Could Jack Kerouac Make it in 2005?

It’s an interesting question explored at least briefly in today’s Los Angeles Times. The article focuses on the publication this month of Beat Generation, a play Kerouac wrote in 1957 that spent years collecting dust in a New Jersey warehouse. On Monday, writers gathered in the New York Public Library to discuss the work, and what would become of Kerouac in today’s world. They weren’t terribly optimistic. “You can’t be a young writer or young artist and live in New York and starve, because it’s too expensive,” said author A.M. Homes.

Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham said he knew young writers with Kerouac’s “hope of discovery of a world that hasn’t yet been sold for a mess of silver.” But he added afterward that “everything is so quickly commodified. What starts out as an idea becomes a dress. It doesn’t take very long.” 

Actor Ethan Hawke said that Kerouac “made it cool to be a thinking, thoughtful person seeking spiritual existence, which is what we need.”

The Times also published a review of the play by newly appointed books editor David L. Ulin. He writes:

Although “Beat Generation” comes billed as “a major literary find,” it’s really a minor effort, meandering, unfocused, of interest as an oddity, if at all. Still, as with even the slightest of Kerouac’s writings, it bears traces of a deeper vision, one defined by both beatitude and despair. In the end, this, more than any intimation of bohemia, is what continues to give Kerouac resonance, his sense of just how sacred, sweet and lost we are. To be human, he believed, was to be cut off from the universe — indeed, to stand apart from God. Or, as he writes early in the first act: “Well now listen here, old buddy Buck ... so it’s true as you do say, that God is us, is just us, right here, now, exactly as you say, we don’t have to run to God because we’re already there, yet Buck really now face it old buddy that ... trail to Heaven is a long trail.”

That sounds like vintage Kerouac.

©2024 World Hum, All Rights Reserved