Back in late 1987 I set off backpacking around the world for several months, a most amazing experience that I could write a lot about but won’t as the point I wanted to make was that travelling presents a multitude of opportunities to read books. In the back of the journal I was keeping, I listed all the books that I had been reading along the way, on buses, in hotel rooms, and on the beach, and it’s interesting to me to review that list as I peruse it now. I’m quite impressed: I see some classics of the dystopian genre (Orwell, Huxley, Kafka), some great American literature (Hemingway, John Irving, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), some stars of Brit Lit (Graham Greene, G K Chesterton, John Fowles, William Golding), and of course there had to be a classic about travel and freedom…and that classic was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.
On the Road was based on Kerouac’s travels with his buddies across the United States in the late 1940s. Being a voracious writer, Kerouac had channelled reams of stream-of-consciousness narrative (he called it “spontaneous prose”) into multiple notebooks and then spent a three-week period in April 1951 copying them all out into one long reel of writing; it would eventually be published in 1957 and become one of the great American novels of the 20th century, the crowning glory of the burgeoning Beat movement.
The novel is a roman à clef, meaning that, whilst its story and characters represent real events and people, it is written with a façade of fiction, and his buddies (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, themselves key figures of the Beat Generation) appear as fictional characters, with Kerouac himself cast as the novel’s narrator Sal Paradise. The plot is centred around several road trips that the protagonists undergo, and the chaotic adventures they experience.
The narrative is full of Americana which appeals to my romantic side (indeed, it was the image of the Wichita linesman in my last blog that got me thinking about On The Road in the first place). We read about long roads and highways, Cadillacs and Ford Sedans, cheap motels and Skid Row, nightclubs and bars, jazz and poetry, drugs and bordellos, and along the way get acquainted with forties New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago and St Louis and a myriad other towns and cities of America.
Although my own travel journal remains little more than a log of events, of interest only to me, Kerouac’s journals turned into a tour de force of literature and a fascinating insight into America’s counterculture.
