I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy
Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s
I think one of the reasons the novel is attractive to readers in their early 20s, in particular, is it’s simplistic anti-establishment bias.
 |
| William S. Burroughs |
Consider the section in which Sal and the fang visit Old Bull Lee. Bull — the book version of William S. Burroughs — is a libertarian-anarchist junkie who loves his guns, experiments with all manner of drugs, reads voraciously, and is an aggressive skeptic, a pessimist of the first order, who trusts no one and nothing. He did things “merely for experience” (143), had multiple personalities and a
sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without a prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening widows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. (144-145)
He hated bureaucracy, which I think is a common human feeling, but he also hated “liberals; then cops,” an all-purpose dislike of anything that might interfere with fulfilling one’s desires. Remi Boncoeur, Sal’s old prep-school buddy, has a similar world view, an ingrained antipathy toward authority. Remi’s term for authority figures who impose limits is Dostioffski — a bastardization of Dostoevski, who Sal has been reading. The Dostioffskis of the world are there to keep you down; they are “the man,” the straight world, parental. They interfere with the hedonism that drives Sal and his friends, which is all about kicks.
There is a scene in San Francisco that allows me to how my view of the book has changed over the years, perhaps more than any other. Sal is staying with Remi, who is working as a security guard. He gets Sal a job, but there is not enough money coming in so they supplement their income by stealing food and supplies from the former military camp at which they work. Sal and Remi break into the barracks cafeteria, which they do frequently to stock up on supplies. Once inside, Sal goes “to the soda fountain.”
Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. Then we got ice-cream boxes and stuffed them, poured chocolate over and sometimes strawberries too, then walked around in the kitchens, opened ice boxes, to see what we could take home in our pockets. (70)
Sal views these break-ins as risky, but justified. He doesn’t necessarily put this justification in words, but he does describe it as part of a bigger adventure, as just another necessary experience. And the younger me thrilled to this, understood implicitly the anti-establishment, anti-authority motivation. Stick it to the man, my younger self says.
My older self, my 54-year-old self, cringes at this simplistic reading. There is injustice — the camp is paying starvation wages, which makes the theft necessary — but Remi and Sal’s actions are still morally suspect, at best, and exist outside of politics when what is needed to address the issue is a political response. This individual act of rebellion, as satisfying as it may be, will do nothing to alter the broader dynamics and, in fact, may leave a worse situation for those who come after Remi and Sal are long gone.
This comes up through out the book — authority and rules exist as impediments and nothing more, without distinction, without any sense that some may be necessary. It is very much an American mode of thought, a bowdlerization of Emerson on self-reliance or Thoreau’s jeremiad in “Civil Disobedience” against immoral government power. Sal, Old Bull, Remi, Dean view authority itself as immoral, because it interferes with their pleasure or their intellectual curiosity.
Sal, for instance, walks by themselves to one of the levees of the Mississippi, near Old Bull Lee’s house.
I wanted to sit on the muddy bank and dig the Mississippi River; instead of that I had to look at it with my nose against a wire fence. When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? “Bureaucracy!” says Old Bull; he sits with Kafka on his lap, the lamp burns above him, he snuffs, thfump. His old house creaks. And the Montana log rolls by in the big black river of the night. “Tain’t nothin but bureaucracy. And unions! Especially unions!” (148)
This puts me in mind of Thoreau, the conservationist/naturalist, and the political rebel. Thoreau romanticizes the woods in Walden, is a narcissist of the first order. In a 2015 essay in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz describes Walden as
less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.
It is a fanatic’s book, a “paean to living purely, with all the moral judgment that the word implies” (Schulz). Walden was published nearly a decade after Thoreau’s seminal political essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which has been used as the foundation protest movements as varied as the push for India independence to the American civil rights movement.
“Civil Disobedience” is, as I said, a jeremiad. It is harshly — and rightly — critical of the political class’ overt (in the South and among many northern bankers) and tacit (among northerners willing to compromise) support for slavery. Thoreau argues that individual conscience has greater authority than that of any government, refuses to pay his taxes, because they are used to maintain the slave regime and to wage an unjust imperial war against Mexico. This is his nonviolent protest. He goes to jail, promises to stay there, but is released after friends pay his bill.
It is a solitary protest, a personal protest. It is steeped in American individualism, and ultimately lacks the force the effect change. It is a personal complaint absent a movement, though it is built upon the same moral questioning one finds in Erich Fromm’s On Disobedience and the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Beats constantly rage against the straight world, against the impositions of authority, but they rarely — at least in the decade after World War II — fully consider what amounts to true injustice and what it takes to push back. Small individual protests and minor criminal acts stand in for a declaration of individuality, and it is rare that Sal or Dean, in particular, consider how their actions create ripples in the universe, that they affect others in ways they do not foresee or perhaps care to see.
This is hedonism run amok. Hedonism as a philosophy seeks to maximize pleasure, but it also has an eye on the way our actions affect others. It is an extreme form of utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize good — an action is judged as positive if it creates more good than bad, if more people benefit than are hurt. Hedonism functions the same way, but the Beats, many among the Sixties generation, many of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, ignore the damage that can be left in their wake.
This is a young-man’s attitude, but it has infected the broader culture — think of all the dopey t-shirts available in t-shirt shops that glorify the act of getting falling down drunk or proclaiming the right to be an unmitigated asshole.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said in the 2005 conversation. “Grab ’em by the pussy.”
And this sums up our current cultural moment, one in which rich and powerful men like Trump and Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Ben Rothlesberger, R. Kelly and so many other feel as if there are no limits, as if everything including women’s bodies and minds are their’s regardless of whether there is consent.
But I’ve gone off on a tangent — I’m not implying that Sal and/or Dean or the rest of the On the Road gang operate in this way. But we can’t ignore the selfish elements of their world view — or I can’t today.
