On The Road - Fifty Years Ago Today…

It was fifty years today
Saintly Jackie taught us how to play…

I think that’s how the Beatles song goes. Yes, on this exact day in 1957, the sky turned red over my high school campus and a voice spoke from the clouds: “Hie thee to the Hillsdale Bookstore right after school, oh feeble mortal, and learn how life is to be lived.”

It was kind of a screwy time (see my A Fifties Teenager pieces) , and for me, On The Road was a one way ticket out of a suburban wasteland into a thrilling new world that made some sense. I bought it all, and I still buy it. In fact I read On The Road three or four more times at different stages of my life and each time it spoke to me in a fresh way. As I got older I saw the sadness lurking behind the kicks. I saw the hurt of best friends breaking up because they didn’t understand each other any more. Later on in the sixties, I met the real Dean Moriarity a few times. He wasn’t a bit like in the story, although still cool and crazy. And I saw that, although Jack based his book on real people, he had recreated them and made them more than they were.

I still cringe for Jack when I remember the vituperation the literary establishment poured on his head for writing such a subversive, immoral and, worst of all, sloppily written novel. Celebrity writer Truman Capote said famously about it, “That’s not writing, that’s typing!”

Today On the Road is praised across the world as perhaps the dominant novel of the mid- twentieth century - (check Google News if you doubt me). They’re even teaching Jack Kerouac in high school! - not that this is a good thing. For the book to work right, you can’t be lectured about it. But Truman must be sulking in some infernal corner. I don’t think too many people look forward to reading In Cold Blood again.

If you’ve never read On The Road, give it a shot. Forget all the hoopla. Just read the book, okay? See if it speaks - or still speaks - to you. And watch for the Saint of the Susquehanna.

Labels: Jack Kerouac

Pure Willa Cather

Red Cloud, Nebraska is not your normal farm town. There are giants walking around here. I saw them, and I am just an ordinary guy:
– your typical Pondering Piggo who thinks Willa Cather is the best writer in the barnyard,
– who just sinks into her pure visual exact images and deep understanding of human nature with delight,
– your normal pigsty piggo with big tears rolling down his snout because little sixteen year old Leslie Ferguesson caught pneumonia and died out on Mrs. Somebody’s farm when she had her whole life to live in front of her (The Best Years).
– who gets big crinkles of smiles because the twins came in from the yard to fix up Grandma’s sickroom when nobody told them to (Old Mrs. Harris). And, in the same story, when Vickie wins the scholarship to the University of Michigan, what relief! And what subtlety of understanding in that story. How your loyalties shift as Cather reveals the Templeton family first from their neighbor’s perspective, then from the mother’s perspective, then Grandma’s perspective.
– who is not a sentimental sap (ok, maybe I am a sap), but a pig who lets Cather’s true vision translate into his mindscreen and from there percolate into his heart. She took the time to tell it true, folks.

Those stories, plus the pure hometown blues of Song of the Lark (the Red Cloud half, anyway) and the for the ages My Antonia - they all happened in Red Cloud, no matter what name she gives the town in story after story. And Red Cloud, because the railroad’s hub moved to another town, kind of got left behind in the mad American scramble for wealth and status.

So it still looks like Willa Cather’s 1890 town. Walking through it is the strangest experience.

For instance…

This is Thea Kronborg’s house. No, sorry, it’s Vickie Templeton’s house. No, sorry, it’s Willa Cather’s childhood home. Walk inside, and Cather readers will recognize the geography right away.

Here’s where Dr. Archie visited Thea when she was deathly sick and slept in the parlor. Through the door you can see the Templeton’s bedroom, where Victoria locked herself in when she learned she was pregnant for the sixth time.

Thea Kronborg’s bedroom where she would lay in bed reading wrapped in blankets with a hot brick at her feet because the air was about minus twenty. No, wait. It’s Leslie Ferguesson’s bedroom where her parents made her sleep because it was only proper that a budding schoolteacher should have her own room. No, wait a minute - it’s Willa Cather’s bedroom papered with the very wallpaper she earned when she was thirteen years old working at the dry goods store and taking wallpaper for wages. It’s not a reasonable facsimile - it’s the same wallpaper she put up about 1886. That’s Red Cloud, Nebraska!

Finally, this is the house where Antonia worked as a housemaid when she was nearly raped by that disgusting Wick Cutter.

If you like to read the good stuff, and you’ve never read Willa Cather (I was probably fifty before I gave her a try), pick up one of her stories. You could be in for a whole lot of pleasure and mental delight.

And, if you are already a Cather fan, well, there’s a great B&B in Red Cloud called Cather’s Retreat (402-746-2599). The house belonged to the Cather family and Willa stayed there when she came to visit her parents in the Twenties. Hey, go for it. I’m going back as soon as I can.

My Winter Reading List

Here’s my winter reading list: Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, all by Jack Kerouac whose prose has tasted good at all my ages so far. I started reading Kerouac at sixteen and will probably never be done. His old friend John Clellon Holmes thinks these are the books “in which his voice is most assured and his vision clearest.” Yum. This is going to be a treat. Doctor Sax is my favorite American novel of the last century. No, maybe it’s Visions of Gerard so gentle and kind.