As a bien-pensant liberal from the other side of the Atlantic, I have long believed that many American bien-pensant liberals are simply mislocated. There are personalities which are simply incompatible with the sense of vastness and transcendence evoked by certain landscapes (the middle of the American continent is one of these, but the great Eurasian steppe would do it, or the Australian outback, or anywhere else that carries the impression of having been very recently subject to the personal interference of God, as it were), and such personalities, being essentially unsuited to such places, would benefit from an extended stay in my beloved home country, England, which is built on the right scale for them. Everything in England, every hill, every dale, is human-sized, and for that matter, human-made — very few people now can even visualise what the moors or the fens would look like without human intervention; at the vanishing point of every landscape in England, I think, there is a human figure, and it is this essential domestication that permits certain temperaments to breathe more easily here. This is not to say that the English landscape lacks either beauty or tremendous intensities of feeling, but there is something comprehensible about it; even the Romantics' Lake District is, when you come down to it, a very nicely delineated and effable little corner of the sublime, you can take all in and feel that you have made a measurable stride towards understanding, and nothing about it carries the sense that its optimal inhabitant is really something much larger than yourself. And I think that it suits a great many people perfectly well to feel, in this way, at home in the world and not cast loose in it. Others seem to need regular inoculations of humility, which is to say, of their true size in physical space. For everyone else, I suppose, there's Mastercard.
Very well said. For my part I tend to fluctuate hard between attraction to the most arch and precise and witty English writers and the slightly gee-whiz and zoomed American visionary stuff. Lots of other wonderful literary traditions in the world but those are my two great loves.
Terrific stuff. Where has the yearning for transcendence gone? It surely hasn’t vanished, but you’re right to say that bien-pensant liberals are among those most poorly equipped to pursue it.
I took my own solo road trip in 1992, taking a dean’s leave from college after flunking a bunch of courses. I was a very sheltered middle-class boy with a car and credit card borrowed from my father; I was afraid of everyone. But I too had my moments of vision: camping jn a Texas campground decorated with a thousand antlers, getting kicked out of Circus-Circus in Vegas for being underaged, driving all night through the streets of Los Angeles, climbing Coit Tower in San Francisco for the first time, smoking ciggies at the foot of Mount Rushmore. And I glimpsed people very different from me, and felt the tug of liberty strongly enough to move to Montana a few years later. All very naive, no doubt, but true to capacity for wonder awakened by the American landscape and its people.
Really appreciate the defense of the visionary in such a cynical age as ours.
I'd throw Steinbeck in the mix of the authors you have in conversation. I read East of Eden and On The Road back to back in college, and while the latter has it's moments of ecstatic brilliance, I felt it was the slow power of the former that better captured the American idea. For a road trip novel, Grapes of Wrath allows you to slum it without wiring mom for a bailout. Nothing against Kerouac at all - he's part of the picture. But Cannery Row is the real novel about friendship. Travels with Charlie grasps the divided soul of the country. Steinbeck is a less obvious and less flashy visionary, but I think there is a good reason that he gets that 'S tier' slot in American letters.
Grapes of Wrath is also a fine reminder that the visionary and the true of spirit doesn’t have to be apolitical. It’s not the politics or the yearning for justice per se that’s the problem with modern lit; it’s the wag-the-dog phenomenon of politics subordinating the vision and soul of the writing and thus smothering it.
Great stuff! I suspect the disproportionate gayness and class/race mixing stuff isn't coincidental: the relationship between transgression and transcendence is a complicated one made simpler if women are left out of the picture (Foucault is rarely criticised for slumming.) I agree with you on Burroughs, although Ginsberg is naturally my guilty pleasure (I've not read On The Road).
I note you slip in Blake as an honourary American. My personal gripe with America the Free is the idea that freedom is something quintessentially American, as if America is the only country in the world with open roads and open skies.
Yes definitely something that could be expounded on at great length as a tradition going through Melville and onwards-- the pirate utopia that is those two things precisely bc there are no domestic women around to cramp your style. Burroughs is v explicit about this. In the published version of OTR (not the scroll which I read) all the references to mothers are changed to aunts-- just like Oscar Wilde! Just like (afaik lifelong asexual) Wodehouse!
And yeah I like Ginsberg too, I find the carnival showman he became a little risible but Howl is great as is Kaddish and (my favorite) A Supermarket in California and a few others.
Blake is obviously as English as crumpets but between America a Prophecy and appearing in a vision to the masturbating Ginsberg I think it's fair to call him the Magna Carta to this tradition's Declaration of Independence. You're not wrong about the America stuff, but I do think the circumstances of America's founding are unique and echo down the ages, whether you consider it a noble enterprise of the spirit or a great lie dreamed up by rapacious slavers or something in between.
I realize I'm late to this party, but I am one of those whose life was shaped by OTR.
My first copy was a gift from a sweet-natured acid-eating football player in my hometown, circa 1970. It struck every chord in my limbic system, and I quickly devoured every Kerouac title I could track down.
In truth, I wanted to BE the next Jack Kerouac, and spent much of the next decade trying to live out the life he depicted in his novels. I hitchhiked up and down the Eastern Seaboard as a teen and, after an abbreviated stint in the military, thumbed my way from Mississippi to Seattle. Always, I was on the prowl for adventure, thrills, escape.
At one point, I went so far as to hitchhike into Chicago, certain I would find some trace of Kerouac's Loop there: the mad jazz clubs, Negro trumpet players wailing at after-hours joints, Benzedrine....
Yeah, I had it bad.
Looking back, I can admit the failings cited - privilege, racism and sexism - but I can also read Kerouac's work in the context of its time. Very few people even knew the word 'feminism' back then, and damn few were contemplating white privilege. It seems unlikely a budding Kerouac could or would tell those stories the same way today.
However, whatever the author's missteps, and the absolute disaster he made of his personal life, I feel no embarrassment at my youthful fandom and enthusiasm. In following Jack and Neal's Excellent Adventures across the continent, I explored an America I feel privileged (that word again) to have witnessed before it disappeared. I also got turned on to a world of literature that was vast, limitless, revolutionary in places, and always a joy.
And, while I am now one of those grumpy old 'back in my day' complainers (at times) I am still exploring whatever's left of the America I knew. Not by thumb any longer, but I've taken my greasy old Harley and my road-weary Dodge van the length and breadth of the Lower 48, seeking out the backroads and high passes, searching, searching, searching.
There is no greater happiness.
One last note, about Edward Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang is a fine, fun, exuberant novel, but Desert Solitaire is a brilliant treatise on wilderness, and The Brave Cowboy is compelling.
This sounds a bit strange, reading from France, because I don't think I ever encountered such disdain for Kerouac. I may be influenced by people around me who hold him in high regard, but I don't think I've seen much of that in academia as well. I suspect it may come from some snobbery from us : we're not so interested in american bourgeois realist novels (European ones are the originals), but if there are not some exotic new world adventures, some vast areas of wilderness or some unruly sea at some moment, we're going to be disappointed.
I should add that I'm from Brittany, where Kerouac's family origins lay ("Kerouac" is as local a surname as can get) and we like to hail him as one of our own. There is a very funny moment in Satori in Paris where he visits my hometown in search of his roots, hates it, but nonetheless kind of manage to capture its soul in one single anecdote.
I wasn't aware either that some scholars liked to lecture against Roberto Bolano and this strikes me as worst. Jean Franco's comments sound to me not only unserious (a novel should be analyzed on its merits and on the ways it manages to achieve what it's tasked itself to do, not on outside political grounds) but it also seems to me it's a gross misreading, since everything in the Savages Detectives and everything in 2666 is intensely political ! All of the literary chapters in the Savage Detectives are Bolano assessing how different people - different writers - reacted to the political dead ends they were facing in their countries, some by being broken, others by assimilating and collaborating. The disenchantment in the book comes from the youth movements and energy from the beginning being crushed, and how people were broken by this repression and became unable to live a life in another way than by drifting. The problems of criminality that are hinted in the Savages detectives are laying the ground for the absolute nightmare that Mexico is going to become by 2666. 2666 is a novel that is entirely about exploitation, misogynistic exploitation, social exploitation, neocolonial exploitation, racist and antisemitic exploitation and Bolano makes up literary tricks that gets you to confront your inner racist prejudices. The Savage Detectives is the avowed inspiration to recent Goncourt winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr who uses a similar structure to confront neocolonialism and how African literature is evolving. GOD ! What more does she want ??
(Rereading the reference to her article, I realize I read too fast and that the political aspects of the novel is well taken into account. I'd have liked to read the actual article to read the critique in her own words and see if any merit could be found to it, but it's only available if one pays 48$...)
Trying not to get too long winded but two other remarks :
1. "Visionary" & "bourgeois realist" literatures are more intertwined than may first appear. Balzac is supposed to be one of our quintessential bourgeois realist novelist, but he also wrote fantastical novels and his worldview was deeply influenced by visionary illuminists like Messmer and Swedenborg. I once read a great literary criticism book about his portraits that successfully made the case that most of his portrait are tied to an element : some characters are fire, others are watery, etc. Nothing is really realist once you scratch the surface, much of what happens does so through a strange struggle of energies. As Baudelaire said, "everyone in Balzac's world, even his portresses, possesses genius. Every soul is like a fire-arm loaded to the muzzle with will-power."
2. I think much of the condemnation for Kerouac, Bolano, etc. may be stemmed in a wariness for what, for lack of a better word, I'd call the vitalism in their books (a focus on life, energy, etc.). It's true that vitalism is an ambiguous value : it's also a staple of fascism, for instance. But I'd argue, perhaps because of my own tastes, that it's also important and that it's important to recognize and appreciate the open, progressive version of vitalism : the one you may find among people like Roberto Bolano, Jack London (there are few things better than the Road or some of the short stories in the Oyster Patrol), Samuel Fuller (talking about his autobio the Third Eye as much as about his films), Tolstoy, Blaise Cendrars, Mark Twain, the other people you mentioned, etc. Some may argue that vitalism may be inherently tied to machismo, aggression, and this may be true to some extend (I should add here that I'm a woman writing this) but I do think there are important things to save here.
Thanks yourself! Yes fully agree on both points. Balzac is a huge blind spot for me but I got really into Flaubert this year and he also has his phantasmagorical side, as I'm sure you're away. It's always fun and sometimes clarifying to write about dichotomies but anything truly great, when you look closer, contains everything in a sort of fractal way. Social novels are novels of interiority, Emily Dickinson is also Walt Whitman and vice versa. I'll have to check out Samuel Fuller's autobio, I'm a big fan of that era of Hollywood.
"anything truly great, when you look closer, contains everything in a sort of fractal way." I fully agree !
I heartily recommend Samuel Fuller's autobiography, it spans from his youth and his experience as a muckracking journalist while still a teenager (with John Huston's mother as his mentor !) to World War 2 and then to his films, with his commentary. What a life !
Loved this, but just to play devils advocate a bit… I think the disdain for Kerouac is less about his un-wokeness (there are many writers who are far worse offenders on that count and might be the subject of attempted cancellation but not provoke *embarrassment* in the same way) and more the way that the very “romantic anarchism” the Beats embodied came to define youth culture in the following decade and then be subsequently commodified and sold in every imaginable way in all the years since. The wild unhinged spirit of youth on the open road is a beautiful thing, something to be cherished and revisited when possible, but it doesn’t contain much of a path toward building an actual adult life in this unforgiving world. I was born in the 80s but I’m convinced we’re all still living in the ashes that fell out of the failure of utopia to cohere from the flowering of the 60s …And On the Road is part of the genealogy of that false hope, the oh-so-marketable youthful delusion that transcendence can be found in hedonism an open heart and the open road.
Right, I agree with that (and yes, I think it often takes woke forms just bc that's the currency of the age, but obviously no one is putting half the energy towards disparaging those worse offenders so I was trying to pinpoint part of the reason why). You only have to look at Kerouac's own life as an example of what not to do, and taken as a whole I think the Beat story is ultimately very sad. I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that you can just read Kerouac and Bolano etc in lieu of stuff that involves real and difficult adult problems. At the same time it's also possible to lose touch w/ that youthful spirit and in that loss come to resent it.
As for the failure of the sixties, yeah, I agree the signs aren't good, though I'm not sure if it's right to categorize it as a failure just bc utopia did not arrive. I don't believe in the New Jerusalem anyway, but I do believe in temporary, ephemeral ones.
As an aside I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the main subculture in San Francisco right now involves meditation and psychedelics and free love but all oriented toward building some horrible AI god and without even any decent music.
Ha. Well, I think it's either the best candidate for an emergent synthesis (in the Hegelian sense) of the ongoing post-60s moment or else another sad drain-circling rehash of the past. We'll see! America.
To be clear, I don’t think most critics of Kerouac would actually articulate this, partly bc it would sound too conservative. But I think it undergirds it!
Thanks! TBH I tried to read the Monkey Wrench Gang a while ago and found everyone in it so obnoxious that I couldn't finish, he might have to stay in the non-rehabilitated pile.
And yeah Marfa is amazing. I cynically thought it might be Silver Lake in the Desert, and sure it sort of is but it's also so weird and remote and beautiful. I loved West Texas and I'd love to get back there. The skies there are like nothing I've ever seen.
The only Abbey I've actually read is Desert Solitaire. It is, I think, pretty routinely criticized, for what are admittedly very fair reasons (there's one part where he's basically like "there should be no paved roads in national parks, because things should be hard and real, and if you're disabled... sorry, sucks to be you!" This is, I agree, very bad), but he's also criticized for just having an old school and now out-of-fashion approach to conservationist views, and I personally find a lot to admire in those views.
There really is something enchanting about parts of West Texas. Sitting in one of the canvas tents at El Cosmico, while a desert thunderstorm rages outside... it's pretty great.
God yes to Other Kerouac! OTR has never been my favorite, but three of them -- Visions of Gerard, Dr. Sax, and Maggie Cassidy together are an evocation of the texture of an Interwar childhood unlike any other I've read.
Loved the comparison with Revolutionary Road. They really are twin works. And you hit the nail on the head on Kerouac differentiating himself through action. It's an anachronism to measure his social interactions by our 2020s ethical standards. As you said, the very fact that he tried (and talked to/lived with people that Frank and April Wheeler never would've) is rather transgressive and worth highlighting.
Hi Henry, this was an absolutely thrilling and energizing read. I enjoyed it very much. So many succinct points to linger on, and your romantic view of America seen through these great writers is one, as a long-time expat, I’ve pondered often in recent years. For instance, Whitman and Thoreau can make me tear up for a nostalgia I’ve never personally known. Yates and Cheever feel accessible and personal to me in ways no other writers can, although theirs isn’t a world I know with any immediacy. But maybe it’s the kind of struggles and aspirations one grows up with, regardless of decade. Unpopular to say, but maybe it’s class? To have the luxury and privilege to have time for certain worries and disappointments.
One point you also made that stuck with me, about fiction, is the particular liberal view of certain writing appreciated “in the wrong way by the wrong people”. Unfortunately this is a relatively unpopular sentiment, but it’s one that’s become all the more clear to me in my years abroad. Somehow contemporary liberalism demands readers to accept without understanding, without questioning, and I wonder how useful that really is.
This was a wonderful read, and I love your photos! They remind me of "road movies," something like Wim Wender's Paris, Texas. Definitely agree with you here: "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?"
Great piece. I’d say Pistelli and GA are both correct, and that the outlaw utopia is often (always?) bound up with the subjugation of other people. This tension exists in the very “discovery” of America, of course. This doesn’t mean we should dismiss the American project—I still think it’s an admirable experiment—but the costs can’t be ignored either.
Another thing that the comment about the lack of state reform in Bolano brought to mind (lol): one of my favorite lines from any movie is the last line of this Italian movie called “Illustrious Corpses.” (It’s one of those paranoid 70s thrillers.) A Communist, explaining to others why they have to withhold information from people protesting in the streets, says “the truth is not always revolutionary.” Then there’s the sound of the crowd turned up to a deafening volume and the movie ends. Whenever I read Marxist criticism that criticizes a book like in the Bolano example, I think, sorry, but the truth is not always revolutionary (and literature has to follow truth wherever it goes).
Really great writing.
As a bien-pensant liberal from the other side of the Atlantic, I have long believed that many American bien-pensant liberals are simply mislocated. There are personalities which are simply incompatible with the sense of vastness and transcendence evoked by certain landscapes (the middle of the American continent is one of these, but the great Eurasian steppe would do it, or the Australian outback, or anywhere else that carries the impression of having been very recently subject to the personal interference of God, as it were), and such personalities, being essentially unsuited to such places, would benefit from an extended stay in my beloved home country, England, which is built on the right scale for them. Everything in England, every hill, every dale, is human-sized, and for that matter, human-made — very few people now can even visualise what the moors or the fens would look like without human intervention; at the vanishing point of every landscape in England, I think, there is a human figure, and it is this essential domestication that permits certain temperaments to breathe more easily here. This is not to say that the English landscape lacks either beauty or tremendous intensities of feeling, but there is something comprehensible about it; even the Romantics' Lake District is, when you come down to it, a very nicely delineated and effable little corner of the sublime, you can take all in and feel that you have made a measurable stride towards understanding, and nothing about it carries the sense that its optimal inhabitant is really something much larger than yourself. And I think that it suits a great many people perfectly well to feel, in this way, at home in the world and not cast loose in it. Others seem to need regular inoculations of humility, which is to say, of their true size in physical space. For everyone else, I suppose, there's Mastercard.
Very well said. For my part I tend to fluctuate hard between attraction to the most arch and precise and witty English writers and the slightly gee-whiz and zoomed American visionary stuff. Lots of other wonderful literary traditions in the world but those are my two great loves.
Terrific stuff. Where has the yearning for transcendence gone? It surely hasn’t vanished, but you’re right to say that bien-pensant liberals are among those most poorly equipped to pursue it.
I took my own solo road trip in 1992, taking a dean’s leave from college after flunking a bunch of courses. I was a very sheltered middle-class boy with a car and credit card borrowed from my father; I was afraid of everyone. But I too had my moments of vision: camping jn a Texas campground decorated with a thousand antlers, getting kicked out of Circus-Circus in Vegas for being underaged, driving all night through the streets of Los Angeles, climbing Coit Tower in San Francisco for the first time, smoking ciggies at the foot of Mount Rushmore. And I glimpsed people very different from me, and felt the tug of liberty strongly enough to move to Montana a few years later. All very naive, no doubt, but true to capacity for wonder awakened by the American landscape and its people.
Really appreciate the defense of the visionary in such a cynical age as ours.
I'd throw Steinbeck in the mix of the authors you have in conversation. I read East of Eden and On The Road back to back in college, and while the latter has it's moments of ecstatic brilliance, I felt it was the slow power of the former that better captured the American idea. For a road trip novel, Grapes of Wrath allows you to slum it without wiring mom for a bailout. Nothing against Kerouac at all - he's part of the picture. But Cannery Row is the real novel about friendship. Travels with Charlie grasps the divided soul of the country. Steinbeck is a less obvious and less flashy visionary, but I think there is a good reason that he gets that 'S tier' slot in American letters.
Yeah East of Eden is great. Cannery Row I need to read. I've spent time in that part of California and there's nothing like it.
Steinbeck’s unfinished Arthuriana book is great too, especially as a meeting of those two traditions you mentioned up the thread!
Grapes of Wrath is also a fine reminder that the visionary and the true of spirit doesn’t have to be apolitical. It’s not the politics or the yearning for justice per se that’s the problem with modern lit; it’s the wag-the-dog phenomenon of politics subordinating the vision and soul of the writing and thus smothering it.
Great stuff! I suspect the disproportionate gayness and class/race mixing stuff isn't coincidental: the relationship between transgression and transcendence is a complicated one made simpler if women are left out of the picture (Foucault is rarely criticised for slumming.) I agree with you on Burroughs, although Ginsberg is naturally my guilty pleasure (I've not read On The Road).
I note you slip in Blake as an honourary American. My personal gripe with America the Free is the idea that freedom is something quintessentially American, as if America is the only country in the world with open roads and open skies.
Yes definitely something that could be expounded on at great length as a tradition going through Melville and onwards-- the pirate utopia that is those two things precisely bc there are no domestic women around to cramp your style. Burroughs is v explicit about this. In the published version of OTR (not the scroll which I read) all the references to mothers are changed to aunts-- just like Oscar Wilde! Just like (afaik lifelong asexual) Wodehouse!
And yeah I like Ginsberg too, I find the carnival showman he became a little risible but Howl is great as is Kaddish and (my favorite) A Supermarket in California and a few others.
Blake is obviously as English as crumpets but between America a Prophecy and appearing in a vision to the masturbating Ginsberg I think it's fair to call him the Magna Carta to this tradition's Declaration of Independence. You're not wrong about the America stuff, but I do think the circumstances of America's founding are unique and echo down the ages, whether you consider it a noble enterprise of the spirit or a great lie dreamed up by rapacious slavers or something in between.
I realize I'm late to this party, but I am one of those whose life was shaped by OTR.
My first copy was a gift from a sweet-natured acid-eating football player in my hometown, circa 1970. It struck every chord in my limbic system, and I quickly devoured every Kerouac title I could track down.
In truth, I wanted to BE the next Jack Kerouac, and spent much of the next decade trying to live out the life he depicted in his novels. I hitchhiked up and down the Eastern Seaboard as a teen and, after an abbreviated stint in the military, thumbed my way from Mississippi to Seattle. Always, I was on the prowl for adventure, thrills, escape.
At one point, I went so far as to hitchhike into Chicago, certain I would find some trace of Kerouac's Loop there: the mad jazz clubs, Negro trumpet players wailing at after-hours joints, Benzedrine....
Yeah, I had it bad.
Looking back, I can admit the failings cited - privilege, racism and sexism - but I can also read Kerouac's work in the context of its time. Very few people even knew the word 'feminism' back then, and damn few were contemplating white privilege. It seems unlikely a budding Kerouac could or would tell those stories the same way today.
However, whatever the author's missteps, and the absolute disaster he made of his personal life, I feel no embarrassment at my youthful fandom and enthusiasm. In following Jack and Neal's Excellent Adventures across the continent, I explored an America I feel privileged (that word again) to have witnessed before it disappeared. I also got turned on to a world of literature that was vast, limitless, revolutionary in places, and always a joy.
And, while I am now one of those grumpy old 'back in my day' complainers (at times) I am still exploring whatever's left of the America I knew. Not by thumb any longer, but I've taken my greasy old Harley and my road-weary Dodge van the length and breadth of the Lower 48, seeking out the backroads and high passes, searching, searching, searching.
There is no greater happiness.
One last note, about Edward Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang is a fine, fun, exuberant novel, but Desert Solitaire is a brilliant treatise on wilderness, and The Brave Cowboy is compelling.
This is a great article, thank you.
This sounds a bit strange, reading from France, because I don't think I ever encountered such disdain for Kerouac. I may be influenced by people around me who hold him in high regard, but I don't think I've seen much of that in academia as well. I suspect it may come from some snobbery from us : we're not so interested in american bourgeois realist novels (European ones are the originals), but if there are not some exotic new world adventures, some vast areas of wilderness or some unruly sea at some moment, we're going to be disappointed.
I should add that I'm from Brittany, where Kerouac's family origins lay ("Kerouac" is as local a surname as can get) and we like to hail him as one of our own. There is a very funny moment in Satori in Paris where he visits my hometown in search of his roots, hates it, but nonetheless kind of manage to capture its soul in one single anecdote.
I wasn't aware either that some scholars liked to lecture against Roberto Bolano and this strikes me as worst. Jean Franco's comments sound to me not only unserious (a novel should be analyzed on its merits and on the ways it manages to achieve what it's tasked itself to do, not on outside political grounds) but it also seems to me it's a gross misreading, since everything in the Savages Detectives and everything in 2666 is intensely political ! All of the literary chapters in the Savage Detectives are Bolano assessing how different people - different writers - reacted to the political dead ends they were facing in their countries, some by being broken, others by assimilating and collaborating. The disenchantment in the book comes from the youth movements and energy from the beginning being crushed, and how people were broken by this repression and became unable to live a life in another way than by drifting. The problems of criminality that are hinted in the Savages detectives are laying the ground for the absolute nightmare that Mexico is going to become by 2666. 2666 is a novel that is entirely about exploitation, misogynistic exploitation, social exploitation, neocolonial exploitation, racist and antisemitic exploitation and Bolano makes up literary tricks that gets you to confront your inner racist prejudices. The Savage Detectives is the avowed inspiration to recent Goncourt winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr who uses a similar structure to confront neocolonialism and how African literature is evolving. GOD ! What more does she want ??
(Rereading the reference to her article, I realize I read too fast and that the political aspects of the novel is well taken into account. I'd have liked to read the actual article to read the critique in her own words and see if any merit could be found to it, but it's only available if one pays 48$...)
Trying not to get too long winded but two other remarks :
1. "Visionary" & "bourgeois realist" literatures are more intertwined than may first appear. Balzac is supposed to be one of our quintessential bourgeois realist novelist, but he also wrote fantastical novels and his worldview was deeply influenced by visionary illuminists like Messmer and Swedenborg. I once read a great literary criticism book about his portraits that successfully made the case that most of his portrait are tied to an element : some characters are fire, others are watery, etc. Nothing is really realist once you scratch the surface, much of what happens does so through a strange struggle of energies. As Baudelaire said, "everyone in Balzac's world, even his portresses, possesses genius. Every soul is like a fire-arm loaded to the muzzle with will-power."
2. I think much of the condemnation for Kerouac, Bolano, etc. may be stemmed in a wariness for what, for lack of a better word, I'd call the vitalism in their books (a focus on life, energy, etc.). It's true that vitalism is an ambiguous value : it's also a staple of fascism, for instance. But I'd argue, perhaps because of my own tastes, that it's also important and that it's important to recognize and appreciate the open, progressive version of vitalism : the one you may find among people like Roberto Bolano, Jack London (there are few things better than the Road or some of the short stories in the Oyster Patrol), Samuel Fuller (talking about his autobio the Third Eye as much as about his films), Tolstoy, Blaise Cendrars, Mark Twain, the other people you mentioned, etc. Some may argue that vitalism may be inherently tied to machismo, aggression, and this may be true to some extend (I should add here that I'm a woman writing this) but I do think there are important things to save here.
Thanks yourself! Yes fully agree on both points. Balzac is a huge blind spot for me but I got really into Flaubert this year and he also has his phantasmagorical side, as I'm sure you're away. It's always fun and sometimes clarifying to write about dichotomies but anything truly great, when you look closer, contains everything in a sort of fractal way. Social novels are novels of interiority, Emily Dickinson is also Walt Whitman and vice versa. I'll have to check out Samuel Fuller's autobio, I'm a big fan of that era of Hollywood.
"anything truly great, when you look closer, contains everything in a sort of fractal way." I fully agree !
I heartily recommend Samuel Fuller's autobiography, it spans from his youth and his experience as a muckracking journalist while still a teenager (with John Huston's mother as his mentor !) to World War 2 and then to his films, with his commentary. What a life !
so beautiful, Henry
Thank you Lucy!!
Loved this, but just to play devils advocate a bit… I think the disdain for Kerouac is less about his un-wokeness (there are many writers who are far worse offenders on that count and might be the subject of attempted cancellation but not provoke *embarrassment* in the same way) and more the way that the very “romantic anarchism” the Beats embodied came to define youth culture in the following decade and then be subsequently commodified and sold in every imaginable way in all the years since. The wild unhinged spirit of youth on the open road is a beautiful thing, something to be cherished and revisited when possible, but it doesn’t contain much of a path toward building an actual adult life in this unforgiving world. I was born in the 80s but I’m convinced we’re all still living in the ashes that fell out of the failure of utopia to cohere from the flowering of the 60s …And On the Road is part of the genealogy of that false hope, the oh-so-marketable youthful delusion that transcendence can be found in hedonism an open heart and the open road.
Right, I agree with that (and yes, I think it often takes woke forms just bc that's the currency of the age, but obviously no one is putting half the energy towards disparaging those worse offenders so I was trying to pinpoint part of the reason why). You only have to look at Kerouac's own life as an example of what not to do, and taken as a whole I think the Beat story is ultimately very sad. I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that you can just read Kerouac and Bolano etc in lieu of stuff that involves real and difficult adult problems. At the same time it's also possible to lose touch w/ that youthful spirit and in that loss come to resent it.
As for the failure of the sixties, yeah, I agree the signs aren't good, though I'm not sure if it's right to categorize it as a failure just bc utopia did not arrive. I don't believe in the New Jerusalem anyway, but I do believe in temporary, ephemeral ones.
As an aside I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the main subculture in San Francisco right now involves meditation and psychedelics and free love but all oriented toward building some horrible AI god and without even any decent music.
Ha. Well, I think it's either the best candidate for an emergent synthesis (in the Hegelian sense) of the ongoing post-60s moment or else another sad drain-circling rehash of the past. We'll see! America.
To be clear, I don’t think most critics of Kerouac would actually articulate this, partly bc it would sound too conservative. But I think it undergirds it!
Really choked me up at the end there Henry. Grateful to this piece and amen and amen again
Reminded me of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie:
https://open.substack.com/pub/lanceschaubert/p/david-bentley-hart-on-travelogues?r=25qi5v&utm_medium=ios
Dang, this is good. Rehabilitate Edward Abbey next!
Also - I'm glad you visited Marfa. Such a perfect place to include in this kind of thing.
Thanks! TBH I tried to read the Monkey Wrench Gang a while ago and found everyone in it so obnoxious that I couldn't finish, he might have to stay in the non-rehabilitated pile.
And yeah Marfa is amazing. I cynically thought it might be Silver Lake in the Desert, and sure it sort of is but it's also so weird and remote and beautiful. I loved West Texas and I'd love to get back there. The skies there are like nothing I've ever seen.
The only Abbey I've actually read is Desert Solitaire. It is, I think, pretty routinely criticized, for what are admittedly very fair reasons (there's one part where he's basically like "there should be no paved roads in national parks, because things should be hard and real, and if you're disabled... sorry, sucks to be you!" This is, I agree, very bad), but he's also criticized for just having an old school and now out-of-fashion approach to conservationist views, and I personally find a lot to admire in those views.
There really is something enchanting about parts of West Texas. Sitting in one of the canvas tents at El Cosmico, while a desert thunderstorm rages outside... it's pretty great.
I’ve always enjoyed this clip of Ginsberg and Dylan visiting Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Mass, in 1975:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ8HTu_MOMA
I remember this from Rolling Thunder Revue, one of my favorites.
God yes to Other Kerouac! OTR has never been my favorite, but three of them -- Visions of Gerard, Dr. Sax, and Maggie Cassidy together are an evocation of the texture of an Interwar childhood unlike any other I've read.
Loved the comparison with Revolutionary Road. They really are twin works. And you hit the nail on the head on Kerouac differentiating himself through action. It's an anachronism to measure his social interactions by our 2020s ethical standards. As you said, the very fact that he tried (and talked to/lived with people that Frank and April Wheeler never would've) is rather transgressive and worth highlighting.
Hi Henry, this was an absolutely thrilling and energizing read. I enjoyed it very much. So many succinct points to linger on, and your romantic view of America seen through these great writers is one, as a long-time expat, I’ve pondered often in recent years. For instance, Whitman and Thoreau can make me tear up for a nostalgia I’ve never personally known. Yates and Cheever feel accessible and personal to me in ways no other writers can, although theirs isn’t a world I know with any immediacy. But maybe it’s the kind of struggles and aspirations one grows up with, regardless of decade. Unpopular to say, but maybe it’s class? To have the luxury and privilege to have time for certain worries and disappointments.
One point you also made that stuck with me, about fiction, is the particular liberal view of certain writing appreciated “in the wrong way by the wrong people”. Unfortunately this is a relatively unpopular sentiment, but it’s one that’s become all the more clear to me in my years abroad. Somehow contemporary liberalism demands readers to accept without understanding, without questioning, and I wonder how useful that really is.
This was a wonderful read, and I love your photos! They remind me of "road movies," something like Wim Wender's Paris, Texas. Definitely agree with you here: "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?"
Great piece. I’d say Pistelli and GA are both correct, and that the outlaw utopia is often (always?) bound up with the subjugation of other people. This tension exists in the very “discovery” of America, of course. This doesn’t mean we should dismiss the American project—I still think it’s an admirable experiment—but the costs can’t be ignored either.
Another thing that the comment about the lack of state reform in Bolano brought to mind (lol): one of my favorite lines from any movie is the last line of this Italian movie called “Illustrious Corpses.” (It’s one of those paranoid 70s thrillers.) A Communist, explaining to others why they have to withhold information from people protesting in the streets, says “the truth is not always revolutionary.” Then there’s the sound of the crowd turned up to a deafening volume and the movie ends. Whenever I read Marxist criticism that criticizes a book like in the Bolano example, I think, sorry, but the truth is not always revolutionary (and literature has to follow truth wherever it goes).