I have always had an uneasy and uncomfortable relationship with the work of Jack Kerouac.
Even when I was what observers would have identified and described as an “impressionable” youth prone to literary fads, carrying a battered copy of “On The Road” in my limp, milky pale hand around with me, a battered copy that gained more visible prominence if it could be brandished within the promiscuous radius of half-closed, dreamy and cannabis occluded New Age girls’ eyes.
I forced Kerouac’s faux hipster psychodramas and irresponsible frat boy antics down my throat, baulking on fayre that was trying too hard to be hip. In fact, by the time I got round to reading Kerouac, his “counter-culture” edginess had long since been blunted. It now just sounded a bit naff, a bit laboured, like your dad recounting his first experimental dabbling with LSD.
The zany, kooky soul-seeking ciphers that masqueraded as characters within the densely packed pages of the Father of the Beat Generation’s prose were far too offensively self-indulgent for my tastes — most of the characters made me want to punch my own eyes out of their sockets: feckless wasters spouting pseudo-philosophy, misquoting Nietzsche and Jung to justify their own aimlessly effete dissolution and avoidance of any responsibility. It wasn’t that I suffered from a curiously misplaced puritanism, but on the contrary, I was convulsed by the realisation that, some 50 years after they were originally composed, Kerouac and his Beat fellow travellers just were not gratuitously and promiscuously rebellious as I expected them to be. The whole thing seemed like a droll parody of something much racier, much more exotically exciting but now only existed as a trace, like the lingering perfume of a hastily concealed joint in a student bedsit.