The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts.
It’s not hyperbole to say
that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York
City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world.
Without their individual
quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock
and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the
beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and
punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction.
Of all the Beat Generation
writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road, is unequivocally the most
famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian
parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a
keen football player. Indeed, it was a football scholarship to Columbia
University which initially drew him to New York, where he first met the young
poet and visionary Allen Ginsberg, heroin addict and aspiring author William S.
Burroughs, and most importantly, the charismatic, sexually rapacious car thief
Neal Cassady, who would become his muse.
Inspired by Cassady’s
companionship, Kerouac hammered out the first draft of his most famous book on
a single, long scroll of paper between April 2 – 22, 1951; a novel he’d been
working on in one form or another since at least 1948.
When it finally saw
publication in 1957, On the Road had
undergone significant changes from Kerouac’s free-flowing initial manuscript: some
passages were rewritten or entirely excised, and his characters were renamed (Kerouac
himself became Sal Paradise, Cassady became Dean Moriarty, Ginsberg became
Carlo Marx, and Burroughs become Old Bull Lee). Most significantly,
descriptions of sexual acts deemed obscene by 1950s standards were watered down
or deleted entirely, such as an early passage describing the fledgling
relationship between Ginsberg and Cassady:
‘Allen
was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw
that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting
dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was
attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. I was
in the same room, I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to
myself “Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.”
So I didn’t see them for two weeks during which time they cemented their
relationship to mad proportions.’
Brazilian director Walter
Salles’ long-awaited screen adaptation of On
the Road reinstates much that was later excised from the novel.
‘I was immediately struck by
the urgency and immediacy of [the original scroll],’ Salles says in the film’s
production notes:
‘The
first sentence already heralded a different type of narrative. The version
published in 1957 began: “I met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.”
The scroll begins differently, “I first met Neal not long after my father
died.” The hero of the scroll has just suffered a loss that compels him to go
forward. The search for a father is a vital theme in the scroll, even more so
than in the version published in 1957. This is a theme that has always
interested me, and it became one of the motors driving the adaptation.’
 |
| The young Neal Cassady in his 1944 mug shot. |
As well as returning to the
novel’s original heartbreak, Salles’ film also reinstates much of the sex that
was excised from the published version of On
the Road. We never see Marx/Ginsberg and Moriarty/Cassady actually fucking,
but the film leaves us in no doubt that the pair were definitely lovers for a
time.
The question of Kerouac’s own
relationship with Cassady is much more ambiguous, and is alluded to beautifully
in Salles’ film in a number of scenes, such as an early encounter between the
two where Moriarty virtually seduces Paradise while begging him to teach him
how to write.
As another early member of
the Beat circle, Lucien Carr said, ‘Every person who came along was someone for
Kerouac to love’. Clearly Kerouac was smitten by Cassady, making him the hero
of another book, Visions of Cody, as well as On the Road. But were the
two men ever lovers in real life, or was their relationship simply a
particularly intense friendship – what today we might call a bromance?
Certainly Kerouac was no
stranger to the occasional same-sex encounter, according to Allen Ginsberg in a
1972 interview in the magazine Gay
Sunshine:
‘I came
out of the closet in Columbia in 1946. The first person I told about it was
Kerouac, cause I was in love with him … And actually we wound up sleeping
together maybe within a year, a couple of times. I blew him, I guess. He once
blew me, years later. It was sort of sweet, peaceful.’
Cassady himself was frank
about his sexuality, as his letter to Ginsberg dated April 10, 1947, makes
plain:
‘I’m on
a spree tonight, I’ll tell you exactly what I
want, giving no thought to you, or any respect or consideration to your
feelings …I can’t promise a damn thing, I know I’m bisexual, but prefer women,
there’s a slimmer line than you think between my attitude towards love and
yours, don’t be so concerned, it’ll fall into line. Beyond that – who knows?
Let’s try it and see, huh?’
But for Kerouac – poor,
Catholic-guilt laden Kerouac – his same-sex attraction was a matter of personal
shame.
‘As a homophobic homoerotic,
he denied enjoying sex with men, but continued to have it,’ Kerouac’s editor
turned biographer Ellis Amburn wrote in Subterranean
Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. ‘The cost of living so
dishonestly was ever-increasing amounts of alcohol and drugs.’
In a short scene late in
Salles’ film, Sal Paradise spies on Dean Moriarty screwing a businessman
(played by Steve Buscemi) who they’ve just met on the road. It was a purely
financial transaction, Moriarty explains afterwards to a sulking Paradise; a
brief return to his hustling days driven entirely by economic need. Paradise doesn’t
reply; clearly his sensibilities are offended by what he’s just witnessed – or
is he, perhaps, jealous?
Seen through modern eyes,
Kerouac’s hero worship of Cassady seems suspiciously close to sublimated desire
for the younger man; a desire that resulted in one of the most significant
books of the 20th century.
We may never know if Kerouac
and Cassady were ever lovers in the physical sense of the word, but the facts
of their passionate friendship are undeniable.
Inspired by his love for
Cassady, Kerouac created what US academic Joshua Kupetz calls ‘a new American
prose form’; a literature that abandoned the traditional narrative structure of
the European novel; a book which changed lives.
As a monument to Jack and
Neal’s friendship, that’s one hell of a legacy.
Walter Salles’ On
the Road opens nationally on Thursday 27 September.
This article originally published on the Gay News Network on Tues 25 Sept 2012.
