"On the Road"

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Beat Generation classic "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac is on display at the British Library in London ... all 120 feet of it. The scroll which Kerouac completed in three weeks in 1951 was rejected by 11 publishers, as I recall, before it finally hit the book stands.

Jack Kerouac

As teenagers, we gobbled up Beat Generation stuff. It was positively built to coincide with our sense of iconoclasm ... both the iconoclasm of any conflicted and cranky teenager and the iconoclasm that targeted the stiff and studied ways that followed naturally from the horrific blood-letting of World War II. Who would not wish for a white picket fence in the wake of painful chaos? And who, following from that, would not wish to tear down the fences that held in the human spirit?

I read the beats -- reading was still in vogue then -- and loved the free-wheeling, brash challenges they laid down. I credit "On the Road" as a partial inspiration for hitchhiking across the country twice. But I never liked Kerouac's novel as much as my friends did. That was a secret I kept to myself then ... I just didn't think it was a very good book, for all its champagne fizz.

Looking back, no doubt with blurred vision, I am wistful for the beats. They seemed wild and full of sap, however nutsy. Looking back from today, they were juicy ... real "grape juice" as compared with the "grape drink" of Facebook and Twitter and blogs and other Internet assertions.
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