The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship

HEN NORMAN MAILER asserted, in Advertisements for Myself,' that Jack Kerouac lacks intelligence, and a of the novel, he was giving voice to an opinion so generally accepted that no critic to this day has attempted to refute or even qualify it. Yet Kerouac's books continue to be read, and even his unpublished manuscripts are receiving attention. (Visions of Cody, a work written in I95I-I952, was published in January I973 by McGraw-Hill.) In addition, a full scale biography has recently appeared (Ann Charters, Kerouac, Straight Arrow Press, I973), and another is in progress. Nevertheless, critical reassessment lags. Readers admire hesitatingly, even helplessly, as if they were unsure how to describe a writer for whom few terms, except pejorative ones, have been invented. What is needed to counteract the negative influence of unproved opinions like Mailer's is not, however, a vocabulary of praise but one of careful critical judgment like that recently accorded Mailer himself.2 Kerouac's work deserves understanding. If, after treating the work fairly, we find condemnation justified, we can pass with good conscience to worthier objects. A close look at Kerouac's work suggests that his sense of the novel, though not identical to Mailer's, is carefully and rigorously developed; and his discipline, intelligence, honesty are indeed evident, perhaps most clearly so in the novel for which he is best known, On The Road. For though many readers of On The Road have thought it a modern version of the picaresque,3 its structure is formidably complex. Here is no loose scribbling of notes whose only organization is geographical and chronological, but a delicately con1 See Advertisements for Myself (New York: Berkeley Medallion Ed., I966), p. 428. 2 Particularly by Richard Poirier in Mailer, in The Modern Masters Series, ed. F. Ker

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