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by Dennis McCarthy
November 9, 1995
"Jack Kerouac's famous road trip now symbolizes a personal quest for meaning and adventure" from Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival!
While the journey as literary device is not new, Kerouac has added his own special imprint on literary treks Ñ and not simply because he "Americanized" the "Odyssey." Twain beat him to that. And even John Steinbeck, in both the "Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men," had successfully combined the American journey with his own unique version of a beat generation.
Yet defining "The Beat Generation" is not quite so simple. Mick Cusimano, cartoonist and co-editor of Boston underground magazine, Squawk, defines it as such: "When someone talks about 'beat,' they're talking about knocked down, dragged out, beat against the wall. It was a lot different in the '50s than today. It was still a very competitive society with a lot of pressure. They (the members of the beat generation) were just pushed to the edge. And they'd start writing, which was to them a very courageous act to go out and be a writer or poet. It made them total outcasts in the '50s."
But Kerouac's view of the cross-country jaunt was far more celebratory than all the rest. The attraction that Kerouac fans have to such literature is apparent every time they open their mouths. Their conversational styles often reflect the loosely structure beauty of beat generation prose. The ideas of Lee Kidd, coffeehouse activist and co-editor of Squawk Magazine, for example, flow from him in river-of-consciousness outbursts. His clauses and phrases surge, twist, meander, gurgle, and eddy without once slowing or stopping. Consider both the manner and substance of this sparkling specimen of Lee Kidd, and you may begin to understand what being "beat" is all about:
"The only reason to go on the road is to get it started for you, to get your adrenaline pumping. If that's what it takes, then do it. But you must become the road. You must be able to create the road in your head. I think that 'on the road' is a great image because it connects everything. Kerouac meant 'on the road' as sort of the adventure of being in your lifetime and skin and affirming everything Ð and not to be deterred. So obviously that's a great image. It's thrilling to even think of it now.
"I started writing poetry just by getting on trains and watching everything flash by," says Kidd. "It's wonderful for the insides because you change the scenes so quickly inside your head." Cusimano agrees, "Many young people want to find themselves. So one thing that they want to do is travel because you find out more about yourself by going into different situations and meeting new people. Your old ways of doing a thing doesn't work, so you have to find something new." Kidd adds, "But it doesn't mean you have to get in a semi or hike on a railroad train. If you're in your own little town or have a little coffeehouse with two people that on any night of the week, you're starting to be on the road."