On My Bookshelf: Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"

I’m  listening now to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road,” and although the phrasing seems foreign, it also seems brilliantly to recollect what little I remember of the late ‘50s Beat Generation-speak. To me, the language, and especially the dialogue, is as much an artifact as the speeches of Bronte’s Jane Eyre. And to both, that language was modern and true when their works were written. As a writer, I often read and listen to books as if I were wandering through a museum with the great masters.

And yet, as I listen to Kerouac, I have a memory of a day spent in my uncle’s print shop in downtown Los Angeles. I must have been about nine. I was dropped off by my mother early in the afternoon, and waited until six p.m. or so to get the ride to San Juan Capistrano for the weekend at my aunt and uncle’s house on the beach. 

With no entertainment but a set of colored pens and a very thick pad of paper, I chose not to draw, but to write. I can still see the pages in my mind, and would give much to have them to read again. But Kerouac brings back the cadence of the writing I did that day, in his “this happened, then that happened”  descriptions of his life on the road. 

I remember my running monologue of people passing by, what they were wearing, onomatopoeic references to the clunk-clunk-thwap of the printing presses in the next room, musings about the thoughts of the workers, revelations about my nine-year-old self, peppered with the self-conscious vocabulary of a child that loved to read the dictionary looking for new words with which to paint the world around her.

 I seem to recall that I filled over fifty pages of paper during that four or so hours, and that the time flew by. And I’ve read that Kerouac kept small notebooks into which he wrote his thoughts as he travelled, despite the legend of the “scroll,” the 120-foot piece of teletype paper that he supposedly filled with “On The Road” at one go.

But just the fact that a novel written in 1951 could bring my 1962 self into focus, here in 2011, reinforces my belief in the power of writing. Jack had no idea or care for the result, I imagine. He only knew he had to write it.

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