David L. Ulin has a similarly revisionist take on the subject here.
Menand says, "They weren't rebels, they were misfits." Which is interesting, because I think that's a generationally-bound distinction. I was a teenager in the 1980s, and if faced with that concept back then, I think we'd have been totally, like, "There's a *difference*?" In that decade, our misfits *were* our rebels. Menand is coming from a somewhat sterner perspective; he's basically arguing that the Beats were *losers*--quasi-closet cases who lived on government checks and drove fast in order to put disappointment and troubling questions behind them.
Ulin takes the view that the Beats were trying "to sustain [themselves] in the face of eternity" by "making [their] friends into mythic figures, turning [their] adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self." Which is basically a friendlier way of saying they were losers who drove fast to outrun disappointment and the question of why none of them could quite make their relationships with women work. But the difference in attitude between Ulin and Menand amounts to a difference in meaning.
Of course, there's another way to look at all this. Much as Menand thinks Kerouac is bourgeois because he lived off of his GI benefits and the largesse of a friendly aunt, that was the precise definition of being an *anti*-bourgeois, a bohemian, in the 19th century. Many of the original bohemians had modest fixed incomes. There were some, like the little-known Tassaert brothers, who didn't--but better-off friends helped the Tassaerts when they could. Private income wasn't an impediment to their ongoing campaign to stick it to the Man. (My favorite bohemian anecdote is about the artist Petrus Borel, who served ice cream in human skulls.)
But the original bohemian creed was not necessarily about failure. They wanted to succeed--eventually--though only on their own terms. And they were willing to pay whatever price they had to pay as a result of that either-or attitude. "The path of the bohemian leads to the Academy or to the morgue," went a contemporary quote. And for many of them, it did. What's confusing to people about Kerouac, I think, is that his path led *both* to the Academy--kind of (Menand observes that "On the Road" is "sub-canonical")--*and* to the morgue. This is a tough one for Americans to get their heads around. He succeeded and failed at the same time?? I can haz cheezburger??
Or as Ulin puts it, "It is precisely [Kerouac's] contradictions (the road warrior who lived with his mother, the 'happy, sheepish imbecile' who became an alcoholic) that make him so compelling after all."
Happy 50th to "On the Road."
