by Jack Kerouac, 1957
I decided to read this book after Geoff Dyer wrote about it in The Last Days of Roger Federer. I’m glad I read it. It describes road trips across 1940s America twice, and then one down to Mexico. The main characters are Sal Paradise and his dear friend, Dean Moriarty. Dean grew up on the streets of Denver, homeless, with a hobo father. He never saw his mom’s face. He loves women and speed. Kerouac doesn’t mention Dean taking any speed, but everything Dean does is fast to a manic degree – driving, working as a parking lot attendant, talking, etc. When the book begins, he has a beautiful girlfriend, Marylou, and a wife in San Francisco, Camille. By the end of the book, he has a wife and two daughters by Camille and a wife, Inez, and baby in New York. He can’t stay true to anyone. He is searching for IT (God) and thinks he finds it through new experiences, new women, new everything.
Jack Kerouac took notes while on road trips in the 1940s. Carlo Marx (a very strange dude who liked to sit cross-legged in front of Dean and they would talk nonsense to each other all night long) in the book is Allen Ginsberg in real life. Dean Moriarty in the book is Neal Cassady in real life. In the 1950s, Kerouac, using his notebooks, typed up the book in 3 weeks on sheets of tracing paper which he had taped together. It has become a classic. He started the Beat Generation. In the book, he talks about beat this and beat that, and it seems like he means things or people who are used up, downtrodden, at the end of their ropes. Not sure how this became the Beat Generation.
There is a tragic, sad feeling to the book. Dean is always searching, searching, searching. People fall in love with him and he loves people, but he can’t settle down. He uses them and abandons them and comes back to them and leaves them again. Sal is his good friend and does not judge him and kind of acts the same way a little bit, but in the end, he finds his Laura and settles down, while Dean’s life, you feel, is going to end tragically.
The book has great dialogue; even though it is stream of consciousness, it always makes sense and stays true to purpose. The characters and settings are described so well, you are there with them.
Jack Kerouac died at age 47 in Florida. From Wikipedia: “In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.”
Here are some quotes from mid-way through to the end. First, he’s visiting Old Bull and his wife and two little kids in New Orleans. Old Bull is William Burroughs in real life. He’s a heroin addict and his wife lives on tubes of Benzedrine – they are all over the floor of the house. The children are precious. Here’s a scene with Old Bull pulling millions of nails out of a piece of wood.
“We stared at the nails; there were millions of them; they were like worms.
“When I get all these nails out of this I’m going to build me a shelf that’ll last a thousand years!” said Bull, every bone shuddering with boyish excitement. “Why, Sal, do you realize the shelves they build these days crack under the weight of knick-knacks after six months or generally collapse? Same with houses, same with clothes. These bastards have invented plastics by which they could make houses that last forever. And tires. Americans are killing themselves by the millions every year with defective rubber tires that get hot on the road and blow up. They could make tires that never blow up. Same with tooth powder. There’s a certain gum they’ve invented and they won’t show it to anybody that if you chew it as a kid you’ll never get a cavity for the rest of your born days. Same with clothes. They can make clothes that last forever. They prefer making cheap goods so’s everybody’ll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow.” He raised his big piece of rotten woord. “Don’t you think this’ll make a spendid shelf?”
Jazz music plays a big part in the book. Listening to Jazz is one of the experiences Sal loves. In one paragraph, he lists the following names and tells about each one of them briefly and the part they played in the evolution of Jazz:
Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Gillespie, Lester Young
They spend a whole night in Chicago, listening to Jazz:
“…They sought to find new phrases after [George] Shearing’s explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy. They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned–and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o-clock in the morning everybody–musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist–staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.”
They are having dinner with Sal’s aunt one night (who is his Mom in real life). She tell’s Dean: “You can’t go all over the country having babies like that. Those poor little things’ll grow up helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live.” He looked at his feet and nodded. In the raw red dusk we said good-by, on a bridge over a superhighway.”
When Sal is in Denver about to go to Mexico, one of his friends hear’s that Dean is on his way to drive him to Mexico himself:
“Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes: I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.
“Do you think he’ll let me come along?” asked Stan in awe.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said grimly. We didn’t know what to expect. “Where will he sleep? What’s he going to eat? Are there any girls for him?” It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.”
When they enter into Mexico, I think they have found the relief and wonder they’ve been looking for all over America:
“Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cab-drivers and border rats wandered around, looking for opportunities. There weren’t many; it was too late. It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air. Cops were red-faced and sullen and sweaty, no swagger. Waitresses were dirty and disgusted. Just beyond, you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico. We had no idea what Mexico would really be like. We were at sea level again, and when we tried to eat a snack we could hardly swallow it. I wrapped it up in napkins for the trip anyway. We felt awful and sad. But everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river and our wheels rolled on official Mexican soil, though it wasn’t anything but carway for border inspection. Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico. It was three in the morning, and fellows in straw hats and white pants were lounging by the dozen against battered pocky storefronts.”
“…It was only Nuevo Laredo but it looked like Holy Lhasa to us. “Man, those guys are up all night,” whispered Dean. We hurried to get our papers straightened. We were warned not to drink tapwater now we were over the border. The Mexicans looked at our baggage in a desultory way. They weren’t like officials at all. They were lazy and tender. Dean couldn’t stop staring at them. He turned to me. “See how the cops are in this country. I can’t believe it!” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m dreaming.” Then it was time to change our money. We saw great stacks of pesos on a table and learned that eight of them made an American buck, or thereabouts. We changed most of our money and stuffed the big rolls in our pockets with delight.”
After driving all night across Mexico they come to the town of Sabinas Hidalgo at around 7:00 a.m. with the sun coming up. Dean is driving and slows way down to take it all in. Old men, barefoot women, burros, muddy streets full of holes. Girls headed for work in the fields, but one of them calls out, “Where you going, man?”
“Dean stared at them with rocky eyes. “Damn,” he said under his breath. “Oh! This is too great to be true. Gurls, gurls. and particularly right now in my stage and condition, Sal, I am digging the interior of these homes as we pass them–these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, their thoughts congealing from the empty mind of sleep, their selves rising, and the mothers cooking up breakfast in iron pots, and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the sleeping gringo and all that crap–and crap about greasers and so on–and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bull. I’m so amazed by this.” Schooled in the raw road night, Deas was come into the world to see it. He bent over the wheel and looked both ways and rolled along slowly. We stopped for gas the other side of Sabinas Hidalgo. Here a congregation of local straw-hatted ranchers with handlebar mustaches growled and joked in front of antique gas-pumps. Across the fields an old man plodded with a burro in front of his switch stick. The sun rose pure on pure and ancient activities of human life.”
Further on, in Limon, a jungle town, they are in a swampy area and they stop to sleep. “We stopped in the unimaginable softness. It was as hot as the inside of a baker’s oven on a June night in New Orleans.” Sal can’t sleep because it’s so hot. He decides to lay on top of the car. He’s been bitten by thousands of mosquitoes but he doesn’t care. “Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same. Soft infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face as I slept, and they were extremely pleasant and soothing. The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy. I could lie there all night long with my face exposed to the heavens, and it would do me no more harm than a velvet drape drawn over me…
“Occasionally a dim light flashed in town, and this was the sheriff making his rounds with a weak flashlight and mumbling to himself in the jungle night. Then I saw his light jiggling toward us and heard his footfalls coming soft on the mats of sand and vegetation. He stopped and flashed the car. I sat up and looked at him. In a quivering, almost querulous, and extremely tender voice he said, “Dormiendo?” indicating Dean in the road. I knew this meant “sleep.”
“Si, dormiendo.“
“Bueno, bueno,” he said to himself and with reluctance and sadness turned away and went back to his lonely rounds. Such lovely policemen God hath never wrought in America. No suspicions, no fuss, no bother: he was the guardian of the sleeping town, period.”
Further on the road in Mexico, nearing Mexico City, Dean is driving and a bunch of little girls hail the car. “They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little piecwes of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the lightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. “Look at those eyes!” breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus…”
Dean stops and gets out and fishes in his battered trunk for a wristwatch and trades it for a tiny berry-sized pebble: “Then Dean poked in the little girl’s hand for “the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me.” He found one no bigger than a berry. And he handed her the wrist-watch dangling. Their mouths rounded like the mouths of chorister children. The lucky little girl squeezed it to her ragged breastrobes. They stroked Dean and thanked him. He stood amoung them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that ha come to them. He got back in the car. They hated to see us go. For the longest time, as we mounted a straight pass, they waved and ran after us. We made a turn and never saw them again, and they were still running after us. “Ah, this breaks my heart!” cried Dean, punching his chest. “How far do they carry out these loyalties and wonders! What’s going to happen to them? Would they ry to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?”
Then, driving through mountain towns, “Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it.”
Sal gets dysentery in Mexico City and is laid up sick in bed. Dean can’t stand staying a day longer and leaves him, saying Stan will take care of him.
“”Yes, yes, yes, I’ve got to go now. Old fever Sal, good-by.” And he was gone. Twelve hours later in my sorrowful fever I finally came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana mountains, this time at night.
“When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say nothing.”
The last few pages of the book, Sal has met Laura, the love of his life, looking for a party at an apartment in New York City.
“Come on up,” she called. “I’m making hot chocolate.” So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly. In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck. I wrote to Dean and told him. He wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home. We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent. And suddenly Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through with the plan.”
So, Sal and Laura are on their way to a Duke Ellington concert with their friends, Remi and his girl. Dean has received a letter from Camille begging him to come back and so he is going back to San Francisco and asks for a lift to 40th Street. Remi won’t let him in the car. Here are the last few paragraphs of the book:
“Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I’d told everything about Dean, began almost to cry.
“Oh, we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?”
‘Old Dean’s gone, I thought, and out loud I said, “He’ll be all right.” And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.
‘So in American when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairies, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”