American Notes: End of the Road

Jack Kerouac’s “barbaric yawp” broke into the American consciousness in the middle years of Eisenhower. At roughly the same time, Marlon Brando, adenoidal and inarticulately glowering, careered through adolescent daydreams astride a Harley-Davidson. From the perspective of the late ’60s, the old rebellions and spontaneities seem as touchingly quaint as the shock they elicited at the time. Kerouac’s vision was compounded of Buddhism, booze (of all bourgeois things) and a chaotic lowlife that he worked into exuberant underground literature. When he wrote of casual sex or marijuana, they were still exotic and forbidden fruits. At the end, he was living in geriatric St. Petersburg, Fla., dutifully looking after his ailing mother.

As a shaman of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was a forebear of today’s hippie and radical counterculture. But he would not or could not translate himself into the ’60s. A little before he died last week at 47, Kerouac was muttering at both straight society and the rebellious young, the military-industrial complex and the Viet Cong. “You can’t fight city hall,” he wrote. “It keeps changing its name.” It would be too easy to believe that all of today’s radical young will slip into cantankerous conservatism. But some undoubtedly will. It may be that Robert Frost had the most sensible formula. Frost was a conservative in his youth, he said, so that he might be free to be anarchistic in his old age.