On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [25]
If Millstein’s identification of On the Road as a novel concerned most strongly with the search for affirmation in the context of a spiritually barren and fearful American society was an attempt to establish the ground on which the novel would be discussed, his view was challenged by less sympathetic reviewers who, while they could not ignore the exhuberant beauty and freshness of Kerouac’s style, would not concede the seriousness of his spiritual purpose and intent. In the New York Times on Sunday, September 8, David Dempsey argued that “Jack Kerouac has written an enormously readable and entertaining book but one reads it in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow—the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives.”
Other cultural critics were more openly hostile. Reviewing the novel for the New York World-Telegram & Sun, Robert C. Ruark argued that On the Road was not much more than a “candid admission” that Kerouac “had been on the bum for six years.” Kerouac’s “snivelling” characters, wrote Ruark, were “punks” who needed a kick “in the pants.” In the New Leader on October 28, William Murray argued that the novel was certainly significant and important in the context of the “mood and meaning” of its time, but Kerouac “is most certainly not an artist, for that would imply a discipline and unity of purpose which his writing does not reflect.” On the Road was important, Murray continued, “because it communicates directly in a non-literary way an emotional experience of our time.”
What Viking publicity director Patricia McManus called the novel’s “resounding, if mixed, effect” in an in-house memo dated February 6, 1958, led to On the Road’s quickly going through three editions. In an earlier, prepublication memo, McManus had anticipated, “judging by advance readings,” that the novel would “stirup considerable lively discussion, pro and con.” By January 1958, McManus reported, “at least two colleges have adopted it for modern literature courses (how the schools are using it hasn’t yet been ascertained…perhaps for after-curfew reading).”
The controversy over Jack Kerouac and On the Road became the focal contest in a larger cultural war in which Kerouac’s insistence that he was on a spiritual quest, his liminal working-class, French-Canadian status, and his apparently out-of-nowhere emergence as the mythologizer and reluctant figurehead of a countercultural generation defined by opposition to cold war politics and ideology made him an open target. Kerouac’s novel, written six years earlier and concerned with the “hot” and exuberant youth of the late 1940s, was mistakenly seen as direct social commentary on the “cool” youth culture of the late 1950s. Kerouac’s technical success in collapsing the distinction between fiction and nonfiction also meant that the intended and conscious thematic and structural kinships On the Road shares with canonical American novels including, most obviously and notably, Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby, went largely unnoticed, while many readers, because it suited them to do so, simply confused Kerouac with Dean Moriarty. In his, “The Cult of Unthink,” published in Horizon, September 15, 1958, Robert Brustein linked Kerouac with the “glowering” and inarticulate “tribal followers” of Marlon Brando and James Dean. The “Beat Generation,” Brustein argued, was surly and discontented, “of much muscle and little mind” and “prepared to offer violence