Mature fiction from Kerouac

Three novels reveal new depths to Beat writer

Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur by Jack Kerouac (Library of America)

Like many American teenagers, I had a brief, intense infatuation with Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” The on-rushing prose, the recklessness, the celebration of freedom — all were remarkably seductive to an adolescent stuck in small-town, middle-class, high-achieving conformity. As with other postpubescent enthusiasms, initial intoxication was quickly succeeded by an almost embarrassed disdain, encapsulated by Truman Capote’s famous dismissal of “On the Road” as a product of one long, amphetamine-fueled creative sprint: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Now, inexorably, comes the Library of America’s release of the three midcentury novels — “Visions of Cody,” “Visions of Gerard” and “Big Sur” — that represent the heart of Kerouac’s mature fiction and an explicit appeal for reevaluation. Reading through these three novels in succession is a curious experience, for although Kerouac’s manifold limitations remain highly evident, they are counterbalanced by depths that seem fresh, even revelatory.

Edited by Kerouac scholar Todd Tietchen with admirable restraint, the volume is nonetheless overt in arguing for Kerouac as not just a relic of a faded countercultural moment but as a major American voice, a judgment fully consonant with its subject’s sense of himself.

“My work,” he wrote in 1960, “comprises one vast book,” adding that “in my old age I intend to collect all my work and ... leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy.” He thought of himself, with a mixture of hubris and wistfulness, as an inheritor of the Proustian tradition of classical high modernism. In this, his ambition definitely outstripped his abilities. Although “Visions of Cody” achieves an intermittent grandeur, with its fascination with beatnik Neal Cassady “grown big and rocky and gaunt and manly in his doom,” much of it is almost unreadable: slipshod, repetitive, hysterical. The signature Kerouac style, with its breathless run-on sentences, neologisms and portmanteau words, appeals to romantics and teenagers because it simulates excitement. It’s a parlor trick that dazzles at first but eventually grows shrill and monotonous. Capote’s put-down is memorable because it strikes at an essential truth: Kerouac had neither the patience nor the craft to polish his fiction

“Visions of Gerard,” meanwhile, comes as a pleasant and underrated surprise. A novella detailing Kerouac’s childhood as refracted through the prism of the death of his older brother Gerard at the age of 9, the book has a winning simplicity and sweetness.

“Big Sur,” in contrast, is a harrowing and scathingly self-aware account of a catastrophic trip Kerouac made to California in 1960, when his quicksilver mind was already becoming muddled by alcoholism and paralyzed by self-loathing.

That teenager who was thrilled by the velocity and cosmic wonder of “On the Road” would have had a much harder time with this novel, with its despair and inertia, its expression of “a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away.”