On the road with The New Yorker

Every couple of years a dear friend sends me a box of old New Yorkers. I tend to pick one up when I’m feeling too blue to engage much with life. I browse through them from back to front. It’s the way I read most magazines, though I am not left handed. It may have something to do with the fact that most magazines put the arty stuff—book and movie reviews for example—near the back of the issue.

Sometimes I read a whole article, sometimes I start an article and lose interest maybe half the way through. I gave up, for example, on Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Jefferson Bottles” in the September 1, 2007 issue. I quit, not because the article was dull or badly written (of course it wasn’t) but because I found myself more and more thinking that anybody who paid more than $150,000 for any bottle of wine probably deserved what he got.

Conspicuous consumption doesn’t impress me too much.

In fact, I was a little disappointed to learn that Thomas Jefferson himself spent the modern day equivalent of $120,000 on wine while he was in France.

But at least he laid in a cellar for that amount.

I know, by the way, that a lot of this stuff is available on line, and I’ve provided links, but I do like holding the magazines in my hand and looking at the quirky little line drawings and pausing to read a cartoon or one of the poems.

Last night The New Yorker for October 1, 2007 was on top of the pile. I read Anthony Lane’s review of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” He didn’t like it much:

It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.

There’s a New Yorker sentence if ever I read one.

Then I read James Wood on Robert Alter’s translation of “The Book of Psalms.” Alas, even God bored me after a bit.

I said I was blue.

About halfway through Louis Menand on Jack Kerouac, I came across this passage:

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of �On the Road� today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It�s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When �On the Road� came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac�s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads �Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,� few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn�t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

Though I was only three years old when Kerouac took his famous road trip, I was a young woman before the first four-lane interstate highway (I-75) became a central factor in my life and I well remember a time when a trip to Lexington or Cincinnati involved fighting pretty much bumper to bumper traffic on old U.S. 25. A slow-mover could back cars up for miles and passing was sometimes a matter of taking your life in your hands.

This danger was not reduced by the fact that U.S. 25 was lined with road houses that, on a Saturday night, drew working class folk in from the dry counties for miles around.

On a perhaps more wholesome level, my columnist buddy Georgia Green Stamper recently wrote a piece about the major undertaking that was a childhood road trip from her Owen County home to the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. (If she’ll provide a link??).

I myself remember a trip from Owenton, Kentucky to Hollywood, Florida in a 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck with a homemade camper on the back made of a welded steel frame fitted with tent canvas. I remember seeing Chattanooga at night from the back door of the pickup and me and my Mom singing “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy.” I was eight.

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country��ramblin� round,� in the Guthrie song�following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank�s photographs in �The Americans,� taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac�s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders�the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father�is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man�s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost�beat. �There ain�t no flowers there,� says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. �I want to go to New York. I�m sick and tired of this. Ain�t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain�t nothin in Cheyenne.� �Ain�t nothin in New York,� Sal says. �Hell there ain�t,� she says. She wants to get in the car, too.

Was it like that? I don’t know. I partook but I was a bit too young to understand what was going on around me. I know that when we went to Florida, it was because my father had heard there was good work in the building boom down there and, though he got a good job as a crew foreman, I wasn’t allowed to enroll in school because I was a transient.

I didn’t feel the lack and I managed to pass second grade anyway. A classmate taught me how to carry when I got back to my home school.

I know that men came and lived with us and worked for my father for a time and then moved on.

So maybe I witnessed the tail-end of something.

Am I going to finish the article? I don’t know that either. Maybe. But maybe I don’t want to see my world reduced to something hip or beat. I read On the Road years ago. I wasn’t too impressed with it either.

Possibly related posts:

Where the Red Road Meets the Sky

James Baker Hall (1935-2009)

Another top ten for the end of the year

Oh to live on Coffeetree Road!

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