Feel The Beat Kerouac Collection Shows Generation’s Experience

Neal Robison was not the type of kid to take a book home from high school. Extracurricular activity meant drinking flavored vodka on camping trips with friends.

But drifting through Indiana State University, he read a book called “On the Road” by a guy named Jack Kerouac.

Like so many young people who continue to be influenced by the general of the Beat Revolution, Robison was inspired to hold a new view of books and the world in general.

Thirty years later, the Washington State University professor still kindles the passion he felt for the movement as he prepares to display an eclectic personal collection of Kerouac memorabilia.

Like the beats themselves, the exhibit has no pretense of academic scholarship. A buttoned-down associate professor of communications and host of Northwest Public Radio’s “The Jazz Collector,” Robison’s chief credential is his exuberance.

“I wanted to be Beat,” Robison, 55, gushes, adopting the prose style of the time in an introduction he wrote for the display, which opens Monday in the Holland Library archives.

“To be Beat was to be beatific and follow the teachings of Zen Buddhism. To be Beat was to be an exile in convention. To be Beat was to comprehend jazz music as the ‘heart beat’ of the disenfranchised. To be Beat was to elevate experience as life’s purpose.”

And today, to be Beat means to be back in fashion, a too-tuned time traveler donning a goateed mirror image bent back from a parallel universe.

Or something like that. Kerouac is long dead, pulled under by alcoholism at the age of 47, but Viking Penguin, the original publisher of “On the Road,” has a Kerouac reader in its spring catalog. Francis Ford Coppola starts turning the book into a movie next month.

When Kerouac died in 1969, his estate was barely worth $50,000. Actor Johnny Depp recently paid as much for one of his raincoats, and legal claimants to the estate now put his papers and other belongings at $10 million.

Copies of the hard- and soft-cover Kerouac books on display at WSU are rare finds, and forget about picking up a copy of “Blues and Haikus,” the recording of Kerouac reading poetry with noodling saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Simms.

Auntie’s has enough trouble keeping backpack-beaten copies of “On the Road” in its used books section.

“It’s a real steady seller,” said Scott Richter, a senior staff member at the Spokane bookstore. “It’s a timeless book. It deals with wandering souls and finding yourself and all that.”

In one of the first display cases housing Robison’s collection sits a quote from “On the Road” that says as much about Kerouac as the people he wrote about.

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!”’

So said America with the release of “On the Road,” a freewheeling crossAmerica travelogue based on Kerouac’s adventures with the energetic “little jail kid” Neal Cassady, known to readers as Dean Moriarty.

It was published in 1957, its third and final draft composed with the aid of brandy and benzedrine on a single roll of teletype paper over three weeks.

By then, the word “beat” had already been coined to describe the tired, post-war generation that sought a state of blissful illumination outside conventional society. But “On the Road” gave the term plot and characters and an overwhelming feeling of “wow ” - the book’s operative emotion - toward the full range of human experience.

“The road was just all of this wonderful land out there,” said Robison. “All of these things happening. All of these people. The immensity of it.”

As immense as the fame that eventually overwhelmed Kerouac. Talk show appearances and public performances reduced him to a nervous, vomiting wretch. His life became a tailspin of ruined marriages, faceless women and drinking binges that by one reporter’s count hit the speed of a dozen boilermakers an hour.

As Robison’s collection shows through records, movie posters, magazines and books, Kerouac did manage to put out a serious body of work, much of it built around a personal “legend” that included his working class, mill-town youth, the death of a brother, his first love and his personal spiritual quest.

But the collection also shows how the beat revolution rolled on, however briefly, as both a literary movement and a widely disdained cultural phenomenon.

It spawned “road” pieces like “Before the Road” and “On the Road with Mother,” articles Kerouac wrote for Playboy and Holiday in 1959 and 1965.

It also gave rise to scholarly studies like “The Real Bohemia,” whose cover features a bearded man reclining by bongo drums on a bare mattress. Nearby is an untended infant and recordings of Miles Davis and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which did for beat poetry what “On the Road” did for prose.

George Peppard and Natalie Wood starred in “The Subterraneans,” a movie of Kerouac’s personal account of “pad life” and one of several beat films that Robison describes as “notoriously bad.”

“When Kerouac was invited in while they were shooting this, he just walked out in disgust, went down to a bar and got drunk,” Robison said.

Then there was a spate of pulp fictions that exploited the stereotyped beatnik. There were “Beat Girls” and the “adults only” “Sin Time Beatniks.” The cover of “Beatnik Ball” leered: “The strange sex life of the sick generation is shockingly displayed.” Complete and unabridged.

“Today, people are collecting these things,” said Robison. “They’re just like the hottest thing going.”

Mad magazine served up the spoof “Beatnik - The Magazine for Hipsters.” It offered articles on “What to do if the landlord shows up,” “The night we slept 12 in a bed” and “How to get high on espresso.”

As the finishing touches of the WSU display were being readied last week, Robison planned to put out a collection of articles about the dispute over a Kerouac memorial in his hometown of Lowell, Mass.

The central question, said Robison, was “Why in the hell would we want to pay a tribute to the town drunk?”

Robison is not so dismissive.

“Basically, I think the ultimate thing Kerouac was looking for was probably pretty good,” he said. “The restlessness of finding what America is all about. The restlessness of finding experiences that are valued.”

In the end, he said, Kerouac was a catalyst for self-discovery, pointing the way for countless others, even when he didn’t know the way himself.

“We spend a lot of our life trying to find out who we are and where we fit,” Robison said, standing by his framed introduction to the exhibit.

“And sometimes someone gives us little clues and those clues sometimes can be very valuable for us. And unfortunately there are those who can never quite find out who they are or where they fit. I don’t know if Jack ever did. I don’t think he did.”

In conjunction with his exhibit, which runs through May 24, Neal Robison will speak on “The Beat Generation” in a lecture at 10:40 a.m. April 18 in Room 307 of WSU’s Murrow Communications Center.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story:

Book’s final sentence is a paragraph

This is the final sentence/ paragraph from “On the Road,” the Jack Kerouac novel WSU’s Neal Robison describes as the “tone and embodiment of the beat movement”: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.