later, benzos, and dope, and drinking, which was part of, I think, the fifties more than the different kind of psychedelic drugs associated with the sixties.

What was interesting, though, was that once his novel was published, “On the Road”, in '57, he became what was almost the first literary figure as a TV celebrity in America. And quite a few people argue that that’s what destroyed him because he was trying to be taken seriously as an artist, as a writer, some kind of spiritual quest and some kind of journey to find out what’s going on, Marvin Gaye’s phrase, what’s happening in his world in his own life, a search, that constant quest. David Mamet said, “Every player is a quest.” And it’s a fantastic understanding, It gives an active dynamic to the writer, not only trying to be political or this or that, which the quest is to write and write well.

So he also then was quite negative about what he called the naivety of the hippies generation. And I’m not saying it’s what I think, I’m just saying his perspective. And you see him in debates with some of the most famous characters of the sixties. And his difference of opinion between them because he believes in the American ideal. He believes in the American myth of independence, and freedom, and individuality, and search and quest, and that the war meant something, that’s a Second world war and a fight for freedom and et cetera that really meant, as I said, many of his friends died. And he understood the war very well. He lived it basically with his friends, his peers. And he’s very often misunderstood because I think the context isn’t given.

And I mean, he’s not necessarily just negative about sixties and the hippies at all, but he’s trying to say, “Look, are you middle class people? And what are you searching for? The Greening of America and so on. What about the Depression? What about the war, et cetera? What about the Walt Whitman idea of America and the individual search in quest?” And I think he feels betrayed by the America of the fifties, the great ideals, the dreams to come, what Eisenhower called the emerging, military industrial complex. There’s a certain betrayal going on because what happens to all these guys who have fought in the war and afterwards come back? Why do they like the Brando and the James Dean image, become rebellious, et cetera? What’s happened to that generation after?

Some other important things were he died in, as I said, in '69 after some heavy drinking couple of years of serious drinking, which I think basically is what killed him. He hugely influences Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Doors, Morrison, Patty Smith, so many of the remarkable artists of the sixties. And there’s another influence for me that he has on the literary, the writing quality of those sixties, the Dylans and the others, is that Kerouac has a mythic perception of America. It’s not literal, I think he sees it through a mythic quality. The road is mythical, it’s metaphor for life. It’s a bit obvious and well-known, but it’s a journey of life. But it turns it into a mythical metaphor in the way that Bob Dylan, when you look at it, Dylan turns even this later song about John Lennon.

He can do it when characters have become myth and icons in America and the history. And I think huge amount of the amazing poetry of Dylan is because he’s turned the literal to myth from early days, “A Hard Rain” and many others. And that connection with the mythical is what helps to make, for me, and many of the other poets transcend the own immediate era, and the same for me with Kerouac. There’s that religious Catholic drive. They quest God, meaning religion, beliefs and so on, which goes beneath the cloves of the political era of the times they live in, these greater forces at work in their own history and the times. I mean, I’m going to come in a moment to when Kerouac went and spent time, 63 days on the top of Desolation Peak, which is in the Cascade Mountains, right up on the Canadian border with the America up on the northwest. And he spent totally alone and the influence that it has on him.

So there’s myriad of many of these things, which they’ll get turned into myth. And that’s a very different approach as a serious artist and a writer because that’s understanding, for me, art and metaphor, certainly in fiction or theatre. What’s really important is that in 1926, his older brother Gerard dies of rheumatic fever at the age of nine. And I think his life is spent looking for this lost brother. So the friend Neal Cassady, Ginsberg, and others become the search for the lost brother, that he feels guilty 'cause he survived, the brother died. And his mother and family were destroyed by the death of that brother. And the mother went to the more extreme, even more extreme Catholicism. And the father went to banding, and into drink, and alcohol, and gambling and so on. It destroyed the family.

And that cannot be ignored in the life of this remarkable Kerouac writer. He was a serious child, and he was devoted to his mother. And she, as I said, was a devout Catholic. He later said she was the only woman that he loved because he could be completely himself, all vulnerability, all the sort of super cool image and strength. And as I said, his mother sought the solace in her Catholic faith after his brother, at the age of nine, died. And the father abandoned by going into gambling, drinking. He went to Horace Mann School at Columbia.

And I mean, maybe one of the naive connections I made was, 'cause I was there in the early eighties, in the mid eighties rather, in the mid eighties to the late eighties, I was studying Horace Mann School at Columbia myself. And the echoes 'cause I’d read, obviously, Kerouac at the age that everybody reads him, just the image of him wandering that same street. We have the corridors, that’s where I went, Horace Mann School. So he goes, and he’s in New York, then he’s kicked out of the Navy in 1943 or discharged on psychiatric grounds that he was, quote, “of an indifferent character”, whatever that means in Navy terms.

Then 1944, he comes back and he starts studying at Columbia. That’s why I said he meets Burroughs and Ginsberg. An important event happens, there’s the stabbing of him, a friend stabs another friend who’s killed. And Kerouac helps get rid of the body and helps this friend try and sort out things. And Burroughs was arrested and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses 'cause they’d helped the friend deal with and get rid of the body of the guy who was stabbed. And Kerouac’s father refused to help with a bail. So what he does, Kerouac, he agrees to marry Edith Parker if her parents will pay the bail. So there’s a ruthless sight to this guy as well.

None of them are just these romantic idols poets, obviously, and writers. They’re opportunists. They’re like all of us. Come make a plan, try and figure out this, figure out that when no problem arises. For me, in a way, there is an echo of the fantastic Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, in this kind of restless searching energy, and wild writing, and wildlife, drinking, and powerballs and everything that Marlowe lived, dies young at 29, stabbed, after some incredible poetry in his language. I don’t want to overdramatize these possible links, but different people go through different things at times, which sometimes if it can be helpful for us to make a link.

“On the Road” is 51. And his great friend Neal Cassady, who he meets and travels late forties and early fifties, they travel all through America, ongoing travels and trials and tribulations, which obviously “On the Road” captures with the writers, with friends, with poets, and most importantly, I think with the the African American jazz musicians, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and so on. And the Harlem bebop vibe of Charlie Parker in particular, and the remarkable innovations that Charlie Parker made in jazz. That’s that bringing of improvisational spontaneity, which he took so much further, Charlie Parker, which influences Kerouac’s writing, and he tries to take much further.

The phrase even Desolation Peak where Kerouac went to, I mean Dylan has a great, fantastic, nearly 10-minute song called “Desolation Row”. The links are obvious between all these guys that happen. Publishers rejected because of this, the writing style and sexual content in the way that they reject “Naked Lunch” on Burroughs, the great piece of William Burroughs. And they rejected Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the beginning. I have seen the great minds of my generation destroyed. And everyone knows Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the beginning. So they insist on editing and cutting and cause attention, but it’s eventually published. He said “On the Road” was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God, in search of meaning.

That’s Kerouac, an American Catholic author, some people have called him. If you look at his diaries, almost every page is filled with images of the crucifix, of prayers, appeals to Christ to be forgiven, and then Buddhism later than I mentioned. He developed enemies on both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, they disdained his association with drinking, and with benzodiazepines, and other drugs, and dope, and his sexual libertinism. And on the left, they were contemptuous because he was devout Catholic and an American patriot at heart, an anti-communist.

He said, “When I went to Columbia, I learned about the great writers, the remarkable literary figures. I learned a huge amount. I studied, but my friends tried to teach me about Karl Marx as if I really cared.” So this was Kerouac’s trying to show the complexity of the guy because I think it’s often misunderstood in sort of a more sensationalist response to his great book. Okay. Was he the Voice of the generation? As I said, he joined Ginsberg, Burroughs, and himself. The term Beat was invented by him. Those three are seen as the kind of godfathers of the Beat Generation. I think they were a fairly small group, but they were at the right time in America and the world, the context I described. And it took off like wildfire as everybody knows.

Where does it come from? Little money, I’m beat to my socks, but I’m aware of the beat of music from the slave period and of the slaves. I’m aware of the beat in jazz and the African Americans. I’m aware of the beat in terms of hardship and suffering during the war and my friends dying. There’s a beat to life. There’s a beat, there’s an energy. I’m beaten because of the Great Depression, no money and poverty, and I’m beat down. I’m finished, I’m exhausted, I’m beat.

I think that the word beat for him, as he says it, these are his words, linked to all of it to be a typic in the Catholic legacy, Catholic religion. He said, “I’m not a Beatnik, I’m a Catholic.” These are all quotes from him. The success of “On the Road” brought him incredible celebrity and fame. He was even beaten up afterwards on the streets of New York, seriously beaten up. So all these words come into that word, that phrase of the beat in the Beat Generation, contradictions. In a sense, and then in 1964, his older sister died of a heart attack. His mother had a paralysing stroke as a result. And in 1968, his great friend Neal Cassady, who was the icon and the great image for the Dean Moriarty character in “On the Road”, dies in Mexico.

So these three deaths happened very quickly at the same time of possibly the people closest to him, his sister, his mother, Cassady, and a huge effect on the guy. And then after at his death, he was still living with his third wife with his mother. He’d gone back for the last few years of his life. He’s only dying at 47. So goes back in his early mid forties, delivered his mother and his wife, goes back to Lowell, Massachusetts. That’s where he is living for the last few years of his life, drinking far too much. As I said, the influence of jazz, Felonious Munk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, huge.

He’s also influenced by Gary Snyder, the wonderful, superb American poet in terms of going to the mountain, becoming a Buddhist for a couple of years of his life, going to Desolation Peak. He first went with Gary Snyder in the north cascades in the mountains. His free flowing prose is what influences Ginsberg, Dylan, and so many of the writers of the sixties. I’ve mentioned the others, the James Joyce and so on. But what’s also interesting, in 1947, Kerouac writes a letter to his mother. So he’s still young and he’s 25. and letter for $25 to help him get from Denver to California. That same letter was sold about 10 years ago for $25,000.

He begs her for $25, and he shows his vulnerability. Dear Ma, and he gives her instructions on how to wire the money to him. But also, he’s not exactly living the life of scholar in Denver. He writes, “Hey Ma,” he’s 25, “I’m staying in a swanky apartment with showers and food and everything. Geez, you don’t realise how much I miss you. I really miss you, Ma. I’ll be back in a few months. Can’t wait to see you.” Signs the letter Jackie with three kisses. It was a regales his mother, his mother with some of his adventures, the same letter. Boy, it’s been a lot of fun around here. Girlfriends, we went up the mountains, I saw an opera. First time, Ma, an opera. I ate swell food. Can you imagine, Ma, unlike we ever had? Venison steak, but I haven’t got a cent left, Ma. Can you please wire me $25?

I mean, is this a coming of age story “On the Road”? Classic ancient story. Is this a kid lost looking for meaning, running back to mommy all the time? So at the same time is there’s this romantic cowboy, ride the wave of going to the Wild West, the cowboy, the West, the frontier, myth, and image. When he is ready down or not, asks mommy for money and mommy sends money. Does he transcended become a great writer? All I can say, from my perspective, he lives with all the contradictions we do, and he still produces great art, great literature. For me, it doesn’t lessen the great work he enriches because I understand even more about his life.

He called Neal Cassady’s friend, who’s the muse for the Dean Moriarty character, the sideburn hero of the snowy West. And he writes even more letters to his mother about how he’s going to achieve his goals, his ambition to be a writer and an artist, all to his mother. That closeness is huge. Truman Capote, when he heard that he wrote “On the Road” in three weeks, Truman Capote gave probably the biggest putdown. Well, he wrote it in a three week burst of writing says Mr. Kerouac. That’s not writing, it’s just timing. Okay.

You can see these writers, these others at the time, all trying to come to grips with this new guy, with a breath of fresh air, like a meteor almost blazing, like a Rimbaud character. And he studied Rimbaud at his poetry at Columbia and many of the other great poets. It’s also interesting that Allen Ginsberg was a man who worked in advertising. There was a lot of debate at the time, which I’m sure many know, that Ginsberg was trying to push the idea of the Beat generation as more of a kind of PR marketing exercise the near romanticism of it all. Well, was the sudden fame like that, or did he really strike a chord?

I don’t believe he would become so famous so quickly, sell so many copies if he hadn’t struck a chord of the zeitgeist, something of the time in America, in the world. He goes to jazz clubs, the streets of America, the streets of New York, the pimps, the gamblers, the vagaries of nightlife in San Francisco, New York, elsewhere. He’s moving all around with this. The other thing that’s important is that he studies, he rewrites obsessively. Neal Cassady’s wife is interviewed about that. And many of the others, this publisher end this rewriting, rewriting like James Joyce and many of the others, Proust.

It’s not just the spontaneous flow. That’s the result of enormous amount of rewriting and editing. Is “On the Road” a moment of the road looking for a Damascus moment, a vision, a light? Let’s not forget his religious background. Life is a road, is that a search for freedom, ups and downs, the true cruelty and compassion of life. He spoke about this. And the movement of the times that I tried to mention are part of that in a way as well. And this is one of a little section from it. As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border, I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, “Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven, you’re on the road to a God.”

And I’m thinking all the time, my thoughts are still flapping in the haunted shrouded desert wind. I mean, the incredible poetry and language, that seem free flowing and spontaneous, but has worked on just a few, the adventure of life, the domesticity of life, the yearning, the seeking in life, a spiritual hunger to attain. And then, of course, going back to mommy in Lowell, Massachusetts very often to look for the joy of just those moments of intensity in life, the moments that just take us out the humdrum of daily life, the necessary humdrum of the practicalities of life.

This is Kerouac. “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day when you know you are wretched and miserable, maybe poor and naked, with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering, and walking, and searching through nightmare life.” So this road story becomes iconic, obvious, becomes this huge metaphor that I mentioned. The other important moment is that’s the dawn of the nuclear age. And none of these people are unaware of it, obviously. And things have changed so much.

The fear, the anxiety, this is all part of the context of history at that time. For me, there’s a Whitman American character, looking for the soul of America, the soul in himself, that constant struggles between the impulses of the secure life which is free and the restlessness of the vastness of life potential, the vastness of America, that ancient myth that comes back of even discovering America and going west in frontier and so on. And at the end of the "On the Road” book, there’s the Dean Moriarty character is magnetic, but let’s not forget in the last sections of the book, we get sick of him, Dean Moriarty, we get fed up.

And the the cell, the Kerouac character sees, he realises he can’t depend on Dean to come to his help if he’s sick, or if he’s miserable, or if he’s depressed. He can’t depend because Dean’s constantly on the move. You’re not going to hang around and help him, get banana, get sick, bring him chicken soup, whatever. The joy rides get less joyful in the novel. And maybe people really do need to grow up is what he’s also saying. You can’t go on the road forever from adventure to the next. And maybe the internals adventures become more important and different.

The book doesn’t answer this quest. It just hints at it towards the end of the novel. You still search for those moments of intensity and wit in life, the sounds, the smells, the movement of life, which can be as powerful internally as on a road, which is another metaphor for the journey. Is it a coming of age? Is it about shame? Is it about growing up? All these questions are part of, for me, “On the Road”.

Okay, I want to show some clips of interviews and some of Kerouac reading. This is an amazing short clip of where Kerouac has a short TV interview with Steve Allen. First of all, it’s an amazing interview, the maturity, the literary quality, the intelligence of the interview itself with Steve Allen. I just miss so much these days. And Steve Allen is playing jazz as Kerouac’s being interviewed, and he reads that last section from the novel.

[Clip begins]

• In the early 1950s, the nation recognised in its midst a social movement called Beat Generation. A novel titled “On the Road” became a best seller. And its author, Jack Kerouac, became a celebrity, partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation.

Jack and I made an album together a few months back in which I played background piano for his poetry reading. And at that time, I made a note to book him on the show because I thought you would enjoy meeting him. So here he is, Jack Kerouac.

Jack told me a little earlier he was nervous. Are you nervous now? No? Good. Jack, I got a couple of square questions, but I think the answer would be interesting.

How long did it take you to write “On the Road”?

• Three weeks.

• [Steve Allen] How many?

• Three weeks.

• [Steve Allen] Three weeks. That’s amazing. How long were you “On the Road” itself?

• Seven years.

• [Steve Allen] Seven years. Yeah, I was on the road once for three weeks, and it took me seven years to write about it from the other way around. I’ve heard that you write so fast that you don’t like to use a regular typing paper, but instead you prefer to use one big, long roll of paper. Is that true?

• Yeah.

• When I write narrative novels, and I want to change my narrative thought, I keep going.

• [Steve Allen] You don’t want to change the pages at the end, you mean?

• A hundred foot long teletype paper?

• [Steve Allen] Oh, teletype rolls. Where do you get it?

• Huh?

• [Steve Allen] Where do you get the paper?

• Teletype paper.

• [Steve Allen] And where do you get it?

• In a very good stationary store.

• [Steve Allen] I see.

• When I write my symbolistic, serious, impressionistic novels, I write them in pencil.

• [Steve Allen] Oh yeah. I’ve seen a lot of your poetry written in pencil, but I didn’t realise that’s how you worked on the prose, too.

• For narrative, it’s good. Keep going.

• [Steve Allen] I got a the most hard question of all, but everybody always puts it to you, I’m sure, because everybody always puts it to you. How would you define the word beat? I don’t mean why not time, I mean, really.

• Sympathetic.

• [Steve Allen] Sympathetic? All right, I asked. Well, about this point, actually, we planned to have Jack read some poetry. And while looking again through his book the other day, it struck me, it occurred to me all over again that his prose is extremely poetic. I think it’s probably more poetic than that. Who else writes poetic type prose? Thomas Wolfe, I guess.

• Walt Whitman.

• Uh-huh.

• In “Specimen Days”, Walt Whitman in “Specimen Days”.

• Nice, I thought you were putting me on there for a minute. Oh, all right, we’ll look into that. And right now, we’ll look into Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, and he’ll lay a little on you. You don’t even have to buy these paper. I’ll try. I’ll play the blues as we did in the thing and see how it works out.

• Well, a lot of people have asked me Why did I write that book or any book? All of the stories I wrote were true 'cause I believed in what I saw. I was travelling West one time at the junction of the state line of Colorado. It’s arid Western one and the state line of poor Utah. I saw in the clouds huge and mast above the fiery golden desert of evenfall.

Frayed image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in his right hand would sayeth, “C'mon boy go thou across the ground. Go moan for man, go moan, go groan. Go groan alone. Go roll your bones, alone. Go thou and be little beneath my sight. Go thou and be minute as seed in the pod. Go thou, go thou, die hence. And of this world report you well and truly.”

Anyway I wrote the book because we’re all going to die. In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid, with just this one pride and consolation, my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

So in the last page of “On the Road”, I describe how the hero Dean Moriarty has come to see me all the way from the West Coast just for a day or two. We’ve just been back and forth across the country several times in cars, and now our adventures are over. We’re still great friends, but we have to go into later phases of our lives. So there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in the moth eaten overcoat. He brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walking off alone. And last I saw him, he rounded the corner of 7th Avenue, eyes on the street ahead and bent to it again, gone.

So in America, when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old, broken down river pier, watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it. And now I know by now that children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry. And tonight the stars will be out. And don’t you know that God is pooh bear?

The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers,, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in. Nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the fall on rags of growing old. Think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found. Think of Dean Moriarty. I think of Dean Moriarty.

[Clip ends]

• Okay. For me, it’s an extraordinary little clip in one of the very few. This is from an amazing documentary made by some Irish researchers. And just the opening section, I want to just show you briefly about Kerouac going to this place, which I think is very important, the Desolation Peak in the Cascades Mountains.

[Clip begins]

• [Narrator 1] This is one of the most remote places in America. The wilderness of the Cascade Mountain rain sits on the west on edge of the continent close to the Canadian border. The mountains here have forbidding names: Mount Terror, Damnation Peak, Mount Despair, echoing the tragedy of those who tried unfilled to conquer this godless terrain. In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac, at that time, a little known American writer, came to spend 63 days as a fire watcher on Desolation Peak.

• Desolation Peak is so remote. It was always the most remote fire station in the forest service. It’s just a few miles south of the Canadian border. When Kerouac was there, there was no road that went anywhere near it. It was a three-day trip by tug barge, horseback, and pickup truck from Marble Mount, which is where the ranger station is. Now, you can make it in one day.

• [Narrator 1] Little has changed on the top of Desolation since Kerouac was here. Fire Watchers still work in the primitive cabin using exactly the same fire-finding equipment as he did.

• Well, my main job here is to watch for forest fires and to detect smokes as soon as I can. And this is the same thing that Jack Kerouac would’ve had to do as his job here, too. And in fact, this is the exact same fire finder that he used at the Osborne Fire Finder model in 1934. I believe that Jack Kerouac went to school actually, a little week-long fire school or something to learn how to do this. I imagine for Kerouac, it was probably pretty lonely because he was here for 63 days without any company.

• [Narrator 1] Kerouac came to Desolation in his mid thirties. He’d been writing and travelling for most of his adult life. But the books that were to make his name had yet to find a publisher. He came here to escape, but he also came in such of a spiritual experience.

• It was eight or nine weeks of mountain solitude, no distractions whatsoever. You could read, write, sing at the top of your lungs, meditate. and if you were lucky, have a vision. Kerouac had been at this point in intense Buddhist studies for three years. And he felt that he was primed for a spiritual breakthrough. So he was going up there with the idea of really having this sort of vision and solitude. And he wrote to a friend before he left, “If I don’t get a vision up on Desolation Peak, my name ain’t William Blake.”

• But something went badly wrong on the top of Desolation Peak. What Kerouac experienced in the small cabin was not enlightenment, but a sense of loneliness and despair was than any he’d ever known, a feeling of desolation so profound that it would change the whole course of his life and ultimately ruin him as a writer.

• With all due respect, even Jesus in the wilderness and Buddha under the Bo tree, only spent 40 days in their trials. So who knows what demons or devils Jack struggled with in his 63 days.

• Desolation is the beginning and the end for him as a writer, and certainly the what kinetic happens next, fame hits. He loses his powers.

• [Narrator 1] Within a few short months of coming down from the mountain, Kerouac became the most famous writer in America. His book “On the Road” was a publishing phenomenon. Overnight, he was called upon to be the spokesman for a generation, the king of cool, the first writer celebrity of the television age.

• Jack, got a couple of square questions, but I think the answer would be interesting. How long did it take you to write on the road?

• Three weeks.

• [Steve Allen] How many?

• Three weeks.

• [Steve Allen] Three weeks. That’s amazing. How long were you on the road itself?

[Clip ends]

• Okay, I’m going to hold that there. And I just want you to show another clip. I think it’s what’s really interesting to me is that he goes to this place for 63 days on his own. And instead of finding enlightenment, or meaning, or a vision, or whatever, what have you, he experiences complete internal aloneness. And not just the despair, but I think it’s that profound aloneness. And that’s what I think shook him up, and that became the driver for the writing. It was interesting that after this is when he wrote “On the Road”. And that, for me, is far deeper than anything that so-called Beat Generation of this or that.

But it’s trying to escape that aloneness that we all know is so darkly powerful in our lives and also so can be richly invigorating that he comes out with this incredible creative spirit because he’s finally… He’s no illusion. He understands that the ain’t an enlightenment, whatever for him personally. And he isn’t a kind of Catholic vision, a road to Damascus moment, the opposite. It’s very internal, accepting it’s completely alone. Sounds banal and cliché maybe and kitschy. But out of that comes the three weeks spurt of writing, which seven years of being on the road. But all of this, that’s a very different journey, it’s internal. It’s not about going on trains and driving everywhere and so on.

So it’s a very different journey that results. And I think that’s so deep inside the book and that section that he reads in the Steve Allen TV interview. Also, I think what what comes out, he talks about the death of my brother, the death of my sister, my mother being in… All of that feeds into this kind of interior monologue writing that he does. There’s a play which Beckett wrote called “Krapp’s Last Tape”. Beckett also talks about an epiphany moment going back in Ireland that he realised ultimately that his own truth was his own inner darkness, what he calls in the play, “Beckett and Darkness”. And it’s not dissimilar.

Again, I’m not trying to draw parallels between these writers, but it’s just not dissimilar how Beckett managed to shake off the influence of Joyce with all the huge amounts of language and words and remarkable rich poetry to become an essentialist, minimalist with words, and minimalist with visual images on the stage, coming from that understanding, well, this is who I am, this is my reality, my vision, this is what I write, from that internal knowing and acceptance that I’m alone. So banal, so simple, but profound, that can be honest to say I write from there and Kerouac with all the other influences in his writing that can come out. And I think that infuses on the book inside it so deeply called it a spiritual quest, called it a spiritual hunger for meaningful purpose, whatever, but it’s a loneliness and trying to risk the see, search, and that dichotomy.

It’s in Hemingway. It’s in so many of the writers throughout the ages. Okay, I just wanted to do one other little section from the same piece here where we get the sense of the influence of jazz, which I’ll just show you.

[Clip begins]

• [Narrator 2] French. Kerouac felt more at home in the anonymous streets and jazz clubs of New York. Here he found the heart of his lifelong fascination with America’s subterranean low life, the world of beat, the dark world of street life. It was in the sweet brash wheel of the street, the new sound of Charlie Parker’s jazz, that Kerouac discovered his new way of writing. He wanted to write like Parker played, letting her all flow spontaneously.

• This was what Charlie Parker said when he played, “All is well.” You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning Like a hermit’s joy, or Like the perfect cry of some wild gang at a jam session, “Wail, Wop”. Charlie burst his lungs to reach the speed of what the speedsters wanted and what they wanted was his eternal slowdown. A great musician and a great creator of forms that ultimately find expression in mores and what-have-you. Musically as important as Beethoven yet not regarded as such at all, a genteel conductor of string orchestras in front of which he stood, proud and calm, like a leader of music in the great historic world night and wailed his little saxophone the alto with piercing, clear lament in perfect tune and shining harmony.

• Charlie Parker was a great hero of his whom he identified.

[Clip ends]

• And just as a way of, you can see the influence of jazz on his writing and his influence of African American, the roots of jazz, the roots of blues coming out of slavery, obviously, and the whole history of African America. But finding a beat, a spark, a moment within all that horror of that history. This is one of the great phrases, seems simple, but I think it’s powerful of Kerouac, “Be in love with your life, every detail of it.” It’s just a way of putting words, which for me takes it slightly out of cliché. This is Langston Hughes’s poem, the great African American poet, written in 1923, “Jazzonia”.

Jazz is beginning early, early days of jazz, and he’s trying to capture it, but how does Langston do it? How do you do it? Not through politics, not through the obvious. Oh, silver tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul! In a Harlem cabaret, Six long-headed jazzers play. A dancing girl whose eyes are bold, lifts high a dress of silken gold. Oh, singing tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul! Were Eve’s eyes in the first garden, just a bit too bold? Was Cleopatra gorgeous in a gown of gold? Oh, shining tree! Oh, silver rivers of the soul! In a whirling cabaret, six long-headed jazzers play. For me, there’s a spirit, there’s a beat. Inside the despair, the pain of slavery, there’s a beat of the soul, there’s a beat of a moment that he tries to capture.

It’s just a human moment in this very early beginning, new style of music jazz that Langston Hughes captures. And for me, it’s one of the poems I really loved, and I think a very underrated poem of Langston Hughes. But it’s becoming more and more well-known, this poem of his now. And the fact that it’s written in '23, that for me is what is also so powerful, which is part of very much, I think part of Kerouac’s world. It’s not only the Walt Whitman going through the Great America, the frontier, et cetera, but also in the city, finding others who have suffered, have gone through hardship, and trauma, and horror in life.

Something that is a beat, that is a spark. It’s a great phrase in the Tarantino film “Pulp Fiction” where they go into Uma Thurman and the Travolta character go into, I’m sure people remember, the restaurant which is full of the wax figures and the actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses dressed as Marilyn Monroe, or Clark Gable, all the other James Dean, all the other iconic figures and mythical figures of America. And they’re ordering, but they’re living in this wax as the Travolta’s character says, well, to Uma Thurman, “It’s a wax museum. We’re having a burger in a wax museum.” America is a wax museum, but the Travolta character sits, but it’s got a pulse. It’s got a pulse even though it’s a wax museum now. And that’s Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” from the nineties.

And I think it’s a beat in the wax museum inside from the Whitman influence to all the others. That, for me, is the beat, together with beaten down. “I’m beaten to my socks,” as Kerouac would say, “of poverty, of hardship, of tough life. I’m beaten, I’m beat. I give up. I’m fed up. I can’t take, it’s enough.” But at the same time, there’s another kind of beat. And I think he’s constantly torn between those two, for me, eternal human spirits, striving and defeat, fighting, searching for that moment of a beat and defeat and being beaten constantly in an inner struggle in himself. And then finally, if I can share with you from Langston Hughes, I’m sure, man, you know his great praise, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or does it explode?”

And this, for me, captures something of Kerouac and the book. It’s a dream that’s on the road that’s coming of age, all the stuff I’ve spoken about, the search, the freedom, the hunger, et cetera, even going up Desolation Peak that mountain, going a bit crazy, but discovering what he discovers internally. Is it going to dry up? It’s a dream deferred because he’s not seeing the enlightenment that either Buddhism or his Catholicism might imagine for him. Will it dry up like a raisin in the sun or does it explode? Or is it caught in that endless tension between the two? That, for me, captures much more of the word beat and Kerouac’s great novel.

Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Really appreciate.

Q&A and Comments

Okay, Mitzi. Sure with Anderson? Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. The link. Gerald David, the benzo in Kerouac context was benzo dream, amphetamine.

Okay, thank you very much, Gerald. I stand corrected. The jazz pianist “On the Road” was a young George Shearing. Great, thank you.

Romain, artists and their mothers. As you say so, well just like the rest of it, only talented. Why should we expect more? Okay, great. I find that relationship with his mother fascinating 'cause he’s 43, 44 when he goes back to live with his mother. That’s the powerful connection.

The interviewer and the clip was Steve Allen then Harriet. And “On the Road” being authored by a woman. Great question. I don’t know, we can only speculate, maybe for another whole discussion.

Q: Romain, was internal journey marred by his alcoholism? A: I think that it became far was ironically after the fame 'cause I think he really wanted to be taken as for a serious writer, not just as this cult leader figure of the Beat Generation. And I don’t think he could deal with it. I think that it was just too much.

Jill, I thought that the narrator on the Irish documentary said that Kerouac went to Desolation while waiting for it to find a publisher, then wrote it coming down. Yeah. He did exactly. He tried to get things published before and had taken years. It had been rejected, it’d been this, been that, et cetera, et cetera. And he did write it after coming down from the mountain.

That’s the Lorraine Hansberry. Exactly, Karen, she took it from the Langston Hughes poem, which is a wonderful player first, Lorraine Hansberry is player. Okay, thank you.

Torn between beats. Lovely phrase, Romain. Thank you.

Carol. Thanks. Cheryl. Thank you. John. He never made in World War II, failed boot camp. Yeah, but he was in the Merchant Marine and then he was in the Navy, but before actual was sent out. I suppose honourably discharged for psychiatric reasons. The one psychiatrist said he was schizophrenic and the other one said he was of indifferent character. I don’t know how these terms were then or now for that matter.

Rhonda, appreciates. Thank you. Elliot, was a Hudson. Ah, great. Gerald. Okay, thanks. And Sonya. Ferlinghetti.

No, he was published by Viking Press. “On the Road” was first published by Viking Press. I mean, there’s a lot of edits, and cuts, and changes, but it was first. Okay, let me just see if anyone else.

Ruth, thank you. Marcia, thanks.

Q: Gita, any of the inattentions we face today? A: Well, that’s what I think, Gita. It’s a great point because that’s what I think. I don’t really read these guys again, men or women, or look at them just because they were sort of interesting years ago, or for only historical interest. I look precisely as you’re saying, Gita, through contemporary eyes. And I try not to over romanticise or idolise, but to see why am I drawn to this one or that one just instinctively? And it’s because of trying to look through current eyes of what’s going on in the Marvin Gaye phrase. What is going on not only in America, but in the world? And can these writers help us understand anything of our moments? If not, I wouldn’t really look at them again. So I agree 'cause we live in times, ironically, after the end of the Cold War and the crash of 2008. What is going on, not only Brexit or America, but more widely, globally? What’s happening with all the divisions, and splits, and conflicts? Can these writers maybe help us with a gleaming moment of understanding, even if it’s a moment?

Okay. Thanks very much, everybody, and appreciate.

Take care. Stay safe.