To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed.
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Have you ever read a book, that is CLEARLY about gay characters, only they never really become gay enough for your liking? That’s sort of how I feel about all of Jack Kerouac’s works, and probably the reason that closeted high school Michael, who was ignorant about his sexuality, loved Kerouac so much. But this past year I came out, properly came out to everyone, and that subtle suggestion of homoeroticism that’s rampant throughout early to mid-twentieth century literature is no longer wetting my sexual curiosity. In short, gay it up.
Jack Kerouac is probably best known for his work On The Road, which was the epitome of beat generation literature. What was the beat generation you ask? It was an American literary movement in the post-World War II era, that explored a rejection of narrative, spiritual questing, rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of humanity, often focusing on drug experimentation, severe alcohol abuse, and very loose sexual morals. It was the original hippie movement that dominated the 50’s. And Jack Kerouac (and his literary friends) were it’s instigators. Ironically, however, for all the free-spiritedness of the beat movement, there was very little place in it for women. In fact, while reading through Kerouac’s very first (and only recently published) novel, The Sea Is My Brother, one of the things I took away from the novel was how little Kerouac felt towards women. All homoeroticism aside, Kerouac’s portrayal of brotherhood and male bonding often casts aside female characters, and makes them little more than the play-things for men. The female characters are dumb, reliant on the male characters, underdeveloped, and little more then objects. This is obviously a problem, and one found throughout literature, but it seems to have been a prominent theme in beat literature. And why is that? Is it because there were no strong women in the 50’s for these men to draw inspiration from? NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST. There were even female beat writers, Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker, Hettie Jones, and yet they never reached the same status as Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs. They were on the outskirts, watching and emulating, while not full participants in the movement, because they weren’t entirely accepted. The beat movement was a boy’s club, and a very close boys club… and very homoerotic boys club.
That brings me to The Sea Is My Brother. It’s the story of two young men, one a seasoned mariner, the other an academic tired of the stuffy life of teaching, brought together by a yearning for adventure by serving on a cargo vessel, sending relief to the warfront. It was Kerouac’s very first novel, and while it feels like Kerouac, it’s missing his grace. Missing a lot of his grace. The Sea Is My Brother meandered on and on while the main characters drank, smoked, played women, and waited around to be shipped out. Very little of the story took place at sea, and there was even less connection to the sea and the characters. I went into this thinking it’d be more like Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, where the ocean is a character in and of itself and intimately tethered to the human characters in the book. Instead, The Sea Is My Brother portrayed characters running away from the realities of life and finding a moment of reprieve on the ocean, with other men. This should have been called, These Other Guys Are My Brothers... And We Like Boats.
Try as I might, I can’t be too hard on this novel. It is Kerouac’s first attempt at writing, and if it weren’t for this, there wouldn’t have been any of his hits, like On The Road. You can feel Kerouac developing his unique writing style and crafting his highly introspective characters, that would become a mark of his literature, and as a writer myself I know that often your juvenilia is never as good as your mature work. And for fans of Kerouac’s this might be an interesting read, a place to delve into the author’s early literary building and development. It just wasn’t for me… the older I get, the more I realize the beat generation and the literature therein is meant for wide-eyed, explorative youth. Give me what I know I love, I have explored and I now know who I am, and what I like.
