Kerouac’s Road: A Place of Stasis

The irony was not lost on me that my first book, The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography 1955-85, a book which deals with the American road trip from a place of stasis, should have been released at the moment of an abrupt and unprecedented halt to global massmobility. The book considers ways of portraying this famous, potentially too-well-travelled modern western trope (the American road trip) from the perspective of the roadside service, a place of fixity designed to facilitate the illusion of smooth, endless motion. A series of close readings and archival trips have led me to believe that European émigrés, especially in the postwar period, had a knack for observing and representing the American road in fiction and in visual culture; receptive as they were to details of the highway’s extensive commercial infrastructure which their American peers took for granted. Good evidence for this emerges from my comparison of the novels of Jack Kerouac with the photographs of Robert Frank. Both draw on experiences of extended road trips across America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Justification for this comparison can be easily found in Kerouac and Frank’s intersecting lives and careers. It all started when Kerouac’s fame rubbed off on Frank’s debut collection The Americans, when he contributed a zany introduction to the collection’s first American edition, turning Frank into an overnight sensation. I would argue that Frank’s practice of photography impacted Kerouac’s road too. In the following years, collaborations between the two men altered Kerouac’s ways of seeing the landscape he had claimed to capture in fiction.

By an interesting twist of fate, I now find myself in lockdown, reflecting that the exponential growth of mass mobility in the late twentieth century, and so far into the twenty-first, had its roots in the American road trip experience; itself rooted in a restless spirit of westward expansion since the closure of the frontier. Does the current situation make the road trip once and for all obsolete? In recent years, as the evolution of transportation technology had us fast approaching the age of self-driven cars, writers such as Henry Mance have reflected on whether the road trip as we know it, from culture if not from practice, was not already a thing of the past. As we live

through times of immobility and isolation on an unforeseen scale, I’ll say a few words about what Kerouac and Frank taught me – and each other – about the aesthetic and ideological flavour of the favourite of American past times: driving around, for the hell of it.

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What’s the spirit of the American road and how do you capture it? When writing a book about this theme, I very quickly and very naturally decided to focus on the American roadside; an aesthetic construct which I found everywhere associated with the mid-to-late-twentieth century road trip, but somehow had been overlooked by Kerouac’s On the Road. Sal Paradise, the novel’s restless narrator, is constantly pining for the next destination, so much so that the narration never really leaves the car. Yet the road is made up of all the spaces in between destinations, spaces whose raison d’être is to facilitate the motion forward, so much that by the end of the twentieth century they end up capturing the mood of transience Kerouac is seeking to capture. Kerouac realises this by looking at Frank’s photographs. The trance of this discovery is evident in his elated style. It is as if he was on the road again.

Through these introductory words, America appears as a combination of tangible, prosaic matter and illusory promises. Kerouac pours over Frank’s road pictures and wonders at the way a roadside café table is illuminated by a halo of sunlight through the window, while in another shot, a cluster of ‘monster’ gasoline pumps on the side of a road is imbued with ominous, anthropomorphic qualities. He notices how election posters, overlooking a gaming table in a ‘luncheonette’ in Butte, Montana, give the scene a sense of sour ‘editorial’ truth, suggesting that public trust and power, in the United States, are as good as games. Signs or crosses by the side of the road, in the eye of Frank’s democratic camera, also appear as culturally resonant to Kerouac: seemingly incidental, they form a subtle portrait of a vast country that lives through and for the automobile. In his description of the collection as a whole, Kerouac keeps oscillating between the abstract feeling to the material detail. On the one hand he praises ‘[t]he humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!’ On the other he delights in Frank’s attention to what he calls ‘the low level of the world’: telephone poles, tarpaulin shrouds in ‘green unexpecteds’, ‘ditches by the side of the road’ – an alternative space which he describes as the ‘orangebutted westlands of Arcadia’ and connects with the Beats imagery of the road as America’s backyard.

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On the Road to Florida

In 1958 Kerouac wrote another piece inspired by a trip to Florida he had taken with Robert Frank within the year that followed their first meeting in New York. Reading this text alongside Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans drives home the implicit assertion that Frank photographed what Kerouac wanted to write but was unable to. This feature-length article, titled ‘On the road to Florida’, details the trip Frank and Kerouac took from New York to pick up Kerouac’s mother in Long Island, then with her to Orlando, Florida, and back. While Kerouac needed to pick up some manuscripts and take his mother with him to Florida – where he would write for the next few months – the trip was also taken as a provisional Life magazine assignment which, Kerouac writes, gave them ‘two hundred bucks for gas and oil and chow both ways’. Again, Kerouac’s affectation of spontaneous prose produces a wealth of praise for Frank, though this time he describes not so much the photographer’s pictures as his practice, which he witnesses as they travel together. He writes about how, having stepped out of the car, Frank would move about the side of the road taking pictures, ‘prowling like a cat, or an angry bear, in the grass and roads, shooting whatever he wants to see,’ as he, the writer, remained seated inside their parked car, bewildered, looking at him. Describing Frank as a predatory animal or, playing on the ambiguity of the verb ‘shooting’, like a hunter, Kerouac wishes he himself had a camera of his own, ‘a mad mental camera’, so that he could take a photograph of his friend in the act of taking photographs. ‘Prowling’ and attentive to the trivia of his surrounding environment, Frank takes pictures the way Kerouac thinks writers of the American road should write: he is, in Kerouac’s words, ‘catching those things about the American road writers should write about’. Kerouac generally implies that writers fail to catch what they ‘should’ about the start of their trip, while Frank shows evidence to the existence of things he may not himself have noticed. It is Frank’s activity as a photographer which reveals these details to him as they travel on the road: his eye falls on easilyconsumed commodities, unremarkable roadside landscapes and structures of the American roadside, which inspires Kerouac to describe them in turn:

We started off in New York at noon on a pretty spring day and didn’t

take any pictures until we had navigated the dull but useful stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike and come down into Highway 40 in Delaware where we stopped for a snack in a roadside diner. I didn’t see anything in particular to photograph or to write about but as we sat he had turned and taken a picture of a big car trailer with piled cars, two tiers pulling in the gravel driveway but through the window and right over a scene of leftovers and dishes where a family had just vacated a booth and got in their car and driven off and the waitress not had time yet to clear the dishes. The combination of that plus the movement outside and further parked cars and reflections everywhere in chrome glass and steel of cars cars road road. I suddenly realized I was taking a trip with a genuine artist and that he was expressing himself in an art form that was not unlike my own and yet fraught with a thousand difficulties quite like my own.

Whether ‘prowling’ in the roadside weeds or neglecting his meal to take a picture of leftovers at a neighbouring table, Frank’s receptiveness to the ‘dull but useful’ landscape of the highway appears as somewhat radical, even to Kerouac. As they exit the diner, Frank continues taking pictures of vernacular architecture on the roadside. Walking alongside him, Kerouac continues to pay attention and to be surprised by what he sees:

Outside the diner, seeing nothing as usual, I walked on, but Robert suddenly stopped and took a picture of a solitary pole with a cluster of silver bulbs way up on top, and behind it a lorn American Landscape so unspeakably indescribable, to make a Marcel Proust shudder... how beautiful to be able to detail a scene like that, on a gray day, and show even the mud, abandoned tin cans and old building blocks laid at the foot of it, and in the distance the road, the old going road with its trucks, cars, poles, roadside houses, trees, signs, crossings [...] little details writers usually forget about.

Writers like himself, judging by the very few poles, roadside houses, trees, signs, or crossings that feature in his famous road novel. The superiority showcased by photography over literature, according to Kerouac, seems to be in its capacity to retain a superior richness of detail for every scene