***In The Time Of “Beat Daddy” Jean Bon Kerouac-Jack Kerouac’s American Journey 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey Of On The Road, Paul Maher, Jr.,Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2007       

Everybody, everybody still breathing and with enough memory to pull it off, and 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 Paul Maher in the book under review, Jack Kerouac’s American Journey, tried a different tact by going to the sources, the real-life adventures by the people that were the models and sketches uses by Kerouac as that project came to fruition. While, as with most works that rely on Kerouac’s note and journals, the line between fiction and real-life after all this time is somewhat blurred there is no question Maher has 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 appeal and no more needed to be applied.           

Paul Maher’s story line recognizes that aspect of the book but wishes to tell us that we, we of the Generation of ’68, had only half the story, the literary half and that the real story behind that novel which took several years to publish after its completion (that publishing story is included here too) is almost as compelling. Although no question if Mister Maher’s work were the novel that it would have long ago gone on the remainder lists. The roar of the road becomes more humdrum when one see the actual actions of Sal/Jack, Dean/Neal and the large cast of characters that passed through this beat travelogue. While the wine, women and song aspect will always resonant with some of future reading publics the real-life figures were made of clay, would not pass muster on the women question, and would be far less romantic that today’s more appropriate anti-hero novelistic characters. Kerouac after all was trying to tell a story of a lost (maybe “a never was”) America with outsized cowboy and outlaw heroes out of the old West in the age of the New West. Throw in the reality of some extremely individualistic and at time bizarre behavior, Catholic mysticism, and the like and the novel certainly has greater appeal. 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 Kerouac’s book as we wait upon the centennial. Read up, please.