The River and the Road

Enough of society. Summer is the time for freedom—woods and meadows, the ocean, the river or the road. During July and August, I suggest you read
Huck Finn by Mark Twain and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. They will make you restless to the point of pain! Here are the rogues and tricksters of the picaresque, slipped free from the codes and constraints of civilization, wandering from one adventure to another on a continent so vast that most human activities seem trivial, apart from surviving to continue the journey—a journey which takes on mythological significance.

Through the heart of Huck Finn drives the great wide Mississippi, unstoppable, imperturbable, unpredictable. Huck and Jim on their ramshackle raft, in fair weather or ferocious storms, are continually at the mercy of the river, but they are insulated from the feuding, frauding, preaching, lynching, and family life which they stop in and out of along the shores they pass. The life of the raft is more vivid and more intense than anything in these hillbilly and planting communities. By contrast to the aimless meandering typical of picaresque novels, in Huck Finn, you feel the constant and forceful tow of the Mississippi, like time itself, pushing the action along, carrying Huck, carrying Jim forward, delivering them inexorably–to the South, to the sea, to their destiny.

Each is making a bid for freedom—Huck from his sadistic, drunken father, Jim from a kind but nonetheless enslaving master. Slavery is a deeply uncomfortable theme in the book, portrayed as an evil produced by society, not by mankind. On the river, Huck feels certain of his friendship with Jim; in a house, on a farm, or in a town, he is reminded that Jim is property on the run and fears he will go to hell for failing to assist in its return. When the bizarre and extravagantly complex denouement crafted by Tom Sawyer to set Jim free proves to be irrelevant, you can understand that Tom must suffer for it, but you wonder why Jim must suffer, too. This is civilisation at its most self-indulgent, a boy inventing a fictional crisis of imprisonment and liberation based on books he’s read and of which he has no practical understanding. Better the boy had never read a book at all. Is this really the message from Mark Twain, the author of such a good one?

Instead of the river, Sal Paradise holds the tires of Dean Moriarty’s Hudson to “the white line in the holy road,” whizzing south to New Orleans, West to San Francisco. Did Kerouac choose a car named after another great river on purpose? Huck and Jim each dies a kind of death before they are reborn into their life together on the river; Sal’s life on the road begins with the end of his marriage and his own feeling that “everything was dead.” Dean Moriarty, sprung from jail rather than slavery, is always in danger of being recaptured by the police. Dean, too, is on the run from his wino dad and his untutored childhood, seeking liberation through all forms of knowledge–intellectual, spiritual, carnal.

In his first few paragraphs, Kerouac introduces so many other characters that you’re afraid you’ll forget who they are before the story gets going. It’s fine if you do. This is a book and a country peopled by hundreds, by millions, and they are all on the move–by train, by truck, by bus, by car–criss-crossing the country in a continual and promiscuous migration. New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and back again. Everyone is hitching a ride, sharing their last bit of food or whisky, giving away their only warm shirt, sleeping with someone else’s partner.

The hobos of the Depression Dust Bowl and the draftees of the vast mobilization of World War II seem to haunt and energize the novel with a communal enthusiasm and generosity now lost in America; but desperate poverty and universal duty have given way to Kerouac’s post-war moment of threatlessness and possibility. Service men are permanently at ease. They want to share, to learn, to dance. Sal has a little military pay; he goes to college on the GI Bill. He and his gang are idealistic, footloose; after decades of necessity and fear, their optimism has the fervor of religious conviction.

Sal is misunderstood by one of his girls because “I like too many things.” He wants to stay up forever at the party that is the whole United States. “All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.” The lines of transport and communication laid thickly over Twain’s raw frontier have not yet spoiled Kerouac’s American landscape; on the contrary, they make its enormity and its beauty more evident because they make it accessible, coast to coast, at seventy miles an hour.

If slavery offers a problem in Huck Finn, the women in On the Road are in another kind of chains. Neither book has any mothers. There are only aunts, trying to civilize all the lost boys or feed them sandwiches, and honey-thighed girlfriends to be slept with, shared, cheated on, condescended to. Romantic love hardly figures except as a prominent cliché. (Surprisingly similar to P.G. Wodehouse, though far more hip.) Ah, fiction! Reading these books will not make you feel distressed that you are a woman or a man, a child or a slave in a role forced on you by society, it will make you imagine you are on the raft or behind the wheel of the Hudson, breaking every bond to get outside of what you already know, having an adventure.

Let me know when you get back; I’ll have some more books for you to read.