Liberation Lit discussion

As perhaps the kick-off book for our raucous period of personal and societal liberation, "On The Road" played a pivotal role in mid century literature and Liberation Lit. How did it affect you as a person? As a reader? As a writer?

Nobody was changed by ON THE ROAD? Ah, come on?

It was an experience. I remember the day I bought my first Kerouac novel, the subterraneans. I found it in a second hand store on Milwaukee avenue in Chicago. I was 18 and nothing would be the same. I wanted to be jack Kerouac. In every way. Roaming around America. Being afoot with his vision and my vision, being underfoot and underground. I wanted to drink too much and hitchhike and have great sex and spiritual adventures with the universe. I read that book and every single Kerouac book I could find. Then I read all the beats I could find, and started college where I met a prof named Paul Carroll who not only knew the beats but published them in his little magazine. He brought Ginsberg and Corso to the school. I couldn't get enough. I dropped out of school and started hitchhiking looking for kerouac's road.

Well, we were on that same road together, John, as you have pretty much described my youth as well. The one additional book that I loved and sent me off into the world was Dylan Thomas'unfinished novel "Adventures in the Skin Trade".

The reason I bring it up is because it is the story of a young man who wakes up early, before the household, packs a bag to run away, then goes down to the kitchen where he destroys his mother's prized collection of china cups. Then, taking up his pack he exits. Why destroy the cups? Because he knew he would be tempted to return home when things got tough out in the real world...but by destroying her dream, he knew he would never be allowed back in the front door of his former home.

Kerouac and Thomas were my guides to individualization and separation from my family unit.They said there was a big world out there just waiting to be explored...all it took from me was a thumb and a sense of adventure. What happened to that spirit? Is it now in a video game?

yes, dreamers and wanderers. one of the great films of my life was John Ford's The Searchers. I was 10 when I first saw it at the movie theater. I loved the endlessness of the search. When I saw it years later I was amazed that the journey in search of the little girl didn't take a hundred years. In my mind I saw all the searchers grow older and older. Till Wayne was an old man, bent to his saddle, jeffrey hunter a grandfather keeping the old man steady so he won't fall. I guess the question then is why have my eyes always been lonesome for hoboes. Why have your eyes been that way too?

Always looking over the next rise for the answer? Always hoping some logic to the search would emerge? Always trying to feel good about not feeling good along the way. Always looking for a better answer. Perhaps these are simply the restless qualities of the American mind?

And I agree with you, John. They do seem to permeate American literature from J.Fenimore Copper's The Deer Slayer to Travels With Charlie by Steinbeck.

It's interesting to me, given that the topic for this group is the literature of the 1960s-1980s, that we go back to "On the Road" for discussion. After all, it was conceived in the 1940s, written in 1951 and published in the mid-fifties. The author was of the "greatest generation" generation, not a boomer.

Writing my own novel on the Sixties, Crystal Ships, the paucity of good novels written in the period struck me also. Those who lived through the period were more influenced by writers of earlier periods, like Kerouac or Orwell, than contemporary writers. Perhaps, relating the Woodstock thread, that is because contemporary music became a more effective means of expression than literature during those troubling years.

You're quite right. A lot of people now conflate the Beat Era with the counterculture of the sixties. The Beats' efforts were in part an attempt to find footing through art in the fifties' button-down era, and part a documentary of such attempts. That gave the countercultural people the impetus to do the same, but the sixties counterculture became much more: it was an attempt to create a new form of society, and as such it was political as well as sociological. The music was indeed an added form of artistic expression, but it was a nearly-in-the-moment form of journalism as well.

I found 'On the Road' frankly tedious. Burroughs' work speaks to me much more, both of the period in which it was written and of the present.