So who knows? Maybe I’ll succumb to Kerouac’s charms yet. On the other hand, having first devoured On the Road at 21 and made a pilgrimage to Lowell at 25, both in the early 1990s, Barnett was still a believer. The consensus seems to be that Kerouac is a thing for callow youths, to be grown out of, to be reassessed in maturity and found wanting.” “Kerouac’s works often make it onto the list of red-flag books that, if you see on the shelf of a man you are dating, you should run a mile. I’m indebted to one long-time fan, David Barnett, who writing in the Guardian for the centenary, included this public health warning:

How deprived I am for not having experienced On the Road at the right time may be debatable, however. But when I re-read it a few years ago, either I or the novel had aged badly. When I first read that, at about 23, I was swept away by the romance of the hero’s adventures blowing up fascist-held bridges in civil war Spain while having earth-moving sex with a beautiful republican called Maria. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is one. There are books you should definitely not revisit in middle age, I know from experience. But perhaps that explains why, despite several attempts, I have yet to reach page 2 of On the Road.

Having not Kerouac a first time before that age, I may be a bit late starting now. Then, somewhere since, I read the notorious put-down by Truman Capote, who once said of Kerouac’s jazz-style compositions, committed to paper in a frenzy of spontaneity and left unrevised: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” And I also saw Capote’s even more damning verdict: “The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is re-read him at 38.” When I still hadn’t made it past page 1 by early April, I even brought it with me on a trip to Boston, thinking that for a more profound encounter with the memoir, I would read some of it in his native state perhaps in Lowell itself, to which a detour was vaguely planned. Mind you, he prided himself on having even more distant forebears in Ireland, of which more later.īack in January, with the anniversary impending, I decided that this year I would finally get around to reading On the Road, one of those supposed literary classics that had hitherto escaped me. In the same corner of Brittany that houses the hermitage of St Ronan (subject of Wednesday’s diary), there is even a hamlet called Kerouac, to which the writer’s distant forebears must be traceable. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in March 1922, he was descended from French-Canadians who were in turn descended from French Celts. Speaking of Brittany, as we were the other day (June 1st), reminds me that this year is the centenary of the birth of Jack Kerouac, a man with deep roots in those parts.

Jack kerouac reading on the road