“Nobody, nobody,” Kerouac writes in the closing lines of On the Road, “knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.” But it is also true that those rags—ghosts from the inevitable future, time bombs woven into our very DNA—are with us even when we’re at our most transcendent. If, in some sense, that’s a form of failure, it’s the same failure we all face, the failure to sustain ourselves in the face of eternity, to build a firewall against the void. No one ever tried harder—making his friends into mythic figures, turning his adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self. It’s a remarkable achievement, or it would be if we could see it, if we could clear away our preconceptions and misreadings, if we could recognize that it is precisely the contradictions (the road warrior who lived with his mother, the “happy, sheepish imbecile” who became an alcoholic) that make him so compelling after all. “Kerouac,” Burroughs pointed out, “opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis . . . [but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life.”
Or as Kerouac himself said, in that Paris Review interview: “It’s our work that counts, if anything at all.”
David Ulin
