From Publishers Weekly
In introducing the fabled first draft of Kerouac's autobiographical novel-written on a single giant roll of paper, without breaks in the text, in an amphetamine-fueled marathon-editor Howard Cunnell refers to Allen Ginsberg's claim that "the published novel is not at all like the wild book Kerouac typed in '51." Characters are identified by their real names (rather than the 1957 version's apt pseudonyms) and their love affairs are more explicit, giving the book a juicy memoir-like feel, especially where Cassady and Ginsberg are concerned. The plot, however, is identical. Neal Cassady joins Kerouac and Ginsberg's bohemian circle in New York in the late 1940's, and inspires and cons them into traveling around the country, "searching for a lost inheritance, for fathers, for family, for home, even for America." The death of Kerouac's father plays a larger role in the story than in the 1957 version; and Justin W. Brierly, a teacher who served as mentor to Cassady and has a cameo in the published book, makes a series of recurring appearances in the scroll. The lack of paragraphs or chapters emphasizes the breathless intensity of Kerouac's prose. The anniversary publicity will introduce this classic to a new generation of readers, and while the scroll probably won't displace the novel's more familiar, polished incarnation, it will be of keen interest to beat aficionados and scholars.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The mythology surrounding On the Road begins with a tantalizing creation story: in a 20-day marathon in April 1951, Kerouac speed-typed the single-spaced manuscript on long sheets of tracing paper he taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. Truly a remarkable feat, although Kerouac, who was not exactly the wild man his image as king of the Beats suggests, had already spent years working on what ultimately became On the Road. The legendary scroll, purchased by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.43 million, is currently being exhibited across the country. To celebrate the novel's fiftieth anniversary, the scroll has finally been fully transcribed and thoroughly explicated in four superb introductory essays. Given that the manuscript diverges from the book in the very first sentence, and that Kerouac used the real names of the friends who inspired his characters and wrote unused sexually explicit passages, this is an intriguing read to say the least. Seaman, Donna
Review
At the very end of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his mid-20th century chronicle-novel-memoir of the Beat Generation, there’s a phrase that has stuck in my mind. It occurs in the book’s long concluding lyrical riff about the flow of daily life, the melancholy of time and memory, and the geographic immensity of the American continent in which our minute trails of wandering are scratched. It goes: “. . . and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old . . .”
That memento mori of a thought and the landmark book in which it appears was published precisely 50 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. A half-century later, we do in fact know what happened, at least to almost everybody in On the Road, and for the no doubt dwindling band of us who read Kerouac’s book in its crisp first edition, we have long since donned the “forlorn rags of growing old.”
The 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road has been marked by a small spate of memorabilia, including a new edition of the 1957 book, a Library of America volume collecting Kerouac’s early novels, John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters, a reissue of Joyce Johnson’s sober Beat memoir, Minor Characters, and Canadian novelist Ray Robertson’s vivid imagining of Kerouac’s post-Road farewell journey, What Happened Later (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). Perhaps most interesting of all, Kerouac’s publisher, Viking, has issued a book version of the now legendary “scroll” on which Kerouac composed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, like a slightly embarrassed Ancient Mariner tugging at the Wedding Guest’s sleeve, I have a little literary tale to tell. I first read Kerouac’s On the Road because of a decidedly negative book review. I was sixteen years old, a highschool student in Chicago, Illinois, with literary aspirations. An older relative of mine, perhaps recognizing a budding artistic sensibility, had given me a subscription to The Saturday Review of Literature (the Books in Canada of its day). That’s where, in autumn 1957, I read a review of Jack Kerouac’s recently published On the Road. The reviewer (who can be allowed the obscurity of namelessness) just hated it, describing Kerouac’s stories of his and his friends’ madcap adventures across America as tiresome, amateurish, and jejune (I had to look up “jejune” in the dictionary).
However, the reviewer made one big mistake. To underscore his critical point, he quoted sizeable chunks of Kerouac’s breathless prose. In one passage, the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, recounting the story of the novel’s hero, Dean Moriarty, and his many road companions, declares that:
“. . . they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Those quotes were enough. Since the mid-20th century was still an age of literacy, I had read books by most of the major contemporary writers and I’d never seen prose quite like the quoted paragraphs of Jack Kerouac. I didn’t hesitate. I put down the magazine with its hatchet job on Kerouac, got on the neighbourhood bus, and went straight downtown to Chicago’s biggest bookstore, Kroch and Brentano’s, to buy a copy of the book. Within the hour, reading the opening pages of On the Road on the bus home, I was in Jack Kerouac’s America.
It was an America different from the one portrayed in two contemporaneous critical novels about the country, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, about the constrictions of corporate life, and Grace Metalious’s steamy bestseller, Peyton Place, a potboiler whose lusts exploded the myth of sedate small town life. Instead, Kerouac wrote about a generation of young men just a couple of years younger than their immediate literary forebears, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and James Jones, whose lives and writing had been shaped by World War II. Kerouac’s road buddies were spiritual seekers-of experience, of the Zeitgeist, of a meaningful life outside the orthodoxies of corporations and conventional suburban living. Its notions of adventure and the possibility of a movement or generation one might join were immensely appealing to an adolescent; so too were the intimations of sex, jazz, and various intoxicants. Most important was its post-war existential insistence that the meaning of life was to be found in the urgent intensity of living it.
As it turned out, through accidents of geography, circumstance, and temperament, I became friends with Ginsberg whom, until his death in 1997, I regarded as one of my teachers, in life as well as in literature. I also got to know, however peripherally, most of the other writers of the Beat Generation, including the hero of On the Road, “Dean Moriarty”, who was in real life Neal Cassady (though by the time I met him much of his fabled youthful charm had worn off). The only one I didn’t meet in person was Kerouac himself, but I never forgot his generosity. I followed his work and, inevitably, the rumours of his unhappy personal decline, which ended in his death at age 47 in 1969, a mere dozen years after the publication of his most famous novel.
Today, On the Road, is a “modern classic”, and though its romanticism has perhaps frayed, and the writing has worn a bit less well than might have been hoped, it’s still surprisingly readable. It also stands as one of the three generation-naming-and-defining North American novels of the 20th century, along with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. Because of its status, and the myths that have grown up around it, that makes the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), intelligently edited and introduced by British writer Howard Cunnell, both informative and useful.
The myth of On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a single roll of teletype paper, unpunctuated, in a white-hot, Benzedrine-fuelled rush, and that it had been mangled into the form of a conventional (read: less exciting, less authentic) novel by the straightlaced (read: “square”, “uptight”) editors in New York who published it a full half-dozen years after its composition. Like most literary myths, this one contains various grains of truth and half-truth, all of which editor Cunnell efficiently sorts out for us.
The brief version is this. There was and is a “scroll”, not of a single roll of teletype paper but of pieces of paper Kerouac taped together. The text is unparagraphed, but pretty much conventionally punctuated (and Kerouac himself formatted it into chapters and paragraphs in subsequent drafts). It was written in a rapid three weeks in April 1951, but the chemical stimulants, according to Kerouac, were no stronger than coffee. And it was a hard sell. Before it was published six years later, Kerouac had reeled off an additional half-dozen (also unpublished) books.
The interesting thing about “the original scroll” is that it’s pretty close to the eventually published book. The editors toned down some of the references to homosexuality (a subject Kerouac was squeamish about in any case), figuring that the drugs, jazz, and heterosexual bedhopping were more than enough “kicks” for readers of the day. They also slightly slowed the pace by inserting various commas here and there, but other than that, any claim that Kerouac’s intentions or his “spontaneous” prose were distorted by his editors is false.
There’s one difference between the scroll and the published book. The scroll uses the real names of the people in the story. What that does is to change the genre of the book. On the Road: The Original Scroll is a memoir rather than the “autobiographical” novel it became. Kerouac didn’t have to “make it up”; it all happened mostly as Kerouac told it during those magical weeks of spring 1951. In the end, the differences don’t matter all that much, though it’s nice to get an answer to the question so frequently asked of novelists, “How autobiographical is it?” In this case, the answer is: “Totally.”
Stan Persky (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
That memento mori of a thought and the landmark book in which it appears was published precisely 50 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. A half-century later, we do in fact know what happened, at least to almost everybody in On the Road, and for the no doubt dwindling band of us who read Kerouac’s book in its crisp first edition, we have long since donned the “forlorn rags of growing old.”
The 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road has been marked by a small spate of memorabilia, including a new edition of the 1957 book, a Library of America volume collecting Kerouac’s early novels, John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters, a reissue of Joyce Johnson’s sober Beat memoir, Minor Characters, and Canadian novelist Ray Robertson’s vivid imagining of Kerouac’s post-Road farewell journey, What Happened Later (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). Perhaps most interesting of all, Kerouac’s publisher, Viking, has issued a book version of the now legendary “scroll” on which Kerouac composed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, like a slightly embarrassed Ancient Mariner tugging at the Wedding Guest’s sleeve, I have a little literary tale to tell. I first read Kerouac’s On the Road because of a decidedly negative book review. I was sixteen years old, a highschool student in Chicago, Illinois, with literary aspirations. An older relative of mine, perhaps recognizing a budding artistic sensibility, had given me a subscription to The Saturday Review of Literature (the Books in Canada of its day). That’s where, in autumn 1957, I read a review of Jack Kerouac’s recently published On the Road. The reviewer (who can be allowed the obscurity of namelessness) just hated it, describing Kerouac’s stories of his and his friends’ madcap adventures across America as tiresome, amateurish, and jejune (I had to look up “jejune” in the dictionary).
However, the reviewer made one big mistake. To underscore his critical point, he quoted sizeable chunks of Kerouac’s breathless prose. In one passage, the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, recounting the story of the novel’s hero, Dean Moriarty, and his many road companions, declares that:
“. . . they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Those quotes were enough. Since the mid-20th century was still an age of literacy, I had read books by most of the major contemporary writers and I’d never seen prose quite like the quoted paragraphs of Jack Kerouac. I didn’t hesitate. I put down the magazine with its hatchet job on Kerouac, got on the neighbourhood bus, and went straight downtown to Chicago’s biggest bookstore, Kroch and Brentano’s, to buy a copy of the book. Within the hour, reading the opening pages of On the Road on the bus home, I was in Jack Kerouac’s America.
It was an America different from the one portrayed in two contemporaneous critical novels about the country, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, about the constrictions of corporate life, and Grace Metalious’s steamy bestseller, Peyton Place, a potboiler whose lusts exploded the myth of sedate small town life. Instead, Kerouac wrote about a generation of young men just a couple of years younger than their immediate literary forebears, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and James Jones, whose lives and writing had been shaped by World War II. Kerouac’s road buddies were spiritual seekers-of experience, of the Zeitgeist, of a meaningful life outside the orthodoxies of corporations and conventional suburban living. Its notions of adventure and the possibility of a movement or generation one might join were immensely appealing to an adolescent; so too were the intimations of sex, jazz, and various intoxicants. Most important was its post-war existential insistence that the meaning of life was to be found in the urgent intensity of living it.
As it turned out, through accidents of geography, circumstance, and temperament, I became friends with Ginsberg whom, until his death in 1997, I regarded as one of my teachers, in life as well as in literature. I also got to know, however peripherally, most of the other writers of the Beat Generation, including the hero of On the Road, “Dean Moriarty”, who was in real life Neal Cassady (though by the time I met him much of his fabled youthful charm had worn off). The only one I didn’t meet in person was Kerouac himself, but I never forgot his generosity. I followed his work and, inevitably, the rumours of his unhappy personal decline, which ended in his death at age 47 in 1969, a mere dozen years after the publication of his most famous novel.
Today, On the Road, is a “modern classic”, and though its romanticism has perhaps frayed, and the writing has worn a bit less well than might have been hoped, it’s still surprisingly readable. It also stands as one of the three generation-naming-and-defining North American novels of the 20th century, along with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. Because of its status, and the myths that have grown up around it, that makes the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), intelligently edited and introduced by British writer Howard Cunnell, both informative and useful.
The myth of On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a single roll of teletype paper, unpunctuated, in a white-hot, Benzedrine-fuelled rush, and that it had been mangled into the form of a conventional (read: less exciting, less authentic) novel by the straightlaced (read: “square”, “uptight”) editors in New York who published it a full half-dozen years after its composition. Like most literary myths, this one contains various grains of truth and half-truth, all of which editor Cunnell efficiently sorts out for us.
The brief version is this. There was and is a “scroll”, not of a single roll of teletype paper but of pieces of paper Kerouac taped together. The text is unparagraphed, but pretty much conventionally punctuated (and Kerouac himself formatted it into chapters and paragraphs in subsequent drafts). It was written in a rapid three weeks in April 1951, but the chemical stimulants, according to Kerouac, were no stronger than coffee. And it was a hard sell. Before it was published six years later, Kerouac had reeled off an additional half-dozen (also unpublished) books.
The interesting thing about “the original scroll” is that it’s pretty close to the eventually published book. The editors toned down some of the references to homosexuality (a subject Kerouac was squeamish about in any case), figuring that the drugs, jazz, and heterosexual bedhopping were more than enough “kicks” for readers of the day. They also slightly slowed the pace by inserting various commas here and there, but other than that, any claim that Kerouac’s intentions or his “spontaneous” prose were distorted by his editors is false.
There’s one difference between the scroll and the published book. The scroll uses the real names of the people in the story. What that does is to change the genre of the book. On the Road: The Original Scroll is a memoir rather than the “autobiographical” novel it became. Kerouac didn’t have to “make it up”; it all happened mostly as Kerouac told it during those magical weeks of spring 1951. In the end, the differences don’t matter all that much, though it’s nice to get an answer to the question so frequently asked of novelists, “How autobiographical is it?” In this case, the answer is: “Totally.”
Stan Persky (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
"On the Road" chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make "On the Road" an inspirational work of lasting importance.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.
