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Kerouac For Grown-Ups
— By Kevin Fenton’81

In high school, a friend of mine crawled out of his bedroom window and into a tree and recited Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" to the neighborhood. He probably didn’t read the whole poem; it is too long to be proclaimed while suspended in mid-air, and it is land-mined with images which make teenage boys uneasy. My guess is that he recited just enough to have a story to tell:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection in the starry dynamo of the machinery of night. . . .

We loved Ginsberg’s "Howl" and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as literature but I suspect we loved them even more as gesture. We tried to apply their lessons to the thoroughly Caucasian streets of Winona, Minnesota. Is there any other movement in American writing in which it is so easy to lose the literature in the lifestyle?

The Beats encouraged this, although if they had known that it would trivialize them, they probably wouldn’t have. "Angelheaded Hipster" could be a comic book hero who "ate fire in paint hotels," "disappeared into the volcanos of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadows of dungarees," "drove crosscountry for seventytwo hours," and "dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time and Space." Remarkably self-canonizing, they became less writers than icons.

In the illuminating collection of correspondence between herself and Jack Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair In Letters, 1957-1958, Joyce Johnson transforms the icons back into men. She appreciated the Beats’ accomplishments—in fact, their project organized and energized her life. And, because she sometimes lived with Kerouac, she saw the Beats’ faults strewn across her couch and sitting at her kitchen table. Kerouac was alcoholic, and, at times, amazingly clueless. He was a 36-year old man who lived with his mom. He was sexist in the oblivious way that men were sexist in the 1950s. But Door Wide Open also shows that he was more than that—open, kind, dedicated, charismatic in the original sense of the word, and willing to risk obscurity for his art.

There is humor and vulnerability—i.e., humanity—here. She writes to Kerouac:

Howard dances knee-in-the-groin style but is picking up on a new style now which is the ‘I don’t give a shit for you, baby’ style to be done with slick hair and long cool body in a red shirt and an unremovable cigarette—while the girl knocks herself out.

And the humanity in these letters had a surprising effect on me. For the first time in a long time, I thought that the Beats might be something other than an adolescent passion.

In fact, they may have something to say about the way we live now. Despite the cool of the stereotypical Beat, the actual Beats spoke with an earnestness which, when it doesn’t embarrass me, makes a great deal of contemporary culture seem cowardly. For example, I recently saw a movie called Croupier which, in some ways, seemed to have been made decades ago: a laconic casino employee is pulled into a conspiracy by a beautiful woman. I enjoyed Croupier but left dissatisfied because every emotion wore its condom of irony.

The Beats also knew the value of leisure, which is that it is necessary to spirituality. (Christians and Jews may want to take a glance at the third commandment.) In a world which glorifies 28-year old millionaires who sleep in their cubes, if they sleep at all, the idea of men who avoided work as a matter of principle is refreshing.

We live in a world which erases its past and avoids its poor, and which, despite its claims to connectivity, oftens consists of time spent, alone, staring at a computer screen. In another time of gadget-obsessed prosperity, the Beats called on us to leave the house; to breathe the air; to travel lightly and, most frighteningly, to make connections with people who are not like us. It isn’t a bad call to heed, or, at least, to consider—not as an alternative, precisely (I like my life) but as a corrective, as a way of ventilating a routine that might otherwise be too closed off. As someone who attended Beloit, with its insistence on mixing the liberal arts with the sometimes illiberal world, it pokes at my shoulder like a good angel.

The friend who shouted from the trees is now 41, with three children. When nieces and nephews graduate from high school, he gives each a copy of On The Road.

*Photo of Jack Kerouac copyrighted by Archive Photos, reprinted with permission.

Kevin Fenton’81 is the editor of Two Cities, a literary journal in Minneapolis, Minn.

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