The Case for Jack Kerouac

Nuanced Discussions about Authors We’re Supposed to Hate

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But people have forgotten what literature is. Literature isn’t there for you to feel ideologically satisfied. It’s not intended for you to “like” the protagonist. It’s not made to make you feel happy, safe or protected. You’re not immunized with literature against annoying, spoiled, bratty central characters. That’s not the point. The point is to nail down some kind of universal human experience, something that makes you think, that challenges your assumptions, that annoys you yet pushes you, that makes you question your underlying ideas. If you had to “like” literature we’d be in a lot of trouble and a lot of books wouldn’t be read. (Which sadly I suppose is the case now.)

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Fewer people read today than ever before in modern times. Books used to be common, the TV of a whole generation, up until the 1950s. Since then tech has basically destroyed all that. Social media was the final murderer, replacing books and TV with 2-second clips getting 12 million views. We’ve raised a whole generation of socially-awkward, anxious kids who have little to no understanding of American history, read little to nothing in terms of books, are highly ideological, and are more interested in internet culture wars than serious debate, disagreement or dialectics. (Not to mention worthy literature.)

Into this stew of confused entropic anarchy we have the literary culture wars. Everybody knows about this. Hemingway was actually a terrible writer, not to mention a terrible human being, a womanizer of the worst magnitude. Catcher in the Rye is a trash novel written about a spoiled white kid who deserves to get punched in the face. Nabokov, a la Lolita, was a sexual predator and molester whose book should have been panned and censored back then but certainly should be now. Kerouac was a sexist piece of shit who couldn’t write, a weak, angry man who hated women and used them for his benefit. Henry Miller clearly hated women and used them only for sex and as social objects for his prose. (Just like, of course, to be contemporary and use a non-literary example: Jerry Seinfeld was never funny and once dated a teen girl in his 30s. Therefore: Terrible subhuman misogynist.)

Etc. On and on, ad infinitum.

The new literary royalty pronounce that writing should be anti-male, anti-White, and blatantly ideological. They claim that all of publishing is still almost completely White, and that Black and women writers just don’t get a fair shake. If you point out the fact that the internet has gone absolutely bananas since 2020 with supporting Black writers, or if you point out that every major bookstore punches you right between the eyes the second you walk in the doors with Black and non-White authors, if you consider the fact that more and more non-Black authors have complained about being rejected and censored by publishing, and despite the fact that most literary agents are women, and despite the fact that most readers are women, you of course get an angry and immediate eyeroll.

It's the classic Art Versus Artist argument which we’ve been having nationally and globally for generations. Can you read someone like, say, Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski and appreciate the art while also having an opinion about the subject matter, but separate these two things? If you can’t then you lack basic critical thinking skills. Think this is “both-sides-ing it?” I have news for you: Looking at both sides is also a factor of critical thinking. Always, always look at multiple sides of any issue; if you don’t, you aren’t truly understanding the issue, whatever it may be.

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Kerouac. He changed my life. (Some of you are now saying, Blah blah blah, Another White Man Who Liked Kerouac; boring; NEXT! Fine. Stop reading.)

I first read On the Road (1957) when I was 22 years old, circa 2005, when I was living with a punk buddy in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on Thomas Avenue in Pacific Beach, San Diego, about a 15 minute walk from the beach. We were like two circus clowns in that place; we stood out like a line of cocaine twisting between two classic novels. Surrounded by surf-bros and beach-bunnies and military people, we hated our new hometown. We’d moved from our native Ventura, a few hours north along U.S. Highway 101, desperate to get out and “see the world.”

I was a rich kid who’d gone to Catholic college-prep high school. Though I’d been drinking hard since sophomore year, and I’d hopped the freight train of anarchic punk rock, I was still in many ways innocent and naïve. It was around this time that I went back to my childhood roots—my mom was an author and she had an incredible library of classics—and started writing in a journal. At first it was bad, immature poetry, and then my earliest attempts at short stories; fiction. I’d always been a reader—my punk friends in high school encouraged me to read Brave New World, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc—but I’d never read anything that honestly, truly “changed my life.”

On the Road was radically different.

I remember reading the novel. It was summer. I worked a dead-end retail job in nearby La Jolla. My roommate was gone all the time, at punk shows, working at a Halloween party store open year-round, and sleeping over at his punk girlfriend’s house on SDSU campus.

There was something new, fresh, unique and totally different about this novel. For years I’d read about the Beats but, other than Ginsberg’s poetry, I hadn’t ever actually read any of their work. On the Road was the first novel I ever read that changed the way I thought, both about what and how a writer could put prose down on the page, and about my actual real life. The novel challenged my existence, challenged by bourgeois upbringing, challenged my notions of what it meant to be alive in the world. Kerouac’s book spoke to me, as if a hand reached out from the book’s pages, an arm from the musty, ancient 1950s and grabbed my collar, shaking me and exclaiming, LIVE, goddamn it!

Finishing the novel I knew something had changed inside me. Something fundamental had been rearranged, cosmically adjusted, altered in some profound, new way. I started working as many hours as I could. I didn’t go out much. I drank alone at the quiet, dark apartment. I had decided to follow Kerouac’s literary ghost and go “on the road.” I felt excited as well as terrified. Though I’d loosened the tie of my middle-class life when in high school—with the heavy aid of alcohol, punk rock and danger—I hadn’t really ever “taken off” on my own. I’d always cherished solitude and even loneliness, as my parents both had. I had friends and I dated girls but I liked being alone. But sitting around in San Diego wasn’t doing it for me.

So, when our one-year lease was up in June, 2006—I was now 23—my roommate and I split off, diverging in different directions. He went to Arizona to go live with an old mutual friend in Phoenix. I boarded an Amtrak train in downtown San Diego bound for Portland, Oregon, where one of my best high school punk buddies was going to college and living. That would be the start of my first wild Kerouacian adventure.

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That summer I took the train up north to Portland, twisting through some of the most gorgeous parts of northern California in Shasta County. I recall sitting, gazing out the thick double-pained windows, seeing the thick Douglas Fir all around me, snow in the distance even in June, and feeling free. I had a discman and I played a lot of Tom Petty during this trip, particularly the song, Straight into Darkness. This song seemed to somehow embody something secret, crucial and metaphysical during the trip. It drove an electric, dramatic shiver down my spine when I listened to it. I was living half in reality, half in fantasy.

I stayed in Portland with my buddy and his five punky-vegan-hipster roommates for a week and then started hitchhiking for the first time. The plan was to head south from Portland back down to California, and then catch another Amtrak train in San Diego again, east across America to New York City for the first time. I didn’t want to fly by plane; that completely missed the point. Too many people were worried about how many countries they’d been to when they should have considered how they traveled, not where or how many places. Americans seemed to have things ass-backward.

Kerouac was the driver behind all this travel—including of course the method—but I also possessed, like the young protagonist stand-in for Kerouac in On the Road, Sal Paradise, a deep thirst for adventure, life experience. The novel had taught me that education wasn’t the crucial component of being a good writer: Life experience was. Good writing wasn’t about doing the MFA or going to writers’ conferences, it was more than anything else a lifestyle, a sensitivity, a sort of metaphysical vision, a way of seeing the world. It was, I felt, innate, not learned. You either had that inherent talent and vision or you didn’t. Kerouac, I knew, had it in spades.