On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women

Essays
August 13, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 36 7 min read

Related Books:

“You should sign up for this,” my sister said, showing me an article about a bookstore that doubles as a matchmaking service. At the Brooklyn indie, lovelorn bookworms choose their prospective romantic interests based on their list of favorite authors pinned to a cork board. The article went on to point out that women never wrote down Jack Kerouac as one of their coveted authors.

My decade-long enamor with the poets and writers of the Beat Generation was about to pay off. As the only woman who adored Kerouac, I would be the vixen of the literary matchmaking board.

covercoverNow, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a girly girl. My regular weekend activity includes clothes shopping, I feel naked without nail polish on, and my favorite color is pink. In fact, it was while reading the fashion magazine Seventeen my senior year of high school that I stumbled upon a mention of Ann Charters’s The Portable Beat Reader and quickly became obsessed with all things Beat related. After reading Jack Kerouac’s road-trip novel On the Road, it only seemed natural to pack my bags and move across the country for college. As Kerouac wrote, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

coverWhile attending Scripps, a women’s college in Southern California, my interest in Beat literature grew as I went on a San Francisco pilgrimage to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, infamous for its involvement in the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. When I returned, diploma in hand, to the East Coast, I attended talks by Beat writers at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. I tucked Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage,” in which he asks “Should I get married? Should I be good?” into my heart. That would be the poem I want read at my wedding, I thought. When I read On the Road, I connected to Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, shambling after friends, being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening, seeing beauty in the mundane, and hitting the road in his eternal quest for meaning — topics I thought both men and women could relate to.

Until my sister showed me the matchmaking article, it had never occurred to me that the author of On the Road could be a cement divider on Lover’s Lane. I had met guys who’d been inspired by Kerouac. They thrilled at the freedom of stuffing beef jerky in a backpack, wearing the same band t-shirt for days, and hitting the road with no plan but more life experience. It’s true I didn’t personally know any women who admired Kerouac, but I figured he just wasn’t on their radar since fifty years had passed since On the Road was published. There were plenty of women I knew through books who had loved Kerouac — women like Edie Parker-Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, and Helen Weaver, who wrote memoirs about their romances with Kerouac. Overcome with his prose prowess as I was, it was easy to overlook the parts that weren’t exactly rom-com material — the failed marriages, the refusal to acknowledge his own daughter, the fact that he lived with his mother until the day he died — particularly since I didn’t read his novels as love stories but as poetic travelogues.

Then I encountered a woman who openly disdained Kerouac — and all that he seemed to represent. It occurred to me that women saw him as a misogynist vagabond, the bad boy who had left their broken hearts in a trail of exhaust fumes. He didn’t like being tied down by responsibilities, or women. Perhaps those female readers who actually did like his writing feared adding Kerouac to their list of favorite authors for a literary matchmaking board because they didn’t want to end up with someone like him: a penniless drifter, a dreamer, an alcoholic.

coverIf I am to be terribly stereotypical, I’d say the literary crush I hear most women talk about is Mr. Darcy, the cute fixer-upper worth the effort because of his money and social standing. Sure, maybe he’s a bit aloof at first, but in the end Mr. Darcy’ll put a ring on it. Of course, dating-savvy women wouldn’t necessarily include Jane Austen as their favorite author for the literary matchmaking board: they’re smart enough to know they might scare off potential male suitors if they implied they enjoy staying in on a Friday night to watch BBC films on television, possibly having to get out the smelling salts during the “pond scene” in Pride and Prejudice.

Instead, women might disclose preferences for less polarizing authors. Female authors would be perfectly acceptable to list, so long as they’re “serious” or witty authors like Toni Morrison, Tina Fey, and Jennifer Egan — and not authors whose books feature shopping bags, pearl necklaces, or candy hearts on the covers. Words like “wedding” and “feminist” probably shouldn’t be anywhere in the title either. There’s nothing wrong with reading these books — in fact, wanting to get married and being treated as equal are both positive desires — it’s just that, well, if on your first date you wouldn’t bring up the number of kids you want to have (unless, of course, you’re on The Bachelorette), then you also would probably subtly edit your reading tastes when you know you’re being judged by them. Like with clothing, it’s best to leave a little mystery.

Men’s disinterest in Austen and other female authors has, of course, been its own cause for consideration. Last year, in an article entitled “Men Need Only Read Books by Other Men, Esquire Post Suggests,” The Atlantic Wire rightly took issue with the fact that only one female author was listed in Esquire’s “75 Books Men Should Read.” However, guess which male author The Atlantic Wire specifically mentions, as if he is the driving force behind men’s exclusion of female writers: “hard-living, macho writers like…Jack Kerouac.” Interesting. I would have called him a life-affirming, sensitive author. It was Kerouac, after all, who wrote, “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

In the past few years, culture critics have speculated that in general men read less than women and that specifically they don’t read much fiction — Kerouac presumably excluded. It appears, then, that men and women read quite differently. If men are more likely to read nonfiction, it seems likely that men are reading to obtain information. In contrast, women maybe read fiction for the entertainment of a character-driven story. And this is where it gets interesting. Every so often, social debates arise whether women are more “sympathetic” than men, “sympathetic” being defined by dictionary.com as “acting or affected by, of the nature of, or pertaining to a special affinity or mutual relationship.” If it is true that women are more sympathetic, either because of their genetic makeup or because they have been conditioned to be so, then perhaps women read relationally, placing themselves within the story. It would be natural then for female readers to cast themselves as the female characters instead of the male characters. In a work written by a man, the female character is usually going to be the subject of the male gaze. If that work happens to be On the Road, you’re going to end up with women like Marylou and Camille, flat characters being two-timed by hyperactive car-thief Dean Moriarty. It’s no wonder then that many women, even when they put his personal lives aside, don’t relate to Kerouac’s writing.

I don’t believe all women — or all men — think and act and read the same way, though. I never automatically put myself in the stilettos of the female character in a book. I read On the Road through the eyes of the eager narrator, Sal Paradise. Even if I didn’t agree with his every action, I desired Kerouac’s joie de vivre.

More than that, I was also the narrator of my own story, my own life. After reading Kerouac, I became the one dashing out the door for my next adventure. If I had a week off of work and wanted to take a vacation, I packed my bags and hopped on a bus or a plane. I took a Greyhound across the United States. I saw Stonehenge. I visited shrines in Kyoto. And I did it by myself, sometimes couch-surfing with friends who lived near my chosen destination before venturing off on my own to a hostel.

I was never looking for someone to jumpstart my story, to open the car door for me, to give me permission to do something. It didn’t occur to me that I needed a boyfriend or even a friend to accompany me to art galleries or readings or to make my life full. I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac. And so I never signed up for the matchmaking board. I didn’t believe in lonely nights. I was a reader. If I wanted company, all I had to do was pick up a book — or my car keys.

Image via [email protected]/Flickr

(www.stephanienikolopoulos.com) is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Essays

Writing in Trains

Essays
December 16, 2009 | 4 books mentioned 10 5 min read
I. My subway writing habit began a few months ago, in the feverish time around the publication of my first novel. It was a hectic summer: my second novel was acquired just before my first novel came out, and it required four or five rounds of fairly intensive revisions, so I was revising the second book at exactly the moment when I needed to promote the first. And this juggling act was actually perfectly doable (and often even fun, in a hectic kind of a way), except that I’d already begun writing a third. Devoting time to the third book in those days felt vaguely irresponsible—there are only so many hours in a day, and the demands of the first two novels were so much more pressing and immediate. I felt that I couldn’t in good conscience sit down at my desk and work on a book that wouldn’t be close to ready for another year or two, with so much to be done on works that were either already in stores or mere months from publication. There were, however, a combined total of six hours a week spent on the subway, commuting to and from my day job, and it felt like extra time. My job’s far from where I live—if the trains are running smoothly, it’s a solid hour each way. I began scrawling fragments of the third novel on folded-up wads of scrap paper, using a book as my desk. A lot of reading goes on in the subway, but it’s rare to see anyone writing down there. I’ve only seen anyone else writing in the subway once or twice, and I began to wonder recently how common it is. So I turned, as I always do when I want to take a wildly unscientific sample poll of the general writing population, to Twitter and Facebook. II. Julie Klam writes on the 1 train. Her memoir, Please Excuse My Daughter, was published last year. “Being a work-at-home mother,” she told me, I take any writing time I can get. Since my daughter's school is a half-hour subway ride away, I can work on the two trips (the ones without her). I also work when I'm meeting someone for lunch to alleviate the guilt of not being home writing every free second I have. Part of the reason I like it is because it has a very distinct end. It's not like having six hours at home. I tend to have great bursts of inspiration that last about six stops. I also like having to beat the clock—knowing that I need to get a thought down before my station. I write notes about whatever I'm working on—a book or magazine piece and generally find the best stuff comes from when I'm out and about and not home and focused. It is also the only time I am not using a computer and there is something very useful to me about having to slow down my thoughts to hand write them (rather than hammering them out at the speed of light on my Mac). This closely mirrors my own experience, except for the bit about working at home and having a kid: it’s partly a question of only-so-many-hours-in-a-day necessity, but there’s also something about trains that’s oddly conducive to writing. For me it’s not so much about the hand writing—I write almost everything in longhand before I transcribe it to my computer anyway, whether I’m at my desk or on the F train—but the rhythm and the white noise, the momentum of travel, the feeling of being immersed in the life of the city. Joe Wallace’s first novel, Diamond Ruby, will be published this spring. He no longer lives in New York City, but he told me that “back when I lived in the city and rode the trains every day, I frequently spent most of my time writing... working on whatever novel I was dreaming of having published. I never planned to write on the train. It's just that I never know where some knot in the manuscript will untie itself, what intractable character will suddenly come clear, which brick wall will suddenly crumble away.” In many ways we’re lucky, commuting the way we do. It’s much harder to scribble your revelations in a moving automobile. III. There are a few who’ve taken it a step further: writers who actively seek out the subway as a work environment. One of my favorite novels of 2009 was Lowboy by John Wray. A lot of the action of the book takes place in the New York City subway system; I was somewhat startled to read in a recent story in the Wall Street Journal that most of it was written there too. Wray wrote much of the first draft on the F, C, and B trains, although “there was a time,” he told the Journal, “when I was really into the G.” For the better part of a year he sat near the conductor’s booth with a laptop, sometimes for six hours at a time. Wray’s arguably an outlier here, but he isn’t alone. New York playwright Mark Snyder lives and works in Manhattan, but he sometimes boards Brooklyn- and Queens-bound trains in order to write all the way to the outer boroughs and back. He wrote: I think the act of working, surrounded by other people living their lives, can be quite a compelling act for yourself. It makes me feel less alone—vs the desk in my apartment, with life happening "out there", behind the window—and somehow makes whatever I'm working on feel more important, more vital, more “I have to get this down NOW!” I would personally prefer, all things being equal, to do most of my writing at my desk. That said, I understand where Mark’s coming from—it’s why I sometimes write in cafés—and even the idea of writing an entire novel on the subway makes some sense to me, although I probably wouldn’t do it on a laptop. (I’ve used a laptop on the subway a few times, when faced with particularly looming deadlines; I find the “I wonder which of my fellow passengers is planning on mugging me?” calculus a little nerve-wracking.) I had an interesting Twitter conversation a few months ago with Drew Goodman, a writer and bookseller living in Utah; both of us, we discovered, like writing in fairly noisy environments on occasion. There’s something about white noise that helps people like me and Drew focus; even in my quiet office, I’m usually listening to ambient electronica while I write. White noise aside, there’s a certain paradoxical privacy in working on the subway. It’s New York City, and we’ve all seen everything down here: if you start writing on the train nobody’s likely to give you a second glance, unless of course you’re writing on your laptop and they’re planning on stealing it at the next stop. Except on the rare elevated sections of track, your phone won’t ring. The odds of running into anyone you know are fairly slim. And Mark Snyder’s right, you’re less alone in the subway than you are at your desk, but what makes writing on a train viable at all is that your aloneness is still a matter of degree. You’re out in the world, surrounded by other people, but there’s enough solitude in that crowd to get some writing done. [Image credit: Jim Kuhn]
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 10 5 min read
● ● ●

36 comments:

  1. Great essay.

    One thing that always seemed strange to me were the staunch defenders of Kerouac often refusing to accept his biseual relationships, and, indeed, dismissing them in order to revel in Kerouac’s (and Sal’s) multiple heterosexual affairs.

  3. I’m kind of shocked to read this, as I think every Kerouac fan I’ve ever known was female. The author might be interested in a novel released this year, “Kiss the Morning Star” by Elissa Hoole, about two teenage girls who are inspired by Kerouac to do a road trip of their own.

  4. I was shocked too when I read that article about the literary matchmaking bookstore that said women don’t like Kerouac, since I am a woman and love his writing. It’s been fascinating to discover how polarizing Kerouac can be.

    Thanks for the book recommendation, Amy. I’ll definitely check it out!

  5. Good for you, loved your independent spirit. I tried to emulate my mentor Doris Lessing, still caught up in the relationships sagas, but struggling with it, seeking and finding her independence form having to seek a match later in life.
    Johanna van Zanten

  6. I think… yes, first: all men are the same in the same way that all women are the same (or did I get that backwards?)…

    And, for what it’s worth, personally, I have read thousands of works of fiction (literally — when I was in highschool I averaged 3 books a day, for several years). And, of course, this included reading numerous books authored by women (Pat Cadigan, Ursla K Le Guin, … and many dozens of others, but you get the idea…). But I have read none of the authors you list here.

    There’s a lot of books out there.

  7. (and I forgot to announce my gender, here, but you can probably figure that out from my thinking that female authors i read were relevant but that male authors I read were not…)

  8. I suppose if you read literature in order to find people you’ll be attracted to, these issues might be interesting. But we now have Craigs List for that. What makes me respond to On The Road isn’t my opinion on whether Kerouac would be a good boy friend for me, but whether the work as a whole is of aesthetic value.

    But I guess I’m old fashioned.

    Carry on.

  9. On the Road inspired me, a woman (egads!), to embark upon a six-month “kerouaking” journey across country in an 1981 Dodge transvan. Why would any reader, man or woman, care about Kerouac’s husbanding potential? I certainly don’t base my favorite authors or fictional characters on their likelihood to “put a ring on it”. An author’s love life is just about as important as his hygiene. Wallow in your filth so long as you continue to write good books. If I made it my business to rate an author on his treatment or judgement of women, A Farewell to Arms and In Cold Blood tragically wouldn’t be on my favorite books list.

    PS – Edit your reading tastes for no one.

  10. I outgrew my Kerouac obsession a few years ago, but I’m not sure when and how… I’m still waiting to outgrow my Bukowski one (as are most of my friends who are probably tired of hearing about him by now).

    I will say that I know an equal number of men and women who are enamored with Kerouac. I always respected his prose in his early novels, even if I felt I had to ignore the fact that he was a real bastard to do it.

    On The Road also has the most musicality and moments of pure prose brilliance… probably because it was the novel he worked hardest and longest on editing. The seven years of hard work he put into it really show…

    I’m a man who reads a LOT of fiction. Comics, graphic novels, and straight literary fiction… with an occasional aside into a modern and\or urban fantasy (a la Neil Gaiman). I sometimes sigh when I look at my bookshelves and realize how masculine they are… some day I’ll even that out.

  11. I am a Kerouac enthusiast in Calcutta, India. Reading Kerouac’s books and reflecting on the large number of broken marriages, I have often wondered: Is that a critique of the American dream set in 1950s suburbia?

  12. This was so much fun to read! As a man who used to consult On the Road like a Bible every night before bed, I really appreciated your take on Jack Kerouac and his split audience. You reminded me of what may be the inverse of your own experience, in that personally I harbored a years-long crush on Maxine Hong Kingston, though I never knew another man who really liked reading her. Naturally, the book that won me over was her Tripmaster Monkey (her take on the Beats), but I felt a little changed by her writing and wished I could meet her. Thanks for the essay!

  13. To me “being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening” is exactly why I stopped reading the Beats at 22. I hated that feeling of mythologizing every moment as it is happening, though it seems in line today’s Twitter/Facebook culture of constant documentation.

  14. @Uttaran Das Gupta:

    No, not really. On the Road is really more a book of the ’40s than the ’50s. It takes place from 1947 to 1950 during the Truman Administration, when a lot of new postwar housing tracts were just being built and before the concept of ’50s suburbia and the “American dream” business had really made its mark on the national psyche. (Kerouac wrote the first draft in 1951, though it took several years and a lot of revision before he could get it published.) And the Beat writers were really all urbanites, anyway — the America of On the Road (at least as I remember it) consists solely of cities and the vast, empty countryside between them.

    On the other hand, it’s fair to say the book did have that impact on many suburban kids of the late ’50s and ’60s who read the book.

  15. I am a woman with no desire to ever be married or have children, yet I love Jane Austen. Loving P& P has no basis in one’s desire for marriage. I just love Austen, and her usually well written female characters.

    I am also a woman who loves to read history books, yet I always hear about how it’s the menfolk who enjoy these. Whenever I used to get emails from Borders for Mothers Day, Borders recommended embroidery books for Mom. The following month, Borders recommended history books for Dad. I (and my female friends) love history!

    Now to Kerouac: I hate his books so damn much! So, in that respect, I do fall in with most girls, but it’s not, as you say, out of a desire to “catch” Kerouac in a relationship, nor a resentment b/c Kerouac represents all the boys who don’t want to be tied down. As I said, I don’t want to be married myself, so I should totally be on board with Kerouac, but I just can’t stand him.

  16. Pingback: Kerouac Divides Men and Women « The Floating Library

  17. On the Road is one of my favorite books of all time too (as a woman)! It was just blowing my mind away the whole time I was reading it.

  19. Stephanie, you have captured my feelings about Kerouac (an author I love) and his writing perfectly. “I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac.” Exactly right!!!! Thanks for a great read.

  20. I wonder if the author or other females have read _Visions of Cody_ and if so, how did they respond to that book? It seems to have the most misogynistic leanings of his oeuvre (which is unfortunate because so much of the writing and the experimental form is exquisite).

  21. Pingback: Barnstorm | Wednesday Linkstorm

  22. Hmmm. Well, On The Road is one of those books that delivers different messages depending on the age at which the reader reads it. I first read it when I was 16 or so, in England … and it was powerful enough that, at the first opportunity, I moved to America. And I’m still here at 38. I’m now officially an American citizen. I read it again in my twenties and appreciated the musicality of his irrepressible be-bop, jazz-infused, rule-breaking spontaneous prose much more. And then I just read On The Road again last year after buying the original scroll edition published for the 50th anniversary. Now that I have kids I realize that it’s Kerouac’s willingness and ability to absent himself from responsibility that is the great pounding heart of the book. At least that’s what attracts men to it because, at various times, it’s what we all want to do. But we don’t have a monopoly on that either. It just seems to be a more masculine trait.

  23. I am a graduate of UConn, where Ann Charter’s taught. I took a class called “the Beats” with her, and the composition was easily 75% female. The one person that didn’t like Kerouac? Me. Good typist, horrible author.
    Ann Charters was not upset my dislike of Kerouac, she even read bits of my essay on why I didn’t like him aloud.
    I still prefer Ginsberg anyway. I’ll still probably see the movie, too.

  24. Pingback: Clip: On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women « Stephanie Nikolopoulos

  25. Firstly … go Nikki. A girl after my own heart. I did the same thing across Australia in a 1976 Bedford.
    I’ve always loved the hedonism of On the Road. I never bothered trying to identify with the women because Sal felt like my own alter ego. I’ve behaved in the same way on various road trips.
    BUT … you know the story, the legendary circumstances in which he wrote the book, a ream of paper fed in one of the typewriter and a novel coming out the other end three weeks later. It has always bugged me that he had a woman to feed him, look after his kids and wipe his arse during the writing of the novel and that he never properly acknowledged that.
    Can’t help it. As a woman writer with kids, it just bugs the hell outa me.

  26. I read On The Road over 30 years ago and have always felt inspired by Kerouac”s free-wheeling musical prose. The story of his (search for the) freedom of being On The Road is reflected perfectly in the poetic and, yes, crazy phrasing. When I get constricted by rules and structure in my writing I read Kerouac…and Brautigan…It always sets me free again.

    Thanks for the splendid article. Bookshop match-making is a hilarious concept!

  27. This is a brilliant essay. I’ve long been attracted to Kerouac for the musicality of his prose, never better displayed than in the story Visions of Neal and the Three Stooges from his recording Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. It inspired me to write a radio play, Neal Amid, about the last minutes of Neal’s life and how he and Jack had altered the English language, as Jackie Robinson had altered the tempo of baseball.There is much curiosity and gentleness to be read in the Beats that is far more relevant today.

  28. Kerouac’s work is not about characters, it’s about stream of consciousness where ALL fare as they should, incidental and inclusive. That is the non-linear storyline, that’s the kick.

  29. Very nice essay. Here’s what I know, though I’m not sure what it means, and I’m just going to leave it here without judgement: I am a man. My favorite contemporary prose writers tend to be men–Sherman Alexie and Tim O’Brien come to mind here. My favorite contemporary poets tend to be women–Louise Gluck and Anne Carson pop into my head. My bookshelves show the same gender bias. Am I alone? Am I wrong to believe, even if mostly subconsciously, women generally write better poems and men generally write better prose?

    As for Kerouac? I’m pretty sure he mostly just made me want to be Gary Snyder for a chunk of my twenties. At the time, it seemed to me that Jack might have wanted to be Gary, too. Anyway, you got me thinking. I’m interested in learning of other experiences that may or may not sound familiar. Thanks!

  30. However polarizing, here we are some 55 years later still talking about On the Road. So, obviously Jack did something right.

  31. I don’t know, I always thought Kerouac’s ballyhooed joi de vivre felt phony, from his novels I get the sense he (and for the most part his whole circle of friends, the “Beats”) weren’t so much overcome with lust for life as they were obsessed with trying to find it, and until then pretending they had found so as not to draw attention to their failure to do so. Kerouac’s stories are preoccupied with actual or alleged sex lives of everyone else, and he talks at much greater length about the affairs of other people as he does about his own. One book (The Subterraneans?) was about precisely that, telling the history of a doomed romance, but belaboring the circumstances that ultimately drove her to cheat rather than the acts of intimacy he shared with her in the first place – and had he been less obsessed with other people’s sexual interests and proclivities, the relationship might not have crashed so quickly.

    The reason why Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) was such a hero to everyone is that even as a kid, he was able to live out the kind of lifestyle they all tried to emulate. But even Neal, the object of the little hero-cult, was an alcoholic (ok: they were all alcoholics but that proves my point, really, doesn’t it?) and prone to impulsive and self-destructive behavior.

    All this is a long way of saying that I think people don’t dislike Kerouac’s books because he was a romantic and a womanizer and untamable, but rather that they see through the act and what’s actually there isn’t very appealing.

  32. Jack Kerouac was a real person. D’arcy is an invented character. Obviously we know more about Kerouac because he exists outside a book.

  33. Stephanie … YES !! … Think NOT of Kerouac as “male” or “female” but simply as a Compassionate Creature of the Cosmos reporting back to us all on what is being seen / heard / felt / thought … He was a master movie-camera! … A movie-camera with a non-stop commentary on the images in the lens / brain / mind. … Jack could write like only he could write – because only he could think of the things he thought of when inspired by what he experienced. He was empiracle to the max – and damn good at it. He captured the beauty in everything, and he instinctively knew to the core of his being that: “ALL IS ONE.” … Read THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY !! … THis was a GREAT article on Jack Kerouac. Truly great! … Come to Lowell and talk with Uncle Billy !! – George Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid

  34. I always enjoyed Ti Jean, as a youth growing up in Providence RI I could relate to his descriptions of the local area, of the sorrowful working class men walking slouched hands deep in pockets. Dr Sax & Visions of Gerard being my favs. As a girl friend at the time (who introduced me to the Beats) said On The Road is a book better to have read than to read.

    Yes he was a jerk as a person, even more so as the alcohol slowly killed him, But I see him not as a jerk, but as another lost soul shattered and splintered by a brutal system of wealth and things.

    War is Over

  35. Kerouac (the man and his works) misogynistic/sexist – how? Can anyone reference me some passages in his books which show him to be thus? I maintain it’s a total myth dreamed up by Kerouac haters. I don’t like the writing of Ernest Hemingway but I’ve never bothered to go on a Hemingway site and say as much. Yet Kerouac haters pour onto onto any web article about Jack proud to proclaim that they don’t like/read his works and go on to attack his character. Strange. I suspect a conspiracy, and who by? probably a far right religious group, or people in that way minded. I repeat give me a reference where Jack is being misogynistic in a book?

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

● ●
Essays

High Style and Desperate Love: On the Life and Work of Eileen Chang

Essays
May 4, 2015 | 4 books mentioned 5 8 min read
Everyone has her own Eileen Chang story. For many readers, the story crystallizes in a single horrifying detail. First you gasp. Then you thrill. When I mentioned Chang's name to a Chinese friend, she smiled wickedly: “In one of her stories, there is a woman so thin, she can slide her jade bracelet up to the elbow.” Before Joan Didion, there was Eileen Chang. A slender, dramatic woman with a taste for livid details and feverish colors, Chang combined Didion’s glamor and sensibility with the terrific wit of Evelyn Waugh. She could, with a single phrase, take you hostage. Chinese readers can't forget her; most Western readers have never met her. This year, on the 20th anniversary of her death, the recent NYRB edition of Chang’s Naked Earth provides an opportunity for new readers to fall in love, and for converts to renew what you might call (borrowing a tongue-in-cheek title from her oeuvre) Half a Lifelong Romance. Chang was born in Shanghai in the 1920s, the daughter of violent extremes. Her mother was an elegant socialite, the product of a Western education; her father was a violent opium addict, descended -- ironically enough -- from the anti-opium crusader Li Hongzhang. After her father took a concubine, her mother fled for Western Europe, where she skied the Alps in bound feet. Chang was five years old. After her father’s near-fatal overdose, her mother returned home to direct her children’s education. Her father promised to end his relationship with his concubine and his opium. Neither promise panned out. After the divorce, Chang and her younger brother lived with their father. Their mother fled again to France, studying art. She would not return for nearly a decade. Meanwhile Chang’s father beat her, raged at her; when she contracted dysentery, at the age of 18, he confined her to her bedroom. She was trapped for six months, until she colluded with a nurse to escape to her mother’s apartment. From an early age, Chang understood that she would survive through her style. Almost immediately after her escape, she published an account of her incarceration in the Shanghai Evening Post. Later in life, Chang famously recycled and reframed her own memories; see Little Reunion, The Fall of the Pagoda, and The Book of Change. But really, all of her work was a series of little reunions with the past. She was always attentive; it was always present. As she wrote in her essay “Notes on Apartment Life,” “I am astounded by how extraordinarily clearly one can hear street noises from the sixth floor, as if it was all happening right beneath one’s ears, resembling the way people’s memories of trivial incidents from their childhood become increasingly clear and close the older and more distant they become.” Chang’s relationship with her father would seem to be the defining tragedy of her life. Much of her later fiction captures the painful claustrophobia of their relationship; in Fall of the Pagoda, her stand-in, Lute, lives in the family compound, penned in with luxury and the stench of opium. Her story “Heart Sutra” reads like something out of Alfred Hitchcock (and, perhaps, the cinematically inclined brother of Sigmund Freud): towering apartments; broken elevators; a girl who falls madly in love with her father, while he runs away with a classmate who looks just like her. But Chang was more wounded by her mother’s betrayals. “I had always loved my mother with a passion bordering on the romantic,” Chang later wrote. And in Fall of the Pagoda, Lute says to her mother, speaking of her father, “He never hurt me because I never loved him.” Chang often downplayed her mother’s influence; she once claimed that the only tendency she inherited from her mother was a love for the color greenish blue. Still, her sense of style -- and style’s importance -- seems to have descended from the maternal line. As she later recalled, “Because my mother was inordinately fond of having new clothes made, my father once muttered under his breath, ‘People aren’t just clothes-hangers!’ One of my earliest memories is of my mother standing in front of a mirror, pinning a jadeite brooch onto a green, short-waisted jacket. Standing to one side, I looked up at her, awash with envy and unable to wait until I grew up.” In middle school, Chang used her first earnings -- five dollars, for a cartoon she submitted to the Shanghai Post and Mercury -- to buy a tube of lipstick. Above all, the girl was a stylist. Chang’s sensitivity to style was an outgrowth of her extraordinary attention to detail. She swooned after smells, sounds, colors. In her writing, the result is cinematically crisp, and phantasmagorical. Take this scene, from the opening pages of The Golden Cangue: “It was almost dawn. The flat waning moon got lower, lower and larger, and by the time it sank, it was like a red gold basin. The sky was a cold, bleak crab-shell blue. The houses were only a couple of stories high, pitch-dark under the sky, so one could see far. At the horizon the morning colors were layers of green, yellow, and red like a watermelon cut open—the sun was coming up.” I don't know anyone with a palette quite like Chang’s. She had the lunatic sensibilities of Marc Chagall, married to a Henri Matisse-like elegance. This sensory acuity made her vulnerable. For all her father’s abuse, Chang’s most precise, terrible childhood memory was being forced to wear her stepmother’s hand-me-downs. The indignity felt like a physical assault. One dress, she wrote, was “the color of chopped beef, and I wore it for what seemed like forever, looking as if my whole body was covered with chilblains, and even when winter had passed, the scars from the sores remained -- the gown was that hateful, that shameful.” During the most productive period of her life, which coincided with the Japanese Occupation, she published her first collections of essays and fiction, her masterly novella The Golden Cangue, and the short stories and novellas now known as Love in a Fallen City. But she was also making her own clothing and operating a design firm. She had finally achieved a measure of self-determination. In her attention to fashion, Chang was alternately a menace and a non-entity. Japanese authorities regarded her writing as unthreatening; after the Communist Revolution, her work -- with its emphasis on haute couture, sex, and envy -- was considered “bourgeoise.” Even today, critics tend to describe Chang’s work as touchingly concerned with life’s “trivialities.” Of course, life is nothing but. “Man's joie de vivre,” Chang announced, “is solely to be found in life's irrelevancies.” She never quite understood “the Art of Living” as her mother wanted her to -- how to properly pare an apple, or remember her own telephone number. “What I knew how to do...was listen to bagpipes, sit in a wicker chair enjoying a faint breeze, eat salt-boiled peanuts, admire neon lights on a wet night, reach out from the upper level of a double-decker bus to pluck leaves from the treetops.” And Lord, could she pluck. In her fiction, as in her essays, Chang knew the details that would appall, vivify, and stun. So it is that a trivial, bourgeoise writer produced some of the Occupation’s most masterful journalism. “From the Ashes” narrates her experiences as a university student in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded. “When we first heard that war had broken out,” she recalled, “a girl in my dormitory started panicking. ‘What am I to do? I've nothing to wear!’” When a bomb landed nearby and the students were evacuated, another student insisted on packing her best clothes into a leather trunk, which she dragged downhill through gunfire. Fashion had always been an arms race; now actual war had upped the ante. “From the Ashes” confirmed Chang’s reputation as a consummate stylist, practical but pleasure-minded. It was a kind of sensual fortitude. “After Hong Kong fell,” she remembered, “we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lipstick.” Her polished wit is enchanting, but critics often find a coolness to her high style. And something horrific does live in Chang’s eloquence. She describes “the cantankerous landlady whose crossed eyes stuck out like a pair of taps,” “the young wife whose neck and head could have been the blow dryer at the hairdresser’s.” Reading Chang, you have a sense of intimacy that can be easily revoked. Her eyes might lift suddenly from the page and describe you. One critic pointedly asked, “Can someone who does not connect with people be a writer?” But she did, and she was. Chang was seduced by colors, but fell as readily for men. (In Classical Chinese, the words sex and color are, in fact, identical.) By the age of 25, already the literary darling of 1940s Shanghai, she fell disastrously in love with Hu Lancheng. Hu was an accomplished journalist. He was also a serial, and simultaneous, womanizer: At the time of their wedding, he was still married to his third wife. Hu left Chang repeatedly -- first for a 17-year-old nurse, then for a 40-year-old widowed concubine. The marriage lasted three years. In fiction, too, her high style was met by high romance. Her famous Love in a Fallen City suffers from a baffling mistranslation: this is, rather, a love that destroys cities. It’s a reference to a classical allusion -- the kind of femme fatale who upends cities and nations. Her women fall in love with married men, spies, their own fathers; they dash themselves against passion and beauty; they make desperate, romantic suicide pacts with lovers who leave them to drink their poison alone. They topple cities; they topple themselves. While the fall of Shanghai could not disrupt Chang’s output, the Communist Revolution ultimately did. In 1952, Chang moved to Hong Kong, where she worked as a translator for the United States Information Service. She had always been an accomplished English writer; her first published essay was written in English. Now she rendered American giants like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Hemingway into Chinese. Naked Earth, written first in Chinese and then translated into English, was commissioned by her employer as anti-Communist propaganda. Naked Earth, one of Chang’s most overtly political works, is one of her least appreciated, particularly in mainland China. The book is not quite characteristic Chang. Its Chinese title, often rendered as Love in Redland, sounds like a mashup of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Colleen McCullough. The English title, with its echoes of The Good Earth, seems built on the preposterous assumption that Chang would ever allow anything to leave her pen naked, uncolored by her particular style. And then there’s the provocation of naked political ideologies. As Chang herself observed years earlier, in “From the Ashes,” “Regardless of whether they were political or philosophical, world views which are too clear-cut are bound to provoke antipathy.” Still, the commission shouldn't undercut the novel’s artistic merits. Recent revelations about support from the American government certainly haven’t undermined the legacy of Boris Pasternak. Like Dr. Zhivago, Naked Earth jolts and arrests almost immediately. Inveterate Chang readers won’t be disappointed. There is high style here, and desperate love. (Two university students caught in a secret romance. A doomed commune. Deadly backstabbing. You do the math, comrade.) The question is whether this new release of Naked Earth can attract new readers. That’s still an open question. Despite her renewed popularity at home, and the international success of Ang Lee’s adaptations, Chang’s fiction, like Chang herself, has run into trouble in its later years. For me, the definitively chilling Chang detail comes from “My Dream of Being a Genius:” “Life is a dazzling gown covered with lice.” It’s a terrifying foreshadowing of Chang’s final days in Californian exile, moving constantly from motel to motel to avoid the lice that trailed her. She was found in her Westwood apartment several days after her death, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean. This last request is pure Chang: a grand, futile, romantic gesture. I hope Naked Earth can cross coasts. But that’s almost beside the point.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 5 8 min read
● ●
● ● ●