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"Call me Sal, Jack": visions of Ishmael in Kerouac''s ''On the Road''.

Article Excerpt
Moby-Dick can be viewed as the ur-Beat novel for On the Road. Over one hundred years before Kerouac popular the term "Beat, Melville's narrators in Typee, Omoo, Mardi and Moby-Dick, are all rover-bohemians, or as Kerouac might call them, "Dharma Bums." These Melvillean narrators are, like Sal Paradise, narrator of On the Road, men alienated from their culture; and they take their "life on the road" (1) in search of self-transformation and self-transcendence.

In her 1935 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton writes how she and those of her class ignored Herman Melville's works because he amounted to nothing more than what we might now call a mid-nineteenth-century Beatnik:

As for Herman Melville, a cousin of the Van Rensslaers [sic] and qualified by birth to be in the best society, he was doubtless excluded from it by his deplorable Bohemianism.... (2)

Arthur Stedman, Melville's literary executor, cites in his 1892 introduction to Typee a letter Dr. Titus Coan had written to his mother after Dr. Coan made what he called, as a student at Williams College, "my first literary pilgrimage, a call upon Herman Melville," wherein Coan describes Melville as a pre-Beatnik:

But what a talk it was! Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong within him.... With his liberal views, he is apparently considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or a "beachcomber." His attitude seemed to me something like that of Ishmael (3)

As Tim Hunt notes in his preface to Kerouac's Crooked Road:

[W]e are still, as John Clellon Holmes noted years ago, a bit like those 1850s folks who found Melville fascinating because he'd lived with the cannibals and peeped at Polynesian life.... Melville's true relevance for the 1850s goes beyond the temporary fascination with the man who lived with the cannibals, and Kerouac's true relevance for the 1950s goes beyond the contemporary fascination for the man who found himself labeled "King of the Beatniks." (4)

Kerouac's first novel, the unpublished The Sea Is My Brother, which Jack finally "hand-printed," "was imitation Melville," according to Jack's friend, Gerald Nicosia. (5) Allen Ginsburg, Kerouac's life-long friend and fellow classmate at Columbia University, notes that while he and Jack were students at Columbia,

[W]e brought [The Sea Is My Brother] to Raymond Weaver, a professor at Columbia [whose] ... real glory was that he had written the first biography of Melville, and he personally discovered Billy Budd and...

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