***From The Jean Bon Kerouac Beat-John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons Of On The Road

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons Of On The Road (They’re Not What You Think), John Leland, Viking, New York, 2007      

Everybody with any literary skills coupled with some wild-eyed youthful romance vision of the open road, long forgotten and suppressed, scurried like crazy to get something in print for the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s great American novel and classic road travelogue, On The Road, in 2007. While Jack Kerouac was clearly the leader of the pack of 1950s “beat” writers, and is rightly regarded as such by most literary critics and the general reading public still interested in such matters, the areas to be mined in order to say something new about that classic “coming of age” saga has gotten rather barren of late. So John Leland in the book under review, The Lessons Of On The Road, tried a different tact by going to the source as a reference point for an alternative way of living, or looking at living. Whether he was successful in that endeavor is an open question, although no question he provoked a certain amount of thought about the effects the book has had on the several “youth nation” generations since the book was first published in 1957.

For this writer, a member in good standing of the Generation of ’68, the generation after Jack’s “beats,” the import of the book was, despite Kerouac’s vociferous disclaimers to the contrary, as a road map to break out of the stifling bourgeois respectability that our parents, parents bringing up children in the frigid red scare Cold War 1950 night wanted to impose on us. In short, we  were mesmerized (we young men anyway) by the buddy duo of Dean and Sal as they headed out on the open highway, breaking convention, busting out the dope, lusting after women, and getting all naked and funky in the process while being be-bop daddies in the wide open towns of this country, especially  San Francisco. For us that was the great lesson and no more needed to be applied.           

John Leland’s analysis recognizes that aspect of the book but wishes to tell us that we, we of the Generation of ’68, had it all wrong because in many ways, political, social, literary Jack Kerouac was arguing for, searching for a way to deal with traditional values, was not looking to bust out but rather was looking for a home. And Mister Leland proceeds in a couple of hundred pages of analysis to lay out that case. To point out how conventional Sal/Jack and Dean/Neal when the deal went down actually were. Some of the points are certainly of literary interest, for example his sections on the Holy Fools, the goofs, the fellaheen, the search for lost fathers, the breaking out of the nine to five mold with a different work ethic, the effect of be-bop Jazz’s influence, and the deep influence of Jack’s growing up a hard Roman Catholic (Gallic version) on his worldview. Some interesting material to think through here but I keep getting this nagging suspicion that wine, women, song and the open road is what will draw the young (and others) to this book as we wait upon the centennial. Read up, please.