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From Kerouac to the hippy trail: some
notes on the attraction of On the Road
to British hippies
Brian Ireland & Sharif Gemie
Published online: 03 Mar 2015.
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To cite this article: Brian Ireland & Sharif Gemie (2015): From Kerouac to the hippy trail:
some notes on the attraction of On the Road to British hippies, Studies in Travel Writing, DOI:
10.1080/13645145.2014.994926
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Studies in Travel Writing, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2014.994926
From Kerouac to the hippy trail: some notes on the attraction of On the Road
to British hippies
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Brian Ireland* and Sharif Gemie
The hippy trail was one of the last great expressions of alternative tourism. The trail to
Lebanon, Morocco, Afghanistan, Nepal, India and other points east, flourished between
1957 (when Jack Kerouac published his influential road narrative On the Road) and 1978
(when the Iranian Revolution closed the land route from Europe to India). This essay
explores the importance of On the Road to the British counter-culture and explains why it
was such an influence on those who travelled east. We argue that Kerouac proposed a
“beat” mode of travelling in which the “outer” journey was a catalyst for an “inner” journey
of spiritual growth or enlightenment.
Keywords: Jack Kerouac; John Steinbeck; William Saroyan; hippy trail
“What the hellya reading?”
“Goddam book.”
J.D. Salinger ([1951] 2010, 22)
The hippy trail was one of the world’s great experiments in alternative tourism. It led from northwestern Europe to Morocco, Afghanistan, India, Nepal and other points east. Tens of thousands of
North Americans and Europeans travelled on it: some had their own VW vans, motorbikes or
Land Rovers; some hitch-hiked; and eventually there were several dozen commercial companies
who offered coach and minibus journeys along it. By the late 1960s the travellers’ exploits had
become well known to the wider public. They regularly featured in sensationalistic stories in
the popular press concerning drug use and promiscuous sex, and the Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh
in February 1968 acted as a type of official sanction of such journeys by the highest of the
hippy aristocracy (Regan 1967a, 1967b; Reck 1985). The overland route from Western Europe
flourished from the late 1950s until 1978, when civil unrest and military conflict in Afghanistan
and Iran closed the route from Europe to India. From that point, most Western travellers had to use
more commercial routes to India that were more akin to traditional tourism than the “rite-ofpassage” experiences of the hippy trail.1
In the many recently established websites and self-published works concerning the hippy trail,
with their meticulously reproduced photographs, maps and written accounts, travellers speak
emphatically of the profound effect the trail had on their lives, and reflect on its enduring positive
influence. Some were searching for an alternative to the nine to five conventions of Western
society; some sought spiritual enlightenment (and a few found it); some went in search of
drugs for personal use or for profit; others saw their travel as a political statement against consumerism and materialism; and some just wanted to see the East, echoing mountaineer George
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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2
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
Mallory’s existential response when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest: “because it’s
there” (New York Times, March 19, 1923).
We have interviewed 26 mostly British-based travellers who went on the hippy trail between
1960 and 1978.2 About half of them spoke of the direct inspiration they took from the literature of
the counter-culture. Many of this sub-set cite the novels of Herman Hesse, alongside the classic
authors of the counter-culture such as Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Tom Wolfe and Robert
Pirsig. The single most frequently cited work, however, was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
([1957] 1972) with one interviewee stating emphatically that it was his “favourite book”
(“James”, interviewed on November 12, 2012). When asked further questions concerning On
the Road, our interviewees were disappointingly vague: perhaps today’s 60-somethings find it difficult to recall why their 20-something selves were so attracted to this work. This article explores
the factors that may have attracted them to it.
Other published sources confirm the importance of On the Road to British counter-culture. In
his pioneering study of the hippy trail, Rory MacLean (2007, 17) places Kerouac’s work first in
his list of “beginnings”. The notorious drug-smuggler Howard Marks (1996, 48) refers to On the
Road in his autobiography: “I spent Oxford’s very long vacations in filthy clothes hitch-hiking
fairly randomly around Great Britain and Europe in the belief that I was somehow ‘On the
Road.’” The more plebeian Billy Wells, from the working-class suburbs of London, remembered
that
All our little team had read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It sounded great, all that travelling about
partying, we decided to buy an old American convertible, head off South for the winter and have a
laugh. (2008, 47)
Oxford student Robert Irwin (2011, 15) “of course” read On the Road “as part of my preparation
for becoming a beatnik”. “What I wanted to do when I was seventeen”, explains Robin Williamson, the inspired poet-visionary who formed the Incredible String Band, “was to write like Jack
Kerouac” (Young 2010, 380). How should one understand these assorted references?
To some extent, our interviewees’ references to Hesse are predictable. His writings were rediscovered by a generation of students in the 1960s. Hesse’s fascination with Buddhism, his alienation from Western culture and his promises of new forms of knowledge all chimed in neatly with
some key themes of the emerging counter-culture. His all-pervasive influence was recognised at
the time. In the early 1970s Kurt Vonnegut (1988, 112–118) discussed “why they read Hesse”.
(His less-than-satisfactory answer was that Hesse addressed a sense of home-sickness.) The
connections between Hesse’s writing and the mental world of the hippy travellers are easy to
understand: Siddhartha (1922, English translation 1951) could almost be read as “Buddhism
for Dummies”, and the enigmatic Journey to the East (1932, English translation 1956) seemed
to prefigure the trail itself. But why Kerouac? On the Road contains no explicit reference to Buddhism or any other eastern religion, no account of travel in the East, and the jazz music that forms
the soundtrack to the work was dated by the late 1960s. Irwin records his disappointment when he
first saw a picture of Kerouac and his friends:
They looked really straight, for they wore check shirts and had short hair. I also learned that Kerouac
spent most of his time living with his mother. (2011, 15)
Why do our British interviewees remember an American work like On the Road in preference to
apparently more obvious incitements to travel eastwards by well-known British authors, such as
Eric Newby’s commercially successful A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), which was cited
by only two interviewees? At first sight, A Short Walk seems to have a far stronger claim to be the
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Studies in Travel Writing
3
great grandfather of the hippie trail. After all, it tells the story of a trip through Turkey and Iran and
into Afghanistan: a route which clearly prefigures the journeys taken by hippies in the succeeding
decades. On the Road is largely set within the borders of the USA, with its last section concerning
an extended journey into Mexico. In simple geographical terms, no one could doubt the proximity
of Newby’s route to that mapped out by the later hippy trail. Yet it is On the Road which is cited
more frequently by travellers.
If our British travellers were not put off by geographical and cultural disparities, why was On
the Road more influential than other memorable and original descriptions of travel in the USA?
One could cite other contemporary American travel narratives such as Simone de Beauvoir’s
America Day by Day (1954), John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, in Search of America
([1962] 2002), or William Saroyan’s Short Drive, Sweet Chariot (1966). What were the specific
qualities of On the Road that attracted our travellers?
The argument we will present in this article is that Kerouac proposed a “beat” mode of travelling in which the “outer” journey was a catalyst for an “inner” journey of spiritual growth or
enlightenment. He championed a nomadic, anti-materialist way of life that challenged the comfortable, middle-class, suburban lifestyle offered to white Americans and Brits in the late 1940s and
1950s. While not overtly political, On the Road prefigured the cultural and political activism of the
1960s, reflecting the growing awareness that the dominant lifestyles rested on a value system that
was open to criticism. Kerouac preferred the company of the socially stigmatised (drug-users and
homosexuals) and socially marginalised (Mexican migrant workers and African-Americans) to
the socially established. As we shall see, in the views he expressed about the Cold War, race,
commercialism, consumerism and conformity, Kerouac challenged the social and political consensus. More importantly, he also offered an original way to understand travelling: he evoked
spontaneity and being “in the moment” rather than planning ahead (a key difference between
the traveller and the tourist). It was these particular qualities, we will argue, that attracted hippy
travellers to him. To explore this point more fully we will first make some general remarks
concerning the nature of travel and travel writing in order to contextualise both Kerouac and
our travellers. We will then compare On the Road with contemporary travel narratives by De
Beauvoir, Steinbeck and Saroyan to reconstruct the attraction of Kerouac’s work. Finally, we
will demonstrate how hippy trail travellers put Kerouac’s ideas into practice, focussing on John
Worral’s Travelling for Beginners (2012) as an indicative account of a hippy trail journey.3
Travel writing and British travellers
Arguably, nearly all forms of travel writing operate a type of trick on the reader: they seem to
promise a type of rational, measured account of a journey through a particular landscape, but
then deliver something quite different. Examples of travel records as simple, rational measurements of space-time can be found: they were some of the earliest forms of travel writing (e.g.
the summarised descriptions of routes designed for pilgrims visiting sites like Santiago de Compostela) and – curiously – they have been revived recently in the route summaries available from
Google Maps. Such texts present the reader with names of locations, a set of directions and some
calculations of distances. It is difficult to imagine reading such lists for pleasure. In reality, we
read travel writing for something else: we want to hear about the writers’ reactions to what
they see, about their inner journey. We are not only interested in the journey, but also in the
guide. Successful travel writing works by playing between these two modes: mixing descriptive
passages of sights and peoples with individual meditations; using the journey as an opportunity to
explore wider themes, whether personal, political or cultural in nature.
These basic observations about the nature of travel and travel writing have a more pointed
importance when applied to post-war British society. 1945 was a turning-point: While Churchill
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4
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
had led Britain into war in order to save the British Empire, the inexorable forces of history were
rapidly dismantling this venerable institution (Clarke 2008). One common British reaction was
conservative adaption: to continue to link British identity to claims of global supremacy, but to
find new ways to assert such claims. It was no coincidence that in June 1953 Sir Edmund Hillary’s
successful ascent of Everest was announced on the day after the Coronation of Elizabeth II. As
Peter H. Hansen (2001) has indicated, the staging of the two events so close to each other
could be seen as one last attempt to claim a global role for Britain.
But there was a growing gap between the imperial impulses of the nation’s political consciousness and the actual role which Britain could play in the post-war world. British travel
writing reflected these tensions. The pre-war epoch had produced some of the finest examples
of British literature: works like H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927) and Robert
Byron’s celebrated Road to Oxiana (1937). These were both works marked by doubts: did the
“true” England still exist? Was the imperial project justified? They were also, in part, self-consciously humorous, often playing on the contrast between the traveller’s great quest and the
petty realities of car tyres and lodgings. But, overall, their confidence and certainty is striking.
In the post-war epoch, British travel writing changed: there are very few examples of “serious”
travel-writing by British writers analysing Britain. The last great urban explorations can be
dated to the works of Orwell and Priestley.4 Instead, in the 1950s, the field was dominated by
tourist-oriented texts: guidebooks to particular British counties or towns, and how-to descriptions
of journeys. While these often carry an implicit political weight, their avowed tone is apolitical,
secular and mundane. When British travel writers turned their eyes abroad, significantly they frequently adopted a self-consciously humorous, self-deprecating tone, neatly illustrated by
Newby’s Short Walk or Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond (1956), or they wrote with the
open nostalgia that characterises Gavin Maxwell’s travel writing and Evelyn Waugh’s When
the Going was Good (1945).
For these reasons, post-war British writers could not produce figures such as Paul Bowles’s
Port in his The Sheltering Sky ([1949] 1990): a character who inherits the perceptiveness and stylishness of the mid-nineteenth-century French flâneur. Port was always planning
some new, impossible trip which sometimes eventually became a reality. He did not think of himself
as a tourist; he was a traveller. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the
tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging
no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the
earth to another. (1990, 12–13)
In The Sheltering Sky, the French are portrayed as venal imperialists, and the British as bungling,
corrupt and racist, consciously exploiting exotic images to create a debasing touristic literature,
far removed from the tragic ideals which inspire the American hero. These examples suggest
the limitations to British-based travel cultures. Rob Young (2010, 21), in his epic study of
British musical counter-cultures of the 1960s, notes something similar: “The land mass of the
British Isles is not large enough to have generated a culture of the open road.” However,
Young’s suggestion of a type of geographical determinism is unsatisfactory: arguably, earlier
works such as W. H. Davies’s Autobiography of a Supertramp (1908) and – to a lesser extent
– In Search of England are marked by a cult of the open road. It was in the post-war context
that Britons were unable to reconstruct an appealing image of the open road in their own land
for social and cultural reasons.
In this context, many young Brits were attracted to the cultures emanating from the USA,
which seemed to offer an alternative to the pattern of conservative British adaption to new circumstances. The amateur drug pedlar in Terry Taylor’s Baron’s Court, All Change (1961) is
Studies in Travel Writing
5
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enraptured by American jazz music and dreams of returning to his London suburb “driving a
modern Yank car that looked like something from Outer Space, with a bank roll so big I’d
have to have an accountant to look after it for me” (Taylor 2011, 124). Billy Wells (2008, 29)
discovered rock’n’roll and American cars at the same time. Counter-cultural activist and organiser, John Hopkins, recalled: “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had an enormous influence on me … I
developed a penchant for American culture that lasted for the next ten or fifteen years” (quoted in
Green 1988, 9). This fascination was not centred on the familiar tropes of American cultural assertion: not the gum-chewing GIs who so impressed war-battered Europeans in 1944 and 1945, nor
the planes, tanks and ships of American military power (Gemie and Rees 2011). Equally, the technocratic America of “standardisation, simplification [and] specialisation” did not attract these
young Brits (Kynaston 2008, 457). Instead, they were fascinated by another America, closer to
the America of Josephine Baker, the America of jazz and blues, an America which was paradoxically at once more modern than “Austerity Britain” and yet also simpler, less fussy, even more
primitive (Archer-Straw 2000).
Kerouac’s contemporaries: Newby – a conservative traveller
To young Britons fascinated by these new ideas, British travel writing looked distinctly oldfashioned. These points can be illustrated by comparing Newby’s Short Walk with On the Road.
Newby writes as a “comic anti-hero”, notes Mark Cocker (1992, 141). The contrasts with the
older tradition of magisterial accounts are obvious. Henry Rider Haggard begins She (1886) by
telling his readers that his story concerns “one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences
ever undergone by mortal man”. Newby’s formal announcement of his plans is deliberately and
provocatively low-key: a telegram. “CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?” ([1958] 1984,
15). There is no promise of spiritual enlightenment or of heroic tales of physical endurance,
just the implied contrast between the petty absurdity of Newby’s minor position in the fashion
trade and the romance offered by the word “Nuristan”. While this stance certainly differentiates
Newby from lauded figures such as T.E. Lawrence and Henry Morton Stanley, it is not innovative.
Cocker’s remarks on this point are perceptive:
Not for Newby to be placed on a pedestal with the great explorers of the past. Yet he is, in a sense, a
type as deeply representative of his race, a national hero of a kind – the common man, the amateur, the
escapee from ordinary existence willing to try his hand at anything. (1992, 142)
Rather than superman, Newby is everyman, and therefore a representation of what Evelyn
Waugh, in the Preface to A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ([1958] 1984, 12), celebrated as “intensely English” values, a symbol of an “essential traditional amateurism” which – argued Waugh –
Americans would not be able to understand. Such a stance is another illustration of conservative
adaptation to a smaller global presence, in which Britishness is celebrated through a deliberate
pose of non-celebration.
Newby was never claimed as a member of any counter-cultural movement. Born in 1919, he
was distant from the new cultures of the 1960s. His values were essentially conservative: while he
could smile at post-war British values, he had no wish to challenge them. His mental geography
was old-fashioned. While revelling in his “amateur” status, his expedition is constructed around
imperial and bureaucratic structures. His travelling companion, Hugh Carless, was the son of an
Indian Civil Servant and worked for the Foreign Office ([1958] 1984, 19). In Tehran, they stay in
the abandoned building of the British consulate (56). They rely on diplomatic connections to
arrange a meeting with the Afghan Foreign Ministry, where they receive assistance for their
journey (73). As they prepare for their final climb, they read John Buchan (164). The chronology
6
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
of the journey works in the same manner: in comparison to Kerouac’s erratic wandering, Newby
conducts a well-regulated journey with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with reasonably
precise indications of the direction of travel.
Throughout his journey, in contrast with Kerouac, Newby maintains cultural separations.
There are few descriptions of the people he meets: the longest descriptive passages concern landscapes, and particularly the mountain he seeks to conquer. When he does meet native people, they
are described from the outside. They are easily, unproblematically categorised by race and
ethnicity:
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In a dim corridor several Pathans squatted together sharing a leaky hubble-bubble. They had semitic,
feminine faces but were an uncouth lot, full of swagger, dressed in saffron shirts and chaplis with
rubber soles made from the treads of American motor tyres. (66)
Frequently, a note of suspicion or antagonism emerges during these meetings. At one moment,
they expect a local boy to guide them: instead, he tricks them, and leads them back to the
place from where they had started. They are infuriated by his duplicity and hit him (211). The
two travellers show little interest in Islam, but express some concern about its “deadly effect”
on the local people (214). The greatest praise that they give the people they meet is that they
are childlike: Newby recounts in some detail how tribesmen were entranced and delighted by
the travellers’ camera and watches. “In a world that has lost the capacity for wonderment, I
found it agreeable to meet people to whom it was possible to give pleasure so simply” (193).
But the reader is left in no doubt: the local people are mere incidental distractions to the more
important business of their journey. Sometimes they are attractively infantile; more often they
are threatening or obstructive.
Newby’s work can be located within a long tradition of British Orientalist travel writing. His
self-deprecating tone, his modest humour, his near-total lack of interest in Oriental religions and
cultures are all mildly distinctive, but do not mark any significant break with the older traditions.
The reason for his journey is to make a point about himself: he proves that he is not “really” a
minor employee in the fashion trade, but someone capable of heroism – in this case, exemplified
in mountain-climbing.5 The narrative is centred on this physical test of self-endurance. Such clear,
goal-directed movements, coupled with little interest in playful experiences or pleasure and a lack
of any sense of wonder, would have made the work irrelevant to the young Brits who were
fascinated by an America of jazz, blues and emotional exuberance.
Kerouac’s contemporaries: de Beauvoir – an existentialist’s America
From January to May 1947, just before Kerouac set out on his first road trip, Simone de Beauvoir
travelled through the USA on a “coast to coast lecture tour” (Flanner and Edgar 1947, 19). With a
letter of introduction from Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir was, according to Douglas Brinkley,
Embraced upon arrival by the Condé Nast set at a gaggle of cocktail parties, cheered on at Vassar
College, where she took part in a symposium called “Women’s Role in Contemporary Society,”
[and] was gossiped about as the “prettiest existentialist” by Janet Flanner in the New Yorker’s
“Talk of the Town”. (Brinkley 1999, 10)
At first glance, given the circles she travelled in, de Beauvoir might seem an unlikely “beat”.
However, she disliked the cocktail circuit, and recorded her disgust with the expatriate Vichy
supporters she met in New York. Moreover, she expressed views about African-Americans,
consumerism and materialism that, in retrospect, seem to prefigure the ideas of the beat movement of the 1950s and the counter-culture of the 1960s. She tried marijuana, smoking a joint at
Studies in Travel Writing
7
a pot party in a New York hotel. Although she claims it had little effect on her, she refers positively to its effects as “almost like that of Benzedrine, and … less harmful than alcohol”
(de Beauvoir [1954] 1999, 328). She admired African-Americans in the same rather naive
way as Kerouac, referring only to their primitivism and sexuality. In On the Road, for
example, Kerouac declares:
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At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver
colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not
enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough nights. [But] I was only myself Sal Paradise,
sad, strolling in this violent dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds
with the happy true-hearted ecstatic Negroes of America. (1972, 113)
Views such as this caused Kenneth Rexroth (1957), in a contemporary review of On the Road for
the San Francisco Chronicle, to accuse Kerouac and Neal Cassady of behaving “as if they were
witnessing a jungle orgy” when in the company of African-Americans (1 September 1957). In a
similar vein, de Beauvoir is captivated by a black dancer who she calls “beatific” (330): “when
you see these men dance”, she claims, “their sensual life [is] unrestrained by an armor of
Puritan virtue” (48). That said, unlike Kerouac, de Beauvoir is at least able to place such
views in cultural and social context, explaining how whites are afraid of black passion and
expressions of freedom.
Like Kerouac, de Beauvoir notes how material rather than spiritual values seem to be at the
centre of American life. However, the characters in On the Road lead lives very different from the
nine-to-five drudgery of most Americans, and often bemoan those times when financial circumstances force them to take menial jobs. For instance, Kerouac had this to say about working for a
few months in a wholesale fruit market in Denver in 1949: “I lugged watermelon crates over the
ice floor of reefers into the blazing sun, sneezing. In God’s name … what for?” (112). Beat philosophy was based on spiritual transcendence rather than materialism, so the burgeoning consumer culture of America was anathema to them. There is evidence of this in On the Road when Old
Bull Lee proclaims that big business interests “prefer making cheap goods so’s everybody’ll have
to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow” (95). While there are few
such outright condemnations of materialism in the novel, it is a recurring motif. For example, in a
story about endless road travelling, there is an unusual absence of car fetishism: according to Roy
Kozlovsky (2004, 213), Kerouac and Cassady’s destruction of automobiles serves instead to
highlight “the waste and violence of the capitalist system”. De Beauvoir (1999, 29) too
laments America’s consumer culture: at a restaurant on her third night in New York she complains
about “too much finery, too many mirrors, and drapes; the food has too many sauces and syrups;
everywhere there’s too much heat. Superabundance, too, is a curse”. Wandering along Fifth
Avenue, she is overwhelmed by the “abundance and sparkling variety” of products available,
but quickly realises that variety is an illusion, the products are essentially the same and are packaged in an assortment of ways to give the illusion of choice and therefore drive consumption (32).
Both authors anticipated the anti-consumerism of the New Left. For example, very similar
sentiments were expressed in the Port Huron Statement – Students for a Democratic Society’s
1962 call to arms against apathy that would become the foundational document of the 1960s
counter-culture:
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity – but might it not
better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these
anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning
to believe that there is an alternative? (Teodori 1969, 165)
8
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
Given that both authors shared some of the beat values that would later inspire the counter-culture,
why did Kerouac’s On the Road become so influential, whereas America Day by Day “generated
few sales and little notice”? (Brinkley 1999, 9). Perhaps a clue can be found in Flanner and
Edgar’s New Yorker article, in which they state,
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Last week, we had a talk with Simone de Beauvoir, the French novelist, playwright, and No. 2 Existentialist, just before she left town on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Aware that Mlle. de Beauvoir is
regarded in Paris as the female intellectual counterpart of Jean-Paul Sartre, we were all set for a
grim half hour. Well, surprise! Mlle. de B. is the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw. (1947, 19).
If New Yorker journalists anticipated a grim experience of French existentialism, a more general
audience was even less likely to be enthusiastic about reading de Beauvoir’s views of the USA.
The five-year gap between press publicity about de Beauvoir’s visit and the publication of the
Grove edition of her book in 1953 meant it did not get the exposure that might have made it a
bestseller. De Beauvoir was 39 when she travelled to New York and 45 when her book was published in the USA (in contrast, Kerouac was 25 when he began the first journey detailed in On the
Road and 35 when the novel was published in 1957). While de Beauvoir shares many of
Kerouac’s interests, not least a taste for alcohol and casual sex, America Day by Day does not
have On the Road’s youthful exuberance, nor the sense of possibility that Kerouac invokes.
This made him popular with a new cohort of young Americans who, he claims, were “Rising
from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly
joining” (34). Kerouac was able to connect with this baby boom generation because he shared
their expectations about the possibilities of the American system, but he could also express
their disillusionment with the world they were to inherit. While de Beauvoir remained aloof, referring self-consciously to herself as a “tourist”, Kerouac embraced the USA, calling it a “mighty”
and “golden” land (35, 86). Unlike America Day by Day, On the Road is therefore a joyful, distinctly American experience, with Kerouac embracing “Mad drunken Americans” and the potential of a once “wild and brawling and free” land (35, 92).
Kerouac’s contemporaries: Steinbeck – a cold war journey
John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, In Search of America (1962) was one of a number of
fiction and non-fiction works published in the 1960s that were influenced, to some extent, by
Kerouac. Beginning on 23 September 1960, Steinbeck travelled counter-clockwise across the
USA in a modified pickup truck, beginning in Long Island and passing through Maine, then a
few Midwestern cities, North Dakota, Oregon, California, Texas and Louisiana, before returning
to New York in January 1961. His journey covered 10,000 miles and crossed 38 states (Hayashi
1990, 90). His intention, ostensibly, was to rediscover America: two decades after the publication
of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck felt he “did not know [his] own country” and that he
was a writer “working from memory” ([1962] 2002, 5). However, as Joseph Dewey (1991, 22)
points out, “the trip across the country gives way to an emerging metaphor of an inward
journey” which, for Steinbeck, meant facing up to his own ill-health and old age and realizing
that he was an “ageing novelist facing disconnection from his original voice” (28). Steinbeck
wanted to meet and converse with ordinary Americans and to refamiliarise himself with the country’s landscape, but it was also a physical test of his manhood and an attempt to ameliorate his
physical deterioration. He states, for example,
My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby … Although this last foundation for the trip was never discussed, I am sure she understood it. ([1962] 2002, 17–18)
Studies in Travel Writing
9
His resulting travel narrative was in the Bildungsroman tradition, with perils, pitfalls and personal
ordeals.
Steinbeck claims he had a natural tendency towards wanderlust, which, he says, had been with
him since his youth. This trait never left him: “once a bum always a bum”, he confesses (3). Mark
Dunphy (2005, 112) claims that Steinbeck here adopts a:
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Zen/Beat, even Kerouacian ‘bum’ perspective on travel: We don’t so much take a trip as a trip takes
us. Steinbeck realises, to metaphrase Yeats, that a wayfarer cannot separate the traveller from the
travel.
However, Dunphy’s assertion that “Steinbeck, like Kerouac, travels down the same yellow centerlined Beat Road” (110) is, as we shall see, less convincing.
At first glance, the book’s major concerns – materialism, uniformity, loneliness, restlessness
and paranoia – echo those of the “beat generation”. In a Chicago hotel, for example, he reflects on
the meaningless, lonely and empty life of a previous guest, “Lonesome Harry”, the classic
“Organization Man” of the 1950s “Lonely Crowd”.6 Throughout his travels Steinbeck laments
the creeping uniformity of American life, whether it was the homogenous restaurants with “simulated leather stools … spotless as and not unlike the lavatories” (71) or the “assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls” (83). Like de
Beauvoir, Steinbeck notes that the seemingly unlimited choice of consumer products masks
their essential sameness. Steinbeck’s unease about materialism is mirrored in his concerns
about capitalism. Of course, his writing career is based largely on the detrimental effects of
rampant capitalism on family and society, as demonstrated in The Grapes of Wrath. In Travels
with Charley he returns to this theme when he is confronted by a hostile man who barks out a
serious of questions and instructions:
“Don’t you know this land is posted? This is private property.”
“The owner don’t want campers. They leave papers around and build fires.”
“See that sign on that tree? No trespassing, hunting, fishing, camping”. (84–85)
This is the kind of low-level “us-and-them” intimidation from authority figures that Kerouac faced
in On the Road. Like Kerouac, Steinbeck was “no lover of cops” (166), but unlike Kerouac, and
aside from one slightly unpleasant encounter with customs officials on the Canadian border,
Steinbeck is never confronted by hostile law enforcement officers. His attempt to claim an
“outlaw” or “undesirable” status rings hollow, for he was insulated from such everyday insults
by his race, wealth and status.
Steinbeck also writes bitterly about the Cold War and of his fears about nuclear destruction:
noting a submarine in the water off Long Island Sound he remarked, for example, that the day
“lost part of its brightness” and pondered if “they are keeping the world’s peace with this
venom” (18). All across America he see signs of an impending nuclear apocalypse, in road-markings showing evacuation routes from American cities to the “enforced ‘consensus thinking’” that
stifled intellectual debate and instilled a culture of fear in Americans (Dew 2007, 49). Such
“venom” also left the Beats bemused and alienated: at Harry Truman’s Washington inauguration
Dean Moriarty remarked, for example, “What are these people up to?” (Kerouac [1957] 1972,
80). Yet it would be a mistake to assume Steinbeck and the Beats shared similar views about
the Cold War: for instance, Steinbeck supported American involvement in the Vietnam War.
He criticised anti-war protesters and praised American troops as “knights” on a noble errand
(Steinbeck and Barden 2012, intro.).
Steinbeck displayed a degree of environmental consciousness. A major theme of The
Grapes of Wrath, for example, is the ecological disaster of the dust bowl. In Travels with
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10
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
Charley Steinbeck speaks directly about the over-consumption and waste of American cities.
He states, for example, that the metropolises “are like badger holes, ringed with trash – all
of them – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered
with rubbish” (22). It is here that Steinbeck comes closest to discovering an inner truth. He
saw waste and over-consumption as symptoms of a larger disease: if Americans were,
indeed, a rootless people with an instinct always to move on, what was the incentive to
behave responsibly, to conserve, or to think long-term? Travels with Charley was published
in the same year Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first serialised in the New Yorker. If we
destroy nature, Steinbeck seems to ask, where will we go when the cities are uninhabitable
or the atomic bombs fall? Kerouac also ponders, briefly, what life might be like devastated
by atomic war (1972, 188). However, he does not explore ecological concerns to the same
extent as Steinbeck: the closest he comes to environmental consciousness in On the Road is
in romanticising the American landscape as a place of escape.
Steinbeck set out “in search of America”, and to accomplish this he meant to meet ordinary Americans. However, he was not in touch with the new counter-culture. The New York
Times Book Review observed, for example, “This is a book about Steinbeck’s America and
for all the fascination of the volume, that America is hardly coincident with the United
States in the Sixties” (quoted in Hughes 1975, 79). Steinbeck was 58 when he began his
trip, 33 years older than Kerouac when he set out on his travels. Kerouac was able to
speak to this new generation. Steinbeck travelled in a pickup truck he had modified at
great expense to provide many of the comforts of home, whereas Kerouac’s preferred mode
of vehicular travel for a time was a 1949 Hudson, a cool forerunner of later “muscle cars”.
Kerouac and Cassady slept in their car, in friends’ homes, and occasionally in seedy hotels.
When Steinbeck tired of his truck, he stayed in luxury hotels. Steinbeck also played it
safe, travelling on main roads only, and avoiding, where possible, the big cities. So although
Steinbeck’s counter-clockwise route is similar to Kerouac’s – starting and finishing in
New York, travelling through Chicago and the West to California, before returning east –
their experiences are very different.
Travels with Charley was a critical and financial success, reaching number one on the
New York Times sales list for non-fiction. A few months after publication, Steinbeck received
the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his lifetime of achievement (Bloom 2008, 142).
A few years later, in September 1964, President Lyndon Johnson presented Steinbeck with the
Medal of Freedom. While Kerouac retained his image as an outsider, Steinbeck was embraced
by the literary and political establishment, as recognised by these awards. Steinbeck’s work
seems conceptually old-fashioned when compared with On the Road. While Travels with
Charley offers some pointed and perceptive comments concerning the state of American
society, it never presents the type of rich internal dialogue that structures On the Road. Politically
and stylistically, it is a more conservative work, and therefore far less likely to attract the later
travellers on the hippy trail.
Kerouac’s contemporaries: Saroyan – a proto-beat
In the summer of 1953 William Saroyan travelled from New York to Fresno, a journey of around
3000, miles, later recording his experiences in Short Drive, Sweet Chariot (1966). Saroyan was in
his mid-50s when he undertook his trip in 1953, which was six years after Kerouac began his
travels and four years before the publication of On the Road. Saroyan was a war veteran and
so, like Kerouac, had first-hand knowledge of loss and death. During the war, he confessed
that he felt “deathly, raging, useless, hating, forsaken, alone, beyond help” and these feelings provoked two potential reactions, “murder and suicide”. Saroyan rejected the option of suicide, he
Studies in Travel Writing
11
says, because he is “addicted to finding the absurdity” in everything (1966, 94–95). In embracing
life, he advocated a passionate attitude towards existence:
Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell,
and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. ([1934]
1941, 13)
Saroyan expressed concerns about contemporary American society. He was sympathetic to marginalised or oppressed groups, such as immigrants, women, the poor, Native Americans and
African-Americans and remarked that he hoped the next President in the White House would
be “a Jew” followed by
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a twice-married, twice-divorced beautiful woman, known to be fond of bed and gazoomp. Then, a
Negro, preferably very black. Then, a full-blooded Blackfoot. (1966, 101)
Saroyan’s contempt for white, protestant hegemony echoes Kerouac’s: Kerouac, however,
expressed a more vehement form of social protest than is evident in Short Drive, Sweet
Chariot. In On the Road, Kerouac lashed out at the commonplace intimidation he and his
friends faced at the hands of the police, calling it “the story of America”. He complained bitterly
about the “booted cops” who gave them unjust speeding tickets, harassed them and threatened
incarceration under the Mann Act, a federal anti-prostitution law often used to harass AfricanAmericans and other “undesirables” on the road ([1957] 1972, 43, 56, 86–87).
Saroyan also critiques consumerism, particularly when he writes of perception of time. For
example, he distinguishes between the natural passage of events and the 24-hour human invention
of time. He says, for example, “watchtime, minute-and-hour time isn’t really the order of time we
are involved in” (1966, 61). He laments being out of touch with natural time and is nostalgic for a
simpler, rural past when the passage of time was marked by clues from nature. Saroyan is,
however, constrained by the writer’s world of deadlines and clockwatching. He refers to
various deadlines on the trip, and so he needs to “watch the days … watch the time” (59). In
addition, in contrast to Kerouac, Saroyan frets over the health of his car, a 1941 Lincoln limousine, listing a number of minor concerns including oil consumption, a rattling speedometer and a
vibrating hood (Darwent 1987, 33). For Kerouac and Cassady, however, time means very little.
They live in the moment, enjoying the existentialist freedom of unplanned events. Cassady states,
for example, “we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really
FINE” (1972, 131). Cassady differentiates between their journey, which is spiritual in nature,
and the mere tourists who share the road with them: “They have worries, they’re counting the
miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather,
how they’ll get there … they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise,
purely anxious and whiny” (131).
Saroyan is nostalgic for a time when hobos and eccentrics walked American roads and he hopes
to meet one to seek wisdom. Like Kerouac, he connects the hobo’s simplicity with an uncluttering
of the mind, which is the first step towards knowledge. For instance, when Kerouac comes across a
hobo reading a muddy, discarded old book, he compares it to finding “the real Torah where it
belonged, in the wilderness” (1972, 87). When Saroyan offers an old man a ride, which is
refused, the author interprets the refusal as a sign that the old man is already where he wants to
be, alone in silent contemplation on the road: “He’s there, so there’s no need for him to be taken
anywhere else. He’s all there, as you saw. In himself” (1966, 67). For both Kerouac and
Saroyan, the inner and outer journeys are inseparable because the journey facilitates self-discovery.
Saroyan states, for example, “The full-time work of any mind should be to discover as complex a
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12
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
truth about itself as possible” and one of the ways to accomplish this, he maintains, is to drive (1966,
37). The road frees the traveller from everyday, mundane concerns and it is a levelling experience
for Americans because affordable cars, cheap fuel, and recently built Interstate roads mean that
almost everyone can travel. The road is then, for both writers, a metonym for opportunity and
freedom, but it also has a numinous quality, with the potential to elevate the spirit.
Given these similarities, why then was On the Road successful and enduring, whereas Short
Drive, Sweet Chariot is mostly forgotten? Kerouac acknowledged Saroyan’s profound influence
(Berrigan 1968). They shared concerns about consumerism and race, and saw travel as a way to
free themselves from society’s constraints and to encourage thinking. Both were from immigrant
backgrounds: indeed, Kerouac saw Saroyan’s success as proof that immigrant writers could flourish in the USA (McNally 1980, 23). There remain, however, some important differences between
them. For example, Saroyan is sceptical about Eastern religions. He recalls visiting as a youth an
Indian Swami called Yogananda. While the audience was apparently mesmerised by “the scorn
the Swami had for them, for America, and for the values of America”, Saroyan found him an
“oily bore” (1966, 118). He also ponders “the fact that Buddha was fat”, believing that
wisdom only comes “when the demands of the body are kept to a minimum”, which usually precludes “fat men” from finding “man’s total truth” (37). While it is difficult to ascertain here if
Saroyan is making a serious point or just wisecracking, his remarks contrast with Kerouac’s
respect for Buddhism.
The writers also offer a contrast in styles: Kerouac invented a new style of “kick” writing –
what he called “spontaneous prose” – whereas Saroyan’s style is easy-going, meandering and full
of home-grown wisdom. In his travelogue Saroyan is quirky, grumpy, and slightly scatter-brained,
but his charm does not produce a compelling travel book. In fact, the journey ends unsatisfactorily
and abruptly, in Pierre South Dakota rather than the original destination of Fresno in California. It
is as if Saroyan has run out of energy or, less charitably, that he felt he had written enough to meet
his publisher’s demands. In fact, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot was one of a number of books
Saroyan wrote in a short time to help pay off gambling debts and fend off insolvency
(Darwent 1987, 33–34). In contrast, Kerouac wrote with such passion and energy that the
Village Voice called On the Road “a rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these
times” (Charters 2000, viii). Short Drive, Sweet Chariot seemed like a voice from a previous
generation and there was a sense that Saroyan’s best work was behind him. In contrast,
Kerouac had achieved popular success in the late 1950s and would achieve critical success in
the 1960s (Charters 2000, ix). He was new, hip and cool, and along with other beat writers
such as Allen Ginsberg, he spoke directly to the hopes and fears of American baby boomers.
After Kerouac: John Worrall – ways of seeing
Unlike the other writers cited in this article, John Worrall has no literary reputation. He has
worked as a chartered surveyor and as a photographer. He made an unusual minibus journey
out to Kathmandu in 1972 and – still more unusually – then wrote about it, publishing a long
text in 2012, based on his diary. His direct connections with Kerouac are minimal: he read On
the Road at some point in the 1980s, but was not delighted by the work. (Curiously, he read
Newby’s Short Walk before 1972, but equally does not see that as a major influence.) (Worrall,
John, Private communication to authors, April 3, 2013). The reason that he features in this
article is that, arguably, this writer has written a more “Kerouac-ian” text than Newby, de Beauvoir, Steinbeck or Saroyan. The evidence for this argument comes not in the form of Worrall’s
Travelling for Beginners, but in its approach to travel.
Worrall wanted to follow the hippy trail, and had some clear ideas about what this might
involve even before leaving. “Would you look around a bit, take more time than is allowed by
Studies in Travel Writing
13
convention, time enough to range over horizons and see, and perhaps get to know, more?”
(Worrall 2012, 20). Although his account is structured as a relatively orthodox, day-by-day narrative, the most important theme in its content relates to the problem of seeing. It is not enough,
Worrall notes, just to be there. Seeing the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the stunning architecture
of Isfahan, Worrall realises that he simply does not know enough to understand what he is seeing
(1018). “Again we stared non-comprehendingly, like those who duck into a gallery merely to
escape the rain or, in our case, the sun and a sense of failure” (2412). Bewilderingly, watching
the desert through a minibus window was rather like watching television (2681).
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We hadn’t come with any knowledge or stories of Hinduism or its temples. The temple was beautiful
but we didn’t get any more from it than that. We didn’t know what to look for. We stared blank-faced,
unable to relate more closely, until before long, feeling the heat, we made our way back to what we
could relate to, a camp site with a bunch of travellers. (4740)
But, then, how should he have prepared? The idea of treating this trip like some school-homework
exercise seemed absurd: like Kerouac, Worrall wanted some immediate, unmediated connection
with the sights in front of him. His long work lists the obstacles to such moments: the minibus
itself, which while conveniently transporting him to far-away places, also insulates and separates;
the daily concerns about food and supplies which prevent concentration on the new sights; the
other travellers, who are friendly and supportive, but who bring their own demands and projects.
This was not “the full elemental take”, he realised (2685). Worrall considered other modes of
travel: while travelling in a minibus brought him closer to the surroundings than a plane, was
it close enough? Should he have travelled independently, at his own pace, in a car? Or even
tried hitch-hiking? Or would this have been too dangerous?
Things improved as his journey progressed. For one thing, the travellers themselves became
more experienced and more confident: therefore some greater form of communication with their
surroundings became possible (3812–3824). Worrall never quite achieved a moment of epiphany,
but came closest to this, surprisingly, at the Taj Mahal. Despite the number of tourists, despite the
constraints of the minibus, he felt something like wonder:
Even with our un-schooled, un-researched approach to this travelling lark, we were brought to
appreciative silence because no one with eyes in their head and the remotest sense of beauty could
have failed to be amazed …
In slow, perambulating inspections, separately though together, we moved around, gazing up at the
intricacy of the inlay work, moving one absent step at a time, immersed in what we were seeing.
That’s what Isfahan had done for some of us at least, it had emphasised the importance of trying
hard on site, lack of prior research notwithstanding. We needed to absorb detail and take more
mind pictures away with us. (4859–4875)
The similarity with Kerouac’s desire to seize a moment, to grasp a meaning is obvious. The point
of the journey is not to “conquer” a space, nor to advance quickly: the point is to ignite something
within oneself. Worrall presents his journey as a learning experience, in which he acquired the
confidence to relate intuitively to the people and buildings he encountered.
Conclusion
The main reason for Kerouac’s success and influence among young Brits is that he was as concerned with his inner journey as with his outer one. The original meaning of beat may have been
“emotionally exhausted” (Rexroth 1970, 104), but Kerouac’s definition had more to do with the
Catholic sense of “beatific” – a step on the road to sainthood – than being worn out. For example,
14
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
when asked by a television interviewer what he was looking for, Kerouac responded: “God. I want
God to show me His face” (as quoted in Krim 1963, 14). He saw travel as a way of purifying the
soul and gaining knowledge, saying in On the Road, for example, there was nothing to do except
“move”, calling it “our noble function of the time” and referring mysteriously to the “purity of the
road” (1972, 85). Kerouac was also interested in Buddhism, and while there is little evidence of
that in the novel, except for inchoate references to his characters divesting themselves of material
possessions (perhaps because he did not “discover” Buddhism until 1953), it was a major theme
of his The Dharma Bums (1958) and other beat writing (Jackson 1988, 55–56). This struck a
chord with his readers, perhaps because it seemed to offer an alternative to the rat race of consumerism. In fact, Todd Gitlin claimed that the Beats’ anti-consumerism was part of
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some larger Buddhist quest [wherein] they assailed the national obsession with family and property.
They felt cramped by the postwar bargain of homes and mortgages, steady jobs, organized suffering;
they wanted to run around, hang out, get away, find spiritual bedrock. (1987, 51)
In On the Road Kerouac spoke of prophets, saints, visions, angels, Revelations, disciples, prophets, the second coming and the Torah; he journeyed out of the Centre and into the Other,
and promised the re-discovery of the pilgrim’s sense of rapture in contemporary America
through the joyous embrace of “other” cultures (Cohen 1992).
By 1957, the USA and Britain were ready for On the Road: in the period between Kerouac’s
trips and the novel’s publication, the baby boom transformed US society. In fact, there were so
many adolescents that a word seldom heard before – “teenager” – entered the popular lexicon
(Savage 2007, xiii). In The Catcher in the Rye ([1951] 2010), J.D. Salinger explored themes of
teenage fear, confusion and alienation in a new atomic world run by adults. Teenagers responded
to these problems by rebelling: they flocked to see their heroes, young stars like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One (1953) or James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955), and listened to the music of
their generation, the rock and roll of Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Such concerns
crossed the Atlantic: British teddy-boys’ joyfully riotous reception of Rock around the Clock
became infamous (Miles 2010, 59–61). These new artists seemed to understand: they spoke of
and to the fears of youth.
All sorts of claims have been made for Kerouac’s influence on the baby boom generation,
from anticipating the civil-rights movement, sparking interest in Eastern religions, making drug
use attractive, and even as a pioneer of free love and homosexual rights (New York Times
December 30, 1979). As we have indicated, even if some of these claims are overstated,
they contain an element of truth. Unlike with Steinbeck and Saroyan, the media portrayed
Kerouac as part of something larger – a Beat Generation, with him at its head. For example,
in the New York Times on September 5, 1957, Gilbert Millstein claimed On the Road was
“the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by
the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’, and whose principal avatar he
is”. Just a few months later, however, in a Village Voice interview on April 23, 1958,
Kenneth Rexroth called such veneration a “Madison Avenue gimmick”. There is, however,
no question that the “Beat Movement” – Kerouac’s contemporaries – shared similar interests
in literature and poetry, and also an unease and discontent with post-war American values.
The youthful generation to which they appealed, often portrayed as mindless, irrational delinquents, were drawn to the thoughtful, literate Beats, perhaps to counteract such negative portrayals. No doubt though, the Beats’ advocacy of drug use, their liberal sexual mores, and
general rebelliousness also proved attractive: for example, On the Road sold in huge
numbers, while at the same time the authorities were trying Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shig
Murao for publishing and selling obscene material, namely Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (Morgan
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Studies in Travel Writing
15
and Peters 2006). The Beat Movement seemed to be going somewhere fun and interesting, even
if the final destination was uncertain, and Kerouac’s On the Road seemed to be an invitation to
join in the journey.7
For this restless generation, and for the one that followed, On the Road also solved conceptual
and political problems of travel: for Kerouac there was no need for study; no need to consider
political context; all that mattered was an arguably Buddhist assertion of the immediacy of experience. By documenting such experiences, Kerouac became more than an observer or a narrator; he
was a teacher: he showed his audience how to experience travel. That is why travellers such as
Rory MacLean, Billy Wells and Robert Irwin found Kerouac so inspiring; his writing appealed
to them in ways which made the entire corpus of early twentieth-century British travel-writing
seem irrelevant. Newby, Saroyan, de Beauvoir and Steinbeck set out on a quest of exploration,
but their answers come in the form of data relating to the exterior world they saw. In contrast,
Kerouac appears to transcend the challenges. Kerouac’s answer is “Go!” and he suggests that a
life constantly in transit is preferable to a sedentary suburban or urban existence. This message
appealed to many young Americans and to their British counterparts: while Worrall never
quite found what he was looking for, his two-month, 9000-mile long trip stayed with him for
the rest of his life.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Gavin Edwards, Judy Greenaway and Carl Levy for their comments on a draft version of this
paper.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
A small number of intrepid travellers continued to make their way to India despite the unrest in Afghanistan and Iran and at least one bus company, Topdeck Travel, continued its operations after the trail
appeared closed. Other routes and destinations on the hippy trail were through southern Spain into
Morocco (made famous by the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Marrakesh Express”) and through
Turkey into Syria, Lebanon and Israel. While these destinations were unaffected by the unrest in Afghanistan and Iran in the late 1970s, the Lebanese Civil War starting in 1975 made it difficult and dangerous
for overland journeys by independent travellers. Furthermore, for those traveling onwards to India from
Syria, Lebanon and Israel via Iraq or Jordan, Iran and Pakistan and onwards to India, the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Iran–Iraq War beginning in 1980 closed that route entirely.
To be fully accurate: 23 UK citizens, 1 Australian, 1 American and 1 UK citizen who had lived in New
Zealand for some years. We discuss these interviews at more length in our book-in-progress, provisionally entitled A Journey to Nirvana: A History of the Hippy Trail, 1957–78.
Before starting our discussion, we want to present a qualification concerning the term “hippy”. This was
a contested and problematic term, more often applied by outsiders than chosen by travellers. A brief
discussion of some of these points can be found in: Stuart Hall (2007). More satisfactory pointers
towards a definition can be found in Roszak ([1969] 1995). On the wider context, see Stephens
(1998). Of our 27 interviewees, only two willingly accepted the term as descriptions of themselves.
On the other hand, many acknowledged that they were described as “hippies” by others, and all
were willing to accept the formula that they travelled “on the hippy trail”. With the clear proviso that
it was an externally-imposed term, we consider that “hippy” is a useful label by which to identify a
specific experience.
Respectively, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and English Journey (1934). Perhaps the last attempt to
apply “serious” travel writing to Britain is Laurence Thompson, Portrait of England: News from Somewhere (1952).
On the history of mountain-climbing, see Macfarlane (2008).
In The Organisation Man (1956) William Whyte argued that management with a collectivist outlook
had replaced the “rugged individualism” that built the nation. The Lonely Crowd is David Riesman’s
1950 work about the absence of individuality in the American national character.
Our thanks to the anonymous reader who raised this point.
16
B. Ireland and S. Gemie
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