On The Road, Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, is turning 50. The exact date is apparently squishy, as I can't find it in any of the news reports I've searched, but apparently September is the month the anniversary will be observed, because Viking has new goodies for us to buy (a hint: They're already out). And yes, I will buy them. First up:
...not just "On the Road" itself but the hitherto-unpublished "scroll manuscript," a 1951 draft that Kerouac typed without a paragraph break on thin drawing paper (not Teletype paper) taped together in a single 120-foot roll, powered by coffee (not by Benzedrine). Kerouac was then a writer with a forgotten first novel ("The Town and the City") who wanted a nonstop, unpaginated flow appropriate both to his convictions about spontaneous composition and to the narrative itself...
The scroll has the real names—Jack, Neal, Allen Ginsberg—and scenes later cut for fear of obscenity charges or libel suits. In an introductory essay, English novelist Howard Cunnell calls the scroll "a markedly darker, edgier, and more uninhibited text than the finished book." In particular, the official version dances around the subject of homosexuality: Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac all hooked up. And it bowdlerizes the encounter with a gay man who gives them a ride: "Neal proceeded to handle [him] like a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare from my corner." In the published novel, this becomes: "Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom."
Good. I'm over my adolescent need to deny the truth about Kerouac's sexuality. The Scroll is the book I've always wondered about, the one we all wondered about, a mythic artifact untainted by The Establishment. We'd approached it, I thought, with Visions of Cody, supposedly a novel of outtakes. And yes, The Scroll could be just as awful. But The Scroll intrigues me.
Next on the list:
Viking's best contribution to the melancholy festivities is New York Times reporter John Leland's "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think)." Leland writes that "Beat scholarship has yet to produce a brilliant critic," and if he's fishing for a compliment, I'm happy to give it: no one has written better and more intelligently about Kerouac. (Leland is a former NEWSWEEK colleague, and his book quotes an essay of mine.) Don't let the presentation fool you—the faux self-help format, the magazine-style sidebars on Kerouac's anti-Semitism or the book's unwholesome food, and such chapter titles as "Sal's Guide to Work and Money." This flippant blasphemy is a device: by casting himself as the irreverent outsider, Leland gets farther inside the book, and inside the man, than Kerouac's solemn and sentimental partisans.
OK, I'll bite. I've bitten on most of the other ones. And the interesting thing now is that my son is 17 and reading Kerouac, and like me he went from reading the novel to wanting to read about The Beats. He didn't move from On The Road to Dharma Bums or Tristessa: He went to the memoirs. Name another writer who routinely inspires that kind of new-reader two-step.
There seems a great need by people to identify with Kerouac these days, not only personally, but tribally. Ginsberg, Bourroughs, Synder and Corso all have their followings, but Kerouac inspires a romanticism that's got to have something to do with his image. The young Kerouac was, after all, a lot better-looking than many of the beats, and though so much of what we "know" of him is mythology, there's a blue-collar, Everyman quality to his life story that still resonates.
So today everybody wants a piece. The GAP uses his image to sell khakis, for crying out loud. Even WIRED is getting in on the act:
On the Road is as deserving of a place in the geek's literary canon as anything penned by Tolkien, Gibson or Dick. Kerouac didn't invent alien civilizations or futuristic worlds, but he helped break down the walls of convention in the real one. If the modern geek is the maverick he often claims to be, then he owes at least a cursory nod backward to a genuine maverick, one who helped pave the way while on a hopeless struggle to find himself.
Geek Kerouac? Well, it's an interesting thought. Maybe Jack is some kind of literary Ken doll we can dress up in whatever cultural fashions match our needs. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Wild or conservative, typist or writer, I guess I just don't give a shit about the arguments anymore. He's there to be experienced, and he still seems to stroke a spot that desperately needs touching in so many of us.
Is he a commodity now? Of course. This is America. But Jack might just have the last laugh, and that makes me grin. Just a bit.
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