GLR November-December 2022

searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.” Sal tells Dean that he and his girlfriend Laura intend to save their money and move to San Francisco. Dean shows up at their apartment soon after, a gibbering wreck. He eventually con fesses “in a sudden moment of gaping wonder” why he rushed across the country: “Well and yes, of course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever.” In full retreat from this tender declaration, Sal rejoices when Dean’s wife in San Francisco invites her wayward husband to come home. Dean asks him for a ride to Penn Station, but Sal turns him down because Remi, a tiresome and pompous friend of Sal’s, doesn’t want Dean along on the double date he has planned for the evening: “So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. ... Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought spe cially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Av enue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again.” The novel closes with a one-paragraph prose poem, a paean to Sal’s travels and his continued longing for the friend he has abandoned just as Dean earlier in the novel had abandoned him: “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.” This fa

My Life As Elizabeth Taylor

Like Elizabeth Taylor I was raised—I thought I was raised—at MGM. A life of being coddled, fussed over in limousines on my way to the set…. Harris, you play shortstop! a gym teacher once barked. Fine, I said . Where’s that? The look I got. Worth diamonds. Rubies. I wear those jewels still.

J OHN H ARRIS

mous ending brings together Sal Paradise’s awe of the beautiful country he has traveled with his love for the friend he longs to be with but can no longer follow to the ends of the earth. The presence of his “girl” signals that he has chosen, more or less by default, the conventions of the straight world. Kerouac himself did not necessarily think this was the right choice. In response to a letter from Elbert Lenrow, whose course on the 20th-century American novel Kerouac had taken at the New School for Social Research, he rebuked the older man for criticizing the ending of On the Road: “Almost like a child you incensedly cry to me ‘Since when is a bookie more important than a man in a motheaten coat’ (concerning the last scene in the book) as tho it was my own MORAL IDEA , as tho I was a spokesman for such ideas, instead of an American Novelist working in the field of Realism.” His distinction between his own views and his character’s actions belies the common as sumption that Kerouac’s novels are just thinly veiled autobi ographies. Perhaps more to the point, he does not condone Sal’s decision to let Dean walk away. At the end of his letter to Lenrow (written late in 1957), Ker ouac makes another important point that shows both his fragile ego and his awareness of the warping power of prejudice: “But I am well loved. Every single woman I’ve met in the past week (excepting dikes) has wanted to make love to me (married or not), at least secretly. I am well loved by almost all men. It’s the SYSTEM that rejects me, and you, and all of us. The system of ig norance. It bears watching, that lil old system.” He doesn’t spec ify whether the men who love him want to make love to him as all the straight women do, but he certainly doesn’t foreclose that possibility. And he’s right about “the system”—the systemic prejudices that infiltrate the minds and hearts of individuals. Ker ouac himself was not immune to ignorant prejudice, including homophobia, but at his best he was more self-aware than most and able to bring solace and pleasure to the legions of readers who came to love not only his books but the man himself. If Ker ouac had lived to see his hundredth birthday, I think that real ization would have made him smile.

The G & LR

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