Book review #37: Rethinking Kerouac

Engaging anthology under the microscope

Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals, edited by Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk (Bloomsbury, 2025)

By Jonah Raskin

THE KING OF the Beats died at the age of 47 on October 21st, 1969, at a time when the US was at war, the nation profoundly divided and the counterculture in full bloom. A great deal has changed and a great deal has remained the same. He is better known now than he was then.

More than a dozen biographers and hundreds of cultural and literary critics have for decades kept Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, aka Jack Kerouac, along with his vast body of work, alive and at times thriving. Movies, too, have helped to keep him in the public eye.

Rethinking Kerouac shows once again that the author, best known for his picaresque 1957 novel On the Road, has indeed enjoyed a series of revivals and rebirths along with periods of neglect and denigration. How he and his work will be regarded 100 years from now is too soon to tell. Kerouac is still finding his place in the canon and the classroom. In some academic circles he continues to be ignored

But Rethinking Kerouac provides a wonderful opportunity to assess his contributions to American literature. Edited by Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk and with contributions from veteran scholars, teachers and translators, this book, with its ample footnotes, splendid index and capsule bios of the authors, tackles controversial topics that have surrounded Kerouac and his works and that have threatened occasionally to eclipse and undermine his popularity.

John Whalen-Bridge’s ‘Teaching Kerouac in the Time of Trump’ stands out as the most overtly topical and provocative of the essays but all of them have been written with an eye and an ear on the present day and in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, post-colonialism and Artificial Intelligence, a topic explored by Peggy Pacini and by Michael Millner, who teaches English in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s home town.

Millner observes that he was first drawn to the author because of his portraits of ‘friends who were artists, who were creating things together’. That has been the attraction of bohemia ever since writers and artists gathered in Paris in the 1850s, built a community, wrote books, painted and defied the bourgeoisie. Kerouac began as a bohemian and became a Beat, and, while he helped to create the world of the hippies, he didn’t belong to it.

Where to begin Rethinking Kerouac? One can start anywhere, at the beginning with the nifty introduction by Mortenson and Sawczuk, who bravely describe the hurdles that confront Kerouac scholars today, including the effort in some, but not all, academic circles to dismiss Kerouac as a writer unworthy of analysis and interpretation. The co-editors skilfully map the territory this new volume explores and prepare readers for the topics and themes that await them.

Yet one could also start with the last chapter, a conversation titled ‘Kerouac in Translation’, which brings a global perspective to the author who didn’t speak English until he was about seven and who would always be something of an outsider even when On the Road made it to the New York Times best seller list.

Minami Aoyama, who translated On the Road into Japanese, says that the novel initially appealed to Japanese youth who were eager for news and information about America. Maciej Swierkocki, who lives in Poland and translated Big Sur from English into Polish, says that, in the process of translating, ‘certainly something was lost and something was gained’. That’s the nature of translation.

Swierkocki also remarks that the process of translating was fun because he had always been ‘a jazz fan’. Jazz speaks an international language: to appreciate Kerouac, it helps to appreciate Charlie Parker and Lester Young. Farid Ghadami, who translated Big Sur into Persian, says that that late work ‘stands as Kerouac’s rebellion against himself, his style, his optimism and his passionate romantic spirit’. Indeed, like most great artists, Jack could actually turn into his opposite.

Whalen-Bridge hasn’t translated any of Kerouac’s fiction, non-fiction or poetry. But, as a professor at the National University of Singapore, he has had to cross cultural and linguistic borders and boundaries, build bridges and explain to students who read The Dharma Bums and want to know if Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder and the woman known as ‘Princess’ really practised ‘tantric sex’. I would also like to know what really happened in that Berkeley cottage long ago, but my understanding and appreciation of the novel doesn’t depend on knowing the facts.

The same holds true for Whalen-Bridge when he wisely observes that ‘questions of historical accuracy and aesthetic appreciation can interfere with each other’. They have been at odds and compatible, too, ever since John Keats wrote in ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.

In their introduction, Mortenson and Sawczuk map the road that lies ahead for readers. They note that ‘paradoxes and complexities’ abound and that they push ‘thinking in new and exciting directions’. Indeed they do, and, while I appreciate the thinking and the thoughts contained in Rethinking Kerouac, I would have appreciated some attention to feelings and emotions, though they are not where academics usually go. Still, Kerouac was a writer with deep and profound feelings that infused his work and which came from the heart as well as from his head.

Before I go any further I want to briefly say that I am mentioned on page 194 of this book. In a superlative essay on Kerouac’s vast influence on popular music, Simon Warner quotes me as saying that the author’s ‘influence has declined in the Black Lives era’. That’s my impression. What Warner doesn't say is how I reached that conclusion.

On the 100^th anniversary of Kerouac’s birth in 2022, I organized and took part at an event held in Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco. I first appealed to City Lights but was turned away. The bookstore that Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded eventually launched a virtual event called ‘Kerouac: Still Outside’. That seems to be part of the story, though now for different reasons than he was originally deemed an outsider.

In an article for the San Francisco Examiner, I wrote that ‘Kerouac’s books are valuable today as a record of the ways that bohemians, hipsters, Beats, misfits and road warriors lived their lives, with ample doses of booze, drugs, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and fast cars.’

Joining me on the panel at Bird Beckett was Steve Wasserman, the publisher at Berkeley’s Heyday Books, who said that Kerouac was a ‘bad person and a bad writer’ (I had read a passage from Lonesome Traveler which didn't appeal to Wasserman. He disliked Kerouac’s depiction of Black Americans.)

Mortenson and Sawczuk observe in their introduction that ‘Kerouac’s vision can well be perceived as hindered by the trappings of his white heterosexual male privilege’ and his ‘romantic naivete’. One audience member at Bird & Beckett called Kerouac ‘a racist’.

What I didn’t foresee when I noted Kerouac’s decline was that Holly George-Warren would explain in print and live at the Beat Museum in San Francisco, back in November, how ‘a feminist’ like herself can ‘still love Jack Kerouac’. Some of her thinking and more will soon be available in her biography which boasts the working title ‘Jack Kerouac: Artist’.

If I had one major criticism of Rethinking Kerouac it would be that there’s not nearly enough about Kerouac’s artistry and craftsmanship, but it has seemed to me that Kerouac scholars and readers of his work would rather talk about sex, gender and race, spirituality, ethnicity and class, than talk about the craft of fiction. Kerouac’s emphasis on spontaneity and improvisation may have helped to remove the topic of improvisation and spontaneity from discussions of his work, though there’s an art to improvisation.

Some of the essays that held my attention are Brett Sigurdson on ‘Kerouac’s Obscure Experiments in Screenwriting’ and Frida Forsgren essay on Kerouac’s painting which includes six of his works: ‘Heart and Handgun’, ‘Truman Capote’, ‘The Gary Buddha’, ‘Woman (Joan Rawshanks) in Blue with Black Hat’, ‘Blonde in the Grass’ and ‘Slouch Hat’.

I have seen the phrase ‘slouch hat’ in Kerouac‘s writing but never knew what it looked like. Now I know. Note: Wikipedia defines a slouch hat as a ‘wide-brimmed felt or cloth hat most commonly worn as part of a military uniform often, although not always, with a chinstrap.’

Truman Capote is not recognizable in the portrait that bears his name. Perhaps intentionally since Capote claimed that Kerouac’s work was not writing but rather merely ‘typing’. It was likely that Capote was envious of Kerouac’s fame.

I enjoyed the wrestling that Whalen-Bridge does with Kerouac and his work and his observation that Kerouac wanted to promote ‘the rucksack revolution’ and at the same time create ‘beautiful sentences’. Deborah R. Geis adeptly applies the concept of ‘radical vulnerability’ to Big Sur, Satori in Paris and Vanity of Duloz. Aldon Nielsen, Steve Belletto, Pierre-Antoine Pellerin, Kurt Hemmer, Nancy M. Grace, Hassan Melehy and Ronna C. Johnson also add to the Kerouac bouillabaisse and offer valuable contributions.

In his essay on the genesis and evolution of the many versions of On the Road, Matt Theado channels Kerouac himself and echoes the end of On the Road: ‘We think of On the Road, we even think of the handwritten and typewritten versions that preceded the first publication, all the changes and emendations to the text, and the various covers, colors and themes that have since adorned and affected it, we think of On the Road, we think of On the Road…’

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I believe that it can be, then Theado’s prose is indeed flattery at its best. Rethinking Kerouac will probably appeal most of all to Beat scholars and teachers, biographers and cultural historians. But the new ideas and challenging assessments in the book will surely trickle down to students and to the general public, who, one hopes, will reconsider Kerouac, revise feelings and lead to new discoveries.

Rethinking Kerouac suggests it’s always time to travel with and explore On the Road, Mexico City Blues, Visions of Cody, Lonesome Traveler, Tristessa and all the wonderful books that have been translated into dozens of languages and published around the world. Bravo Mortenson and Sawczuk.

See also: ‘Live review #4: Holly George-Warren’, November 12th, 2024