New York in the '50s (26 page)

What most impressed me about Kerouac, though, was that he paid for our drinks by pulling a wad of bills from a money belt he wore around his waist that contained some of the cash from his $1,000 advance from the publisher (he received it in a series of installments of $100 a month). I had heard about money belts, perhaps on one of my boyhood radio serials like “Jack Armstrong,” but I had never seen one before in real life, and it symbolized to me adventure and intrigue. If anyone had asked me then what Jack Kerouac was like, I would have said he was a moody guy who wore a money belt.

I forgot about Kerouac until the following September, when his name popped out at me from the pages of the
New York Times
one morning while I was having scrambled eggs and french fries for breakfast at Jim Atkins's hash house in Sheridan Square. The novel whose advance had bought me drinks at Johnny Romero's bar was hailed in the day's book review of September 5, 1957, in terms of praise I had never before seen lavished on a new work by a young and almost unknown author.
On the Road
was described not only as an “authentic work of art” and a “major novel” but, more important, as a “historic occasion.”

I gulped my coffee, concentrating on this review that was the literary equivalent of “a star is born.” The
Times
critic declared: “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties,
The Sun Also Rises
came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation,' so it seems certain that
On the Road
will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.'” I knew that the
New York Times
was “the newspaper
of record,” especially in the interpretation of literary matters to the public, so its own prediction of the book's historic status (“it seems certain …”) automatically made it true. The book and the generation it celebrated were officially anointed.

Oddly enough, this crucial review was not written by the
Times
's regular daily book critic. As a matter of fact, it was hard for me to imagine the conservative, establishment-oriented Orville Prescott finding any literary merit—much less historical significance—in Kerouac's work, or in the whole idea of a new generation of rootless young people smoking marijuana and driving to the Coast looking for kicks. But Prescott, the
Times
's daily reviewer, didn't write this landmark notice that launched a book, its author, and a whole way of life to the level of a national industry, and changed the cultural course of our society.

The rave for
On the Road
and its author was written by a
Times
staff writer named Gilbert Millstein, whom I came to recognize later as a denizen of the Village—a friendly, sharp-minded man I saw around in bars like the San Remo and the Kettle of Fish, always ready to have a beer and engage in a good discussion of the latest novel, poetry volume, or jazz group. Was he given Kerouac's novel because he was an expert on the subject? I assumed that must be the case, since he wrote in his review, as if to explain and defend his role as the novel's critic, “This book requires exegesis and a detailing of background.”

Millstein was, in fact, a logical person to provide such exegesis and background, for five years before, he had given a very favorable notice in
The New York Times Book Review
to a first novel called
Go
, which described the lifestyle of “the beats” and used the term in print for the first time. Then, at Millstein's suggestion, the novel's young author, John Clellon Holmes, had written an article, “This Is the Beat Generation,” for
The New York Times Magazine
of November 16, 1952, which first defined this new phenomenon for the public: “The generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective. It was John [
sic
] Kerouac, the author of a fine, neglected novel,
The Town and the City
, who finally came up with it.… One day he said, ‘You know, this is really a
beat
generation.'”

Kerouac later recalled that day for
Village Voice
photographer Fred McDarrah: “John Clellon Holmes and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism, and I said, ‘You know, this is really a beat generation,' and he leapt up and said, ‘That's it, that's right!'” It was one of those great moments in American literary history, like the time in Paris when Gertrude Stein said to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation” and began the obsession with “generations” that became a national pastime.

That morning in Jim Atkins's beanery as I munched the last of my toast, I imagined the
Times
had assigned the review to Millstein because of his role as an expert on a subject that must have been of little or no interest to Orville Prescott. Maybe Prescott himself had recognized his own lack of interest and sympathy for the scene of the novel, and out of a sense of fairness passed it on. (I was very young.)

Long afterward, I heard and read that it happened because Prescott was on vacation, but as I looked back on the event, I wondered if anything so significant could have occurred simply by accident. There must be more to the story, I suspected, and decided to track it down. I found Millstein's name in the Manhattan phone book, thirty-three years after the event, and called him to ask about it. Sounding as friendly and interesting as he had been when he held forth back at the San Remo and the Kettle of Fish, Millstein explains that he didn't get the book to review because of his own expertise or by any design at all. Not only was Prescott off on vacation; Millstein was about to leave for his own.

“But before I left,” he says, “I went up to the book review department to choose several books to take with me to read—the idea was I'd review them later, in good time. I looked through the pile and saw Kerouac's novel, and picked it because I'd heard about him from John Clellon Holmes. I wasn't looking for Kerouac's novel beforehand. I didn't even know it was coming out.

“When Prescott got back and read my review of
On the Road
he was enraged. He hated the book. He even hated to
look
at it. That was the end of me in daily book reviewing for the
Times
, though I did do some more for the Sunday
Book Review
.”

Millstein had not only called the publication of
On the Road
a “historic
occasion” but also cast its author as “the principal avatar” of “the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat.'” Millstein hadn't known Kerouac before reviewing his novel, but met him soon afterward: “I was enchanted by him. The only word for him was sweet. He was a sweet man and he loved his mother. That, of course, was literally true, you know.

“After my review came out, I used to go out with Jack on the Bowery, drinking in those bars. He would always end up dead drunk, passed out with his head on the table. We'd have to get a cab and somebody would take him home.”

I ask Millstein if Kerouac appreciated what his review in the
Times
had done for him.

“Oh yes, and he made no bones about it, either. When he introduced me to people, he'd put an arm around me and say, ‘This is Gilbert Millstein—he made me.'”

In the weeks that followed Millstein's review of
On the Road
, Kerouac was photographed, interviewed, enshrined, adored, and deplored, on television and in the press; overnight he became the hot new controversial antihero of the national media. A few months later I was covering his act myself when he opened at the Village Vanguard, reading his work to the accompaniment of a jazz piano player on a double bill with the J. J. Johnson Quartet.

The Vanguard was in my own neighborhood, on Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square, and I sometimes went there to listen to jazz. When I passed the place I usually checked the pictures outside to see if there was any musician or group I wanted to catch. On a cold Friday night in December, the week before Christmas, I was on my way to a poetry reading (non-beat) at NYU when, outside the Vanguard, I saw a glossy photo of Kerouac. I decided to stop by later and watch the avatar in action, sensing at once I could get a good, ironic piece out of it for
The Nation
.

I didn't come as an objective reporter, much less an admirer, of Kerouac and his work or of the Beat Generation he seemed to have created, like Frankenstein's monster, with the publication of
On the Road
. Like many of my friends under thirty, I resented being labeled because of my age first as “silent” and suddenly as “beat,” when my own life and work, like that of the writers I admired—James Baldwin and William Styron, J. D. Salinger and Carson
McCullers—had little in common with the life or literary style exemplified by what Seymour Krim called Kerouac's “non-stop gush.”

We were what Krim rightly distinguished as “the writer writers,” as opposed to the beat writers. Kerouac himself made a similar distinction when he called
The Town and the City
his “novel novel,” as opposed to his later books, which were transcribed in the free-flowing style. With his usual flair for popularizing his friends' work, Allen Ginsberg christened Kerouac's method as “spontaneous bop prosody.” Truman Capote coined the
mot
that became the accepted literary judgment of the time when he said that Kerouac's prose wasn't writing at all but “typing.”

I tried to read
On the Road
and found it hard to take—embarrassing not only in what I considered the amateurish style or purposeful lack of it, but in what seemed to me the hokey, high school exuberance of these innocents abroad in their own land:

“Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even
begin
to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears.…”

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska. “Whooee, here we go!”

I said to myself, “Wow, what'll
Denver
be like!”

Wow. Whooee. I figured Kerouac must regard me and my friends, the Village “writer writers,” as “the arty types … all over America, sucking up its blood.”

Some of the Columbia literary alums, a little closer to Kerouac's age than my own, were among his most adamant attackers. Herbert Gold wrote acidly in
The Nation
that
On the Road
was “proof of illness rather than a creation of art, a novel.” Norman Podhoretz, the young critic and
Commentary
editor, called it “an inept imitation of Faulkner and Joyce done by a man who thinks all you have to do … is sit back and pour out anything that pops into your head.” He suggested in an
Esquire
essay that the Beat Generation was “a conspiracy to overthrow civilization” and replace it with “the world of the adolescent street gang.” Harvard grad John Updike later added a parody of the novel in
The New Yorker
called “On the Sidewalk,”
which portrayed Kerouac's characters as childish and ridiculous. My wry friend Marion Magid recalls her reaction back then to
On the Road:
“I found it boring. It was eventless, and besides, I was never interested in vehicles.”

Still, if you were a New York writer you had to read, or at least try to read,
On the Road
in the fall of 1957, simply to be able to express your dislike of it with authority at the bars and coffeehouses where such things were discussed. “After that Millstein review in the
Times,
” Nat Hentoff recalls, “if you didn't read it, you were a square.”

True to his genuinely liberal nature, Nat was my only writer friend in the Village who admits to enjoying the book when it came out. “I thought it was exciting because it was about a new scene,” he says. “I'd known itinerants before, but not people like this. I wasn't sure this was the arrival of a whole new generation, though. I just thought it was about some interesting persons.”

In
Advertisements for Myself
, published two years after
On the Road
, Norman Mailer evaluated his competitors for the crown of great novelist. He called Kerouac as a writer “pretentious as a rich whore” and “sentimental as a lollipop,” though he granted Kerouac “a large talent.” Looking back, Mailer now recalls a more personal reaction to
On the Road
when it came out: “I read it with a sinking heart. We were very competitive back then. I was thinking, Oh shit, this guy's done it. He was there, living it, and I was just an intellectual, writing about it.

“I enjoyed it more when I read it a few years ago, now that I was no longer competitive about it,” Mailer says. “I felt I betrayed Kerouac—and so betrayed myself—when I was supposed to defend him on a TV show with Truman Capote. It was Capote's first time on TV, and he made his remark that became famous about Kerouac's work, that it isn't writing, it's typing, and that won the evening. If I was as wise then as I am now, I'd have defended Kerouac with all my ability. A half-assed defense is a form of self-treachery.”

In Mailer's evaluation of Kerouac in
Advertisements for Myself
, he advised that “to judge his worth it is better to forget about him as a novelist and see him instead as an action painter or a bard.” Perhaps it was as a bard that his freedom song appealed.

Richard Lingeman, now executive editor of
The Nation
, remembers
how
On the Road
affected him when he was a student at Yale Law School. “There was a voice in it that called you. It was very seductive and had the effect of making me want to get away from the straight world. I don't know if
On the Road
decided me to quit law school, but it helped me develop a revulsion to that whole mindset, and the urge to be a writer came up in me—so that book was probably one of many influences. Anyway, I dropped out of law school and went back home to try to write a novel.” Lingeman didn't finish that novel, but six months later he moved to New York and began his career as a writer and editor.