Jack Kerouac Was A Poser:
Three Travel Books to Read Besides 'On The Road'
Having grown up in the Midwest, Nebraska specifically, I'll admit that in my teens it was very validating to have my own 'space', open highways and miles and miles of nothing that constitute most of the Heartland, written about and romanticized in best selling and 'classic' books by well known authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and a slew of other sophisticated East coasters that found my home, my 'space', beautiful. I still read Allen Ginsberg, mostly thanks to his stubborn devotion to politics and social justice, but Kerouac just doesn't cut it anymore. In this article I'm going to focus on some ignored or 'lost' masterpieces of 'survival' versus 'travel' texts and the combination of the two.
The first book is actually two books that can be read together, 'The Big Sea' and 'I Wonder As I Wander' by that legendary (who also got his start in the MIdwest, Topeka, Kansas specifically) and celebrated Poet but underrated prose writer Langston Hughes. 'The Big Sea' is one of those simple yet complex novels, written in an understated style, which probably shows his Midwestern roots, a plain spoken voice that is able to talk about complex subjects in an accessible language. He was already a renowned poet, he didn't need to flower up his prose with unnecessary linguistic tricks. The novel starts off with a revolutionary, for a writer and reader anyways, action. Hughes throws away piles of books into the ocean after becoming a Sailor, at the tender age of 21 years old. The difference between Kerouac and Hughes is very glaring here. Kerouac was an 'explorer', whereas Hughes was an 'adventurer', who, you know, needed a goddamn job that would facilitate his journey to see the world. Kerouac was a sponger and a drunk, which he admits to non-ironically in his novels, whereas Hughes was a worker, a poet, and a 'practical vagabond'. Both novels, 'The Big Sea' and 'I Wonder As Wander', have Hughes showing his roots growing up in the Midwest, where he wrote some of his most beautiful and famous poems before relocating to Harlem, his adventures, which include traveling to Stalinist Russia, his time in Civil War era Spain, and basically working and traveling all over the globe while also showing the necessity of 'food' and rent money. This is called reality. Hughes talks about the times when he had to depend on the kindness/benevolence of strangers throughout his life, and the results weren't usually to his benefit. He writes about showing one of his patrons, a white woman who was letting him stay with her so he could have more time to focus on his art, a poem in the vein of Carl Sandburg, one of Hughes' earliest heroes. The reaction of the white patron was ignorant to the point of brutality, her stating that it wasn't 'savage' enough for a black poet. Hughes, being a person of integrity, left the woman's house never to return again. After this encounter he became convinced he had a tapeworm in his stomach, even visiting several doctors because the pain was so excruciating. After several visits to clinics, he was soon to find out that it wasn't a tapeworm, just a sickening disappointment and rage at having been so disrespected and pigeon-holed. Instead of just drinking up all her alcohol and letting this 'patron of the arts' take care of him like Kerouac, he struck out on his own, soon to become the literary giant his large body of work shows him to be. That's called integrity. More writers should possess that trait.
The second book I would like to delve a little deeper into is 'Down and Out in Paris and London' by the author George Orwell. I first read it in high school, around the same time I was reading the Beats, and was struck by the lack of romance shown to the situation of brutal poverty that Orwell struggled with during his early days as a writer. Having grown up mostly with my disabled mom, whose manic episodes usually led her to spend her welfare/disability checks on fast food and K Mart specials in the first three days of the month, leaving me and my sibling to eat peanut butter and stale saltines the rest of the remaining 27 days, I could relate to Orwell's appreciation/degradation of his 'One cup of black tea and a piece of toast' diet that he mostly subsisted on after emigrating from his native India to try and survive in Europe. This poverty would later reappear in my life during my early sobriety/onset of my schizophrenia. I'm not going to lie. After I lost my job due to a major psychotic break which involved the cops being called, I drank and sponged off my loved ones for years. It was beyond gross, to say the least, and not in the least 'Romantic' as Kerouac often portrays it to be. But after I sobered up, and learned, you know, LIFE SKILLS, I finally started to take care of myself. And let's just say it was rough going at first. My diet subsisted of one Whopper Jr minus the cheese each day, just enough calories to keep me from passing out, and it was cheaper than buying the cooking equipment and supplies needed for the 'beans in a pot' diet that is so popular. Later this would be replaced by a one gas-station hot dog a day diet. Let's just say early sobriety/early mental health recovery is rough. Orwell's austere tea and toast sounded pretty good after a year of dollar a piece hot dogs that endlessly rotated for hours (who knows, maybe days) at the gas station. But, now that the alcohol was out of my system and I had gotten on some medication that worked for me, the act of writing came back into my life. I didn't imagine myself as Kerouac or Orwell, my ego thankfully wasn't big enough for that anymore, but CREATION, a life saving tool for me in my youth, had reappeared like a long lost friend. I didn't worry about being published, I didn't worry about the grease and pig scraps in my stomach, I didn't worry about anything besides scribbling away in my Moleskine journal in a tiny town off the Mexican border in Arizona where I was living at the time. That, fellow writers, is deliverance and redemption. Much better than the youthful dramatized death that some unpublished writers dream of. Trust me. Put down the glass, needle, or pipe, and just get back to the sensation of ink staining a page for the joy of it. You may never be published, but it's better than pissing the bed every night and chewing on a mouthful of puke. Have a cup of tea instead, and if you're lucky, some toast.
The third travel/survival book has become pretty popular recently, and for very good reasons. 'La Batarde' by Viollette Leduc is a twentieth century classic of very HUMAN tenacity, and by that I mean that the narrator is not perfect, nor does she pretend to be. She scrapes, swindles, and triumphs in equal measures throughout her long memoir. She HAS to. Some of us can't afford to be moral all the time. Her voice is filled with pain, but her possession of poetic prose and her real life circumstances keep her from being a victim. Starting her life in an orphanage, it is no wonder that failed early relationships and heartbreak and loss take up the lions share of the work. But I would like to focus on the last third of the book, which shows that bare bones survival is rarely pretty, but it is always human. In the end of the book she is not traveling, but running for her life, literally. It is set during Nazi occupied France, and she retreats outside of Paris to escape the regime. During this time she doesn't protest or join the French Resistance. She just does what she has to do to SURVIVE, at any and all costs, this skill probably ingrained in her after her troubled youth. She was a black market smuggler, bringing in goods from the country, sneaking past SS inspection stations at the risk of her life, all to deliver to wealthy Parisians who could merely 'sit out the Fascism' due to their ethnicity/abilities and wealth privilege. This reminds me of our last four years during the Trump regime, as the armchair amateur politicos sat around in bars and considered being accidentally mis-gendered a hate crime, turning cannibal on each other instead of fighting the Fascists, and sipping fair trade organic coffee at five bucks a shot in some gentrified neighborhood cafe. And yes, I've spent my beyond-too-long share of time in the Pacific Northwest. Am I being bitter right now? Yup. Do I care? Nope. And maybe that is what draws me to Leduc's voice in 'La Batarde'. She doesn't moralize or try to make herself look good. She just states things as they happened, in a voice more poetic than any of the traveling Beats could ever hope to possess. She was a survivor more than a traveler, though if you do it right, both can coexist in life as well as art.
So, even though Kerouac and the Beats helped 'legitimize', artistically at least, the American Midwest, and helped me when I was fourteen and found these books of travel and freedom hidden away in my dad's dusty old cardboard boxes, I think they have done more harm than good to the Midwesterner who either wants to stay put and make changes where they're at, or escape to the artistic/queer bubbles on the Coasts, (and I've done both, and don't regret either life choice). At this point we need a new 'Guide' besides the drunken loser who so many of my childhood friends have emulated. And I hope it isn't just one 'rock star' writer or musician or activist who does this. I hope it involves ALL of us, irrespective of 'community', 'crowd', or what's becoming more and more popular these days, the 'clique', whose formulas we should have given up on in Junior High. At this point, in late stage/accelerated Capitalism, we need new 'Maps', not 'Guides'.
