Brief Reflections from an Old Believer

04 Aug, 2024

I was twenty and very lonelily living in Madrid, not yet having found any friends and not yet comfortable in the language I’d need to survive in for the foreseeable future. And so I took myself down to Europe’s all-purpose media-and-music store, hoping against hope that I’d find among their selection of books in English one that might make me feel as if I weren’t invisible. I was in desperate need, in other words, of some Kerouac.

That memory came to me while reading Nicholas Berdyaev’s forward to his book on Dostoevksy. Berdyaev makes it plain from the beginning that what follows might not be a totally disinterested exploration of the big man’s work; as he says, “Dostoievsky has played a decisive part in my spiritual life. While I was still a youth a slip from him, so to say, was grafted upon me.”¹ He recognizes, though, that his enthusiasm isn’t universally felt, and that there’s only so much you can say to try and convince others “to whom [Dostoevsky’s] spirit is foreign” that they’d really love him if only they’d give him another try. And Berdyaev’s not going to pick apart his subject, or focus only on particular ideas he may have had in isolation from the totality of his work—but will instead “come to Dostoievksy by the believers’ road.”

It’s an unapologetic embrace, in other words—and it also sounds much like the way a “slip” of Kerouac is still lodged in my own soul, even if it’s been a few years since I’ve read anything by him. I’m well aware, too, that the (spirit of the) man most associated with the Beats is foreign to more contemporary people than not, that he presents all kinds of problems where, among other things, gender, race, sexuality, and nationalism are concerned. I get, too, that you can criticize his writing for not being the polished stuff of more nuanced authors. Maybe it’s at least partially because I came to his work in early adulthood, a time of life so much Beat literature celebrated, and one during which you fiercely defend the things that speak to you, that when we’re talking about Kerouac, I can’t follow the path of “so many of our contemporaries, who are inclined always to suspect as it were a hidden disease in a writer whom they love and so treat of him scalpel in hand;” like Berdyaev with Dostoevsky, I still approach him by the believers’ road.²

Why, though? Again, I’m sure a lot of it had to do with when I first came across his writing. Here was a voice, a person, obviously dissatisfied with the stale comforts on offer—but who was, at the same time he was trying to get beyond the trite safeties of his day, not being ugly or cynical or studiously nonchalant about his search. He cared about trying to find something more meaningful, even if he was clumsy and inept and even selfish in doing so. He wasn’t going to pretend not to care; he wasn’t going to act as if his interests were just casual. What I may have seen, in other words, was a voice that finally felt like it was just being honest about its hopes and beliefs and frustrations, even at times its faults. And coming out of a mostly Cold-War childhood swimming in “just say no” and talk shows, on into the put-on apathy of emo and grunge, all these drunken boys’-club shenanigans—which included dudes sincerely writing and celebrating poetry, of all things—seemed unscripted in a way that felt like simple relief.

It also, strangely enough, provided the first example I could truly understand of criticism, in this case of country, undertaken not out of disdain, but rather out of pained love for what seemed to me a recognition of so much potential wasted, as well as of the fact that you were involuntarily mixed up in it all.³ As a child and young teen in the ‘80s, I could tell that something was very strange about belligerent assertions of US greatness over all others, while also knowing that it was unwise to say too much about my discomfort. And as I grew older, trying and failing to find something that spoke to me in all the nation’s pop and political and other cultural fare, all I felt was that I belonged elsewhere, but definitely not here. With Kerouac and some of his peers, I got the sense that someone in the past might at least have understood my sense of displacement, and so I must not be a complete freak. In all the road tripping and relationships gone wrong, even if the kicks and their aftermath weren’t for me, I at least had proof that I was not alone in wanting something less manufactured, in one way or another, than what was usually available in the US.

That impression, too, made a certain new sense to me as I kept reading Berdyaev, who takes up and agrees in this case with the argument “that all genius is national, even, nay, the more, when it is most human.” He goes on to the not-new assertion that Dostoevsky “was specifically Russian, Russian right through, the most Russian of all Russian writers: at the same time he was the more human.”⁴ I’m not sure you could assert that Kerouac was all the more human for the fact of his being American to the core, but the latter he certainly was, and his writing—its style, its outlook, its very purpose for existing in the first place—would have been entirely different had his family stayed in Quebec, or never left Brittany. And like it or not, conscious of the fact or not, when I walked into FNAC in search of anything by Kerouac almost thirty years ago, what I was really searching for was something deeply familiar, American in a way that didn’t make me feel like a Pollyanna or a flag-waving imperialist. What’s more, what I refused to recognize at the time was what I would only finally come to accept, if resignedly, fifteen or so years after, when, making my way home after a trip abroad, I nearly fell to my knees in gratitude in the Brussels airport when I realized I could get a cup of drip coffee—not an Americano, not an espresso—at an otherwise crappy American chain: that I was from where I was from, and that some slip of the good old U.S. of A. had grafted itself onto me, and could probably never be disavowed.

What I’ve held onto with Kerouac is similar to what I’ve held onto in writers I found later, especially Edward Said and James Baldwin—that there are others for whom either emotional or physical exile, chosen or unwilled, is a fraught condition that cannot and should not be romanticized, only confronted and lived with as conscientiously, as honestly, as is possible. You can legitimately argue that I’m placing Kerouac among others with whom he just doesn’t belong, others who faced a whole host of serious injustices and situations and conundrums that he never even had to think about, much less act on. And I accept that argument, while also still asserting that it’s not horrendous of me to lump these three men, along with so many others, into the same personally relevant category: the one Adam Shatz uses to describe a group of writers he’s intrigued by: the ones who “have changed the way we think about” what’s around us.⁵ What that means for me in this instance is that thanks to Kerouac, and later so many very different others, I’m wiling to believe I do belong on this planet, maybe even in my native country, even if in some as-yet (and maybe never-to-be) identified way.

And so that’s the point I’ve come to, and one from which I’ll certainly move on as I continue reading, exploring, investigating—unapologetically seeking. As for my long-ago hunt in a European box store for a profoundly American author, I did find him—but only in Spanish. I leafed through On the Road for a while, intrigued about how in the world such a unique example of American English and the sensibility behind it would get translated into another language, and whether it would retain its original feel in the process. It didn’t hold me; it wasn’t what I needed right then. I walked out instead with something by one of the Brontës, and it tided me over until I started making friends, started hanging out with a few others who were almost as ill fitted to their own home as I’d been, and continue to be, in mine.

A few years ago, I came back to On the Road, when the version as originally typed out on Kerouac’s pieced-together scroll was published—and when I had a chance to see that 120-foot-long roll of paper with its tiny type. I stood there for a long time, not unaffected by what Walter Benjamin would probably have agreed was its particular aura. I wasn’t the only one hanging out there, though; plenty of others lingered along with me. I’ve no idea how they felt about it all, or if it was just another significant cultural artifact they were duty-bound to see. Standing there, though, I did feel a little less alone, comforted by the thought that maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten here on the believers’ road.

Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!