On the road

'One the Road' being the book by Jack Kerouac bought on Rideau (see reference 1). As it turned out, a read both easy and interesting, if not very edifying.

I now know that Kerouac was born in the US to French Canadian stock, once potato farmers, and spoke a dialect of French call joual for the first five or six years of his life. A troubled background with a devout Catholic mother and a father who took to drink when his elder brother died of rheumatic fever. He himself appears to have been a serious drinker, if not a drunk, effectively dying of drink in his forties. As a young man he had got to Columbia on a football scholarship and dropped out. He then had an honourable, if inglorious war record, being discharged in short order by the US Navy with mental health problems. Despite all of which he managed to write a lot of books, of which this one was an instant best seller when it was first published in 1957.

There is a story that the book was typed in an eruption of creativity over some small number of days on a continuous roll of paper, perhaps teleprinter paper, without paragraphs or chapters. Further enquiries reveal that this was not the whole truth, with the book having a long gestation after the journeys which it described taking place in the late forties. Substantial chunks of it appeared in other, prior work. Despite it being a best seller when I was young, I do not think I ever read it. The circles I moved in at the time were more into Tolkien and Pentangle (the guitarist from whom was last heard of by me playing pubs in Swindon. I think he had substance problems too) than beat - and while I did read, or at least skim, the Lord of the Rings, my reading was largely on hold at that point.

I found the continuous text an affectation. The steam-of-consciousness style would not have been disturbed by the use of paragraphs and chapters, devices which have been in use for centuries as an aid to readers. There are three or four BOOK markers in-line in the text and I would have thought that one might have used them to break the text, if one was precious about introducing chapters after the death of the author.

But an interesting portrait of a particular class at a particular time. Not very edifying because Kerouac and his friends get up to a lot of anti-social, not to say criminal stuff. Maybe the Soviets of the time would have called it hooliganism and packed them all off to Siberia. They steal from shops and gas-stations. They make a great deal of noise. They invade houses on the slenderest of excuses. They drive cars without regard to their own safety or that of others. They treat their women pretty badly - although to be fair this did not appear to include physical violence.

All of which is mitigated, at least in part, by regular flashes of insight and humanity. Also a book which might be of particular interest to lovers of jazz of the period. Something called behop.

The book included three introductory essays which I found rather heavy going and wikipedia was not much better. But it did make me think that one might write a scholarly article entitled 'The generation of doctoral dissertations from the works of James Joyce and Jack Kerouac: a comparative analysis with special reference to geography'. Maybe next year. Notwithstanding, in other respects this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition was exemplary. A snip at $11.99CAD secondhand.

Reference 1: last body paragraph of http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/warf-warf.html.