HELICON LITERARY MAGAZINE

            His hair gleams

On his arms and

Upper lip and toes with

Knees sharp bending over

Ankles—if you took my hand

It would be rough and calloused

Like a mollusk

And you’d want me

To take the oars and row

Us out to sunset.

            We drink tea milky

Sweet              and palms

Of thick bread soft

With butter;

Out on the water

There is no season but

Drift   and   pull water     and

Sift through the clouds of

Afternoon, grey fleeting

            tomorrow.

Paddle    paddle

                  row  and  sow

Your feet into planks and

Water

            Currach:

Take me to the other side

Teach me how blood was

This passage encapsulates Kerouac’s sensitivity, his vulnerability, his romanticism towards people and place, and the rolling prose that beautifies the world.  Most of all, it speaks to the experience of a person who is young, scared, and searching.

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

In the summer that I first read On the Road, I found myself working at an animal hospital, and sneaking American classics when things were slow.  I read Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Kerouac loved them all, and wanted to be able to write like an American great, with grandiose romanticism, with declarative sparse sentences, with uninhibited and confessional frenzy.  It was a hot day and I stood outside, walking a dog, sweating in my scrubs, the cars stopping and starting at the corner of Route 35 and Route 116, with one hand holding the leash as the dog snooped around the lawn to take a shit, and the other typing furiously into my phone about “the restlessness of the mind of youth” and the “screams and symphony of noises”.  It wasn’t original, and it wasn’t very good, but it was my best Kerouac imitation at the time.  Even then, I knew that I was imitating those great American writers, as I had written in my journal, “The challenge is to surpass emulation”.  This struggle is not unique though; many developing writers, including Kerouac, express concern with breaking out of the shadows of their influences.

Ann Charters, who wrote the first biography of Kerouac, outlines the importance of influences and growth in the process of writing On the Road.  Kerouac had great difficulty with the form and voice of the piece, scrapping it over and over again. He found that his literary influences such as Thomas Wolfe were unsuited for conveying the nature of his experiences with Neal Cassady.  Innovations in loose and free flowing prose replaced the conventional forms that restricted his ability to express himself in writing.  By channeling the influence of jazz and Cassady’s energy, Kerouac finds his own voice and style in the form of “spontaneous prose”.  His fascination with jazz appears in the essay Jazz of the Beat Generation, an excerpt of what would later become his famous novel. 

“Dean was directly in front of him with his face glued to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys; and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy mule’s heehaw and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along skittely-boom and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct”.

The influence of music is clear - the scene is not stagnant but alive and moving, the pace of the prose picks up as the sound intensifies, and his beautiful frenzy is captured in the excitement of the words.  Kerouac’s ability to build around an idea with words, before crashing down with clarity and understanding, speaks to the volume of this style.  Kerouac finds perfect subjects in jazz, in Dean, and in America – they are riveting and unknown, filled with restlessness, the splendor of the search, and the wavering resolution. 

This is not Hemingway, who took hours to write a single sentence, crafting the end of A Farewell to Arms thirty nine times because he wasn’t satisfied.  No, this was Kerouac, this was spontaneous and fast and jazz, and his writing style espouses an entirely different notion of what it means to write well and write honestly.  Some writers and critics expressed their disdain for this technique - Truman Capote said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.  By moving beyond the literary standards of the day, Kerouac alienated critics and writers who dismissed him as anti-intellectual and talentless.  With the insistence on moving on to different forms of expression, Kerouac and other writers of the Beat Generation paved the way for the emergence of post-modern writing.  Instead of sticking to the formula, Kerouac took literary traditions and innovated, only truly reaching his potential through the discovery of his own voice.     

After becoming famous, Kerouac produced “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, how-to declarations of his writing style and literary philosophy.  In terms of prose and pace, the way to write was “following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought”.  He focused on the here and the now and the expression of the self – he wanted to put his mind on the page and let the reader into the experience of his consciousness. Kerouac felt that “the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself”. 

I have used his two guides before, attempting to channel Kerouac into my own writing.  This summer, I put a jazz playlist, not knowing much about jazz, and I opened up my grey thin notebook and assembled an army of pencils and beer to get me through the night.  I proceeded to write for four hours straight in that notebook, filling up pages after pages, my hand cramping and sweating and collapsing, and then shaking it desperately into the air to get back to work.  At some points I stood up and paced and tried to clear my mind, but I was totally entirely helplessly immersed in the writing and everything just seemed to flow out onto the page before I was even thinking it – as if my hand and my brain were fused in secret partnership, and the price was a future with carpal tunnel.  Well, I thought it was beautiful, and then I read it later, and realized it was mostly shit, usually barely legible and sometimes incredible.  At the very least, the writing was honest. It was really my mind on the page, and there were connections that could only occur in free flowing inhibition. 

A unique voice is the culmination of influences that embraces a personal perspective – part skill and talent, part personality, part luck.  Hemingway said “what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made” – in trying so desperately to attain this unique voice, the writer flails wildly and succeeds only in the way that they have managed to put their mind into their work.  I don’t know if I can call myself a writer, but I know that I am amateur, clinging to the words of the minds that found their voice, and desperately searching for one of my own.

The movement to unique expression is evidence of growth, not only within the realm of writing, but also in personal development. Sal searches for meaning in life across America, in bars and jazz and cities and roads, always following Dean Moriarty, the mad saint who leads the way.  At the end of the novel, Sal finally establishes a path for himself and settles down, in contrast to way he initially “shambled after” Dean across the country.  The impact of influences, grappling with the world around us, and choosing a direction define the experience of being young. 

I realize now that Kerouac’s work had influenced me too much, in both prose and content.  I had written a story that begins “We liked to say that was the summer that we found it”.  I was looking for “it”, which meant being young, the delicate and dynamic experiences of taking life in, and all that jazz.  When re-reading On the Road, I discovered in horror that Dean Moriarty himself discusses an “it” too, one that he and Sal attempt to find, so what I believed to be an idea of mine was just the Kerouac’s words recycled for my life and stories.

Kerouac speaks to the young because of the incredible desperation and sincerity for his search for something real in life, in God, in America. I thought my vague search for “it” didn’t differ much from Sal’s, with him blowing back and forth across the country, always thinking that he would find what he was looking for in San Francisco or Denver, though the places were never quite what he expected.  I was young and restless, a kid home for the summer.  I wanted to drink with my friends and know the nights and experience, really experience, things.  There were times of transcendence, like the “it” of Sal and Dean – sprinting naked across the beach, gritty sand in my toes and spraying my calves, shivering and gleaming with the light of Lake Michigan, and standing on rooftops in Brooklyn, seeing the glow of the cities and the stars.

 I did those things, and yet I felt the same sort of dissatisfaction that Sal feels after spending time in cities across America.  I had been so focused on the “kicks” that I didn’t realize Sal was lonely and unfulfilled much of the time, arriving at a city thrilled only to later leave restless and depressed.  The ideas that appealed to me then seem idealistic and flawed – the life of the road seems empty despite the excitement and the mystery of it all.  I knew that I needed to go somewhere - I needed to pick a road, any road, but not the one that followed in footsteps without deeply considering the implications of that life.  

On the Road is also about the escape from responsibility as the idealized experience.  When re-reading the novel after time had passed, the depiction of race and gender in the novel made me uncomfortable, an element I didn’t focus on before.  Sal romanticizes the lives of blacks and Hispanics in Denver as embodying the excitement and freedom of America, in contrast to the “white world” that “was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy”. Dean and Sal seem to abandon families and children throughout cities and work as a means to get back on the road again, acting rather careless in the process. This idyllic life of the road is romantic, capturing the spirit of youthful searching and wanderlust, but also immature for its rejection of opportunities and responsibilities.  I’m on the verge of adulthood and I look towards embracing responsibility, whether that’s a real job or relationship, and Sal and Dean’s recklessness no longer appeal to me as it once did.

There comes a point when you recognize that it’s time to move on from a certain influence – out of their shadow, and into yourself.  Sal realized that he wanted something different than Dean, Kerouac broke free from literary expectations, and similarly, it’s clear that I have a different road to take.  Kerouac is a beautiful writer, a French-Canadian, a mystic, a Catholic, an athlete, the voice of the Beat Generation, an alcoholic who died young. As much as he has been an influence on my life and work, I am not those things.  I am a student, American, young, intellectual, curious, and trying to be a successful person, whatever that means.  I’m no member of the counterculture, and as much as I love On the Road for its prose and unabashed exploration of America, so much of that lifestyle is merely a fantasy for me.  The closest that I get to Kerouac’s experiences are driving from New York to Chicago, or weeks spent in the woods hiking with friends, drinking and staring at the stars, on short vacations from my otherwise stable life as a student.  Still, the idea of a road is appealing – it’s part of this narrative of finding your way in life, and the question still remains as to which road I will take.     

baby love me like shrieking babies in hospitals where mothers can go down two roads

cribs incomes gerber’s baby formula and toys that rattle, or shit

baby love me like stereotypical criminals who like sex and drugs and fuck up

fuck up hard with guns and end up in jail after they robbed a couple bucks from the bank of america but really

who robs a bank these days? the new thing is rape baby it’s trafficking and slow sexy murders with love letters written in blood on the wall

baby love me like white lilies on breathless teenage girls’ doorsteps

like timid bubblegum kisses and walks with baseball caps and neon converse sneakers

baby love me like white roses delivered to apartment doors of late-twenty-something

girls who are up late working but get to smile for a minute because their boyfriend is cute alright cute

  baby love me like darts want so badly to lick away the wounds they give dartboards because after leaving that stinging adoration where’s the pain-pleasure balance just like

fast baseball bats whisper to faster baseballs i’m sorry i’m sorry i do like you honest

and fans get mad till they get red and holler like old school cartoons and seem drunk even if they’ve never drunk in their whole life but that’s funny isn’t it

baby love me like pastel chalk and hop scotch love each other disappearing away in the rain even more than they love each other in the sun

baby love me like empty bars at 4am where the last ones left glance at each other from across the room and drink to preoccupy their hands, wondering

if this is it, if they’re making too much noise when they swallow, why they’re alone in a bar at 4 in the morning

  baby love me like light kisses darkness and nobody knows that really it just wants a little love everyone wants a little love even the dark baby even the dark

baby love me ‘cause everyone wants a little love and it’s not overrated at least i don’t think so

and maybe people dramatize magic but baby love me ‘cause we should have each other so just, love me baby, pretty much everything you are

does it for me so

do it for me, baby,

I don’t

have that luxury here.

I decorate thrift walls and tabletops in my image

coffee cups, ignored receipts, stacks of unread authors

washable markers, cheap plastic wayfarers, my mother’s scarf under my father’s sweater

don’t you know

the lecture rooms have always been full of young smiles///clapping hands in trim suits

yesterday’s arc-sodium dream is dead, long live

the Consultant and the Banker and the Analyst

new fantasies and

new constellations and

new fathers

what kind of promise is that?