Sal Paradise, Stephen Dedalus and me

by David Benjamin

“Jack Kerouac the last time he visited my apartment 704 East 5th Street, N.Y.C., he looked by then like his late father, red-faced corpulent W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror, grimacing on D.M.T. I’d brought back from visiting Timothy Leary at Millbrook Psychedelic Community.” — Allen Ginsberg, 1964

MADISON, Wis.—I come to bury Jack Kerouac, not to praise him. But before I lift a shovel, I probably have to explain to you who the hell he was. When I was in high school. Kerouac’s “novel” On the Road, although forbidden from every English department curriculum in American education, was required reading for every teenager with the slightest intellectual aspiration.

So I read the book, and decided—despite the consensus of my generation—that Kerouac was full of crap. After, for reasons I can’t explain, I tormented myself by “hate reading” more and more Kerouac. I consoled myself for this waste of time with the belief that I’d accumulated lots of ammunition with which to fight the Kerouac-lovers of my acquaintance.

Trouble is, I never had that argument. By about 1969, when Kerouac died of cirrhosis at the age of 47, he had become passé as both a writer and cultural icon. Credited with launching the “Beat” movement, he had, long before his death, turned his back on the counterculture that regarded him—mistakenly—as its angry young progenitor. He died an alcoholic Republican.

Ironically, I was influenced more by Kerouac than contemporaries who viewed him with an admiration that bordered on devotion. I understood why my friends wanted to emulate Kerouac and write like him. He epitomized the facile fallacy that “creative writing” teachers nowadays preach to their teenage students: “Write what you know. Write about yourself.”

This is an unnecessary suggestion. High-school kids are solipsists, egocentric, insular and fragile. They draw into themselves instinctively. When I was in high school, I kept a diary, confessing obsessively my trials, tribulations, hungers, desires and unrequited passions for the latest girl whom I had a case of the hots. I knew these nocturnal emissions were self-indulgent and whiny. I never shared my diary. I never went back and read it. I threw it away before I graduated.

Meanwhile, as I slogged through On the Road, I recognized Kerouac as a fellow of diarist—like me, but run amok. He had written about himself, tirelessly, grandiosely, logorrheically, without any evident awareness that he just might be an overbearing bore. His legendary keyboard technique was to pour a stream of consciousness onto a continuous roll of paper that spared him the interruption of rolling a new sheet of foolscap onto the spindle. This frenetic method had a sort of innovative charm, but to a seasoned author, it suggested the victory of raw energy over coherence. Truman Capote, apprised of Kerouac’s nonstyle style, said, famously, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

I got that. One of my adolescent pastimes was to sit at my typewriter for an hour or so, unspooling random thoughts, making spontaneous associations and connecting it all together—without capitalization or punctuation—with dubious segues and sudden non sequiturs. When I had four pages of this verbal mulligatawny, I taped the sheets into a square large enough to make a book cover. (I always cover the book I’m reading.) that was both interesting and idiotic. Unaware then of the Kerouac/Capote dichotomy, I had no idea I was mimicking one while agreeing with the other.

Ironically, I learned more from Kerouac, by opposition, than from the more emulation-worthy Capote. Above all, while conceding the passages in his prose that were lyrical and inventive, I studied Kerouac as a model of how not to write. However, I also understood that Kerouac represents a broadly influential school of twentieth-century literature. He was prominent, if not foremost, among a “manosphere” of writers and poets for whom the significance of their vocation lay not so much in their written output as in their “lifestyle.” They contrived to live and behave, ostentatiously, beyond the pale—iconoclastic, impulsive, hedonist, contemptuous of middle-class mores and, too often, self-destructive. They were a community of elitists who dressed like slobs and drank like fish. Instead of telling stories, they did stuff and met people, then got around afterward to telling the story of what they’d done and whom they’d met. Some of this was worth reading. Most of it was turgid, self-indulgent shit. On the Road is a good example of both.

Go ahead. Try to read it. See for yourself.

I’ve always suspected that the inspiration for “gonzo” look-at-me writers like Kerouac, William Burroughs and Hunter Thompson (whom I forgive because he was funny) was James Joyce. In his breakout novel, Joyce presumed to call his obviously autobiographical hero an “artist,” a term rarely applied at that time to mere writers, not even Shakespeare. By thus anointing yourself, you assume a persona that once applied largely to mystic, mythic figures like Da Vinci, Delacroix, Modigliani, Van Gogh. You can languish in your garret, alone and palely loitering, groping for inspiration, sunk into a slough of despond, steeped in absinthe and opium, anguishing over each word in every tortured sentence, then ripping it all to shreds and wailing into the existential void. You don’t really have to put much of anything on paper. Your friends will understand. You’re enigmatic. You’re inscrutable. You’re an artist.

Kerouac taught me that I had to decide whether my “art” would be a monolog with myself or a conversation with, well, anyone willing to listen. This wasn’t really a choice. I had started foisting my less than limpid prose onto my classmates in fourth grade.

According to Wikipedia, Kerouac’s On the Road explores “themes of disillusionment, connection, and the American dream.” It was published eight years after J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye hit the bookstores, exploring themes of disillusionment, connection, and the American dream. Both books were deemed, by grownups, a “bad influence,” the seed of juvenile delinquency. Kids weren’t supposed to read them. So, kids read them.

Now that so much verbiage has flowed under the bridge, it’s possible to compare and conclude, thankfully, that Salinger’s Holden Caulfield proved a better, more lasting influence than Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. Kids still read The Catcher in the Rye, sometimes even in classrooms. On the Road seems more the relic of a bygone fad. This is true despite the fact that Kerouac’s working-class protagonist seemed, at mid-century, a likelier role model than Holden Caulfield, a college-bound, prep-school, New York City smartass with rich parents.

But, you see, Holden Caulfield’s conversation with the reader was only superficially about where he went, what he did and whom he met. He was telling an audience of peers what he felt, about himself and about the world, in a way that young people then felt, still feel, and will always feel. In his story, Holden Caulfield erects a facade of defiance that badly conceals an inner turmoil of doubt, fear and remorse. This shows through. Also, we like Holden Caulfield because, for all his insouciance, he’s humble. Even better, he’s funny. Every kid who read Salinger knew that putting up a front and laughing through the pain was a matter of survival. You could identify with Holden Caulfield in ways that you couldn’t relate to Sal Paradise, whose high-speed picaresque and self-imposed squalor was far beyond the lives, prospects and good taste of Kerouac’s youthful readers.

Here then, I propose, is the difference. Kerouac, writing about himself, typed out a stream of consciousness. Salinger wrote, in the voice of his character, a stream of conscience.