Kerouac's Legacy: Some Understated Strands

R. W. Watkins

Fifty years after the publication of On The Road, Kerouac's position in literary history as American stream-of-consciousness pioneer and encapsulator of the Beat Generation is simply undeniable; but, as I see it, there are at least four other major ‘strands’ to Kerouac's legacy that have been unfortunately understated.

One would certainly be his contributions to Japanese verse forms composed in English—not only the haiku that he is relatively well known for, but also that of the haibun. Haibun consists of prose of varying lengths interspersed with theme-related haiku (or sometimes the lighter senryu) following various paragraphs.

his desk now vacant,

sunlight pouring unbroken

into the bard's room

As Cor van den Heuvel (whom I seldom agree with on anything!) points out in his intro to the third edition of The Haiku Anthology (1999): “In several passages in Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac has come closer than any other writer in English to the terse, elliptical, nature-inspired prose that characterizes the genre [haibun]. His descriptions of his experiences alone on Desolation Mountain have the whirling brevity and vivid immediacy of some of Basho's great haibun. Unfortunately, the few haiku he includes are not of comparable merit.” From the final chapter of The Dharma Bums, shortly before descending Desolation Peak where he has been working as a fire lookout:

What is a rainbow, Lord?

A hoop

For the lowly.

Another understated aspect of Kerouac's legacy would be his cofounding (with William M. Gaines, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and various jazz musicians and their record labels) and popularising of a second artistic ‘establishment’, with its own sociopolitical values and criteria of worth and beauty—almost a bohemian parallel universe or alternative aesthetic ‘shadow cabinet’. Sometimes artists associated with this second establishment manage to cross over into the mainstream cultural market (as Kerouac himself did), achieving relative commercial success: Ginsberg, the early Marvel comics bullpen, Warhol, Dylan, The Doors, Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorcese, Hunter S. Thompson, The Clash, Jim Carroll, David Lynch, Matt Groening, Johnny Depp, Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc.; but usually such artists are content to work for a limited audience comprised of other members of this second establishment, with little thought for the mainstream of their chosen medium(s). For example, as a poet, who cares if, say, Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje has never even heard of me—I'd be much happier knowing that a hip musician like Ray Manzarek or Herbie Hancock was a fan. Similarly, a young blues musician might not give a tinker's damn what George Thorogood or Robert Cray thinks of him, as long as cartoonist Robert Crumb or poet Michael McClure is an admirer.

A third—and probably most understated—branch of Kerouac's legacy would have to be the darkest: his reactionary politics and social values towards the end of his life. Similar in this regard to his near-contemporary, cartoonist Al Capp, Kerouac can be seen as the beatific ‘big brother’ or hepcat ‘granddaddy’ of Mordecai Richler, Steve Ditko, Frank Zappa, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Lou Reed, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Johnny Hart, Bill Maher, Pete Townshend, and many others who have watched in dismay as the leftist revolutionaries of old have disintegrated into arrogantly close-minded lobbyists and legislators. (“How many liberators / really want to be dictators?”—Jello Biafra/Dead Kennedys) In this sense, Kerouac is the father of political incorrectness and sociocultural curmudgeonism; he knew that the further one goes in either direction, left or right, he or she is bound to encounter thoughtless, dogmatic conservatism of one sort or the other. Ironically enough, this may yet prove to be the most important ‘strand’ of his amazing legacy.

The fourth strand of Kerouac's legacy I've chosen to address is one some might deem inappropriate and even disrespectful, given the current occasion of On The Road's 50^th Anniversary as a published novel. True, On The Road is a landmark American novel, and a landmark novel in the larger global context of the mid 20^th Century; but from my viewpoint, it is not the quintessential Beat Generation novel that it is purported to be, based simply on the historical period in which it is set. As David Gates has pointed out in Newsweek, On The Road takes place between 1947 and 1950, with serious attention paid to the ‘vestiges’ of the 1930s Depression era. Thus there was an innate sense of nostalgia present in the novel from Day One; this in turn was amplified by a five- or six-year delay in finding a publisher and actually getting the book before the public. As a result, On The Road—like John Clellon Holmes's Go (1952)—is actually more representative of the 1940s bebop period, of ‘hepcats’, sawdust floors, petty thieves and small-time hoods; a period in which ‘beat’ was a term known merely to the cutting-edge literary world and the so-called beats themselves. No mention is made of Eastern religions, Japanese poetry, folk music or bohemian coffee shops. In fact, if the book had been set in just a slightly later period (circa 1955), it might be interpreted as a rock 'n' roll novel, a literary Rebel Without A Cause for the university-age crowd. It is actually the novel's aforementioned successor, The Dharma Bums, that captures Beat culture ‘full-blown’, so to speak. This is the novel in which the famed poetry reading of October 13th, 1955—featuring Ginsberg's initial public performance of ‘Howl’—takes place at the Six Gallery in San Fransisco. This is the novel in which East meets West—both the East and West of New York and California, and the East and West of Han Shan and Levis blue jeans. This is the novel in which a young American Buddhist poet by the name of Gary Snyder (‘Japhy Ryder’) is introduced as a figure of note. Hell, this is even the novel in which Kerouac (‘Ray Smith’) goes mountain climbing in a beret! On The Road may be the quintessential post-WWII American ‘hipster’ novel, a swirling account of proto- or inchoate beats at play; but The Dharma Bums was almost undoubtably the first novel to represent what comes to mind when we hear the Herb Caen-coined term ‘beatnik’ and virtually all its trappings, and it is for this reason that it is the quintessential Beat Generation novel (for better or worse), and surely an overshadowed element of Kerouac's literary legacy.

I'm sure every avid reader or writer out there with a considerable knowledge of Kerouac and the Beat Generation in general has his or her own ‘shopping list’ of neglected and under-recognised aspects of Kerouac's legacy. Without question, there are numerous other achievements and thematic nuances of the man and his output that I could have examined in such a context. Given the occasion, I thought the time was right for me to share a few that I considered most vital. After all, it's a slim chance I'll be around to witness the 100^th Anniversary of his most famous work.

Last update : 05-09-2007 20:59

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