You can't howl a gripe!

Review of Kerouac's "On The Road"

In three hundred pages these fellows cross America eight
times, usually camping on friends or relatives; and they have
kicks. The narrator tends to become saddened by it all, but
gives little evidence of understanding why. The fellows seem
to be in their middle or late twenties ("not long after my wife
and I split up") surprisingly, for the kicks are the same as
we used to have less solemnly in our teens, between terms.
Mostly they are from the middle class. Many other young
men in their twenties and thirties call this book crazy and the
greatest, as if it were their history: they were there. So let's
look into it.

To an uncritical reading, On The Road seems worse writ-
ten than it is. There are hundreds of incidents but, through-
out most of the book, nothing is told, nothing Is presented,
everything is just "written about." Worse, the narrator seems
to try to pep it up by sentences like, "That night all hell
broke loose," when the incident is some drinking sailors re-
fusing to obey an order; "this was the greatest ride I ever
had," but nothing occurs beyond a fellow getting his pants
wet trying to urinate from a moving truck; "this was excit-
ing, this was the greatest" but it's not exciting. Soon, when
the narrator or some other character says "The greatest," we
expect that he means "pretty fair"; but alas, he does not
mean even this, but simply that there was some little object
of experience, of whatever value, instead of the blank of ex-
perience in which these poor kids generally live.

For when you ask yourself what is expressed by this prose,
by this buoyant writing about racing-across-the~continent,
you find that it is the woeful emptiness of running away from
even loneliness and vague discontent. The words "exciting,"
"crazy," "the greatest," do not refer to any object or feeling,
but are a means by which the members of the Beat Genera-
tion convince one another that they have been there at all.
"I dig it" doesn't mean "I understand it," but, "I perceive
that something exists out there." On me as a reader, the ef-
fect is dismay. I know some of these boys (I say "boys"; Jack
Kerouac is thirty-five) .

Last summer I listened to Kerouac's friend Allen Gins-
berg read a passage from his Howl; it was a list of impreca-
tions that he began pianissimo and ended with a thunderous
fortissimo. The fellows were excited, it was "the greatest."
But I sadly asked Allen just where in either the ideas, the im-
agery, or the rhythm was the probability for the crescendo;
what made it a sequence at all and a sequence to be read just
like that. The poet was crestfallen and furious; this thought
had never occurred to him. And yet, during those few min-
utes they had shared the simple-minded excitement of his
speaking in a low voice and gradually increasing to a roar; it
was not much of a poetic experience, but it was something, it
was better than feeling nothing at all that night. What
Kerouac does well, not just writes about, is his description of
the jazz musician who has hit on "it" and everybody goes wild
shouting, "Go! Man! Go!" But they cannot say what "it" is.
These boys are touchingly inarticulate, because they don't
know anything; but they talk so much and so loud, because
they feel insulted by the existence of the grownups who
know a little bit.

"You can't howl a gripe, Allen. You can howl in pain or in
rage, but what you are doing is griping." Perhaps the pain is
too sore to utter a sound at all; and certainly their justifiable
rage is far too dangerous for them to feel at all. The entire
action of On The Road is the avoidance of interpersonal con-
flict.

One is stunned at how conventional and law-fearing these
lonely middle-class fellows are. They dutifully get legal mar-
riages and divorces. The hint of a "gangbang" makes them
impotent. They never masturbate or perform homosexual
acts. They do not dodge the draft. They are hygienic about
drugs and diet. They do not resent being underpaid, nor
speak up at all. To disobey a cop is "all hell." Their idea of
crime is the petty shoplifting of ten-year-olds stealing ciga-
rettes or of teen-agers joy riding in other people's cars. But
how could it be otherwise? It is necessary to have some con-
tact with institutions and people in order to rebel against
them. It is necessary to want something in order to be frus-
trated and angry. They have the theory that to be affectless,
not to care, is the ultimate rebellion, but this is a fantasy; for
right under the surface, obvious to a trained eye, is burning
shame, hurt feelings, fear of impotence, speechless and pow-
erless tantrum, cowering before papa, being rebuffed by
mama; and it is these anxieties that dictate their behavior in
every crisis. Their behavior is a conformity plus royaliste que
le roi.

One kid (age twenty-one) visited my home the other night,
carrying his copy of On The Road. The salient feature was
his expressionless mask-face, with the squared jaw of uncon-
scious, suspicious watchfulness, the eyes in a fixed stare of
unfelt hostility, plus occasional grinding of his back teeth
at a vague projected threat. Even the hostility was hard to
make overt, but his lips cracked in a small childish smile
when he was paid attention to. "But nothing can be inter-
esting from coast to coast, boy, if you do not respond to it
with some interest. Instead all you can possibly get is to
activate your rigid body in various towns, what you call
kicks." He explained that one had to avoid committing one-
self to any activity, lest one make a wrong choice.

It is useful to place this inexpressive face and his unoffend-
ing kicks in our recent literary genealogy. Great-granddaddy,
I guess, is the stoical hero of Hemingway: Hemingway's
young fellow understands that the grown-up world is corrupt
and shattering, but he is not "Beat," for he can prove that
he is himself a man by being taciturn, growing hair on his
chest, and shooting elephants. He has "values" and therefore

can live through a few books. His heir is Celine's anti-hero, a
much shrewder fellow: he sees that to have those "values" is
already to be duped by the corrupt adults, so he adopts the
much more powerful role of universal griper and cry baby,
to make everybody feel guilty and disgusted. The bother with
his long gripe is that it is monotonous, there is a lot of oppor-
tunity for writing, but not even a single book. The next hero,
and I think the immediate predecessor of being on the road,
gives up the pretense of being grown-up altogether (a good
case is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye') : he is the boy in the
very act of being mortally wounded by the grownups' cor-
ruption. This terrible moment is one book. But you can't
cry forever, so you set your face in a mask and go on the
road. The adolescent decides that he himself is the guilty one
this is less painful than the memory of being hurt so he'd
better get going. The trouble is that there is no longer any
drama in this; the drama occurred before "my wife and I
split up" before I lost my father.

Sociologically, the following propositions seem to me to be
relevant: (1) In our economy of abundance there are also
surplus people, and the fellows on the road are among them.
There is in fact no man's work for them to do. (2) We are
inheriting our failure, as an advanced industrial country, to
have made reasonable social arrangements in the last cen-
tury; now when there is no longer a motive to work hard
and accumulate capital, we have not developed an alterna-
tive style of life. (3) The style that we do have, "Madison
Avenue," is too phony for a young person to grow up into.
(4) Alternatively, there is an attraction to the vitality (by
comparison) of the disfranchised Negroes and now the
Puerto Ricans; these provide a language and music, but this
culture is primitive and it corrupts itself to Madison Avenue
as soon as it can. (5) In family life there has been a similar
missed-revolution and confusion, so that many young people
have grown up in cold, hypocritical, or broken homes. Lack-
ing a primary environment for the expression and training
of their feelings, they are both affectless and naive in the sec-
ondary environment. (6) The spontaneous "wild" invention
that we may expect from every young generation has heen
seriously blighted by the anxieties of the war and the cold
war. (7) The style of life resulting from all this is an obses-
sional conformity, busy-ness without any urge toward the
goals of activity, whether ideal goals or wealth and power.
There is not much difference between the fellows "on the
road" and the "organization men" they frequently exchange
places.

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's practically
all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nu-
tritious and it was delicious of course. (Page 15.)

On other occasions, they eat franks and beans. More rarely
hamburgers, malted milks, of course. That is, the drink-down
quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the pre-cut meat
for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten
or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for
animal energy, but not much solid food to grow on. I sup-
pose that this is the most significant observation one can
make about On The Road.

For nearly two-thirds of this book one is struck, I have
said, by the lack of writing; the book is nothing but a con-
versation between the buddies: "Do you remember when?"
and, "Do you remember how we?" "That was the great-
est!" Here is confirmation that they, like Kilroy, were there;
but not much distilled experience for the reader. But then
(page 173) there is a page of writing, not very good and not
original it is from the vein of rhapsody of Celine and
Henry Miller nevertheless, writing. The situation is that the
narrator finally finds himself betrayed, abandoned, penniless,
and hungry in a strange city. The theme of the rhapsody is
metempsychosis. "I realized that I had died and been reborn
numberless times but just didn't remember" and this theme
is a happy invention, for it momentarily raises the road to a
plane of metaphysical fantasy. And this is how the passage
climaxes:

In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.
... Let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws.
There were places where they specialized in thick red
roast beef au jus or roast chicken basted in wine. There
were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the cof-
fee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow
mein . , .

Here, at least in wish, is a piece of reality that is not just
kicks and "the greatest"; he wants to eat this food. Silone
was right when he said that we must learn again the words
for Bread and Wine.

Paul Goodman,

From Midstream, Winter, 1958.