Fall Book Week: Gene Ciarlo on Jack Kerouac

The 1950s in America anticipated the grand, anti-establishment, Haight-Ashbury, bearded, beaded, burnt-out, busted but benign hippie movement of the 1960s.

Normally, the midcentury period in America was rather conformist, conservative, and relatively quiet. Of course, there was buzz about communism and McCarthyism; and the Rosenbergs, convicted as charged, suffered the ultimate punishment. But the 1950s generally were times of mild fads like hula hoops and coonskin caps. The word of the day was cool.

In his classic novel about footloose young life in the ’50s, On the Road, Jack Kerouac presents a different picture. There are no incense and candles in this work, notwithstanding plenty of cannabis clouds. Certainly it is more than fiction, since the author has described events all too personally for readers to believe they came exclusively from his wild imagination.

My quest in rereading the novel was to find God in its pages—not “per se,” but at least a vague suggestion that someone among the wild and crazy cast of characters that comes to the fore in these pages possessed a wisp of spiritual life. I wanted to find it; I believed it was there. If the author was true to his or her characters and tried to present real men and women, he would at least suggest that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty—the two men who dominate this tale—occasionally thought about more than just sex and cigarettes, marijuana or Marie Joanna.

On the Road is a first-person account told in the voice of Sal, a stand-in for Kerouac. Sal and Dean are traveling westward, careless, carefree, and reaching the Great Divide. There are moments of poetry and suggestions of the spiritual in the writing:

I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. . . . We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

I find just a hint of the mystical in that passage, a taste of the Word-made-earth and all that it holds of miracle and wonder. There are the roots of soul. The passage ends with this memorable sentence: “Suddenly we came down from the mountain and overlooked the great sea-plain of Denver.” There it is: coming down from the mountain. Not quite Moses with the Ten Commandments, but indeed a mystical moment.

There are also less inspired passages that give us a taste of that shallowness (with a hint of something more) that sums up for me a certain kind of American spirituality, from the 1950s through today:

Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. . . .

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. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.

Is there a contradiction here somewhere? “Life is holy” and “every moment is sacred,” yet this is proclaimed in a moment of illicit sexual activity. Who is making the rules? We hear the idea is that sex is okay, that it is “beautiful”—and, of course, it is. But the priest says, and the minister and rabbis say, and Mom and Dad say, and history says, and society says, and the Evangelicals say, and the Catholics say, and the Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Congregationalists, Hindus and Buddhists, Muslims and Whirling Dervishes—they all say you can’t do what you want with your sexuality (nor with anything else, for that matter), but you must conform to certain prescribed norms that are part of culture and tradition and based, fundamentally, on a religious ethic. Order demands it, lest all of society devolve, disintegrate into chaos.

The anti-establishment youth of the ’50s tried to end that line of thinking, and for a while they succeeded, even if only among themselves. The ’60s brought “flower power” and peace onto the scene, giving it a veneer of respectability. Incense and candles became substitutes for religious rituals that the churches and their doctrines couldn’t supply, and cannot supply even today. There is an inner sense that life is holy and moments are precious. It is seared into the core of our being, and it was seeping out in the young people of midcentury America. This is humanism, and if they thought Jesus was cool, then they were unwitting adherents to a kind of Christian humanism.

There is another mystical scene from Kerouac’s novel that has stayed with me. Sal and Dean are in the high mountains of Mexico around the Rio Moctezuma when they encounter some native people. There is a moment of intense self-awareness that brings a sudden feeling of loss and desperation. Yet like so much of our American religiosity, it conveys a sense of hope in the midst of apparent despair:

They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusions of it. . . .

We had reached the approaches of the last plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade. Now Dean was sleeping and Stan driving. The shepherds appeared, dressed as in first times, in long flowing robes, the women carrying golden bundles of flax, the men staves. Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond. “Man, man,” I yelled to Dean, “wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from with your own eyes you can tell!”

He shot his head up from the seat, saw one glimpse of it all in the fading red sun, and dropped back to sleep. When he woke up he described it to me in detail and said, “Yes, man, I’m glad you told me to look. Oh, Lord, what shall I do? Where will I go?” He rubbed his belly, he looked to heaven with red eyes, he almost wept. ♦

Gene Ciarlo is a priest no longer active in the ministry. Ordained from the American College, University of Louvain, Belgium, he spent most of his ministry in parish life. After receiving a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Notre Dame University he returned to his alma mater in Louvain as director of liturgy and homiletics. Gene lives in Vermont, where everything is gracefully green when it is not solemnly white.