Lost Highways

a few words in defense of the visionary tradition, the road, america, etc.

(All photos my own)

I’ve been reading On the Road. I really, really, really, really did not want to write about it.

Lately I feel as if my work here has come dangerously close to resembling clocking in for a shift at the Dead White Male Rehabilitation Factory. Whether it’s Hitchens, Mailer, or Wolfe, the formula is the same: acknowledge the faults, point out the good things, and end in a sense of grudging admiration, having done my bit to ease the passage of these disreputable figures back into the canon. Sotto voce there is perhaps even a bit of prurient nostalgia for a time when writers were allowed to be so boisterous on the page, when they lacked an inner flinch, an inner censor, even if it came at a high cost to others.

I stand by everything I’ve said about those guys, but one must not travel the same road a thousand times. And writing about Kerouac, perhaps the most maligned canonical American author of the century, seems like self-parody, almost. And anyway he was never someone I had a particularly strong affection for; the only Beat I ever really loved was Burroughs. But my notes kept accumulating, my thoughts kept racing, and grand theories started formulating, theories about America, about the road, about the secret kingdom underneath it all. So hang with me, we’ll leave the book and light out for new territories soon enough.

Beyond the boundaries of North Beach the Kerouac Industry has fallen on hard times. Amanda Petrusich, who actually has travelled the byways and backroads of America writing books on blues and folk music and collectors of rare 78rpm records, must still flash her Legitimate Critic badge for the readers of The New Yorker and declare “At a certain point in a person’s life, liking Jack Kerouac becomes embarrassing.” The general strategy to writing sympathetically about On The Road in the 2020s is to confess that you liked it at fifteen, it was a huge part of your life, and eventually you outgrew it, but god dammit, that kid is still in you somewhere and it’ll always mean something to her. When I was a child, I spake as a child, et cetera, et cetera.

I, unfortunately, cannot lean on that old saw. When I was growing up in San Francisco, there were still a few old Beats around, part of the city’s literary fabric, but my natural interest in my forefathers was tempered with a typical and healthy teenage resentment of smug adults telling you what the counterculture ought to be, man. Anyway, if people go around saying a book is strictly for teenagers, smart teenagers will get a sense of the prevailing sentiment and skip those books entirely, which is why I only read The Catcher in the Rye and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this year. I did try On the Road around age sixteen and found it kind of boring. I’m not sure if I ever finished it. I mostly read science fiction back then.

But hey, at thirty it’s pretty good. Better than I expected at any rate. In fact I’ll go so far as to say it is a flawed and blinkered and sometimes irritating book that nevertheless has an irrepressible exuberance and vision to it that makes it more valuable than many of its more right-thinking contemporaries and has kept it alive throughout the years despite an air of institutional eye-rolling¹. There are wonderful little picaresque episodes and gorgeous descriptions of cities and highways and bayous and strange characters who wander in and out. The energy and pace, particularly in the original scroll version which keeps the formatting as one long paragraph and reverts to everyone’s real names, reminds me of one of those great 1950s Blue Note records by Hank Mobley or Art Blakey, all drums and bass and horns, drive, drive, drive². And the book is more ambiguous and self-critical about its middle-class protagonists searching for kicks among the down-and-out than its reputation might suggest (anyway, why does everyone forget how explicitly gay a literary movement this was?).

The major criticisms, though, are all still basically sound. Women exist in the novel to be fucked and do the dishes and occasionally cause problems (on second thought, I guess everyone forgets how gay the Beats were because you get the sense it’s because they really can’t stand those nagging broads). And a few ambiguities here or there don’t really change its naive exoticizing of the American preterite, whether black jazz musicians or Mexican grape pickers. If I were alive when On the Road became a national phenomenon and I were not among its chosen demographic, I could see myself getting pretty annoyed.

But as I said, I’m not here to steer the ship of criticism through the rapids of reputation. I’m after bigger game.

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What I’ve been thinking about is a persistent low-level hostility towards the visionary and the exploratory in the novel, a fear of it even. After all, there are definitely many worse books than On the Road, both aesthetically and morally, that people don’t seem to feel the need to apologize for or attack quite so vehemently. As it happens, there’s another late-50s-early-60s novel on my bedside table that I’m excited to start. It’s also about the stifling effects of placid suburban American culture and the search for something more and it even has a similar title: Revolutionary Road. Now, if its reputation is at all accurate I’m quite confident I’m going to enjoy Revolutionary Road and its portrait of the shattered dreams and broken promises of a middle-class 1950s marriage. But there’s something that bugs me in the different positions these two books occupy in the cultural imagination.

I’ll tell you what I mean. In an early section of On the Road, Jack falls in with Bea, a Mexican immigrant escaping from an abusive marriage. They begin an affair and Jack goes back with her to her family in Bakersfield, where they eke out a living picking cotton and grapes (“I was a man of the earth precisely as I had dreamed I would be in Ozone Park,” he rhapsodizes about subsistence farming, a condition that humanity has spent tens of thousands of years inventing ways to escape). Eventually they part ways, knowing it can’t last, and Jack wires his mother for money and gets on a bus back to New York.

This section left a bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does to many modern readers. Who is this guy to go bumming around some of the poorest and most put-upon people in the country, romanticizing their simple connection to the land, until he gets bored and goes back to his privileged life? The guy went to Columbia, for God’s sake! It’s just arrogant, insensitive cultural tourism in order to have some sort of groovy way-out identity-building experience, a perfect example of everything bad about the Beats and their purported vision quests that are really just interesting new consumer lifestyles.

And yet I also find myself thinking: shit, at least it tries. This is where Revolutionary Road comes back in. Now, I’m obviously not faulting Revolutionary Road for not being about Mexican laborers any more than I would fault Middlemarch or Anna Karenina; bourgeois marriage is one of the great preoccupations of the novel as a form. I’m just saying that no one would consider it immature if it happened to be your favorite book. Write a novel about escaping the suburbs and looking for a new way to live and it’s juvenilia, write a novel about staying in them and crumbling into despair and it’s a mature American masterwork.

It all made me think about an attitude that persists subtly among many right-thinking liberals (an attitude, I hasten to add, that I do not exempt myself from): any attempt by the educated classes to freely interact with the other tribes in America, whether separated by class or race or folkway or anything else, will always have some tinge of condescension or insensitivity or the stink of unearned privilege, so it’s better not to try (with exceptions, I suppose, being made for attempts to recruit them to some political program or other, or desultory charity work). If your novel never leaves the neighborhood, as these novels of suburban disenchantment don’t, it won’t offend. Avoid interacting with people in the wrong way by never interacting with them at all.

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The road novel in general seems to get a certain class of people hot under the collar. This hostility reaches its pinnacle in this frankly astonishing article by David Kurnick on the contemporary academic reception of The Savage Detectives, a book deeply indebted to and in conversation with On the Road, and a book that I actually did love as a young man and continue to love today. It turns out that bigwigs in Latin American studies hate The Savage Detectives. They don’t even really know why. They’ll throw any reason at the wall to see what sticks: Bolaño is a one-trick pony, he’s too theoretical, he’s not theoretical enough, he’s a romantic stereotype for gentrifiers and gringos, and most absurdly of all, Bolaño’s popularity is “an excuse for American readers not to read any other Latin American literature.”³ In general the actual problem seems to be that, like Kerouac, the wrong people like it in the wrong way.

The centerpiece of Kurnick’s exposé is a 2009 paper by the esteemed scholar Jean Franco called “Questions for Bolaño.” The actual paper is cloaked in more genteel academic language than this, but Kurnick sums up its basic preoccupations pretty well:

Franco establishes the kinship of The Savage Detectives with formally jumpy, art- and politics-obsessed novels by Julio Cortázar and Roque Dalton; she is acute, and dubious, about what she calls Bolaño’s “romantic anarchist” politics—his pre­occupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life, the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit appeals to state reform, a fatalism that can feel apolitical.

CHRIST!! There it is right there: everything I stand against. I’ll read a thousand mediocre, self-aggrandizing Kerouac ripoffs before I let these people dictate culture. Let’s go down the list:

• “Romantic anarchist”—I would be thrilled if I were tagged with this description, one of the ideal political temperaments for a poet or novelist. Let’s go ahead and censure Whitman and Melville and Blake for being those things while we’re at it (don’t you hate when you’re at a party and some Blake Bro comes up and talks your ear off about Orc and Urizen?). Give me romantic anarchists like the aforementioned or cheerful nihilists like Shakespeare and Flaubert. Only the really, really good, like George Eliot, can get away with being sensible liberals and almost nobody can get away with being a middle-class radical, spouting the rhetoric of human emancipation to conceal their secret desire for another bureaucracy to rise in.

• “pre­occupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life” —One can quibble with this I suppose, though it seems a strange thing to be bothered about. I’ll just say in its defense that if you’re younger than fifty or so, your oldest friendships will inevitably be older and more storied than your longest romantic relationships, even if their passion and intimacy manifest in different ways. Unless we should all be writing books about our parents, I guess.

• “the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit appeals to state reform” and “a fatalism that can feel apolitical”—tiresome, small-souled commissar nonsense, immediate Pay No Mind list.

What are we doing here? The visionary tradition, the quest narrative—away from the state, out on the road—is as old as literature itself. What is writing for if not to slip the surly bonds of earth? What is it for if not to chase after the transcendent, even if the attempt ends in disillusionment or disaster? None of these concerns are new. Eliot Weinberger points out that in the Jerusalem Bible, a 1966 attempt by eminent scholars and theologians to translate the Bible into unadorned language more appropriate to the desert tribes from which it sprang, many of the psalms sound strangely familiar. They sound, unintentionally, like 20th century beat poetry:

The voice of Yahweh over the waters!
Yahweh over the multitudinous waters!

The voice of Yahweh in power!
The voice of Yahweh in splendour!

The voice of Yahweh shatters the cedars,
Yahweh shatters the cedars of Lebanon,
making Lebanon leap like a calf,
Sirion like a young wild bull.

The voice of Yahweh sharpens lightning shafts!

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Perhaps now is the time to say that I also took a long car journey through America that was very transformative and important for me. Reeling in the wake of a shattered relationship a few years ago I packed up the car and spent weeks moving from Florida back to California, passing through the bayous and swamps of Louisiana and through the West Texas plains, through New Mexico and Arizona and Colorado and the bleak and blasted Nevada desert and back into the Sierras and home. I met a cowboy musician in Cloudcroft, New Mexico who was traveling from Lubbock to Denver and had shared bills with Terry Allen and The Flatlanders. I slept in a man’s yard on the Mescalero Reservation and we smoked joints and ate Cheez-its and he told me about growing up on the rez, and on the way out the next morning I took a wrong turn and had to inch along a muddy dirt road alongside a pack of jumpy, half-starved wild horses. I saw a huge black wildcat in the Sierras that to this day I have no reasonable explanation for. I found that something about being alone on the road makes you a better version of yourself: looser, more open, more willing to shed the burdens and expectations and prejudices of everyday roles and meet the people you encounter as they are, with no fear or expectations, face to face.

I say this appropriately chastened. I know that it takes a certain amount of privilege to be comfortable rambling around the country alone. But it’s probably the single best thing I ever did for myself. I find episodes from those few short weeks resurfacing again and again where I least expect them, in my creative work, in my outlook on life, and in my attitudes towards America and its inhabitants.

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Recently, first-team all-pro friends-of-the-blog John Pistelli and Gnocchic Apocryphon had an exchange where JP proffered the following about this country of ours:

One’s liberties are not up for deliberation. If they are, they aren’t liberties. (“Rights” are not liberties. That’s a word the state uses to pass off its presumptuous permissions as freedom.) The American left and American right both understand this, but they only apply it in selective and opportunistic contexts; hence why one loves to see a trans woman with a gun. Isn’t this—liberty, not democracy—the meaning of America, a country founded by rogues and extremists as a utopia for outlaws and cults?

To which GA responded:

I have my own “get off my lawn” type tendencies, but can this kind of Emersonian-Whitmanian pastoral really be squared with American history, with the place in the world we’ve occupied?

GA is entirely correct, it cannot. America isn’t an outlaw utopia, not the America of white picket fences and whites-only signs, of Exxon and OpenAI and Disney and the CIA all under the black sun. Not the nasty, rapacious, hateful America you can turn on the news and see.

And yet my heart can’t help but be with JP, and with William Burroughs, depicted in On the Road as “a Kansas minister with exotic phenomenal fires and mysteries” who “had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910 when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinamen smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone.” I do think that GA is wrong in a certain sense. Sometimes, in moments, in flashes, the outlaw utopia BECOMES real. It becomes real in part because our Whitmans and our Emersons and our Blakes, Dylans, Coltranes, Pynchons, Nelsons, and yes goddammit, even our Kerouacs all do their bit to dream it into existence. And I really did experience something of it when I drove from coast to coast and saw great mountains and vast canyons and met strangers and slept under the stars.

Marxists return again and again to the Paris Commune, their brief moment of possibility in which the future was unwritten, in which, maybe, a new society could actually be born. There are moments like that in American life all the time, certain moments that are possible here because of an ethos of individualism and self-creation that can be disastrous, that has wrecked too many lives to count, but that has also created wonders. Wonders that surface occasionally, briefly, in the jazz club and in the honky-tonk, in the light over the ranges on the cattle drive, in the still moment at the top of the arc of the Hail Mary pass and in the deep fly ball hanging in the air, the crowd willing it to go, go, go just a little further. And in the sensation of driving fast, up into the hills at last light, music blasting, destination unknown.

Robertsdale, AL

New Orleans, LA

Marfa, TX

White Sands, NM

Carrizozo, NM

Cloudcroft, NM

What is the Mississippi River?---a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out. So the stars shine warm in the Gulf of Mexico at night. From the soft and thunderous Carib comes electricity, and from the Continental Divide where rain and rivers are decided come swirls, and the little raindrop that in Dakota fell and gathered mud and roses rises resurrected from the sea and flies on back to go and bloom again in waving mells of the Mississippi’s bed, and lives again. So we Americans together tend as rain to the All-River of Togetherness to the sea, and out, and we don’t know where.

1. A few passages like this can cover a lot of faults.

2. I picked up the rougher, sparser Original Scroll version, which I think is the way to go and excises many of the flaws of the published version. I agree with Lucy Sante’s assessment.

“Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby […] The novel that “On the Road” became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.”

3. I read Borges, Cortazar, Parra, Fuentes, Ocampo, Aira, Casares, and many more for the first time because I got so into Bolaño in my early twenties. In every single book of his his characters live and breath literature and tirelessly talk about it. I only emphasize this to highlight for anyone who hasn’t read him what a completely ridiculous thing on every level this is to say. It’s like saying Anne Carson is preventing people from getting into Greek mythology. Bolaño, for his part, said this about Latin American professors at American universities:

“To attend a dinner with them and their favorites is like gazing into a creepy diorama in which the chief of a clan of cavemen gnaws a leg while his acolytes nod and laugh. The patron-professor in Illinois or Iowa or South Carolina resembles Stalin and that’s the strangest and most original thing about him.”

So I suppose that accounts for some of the animus.