On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [1]
Like everything else about him, the story of how Jack Kerouac came to write On the Road became a legend. Certainly when I read the book at sixteen my friend Alan knew all about it. He had read it first and now he was wearing a white T-shirt and low-hipped Levi’s and listening to George Shearing. This was in a sun-washed white-and-blue seaside town on the south coast of England twenty-five years ago. Kerouac was high on Benzedrine when he wrote On the Road, Alan told me, and he wrote it all in three weeks on a long roll of Teletype paper, no punctuation. Just sat down with bop on the radio and blasted it out and it was all true-life stories, every word, all about riding the roads across America with his mad friend Dean, and jazz, drink, girls, drugs, freedom. I didn’t know what bop or Benzedrine was but I found out, and I bought a bunch of records by Shearing and Slim Gaillard. On the Road be the first book I’d read or heard of with a built-in soundtrack.
After I read On the Road and tried to find other books by Kerouac it was always the same story that I heard. On the dust jacket of my old English copy of Visions of Cody it says that On the Road was written “in 1952 in a few hectic days on a scroll of newsprint.” The story goes that Kerouac grabbed the scroll and raced over to Robert Giroux, the editor at Harcourt, Brace who had worked with Kerouac on The Town and the City, the novel he had published the previous spring. Kerouac rolled the road out in front of him and Giroux, not getting it, asked Kerouac how could the printer work from that? A story that whether true or not perfectly expresses the collision of straight America and a new subterranean hipster generation come to tell you about IT. Books, if not exactly square, certainly didn’t look like this. Kerouac takes the novel away and refuses to revise it and goes on the road again to California and Mexico, and he discovers Buddhism and spontaneous prose and writes more novels fast one after another in little notebooks that nobody dares publish. Years go by before Viking buys On the Road. Allen Ginsberg says that the published novel is not at all like the wild book Kerouac typed in ’51. Ginsberg says that someday when “everybody’s dead” the “original mad” book will be published as it is.
In his May 22, 1951 letter to Neal Cassady, Kerouac had explained that “of course since Apr. 22 I’ve been typing and revising. Thirty days on that,” and Kerouac’s closest friends knew he had been working on the book at least since 1948. Fifty years on from the novel’s eventual publication, however, the defining images of Jack Kerouac and On the Road in the cultural imagination remain his apparent frenzied channeling of a true-life story; the never-ending roll of paper billowing from the typewriter like the imagined road, and the T-shirts Kerouac sweated through as he speed typed hanging to dry in the apartment like victory flags. Kerouac’s clattering typewriter is folded in with Jackson Pollock’s furious brushstrokes and Charlie Parker’s escalating and spiraling alto saxophone choruses in a trinity representing the breakthrough of a new postwar counterculture seemingly built on sweat, immediacy, and instinct, rather than apprenticeship, craft, and daring practice.
We’ve known for a while now that there is much more to it than this, just as the novel is far more spiritual quest than how-to-be-a-hipster manual. On the Road does not appear out of clear blue air. From Kerouac’s writing journals we know that during his travels through America and Mexico from 1947 to 1950 he collected material for a road novel he first mentions by name