Giving Old Jack a Try

An effort to resurrect Kerouac

The Duluoz Legend by Joseph Rathgeber

I never liked Jack Kerouac; I can confess that here. It must be because I never got it. I read On the Road at university and simply thought, of the boring, interminable text that sprawled out before me, is that it? Do they really do nothing? Get nowhere? Learn nothing? The reader left with nothing?

I’d been told, once upon a time, that the book was a revelation. So many said — I could quote them if it wouldn’t be such a bore — that it was that book, above all others, that made them who they were. Showed them another side of life. Without it, goodness alone knows who they’d be. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Nothing you ever read will come close, I believe someone once implied — not to me. And you’re just the right age. A young poet of 22, Kerouac even says in this book, somewhere. I would have been nineteen or twenty then.

But all that praise seemed so insane, so implausible. How could anyone, I thought, be inspired by such insipid work?

Why didn’t I like what I read? I don’t think I’m too much of a snob. I can like things well enough that are imprecise, or tonal, moody or mood music. I don’t mind it, not in the least, when writers don’t seem all that motivated by plot and event and happening.

I was prepared to be moved along by timbre alone or made to think. One or two nice phrases, strange ideas. A little idiomatic language or spelling. That’s all I needed then. I was a captive audience. The perfect reader. I was, at that time, an easy mark. And yet I was not got and went ungrabbed. I did not catch the bug. And a handful of years later I’m writing this review, this bitter retrospective review, wondering why it all went so wrong.

Joseph Rathgeber produced this assemblage of poetry that is cut and striated from Kerouac’s long shelf of slight works. Kerouac wrote his own poetry but this is poetry from a new source. Poetry in some cases from prose; poetry from nothing. Verse ex nihilo.

What Rathgeber was trying to do in this book, he writes, was to give Kerouac back his energy. To give books that were in their time and subsequently derided a little life — to give them political energy, and a little credit for oddity, madcap oddity, for which some of the Beats and their surrealistic brothers are still cherished. Ginsberg was a nut but he could write. Not always — indeed, not often. But the man could write. Perhaps Rathgeber believes the same is true of Kerouac: that in his eccentric spellings, his phrases which seem a little off-beat, a little different, we might find a new artist, a new man.

A man, as Rathgeber writes, who is political, who says something about life and the human condition and the melange of influences that the latter half of the last century bred and combined and contorted.

What influences do we find? We find Christianity — but of a superficial sort. There is a big old man called God and a son, Christ, who is more often invoked as an oath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ the author might say, where something to happen to him.

We have some of the new age, new wave, newly spiritualised language with Buddha and Rama that floated and effervesced about that time. The idea of consciousness being not what we perceive it to be, that life itself is not a straightforward path from one thing to the next and then the end but a bizarre journey, a trip, as it were.

And we have the language of lounging, of squalor, of wasting time.

It’s in this domain, I think, that Kerouac most clearly speaks to us in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

We hear that the technology, the very architecture, of the world is being remade before our eyes. In what some believe fervently is an optimistic, wonderful way. It’s all going to change, baby! Soon there will be no blocked sinks because of AI. No dams or bridges will ever collapse again. There will be no dying plants because robotic watering cans will keep them topped up. There will be no ugly, dirty streets because we can remake the physical world as easily as imagining it.

That’s what those people say.

Many deranged young people truly believe that the world economy will grow and grow thanks to AI and won’t be hamstrung and stymied by process and people and politics.

How can reality dawn on such people?

This growth has, of course, failed to arrive, except in the companies who are selling it.

Will the labour market crash? It certainly seems as though there are no jobs. We have a crying, crippling labour shortage, we are told, but no one who actually lives in the real economy can believe that for a moment.

What we have, perhaps Kerouac would have said, is a shortage of wages. Not a shortage of workers. And in this gulf, this great yawning lack, we have the people Kerouac talked about. Between jobs; between romantic partners; between lives.

Maybe heading after some cheap amusement, some approachable, downmarket sleaze. Bits and pieces, poems and idle thoughts — ‘a Yugoslavian knife.’

Drifting around the world physically or psychologically. Unrooted, uprooted. With nothing to live for, nothing to go back to. And nothing — nothing at all — to do.