Poor Kerouac

On the Road was the first book I didn't like. I was 17 and had been on a manic tear, thinking all famous authors were prophets. I was fresh off The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, and Kerouac stopped me in my tracks. I tried over and over again to get something out of it, but there was no magic. In the end, I threw it against a wall.

He had nothing to say. In my mind, poor Kerouac's beloved novel represented canonic bullshit, as American Beauty did around the same timesomething popular that was supposed to be meaningful but missed the point entirely.

But that was five years ago. Now I find myself in some sort of strange Kerouac idolatry. My opinion of his writing hasn't changed much. It's the world around me that's different.

The spur for this was Empty Phantoms, a recently issued collection of interviews with, and anecdotes about, Kerouac that a Press editor thrust on me. It was in reading this book that my image of Kerouac began to change from phony to idolnot necessarily an intuitive step, given how the book shows his rapid decline, bitter alcoholism and early death.

The book begins like this: On the Road explodes in 1957. It gets a rave review in the Times. Voice-type papers start jumping on the Beat thing. Profiles of Kerouac abound. Television gets in on the action.

These early media dispatches on the Beat phenomenon generally pigeonhole Kerouac as a menace responsible for juvenile delinquency, the prophetic leader of a new religious fanaticism or at least a pretender. ("We had 'Beats' back in the '20s you know, we just didn't call them Beats. Have you ever heard of the Dill Pickle Club?")

Other entries, written by Kerouac's friends after his death, ask that we ignore the hype and focus instead on Kerouac the artist. As they say, there's no there there.

I offer the square '50s press and overzealous old poets a compromise: Kerouac was a critic. An important, special kind of critic.

Kerouac saw something lacking in post-war life. What it was has been well-documented and rendered meaningless by repetition: materialism, suburbanization, hypocrisy, self-satisfaction and all the rest. What Kerouac nobly strove for was to get the big metaphysical stick out of the collective ass. This, too, has been well-documented.

It is once Kerouac has his hands on the stick that things get confusing. Announcing the demise of '50s hypocrisy, being heard by readers of the mainstream press and watchers of television, Kerouac helped put America into a strange sort of limbo wherein everyone knew that something required change, but no one knew how that change would happenor if it had happened already.

Hollywood made movies about Beats, but they were as goofy and uptight as movies about everything else. Kerouac gave interviews about angels and dreams, but they were still just interviews.

Eventually, America began to change more or less along the lines Kerouac had sketched out. It was dirtier than he had hoped, and the music was different, but the spirit was the same. Maybe this had nothing to do with Kerouac. Maybe he had just articulated clumsily what other more divinely inspired types were already brewing in a more divinely inspired way.

But history suggests otherwise: Bob Dylan loved Kerouac, claiming to be as inspired by him as by Woody Guthrie. And while Dylan is one of the great liars in American history, it's worth asking what he saw in a writer who seems, in retrospect, so crude and obvious.

Sometimes Kerouac was all shtick. "We were saints and angels and Villagers and we're beautiful," he told the Voice. "And we went to San Francisco and did beauty there."

But he didn't whore out his shtick.

"Why is there so much violence?" asked Mike Wallace of the New York Post. "Why do they drive, drive, drive? Why do they go, go, go? Why the rush?"

"Oh that's just lyricism," said Kerouac. "Wild motorcycle rides under the moonlight.A lyrical thing. It's not so unusual."

If he had played up the violence and rebellion, he would have admitted to the Beats being some sort of anthropomorphized id of the sexual failings of the establishment, maybe even some sort of punishment sent by God. If he winked and nodded and hinted that he was just commenting on life, he would have admitted to participating in the grand tradition of academic squabbling and hypothesizing about the theoretical problems of the old guard's philosophies, like he didn't believe any of that religious nonsense.

Faced with the same dilemma, Dylan went on the attack. He didn't even bother trying to reason with the press. Instead he made them feel terrible about themselves, badgering the young reporters to be less lame and blaming the old ones for the sins of the world.

But he could afford to, because of the groundwork Kerouac laid. He was on the winning team. The world was changing, and everyone knew it. Time magazine wasn't giving any more lectures; it was getting them.

Just after chucking On the Road, I took mushrooms for the first time and had a prophetic insight. "Irony ingrained has produced navet." It came to me all at once. "We're in the '50s again, some kind of strange, neo-'50s renaissance."

The neo-'50s are upon us, and it is not as fun as I hoped. Observe the frantic, boozy heartbeat of this safe, frustrated city.

I kept thinking about my insight later, more sober. "It's seeming less cool to act like Tupac," I realized, "and more acceptable to act like the Fonz. This might not be a bad thing. After the Renaissance comes the baroque, when legs are meatier. After the '50s comes the '60s.

Still later, thinking it through while all the way sober, though, the neo-'50s haven't worked out so well, what with Bush as Ike and BET's ass-shaking party as the new "Leave It to Beaver."

"This is all so obvious," I thought. "Sure, driving is nice, boredom is bad, sex is fun, hypocrisy sucks. Who cares?"

But how to make a dent in this oppressive fog? No longer my exemplar author of crap, Kerouac is now my inspiration for keeping the neo-'50s bullshit out of my pores. But he's no example to follow. The malevolent squares can take many forms nowBush's favorite band is Creedence.