Mick Hartley

I don’t know how Anthony Daniels decides which of his written pieces go under his own name and which under his nom de plume of Theodore Dalrymple. This one, I’d have thought, has that slightly Blimpish air of Dalrymple, but it’s credited to Daniels. Anywat, it’s a review of “Why Kerouac Matters“, by John Leland, and it’s no surprise that Daniels/Dalrymple is not a fan:

A writer can be important without being good, either from the literary or the moral point of view. He who wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was among the most important writers who ever lived. So while I agree with the premise of Mr. Leland’s title, that “Kerouac matters,” I disagree as to why he matters. Mr. Leland takes him to have a serious or deep moral purpose: he sees On the Road as a profound Bildungsroman, a mid-twentieth century Great Expectations, whereas I see it as manifesto for psychobabble.

There follows much tut-tutting about the dubious character of Dean Moriarty, the hero, or more accurately perhaps the anti-hero, of the book.

It is, of course, the case that consistently bad people such as Moriarty may be highly attractive to the good, and influence them unduly. Bad people can be charming, witty, intelligent, and talented. Indeed, Kerouac leads us to believe that Moriarty is possessed of such qualities, though he, Kerouac, is so poor a writer that he is quite incapable of conveying them to the reader. In fact, Moriarty comes across as a psychopath and nothing else; never once does he say a clever, witty, or arresting thing; in this respect he is rather like the author himself.

His very inarticulacy, however, is meant to imply depths that lie beyond the powers of language to express. On the way south, he says:

It’s the world. My God! It’s the world! We can go right down to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!

The italicization insinuates that these expletives express more in Dean’s mouth than in the average person’s who might use them.

We are told by Sal that Dean is a wonderful talker, but it is as if Boswell had told us that Johnson was an unexampled conversationalist without having given us any examples. One of Dean’s longest speeches in the book starts as follows:

Oh, man! man! man! And it’s not even the beginning of it—and now here we are at last going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denver together and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.

Compared with Dean Moriarty, Javier Pérez de Cuellár is Oscar Wilde, Ella Wheeler Wilcox is Keats, and Dale Carnegie is Spinoza.

Yes yes, we get the point. But, despite the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel feel to all this, Kerouac’s portrait of Moriarty, and the hold he has over Sal Paradiso, is in fact acutely done. Yes, people like Moriarty – charming, full of energy, sociopathic – do hold a fatal attraction for young people. That’s the way it goes; the way it’s always been. And then Paradiso tires of him, grows up. To that extent it’s a rite-of-passage, a young man’s book.

Then there’s the question of Kerouac’s style:

I mentioned the banality of the book to a young man who told me that he had thought it wonderful when he had read it a few years previously. I devised a test. He would open it and point to a passage at random, and I would read the passage out loud. He would then tell me whether he thought it was banal. Here is the passage:

The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four Post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.

A passage such as this, appearing in an alleged literary classic, must encourage and delude many an adolescent keeper of a diary that his entries will one day find the appreciative audience that their immanent genius deserves. The popularity of On the Road is a manifestation of the propensity in a demotic age of mediocrity to worship itself. But the young man who had so appreciated the book only a few years previously was honest enough to accept that my point was made.

Whether that was a random passage or not (I always distrust a reviewer who claims to be picking a passage at random) I have to say I don’t find it banal at all. You could I suppose, if you wanted to be insulting, say it was sub-Hemingway, but I like those short matter-of-fact sentences. I particularly like the last few: “We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.” Kerouac famously tried to write fast, getting it all down in one go, with no revision. It’s all a question of taste no doubt, but most of the time it worked, and that immediacy comes over. As it does here, I think.

But really, my objection to the whole piece is its joylessness. On The Road is bursting with that young man’s energy, that feeling of a boundless America, full of possibilities. It’s not a book I feel like I want to read again, but to miss the power of that is to miss the whole glory of the book. Daniels comes across as though he was born middle-aged.