lOOKS
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gether, for
if
a filling station will serve as well as the Rocky Mountains
to arouse a sense of awe and wonder, then both the filling station and
the mountains are robbed of their reality. Kerouac's conception of feel–
ing is one that only a solipsist could believe in-and a solipsist, be it
noted, is a man who does not relate to anything outside himself.
Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac's fiction.
On the
Road
and
The Subterraneans
are so patently autobiographical in content
that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity
were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and
literature, these books would unquestionably be It. "As we were going
out to the car Babe slipped and fell flat on her face. Poor girl was
overwrought. Her brother Tim and I helped her up. We got in the
car; Major and Betty joined us. The sad ride back to Denver began."
Babe is a girl who is mentioned a few times in the course of
On the
Road;
we don't know why she is overwrought on this occasion, and
even if we did it wouldn't matter, since there is no reason for her
presence in the book at all. But Kerouac tells us that she fell flat on
her face while walking toward a car. It is impossible to believe that
Kerouac made this deail up, that his imagination was creating a world
real enough to include wholly gratuitous elements;
if
that were the
case, Babe would have come alive as a human being. But she is only a
name ; Kerouac never even describes her. She is in the book because
the sister of one of Kerouac's friends was there when he took a trip
to Central City, Colorado, and she slips in
On the Road
because she
slipped that day on the way to the car. What is true of Babe who fell
flat on her face is true of virtually every incident in
On the Road
and
The Subterraneans.
Nothing that happens has any dramatic reason for
happening. Sal Paradise meets such-and-such people on the road whom
he likes or (rarely) dislikes; they exchange a few words, they have a
few beers together, they part.
It
is all very unremarkable and common–
place, but for Kerouac it is always the greatest, the wildest, the most.
What you get in these two books is a man proclaiming that he is
alive
and offering every trivial experience he has ever had in evidence. Once
I did this, once I did that (he is saying) and by God, it
meant
some–
thing! Because I
responde.d!
But if it meant something, and you re–
sponded so powerfully, why can't you explain what it meant, and why
do you have to insist so?
I think it is legitimate to say, then, that the Beat Generation's
worship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hos–
tility
to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well.
The hipsters and hipster-lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all
right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the
