Was Jack Kerouac simply a hobo, traipsing around the country in the late 1940s? Were he and his buddies just bums? Tramps? Or were they pilgrims?
I wrote about hoboes, bums, and tramps, earlier this year in a post about Louis L’Amour.
In L’Amour’s world of the 1920s bums were locals who did not work, tramps were wanderers of the same ilk, while hoboes were wandering workers essential to the nation’s economy. The definitions, or understanding of the people represented by those terms, changed in the decades that followed.
A few days ago I picked up a fascinating book titled No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac (Citadel Press, 1964) and written by Frederick Feied.
Kerouac as Sal Paradise, and Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty, were on the road nearly a generation later than contemporaries L’Amour, London and Dos Passos, as Feied acknowledges in his book, but he makes an even greater distinction about Kerouac, the “middle class, college educated romantic who hitchhikes, hops freights, and waxes poetic about the hobo life” in On the Road.
It’s a distinction far flung from how the hobo is treated in the works of London and Dos Passos. Feied writes …
In On the Road the pattern of restless, unprovoked and aimless flight gradually begins to take on the aspect of a pilgrimage. Through a kind of motivational metamorphosis, flight becomes transformed into its opposite—a search for values, for something to do, somewhere to go, someone to believe in.
More and more as the novel progresses the talk turns on religion—God. Every happening of any possible religious consequence is examined for any significance it might possess.
Though Truman Capote famously panned Jack Kerouac’s prose as “just typing,” On the Road is, as its author said (and who would know better?) “really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God.”
In other words, a kind of hobo pilgrimage, the holy place presumably to be found on the road itself.