Catching up on Kerouac
I never read Kerouac when I was reading Catcher in the Rye or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my teens. Nevertheless, Kerouac’s On the Road is another of the American classics of the post-WW2 generation.
Me, I hitchhiked around Europe when I was 21 and Inter-Railed at 26. You do meet interesting people travelling like that. A few years later I used a VisitUSA air pass to fly in stages across America, not having time to hitch or use the coaches. So I drove just short stretches on Route 66 and I got my kicks in safer places than Kerouac’s colourful characters.
Anachronistic perhaps to read about bumming across America whilst on a privileged balcony above the Mediterranean on the French Riviera. I have earned my pension and my roadtrips were only intervals in my career, they gave me useful perspective and experience. Menton also is emblematic of a free-rolling lifestyle, sleeping on beaches, hitchhiking, working as and when.
So it’s strange to me that although there are plenty of people living life on the road in Europe, modern European authors don’t really tackle roadtrips. It’s part of the American Dream to Go West, there’s a primal urge to cross the continent, which Europeans don’t have. We criss-cross and tour Europe but quite a lot of us settle down and make good somewhere.
Kerouac describes his coast-to-coast journeys, each one seemingly undertaken on a whim. The author glorifies life on the road but doesn’t go very far to answering why some people are born to run. And his ending of the book is altogether bleak.
So although reading Life on the Road is a roadtrip to the past, it’s a journey in a world I’m happy to have missed out on. Yet reading this book here on holiday in Menton is stirring memories and even dreams of my own times travelling in the USA: people I met in diners, airport lounges and of course my hosts, playmates and friends.