What Happened Later: A Novel [Hardcover]

A little while ago I saw and heard a singer with whose music I had only recently become acquainted. Although I am no longer young, popular music (if that is what this singer performs) can still sometimes change me. This particular singer’s art haunts me even weeks after the evening on which I witnessed her performance. She materialised on my nervous system in a way that feels indelible. Hence, for me, Ray Robertson’s recollection of how Jim Morrison’s music affected him as a teenager rings true. Robertson’s new book, What Happened Later, is full of gratitude and irony. The Dionysiac Morrison offers one focus for the play of these contrapuntal sentiments. Remarkably, Robertson’s irony does not cancel his gratitude.
It was a stray remark from the lips of the dissipated rock god Jim Morrison that put into young Robertson’s mind the idea of reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Robertson’s own book takes its title from what would have been Kerouac’s last project. With this gesture, Robertson makes a profound and energetically solacing point, a point that in some moods a person might even call “spiritual”, if the word did not imply pallor and acquiescence-features of neither Robertson’s syntax nor his subject matter. The aim of Robertson’s narrative is alternately to trace his own coming of age in Chatham, Ontario (a place in which it was impossible to obtain a copy of On the Road), and to recount Kerouac’s decline, manifest in a late visit to Quebec, the province from which his Massachusetts family stemmed. As Robertson’s story develops, it reveals that growth and decline are not opposites, and that, moreover, in some real sense (such is the success of this work), Kerouac is not dead, not ruined, not exactly the reactionary, bigoted wreck of pathetic legend. Instead, with all his flaws, he still lives in Robertson’s prose and in Robertson’s reader. As for irony-Robertson revels in it, but with strange freedom from spite. His irony is sometimes furious; it is not petty. Robertson recounts, for example, the irony of Jim Morrison’s worshipping Jack Kerouac: Kerouac despised what Morrison and his band stood for. And what Morrison and Kerouac would have made of Robertson is anybody’s guess. It would depend, perhaps, on the phase of life in which one chose to consult them. But if there is an afterlife, and if it implies (as it surely ought to) a broadening of perspective, both men should be gratified. Robertson compounds honesty with love to make them memorable.
At first glance, the book may seem to be about squandered energies and annihilation, as well as about the limitations of small-town life in late 20th-century southwestern Ontario. But this assessment is off the mark. The youthful, theatrical cult of debauchery and death becomes, in Robertson, the instrument of growth and life. Vividly recollected catastrophe becomes the triumph of those who themselves “happen later”. Robertson makes Kerouac live past and through his collapse; the memoirist regathers him and puts him back “on the road.” Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Robertson’s narrative takes Nietzsche’s apophthegm and adapts it: “What kills those whom I love can make them and me stronger, even after their death-for love is stronger than death.” At the heart of Robertson’s book, for all its kinetics and anger and clowning, is an intensely moving insight: one man’s sad end can be another man’s beginning, without any admixture of meanness or competition. It is in this sense that all is forgiven. Moreover, there is nothing genetic about this, even metaphorically-Robertson is not to Kerouac as son to father. They are equals before history and eternity. Robertson’s idea of eternity-or at least of history-comes to the fore when a friend of his youth, the son of a mortician, takes him to look at the body of a nun. What is heaven? The boys cannot believe in the nun’s version. Instead, Robertson the writer offers a sort of astringent, cockeyed, eloquent heaven for Kerouac, who brought the good word to Robertson. Also occupying this heaven is the young Robertson.
Robertson excels at contrasts. Alcohol, for example, can be a weakness and a pleasure for the poor and rich alike. Kerouac is one kind of lush; with his cocktails, the suburban Ontario lawn king, Dr. Franklin, is another. Now and then I felt that Robertson’s resentment did get the better of him. What might have counterbalanced the critique of Dr. Franklin is a perspective like John Cheever’s. Such a perspective would have disclosed the magic in Dr. Franklin’s world. (Besides which, Cheever had more than a touch of Kerouac & Co. in him, both as a writer and as a man.) Also, Robertson rushes sometimes to the polemical dismissal of some kinds of existence. Yet the professor John Berryman is as much god-awful fun as the barfly Jack Kerouac, in ways that are at once similar and discrepant. Of course, Robertson does register the truth that Kerouac was consciously complicit with what he claimed to despise. The writer at once marketed himself and did not market himself, caught not in the world of compromise but the limbo in which every human heart lives: half good and half bad-bad in some ways that qualify as good, good in some ways that qualify as bad.
So far, I have praised Robertson’s writing rather abstractly. It is excellent in several respects. His phrasing is often striking. Kerouac perceives, in the company of a friend, that he has turned into a monologist: “Talking to himself. Talking to himself talking to Joe.” A well-timed drink “flushed [Kerouac’s] face phony healthy.” And when you try to find a station agreeable to you, you are “making love to the radio dial.” Robertson also has a light touch with symbolism. The bag attached to the side of a lawnmower always turns out to be heavier than expected. Such is the useless, eternally recurrent harvest of a suburban yard. Robertson’s French-speaking grandparents give him a French-speaking G.I. Joe, and his distance from the francophone world is manifest in the way that this little soldier always plays the hateful role of “The Prisoner”. Robertson knows that, when they finally get into their bathing suits and you get to see them, the people whom you hoped to find even more desirable in this costume are often less so. Robertson shows a great tactical sense of drama and humour, as evidenced in a story about the adventures of a jelly donut in a spotless car. He gives a fantastically accurate catalogue of what you might find in a southwestern Ontario book sale in the 1970s or ’80s (Irving Stone, Pearl S. Buck, Arthur Hailey, Anita Bryant-and then the revelation, Bertrand Russell).
In the course of What Happened Later, the separate lives of Jack Kerouac and Ray Robertson become an allegory for what happens in a single person, all the time. “Jack Kerouac” and “Ray Robertson” are one. We die and are reborn, over and over. We perish in what feels to us to be squalor. Then we undergo resurrection from the ruins of a former self. Constitutionally we are phoenixes. Artworks are often the substance of the pyre from which we arise, not perfect by any means but “on the road” again, enjoying a view, a donut, a conversation, a daydream, a book, or a kiss. A figure such as Jim Morrison is deputed by fate to lead us into transformation, at our hazard, and at the hazard of those close to us. Is the hazard worth it? In Goethe’s Faust, the Lord Almighty remarks of the tempter Mephistopheles:

I have never hated your kind.
Of all the spirits that try to destroy
This joker is by far my favourite.
Human beings quickly get too lazy.
They love nothing more than snoozing.
That’s why I like giving them a friend
Who shakes them up and who, though a devil,
Is compelled to be constructive.

Eric Miller (Books in Canada)

Poetic, poignant and clever, "What Happened Later" is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book. In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of ON THE ROAD, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French-Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead. Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life-myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarked upon his own quest--to own a copy of ON THE ROAD. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, and also begins to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage. Taking its title from Kerouac himself--"What Happened Later" was the title of his proposed sequel to ON THE ROAD--this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac's famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author's slow decline with one boy's literary coming of age, "What Happened Later" explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.