Just Finished Reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac

My experience with beatniks has always been very limited...since they're pretty much extinct by now I suppose that puts me in a better position to discuss them than most people nowadays, although my "contact" was through the early sixties sitcoms Beverly Hillbillies and Dobie Gillis.  Yet the characters in these shows satirizing the Beat aren't all that far off the mark...I know because I finished reading Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, which defined the movement.  The Beverly Hillbillies beatnik I remember the most from the two or three episodes that focused on them was the dude who just lied there on his back and never talked...now that's the acting role I was born for!  And in Dobie Gillis, goateed beatnik Maynard, played by future Gilligan Bob Denver, stole the show with his antics and speech.  So I had a pretty generally favorable view of the Beat Generation as people who had their own special lingo and appearance, were totally immersed in the present moment and people around them, and had a special thing for jazz.  That pretty much describes Kerouac's experiences as well as he...in the guise of narrator Sal Paradise...crisscrosses the USA...and later Mexico...hitching rides, taking buses, and using other means of locomotion while describing his friends and the land and people they encounter.  And of all his friends, it's Dean Moriarty who epitomizes the beatnik: totally irresponsible with his friends and lovers, he bounces off one experience into another...and then expects everybody else to follow him as he follows only his own whims.  Which they do, including Sal...much to my consternation: you see I have a strong antipathy to loud and aggressive personality types who expect me to fall in behind them as a passive follower.  So no, using the Beat movement's parlance, I didn't "dig" ol' Dean one bit...but it was interesting to see how others in the story kept forgiving him for his many offenses since he had such a charismatic sway over them...

With On the Road I was initially impressed by the author's vivid, detailed imagination of the different settings, characters, and experiences until I later read that he had actually pretty much lived through it all himself and that the "fictional" characters had real-life counterparts.  It all takes place around 1947-49 as millions of young men, back from World War II, are in states of flux and uncertainty about their futures, with the G.I. Bill being enacted around this time to subsidize their college educations and their eventual upward social mobility into conventional, middle class prosperity.  In the meantime, though, many just drift around, some even adopting the hobo lifestyle traveling by boxcars...something narrator Sal keeps expressing his desire to do himself without ever getting around to it.  There is a peeling away of some of the old gang from Sal and Dean as they marry, get stable jobs, and have children.  But Dean never seems to change as he "keeps the faith"...

The other night I saw a CNN show about the 1960s which examined the hippie counterculture movement in the second half of that decade and how it had its origins in the Beat movement of the fifties and early sixties.  But they also showed a clip of Jack Kerouac criticizing hippies, and I get what he was saying.  Beatniks were into experiencing everything on its own terms, not rejecting everything, while those in the later counterculture movement seemed intent on reinventing their own lives apart from the rest of the real world. Hippies were preachy and superior...beatniks were just cool.  I never did care too much for all that crap that went on in San Francisco and Woodstock, but I always kind of dug beatniks....but not Dean Moriarty...