On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2006) (Penguin, 2007)

My copy of the 2007 softcover edition of On the Road: the Original Scroll

On the Road: the Original Scroll (Viking, 2006) is a transcript of Jack Kerouac's legendary "scroll," the first draft of On the Road (Viking, 1957).  Jim Irsay—current owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts— paid $2.43 million for it at auction in 2001.

I read On the Road twice back in the nineties. I will likely read it a third time.  After my first reading I thought it wasn't much of a book and I wondered what all the hoopla was about. It didn't get better with the second reading. Well, ahem, putting aside why I would've wanted to read this disappointment a second time, why would I consider reading it a third time?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

But stick around. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I finish writing this.

On the Road is not a work of art by any definition of art I’ve ever used. The prose isn’t transcendent (The Great Gatsby) or captivating (The Catcher in the Rye). The story is just real life with the names changed. The structure is uncomplicated: it isn’t symbolic, it isn’t multi-layered, the story doesn’t start out linear but then go in a circle or collapse on itself. There really isn’t anything to “get.”

Or is there?  Maybe there is.  Maybe that's why I keep reading the novel: I keep thinking it has something to "get" and I'm not getting it.

U.S. 50 in central Nevada

The On the Road characters are antiheroes. Nothing compelling about that. What is compelling is their collective unlikability, an odd quality in the midst of other mid-century fictional characters—Ellison's Invisible Man, Holden Caulfield, Yossarian, and Humbert Humbert among them. The On the Road characters might give Quilty and Captain Queeg a run for their money.

I don’t envy the way Sal Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego) and his associates live their lives. I wouldn’t want to be any one of them for five minutes. Moreover, Paradise and Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) are blind to the pathology of their muse, Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). Beyond whatever charisma he might have, Moriarity is simply an uneducated barroom-brawler, drunk, car thief, sex addict, parvenu, and revolving-door prisoner who can’t hold a job or get along with anyone except Paradise and Marx, Ivy-Leaguers to whom he is painfully solicitous. He peppers his antisocial self-absorption with occasional efforts to enter the enlightened conversation going on around him, and when he does he spouts doubletalk.


In the background material that I've read I learned that Kerouac and Ginsberg in real life were fatally attracted to Cassady who, to gain and keep their attention or their potential monetary generosity or both, was desperate to be accepted by these two. His repeated doubletalk episodes are solid evidence of his wish to fit in. Perhaps he never realized he had them at hello.

Kerouac and Ginsberg were intellectual middle-class Ivy-Leaguers.  And they believed that they and their Columbia University mates were onto some new way of living and thinking that was exalted, superior, ahead of its time, and intellectual, a way-of-being they labeled “beat” without coherently defining it. When Cassady joined them he was a gorilla in a tux— incongruence incarnate—a man leading an unintellectual antisocial life which Kerouac and Ginsberg misunderstood and romanticized, turning it upside-down in their minds, causing or allowing them to view Cassady as the very avatar of “beat.”

I readily confess I've never understood "beat." I have no idea what it means, if it has a meaning. I've never understood what Kerouac and Ginsberg saw in Cassady. I've never understood why they stooped to Cassady's level in their travels with him.

So maybe all the foregoing is why I bought and read On the Road: the Original Scroll when Penguin Classics published it in paperback in 2007.

"The Scroll," housed at the New York Public Library

Kerouac wrote the scroll in April 1951 in one three-week-long marathon of transferring unfiltered thought onto paper.  (See note 1.)  As it appears in On the Road: the Original Scroll, it is raw, the real-life names haven’t been changed, the sexual (including gay-sex) references censored from On the Road are fully intact, and the misspellings and erroneous place-names haven’t been corrected.  I now believe my key to “getting” On the Road (i.e., the 1957 published version) is the scroll—the text, certainly, but also its very existence in legend and fact and the Benzedrine-nicotine-caffeine-fed manner in which Kerouac wrote it.

I don’t normally delve into background sources to understand a work.  I’m from the “New Criticism” school of literary analysis, and so I stick to the text and avoid things like correspondence, journals, biography, other literary analyses, etc.  But I had had so much trouble “getting" On the Road I decided to make an exception.  Here’s what I learned.

What turned into “beat” started out in the mid-forties as the “New Vision,” which Kerouac and a handful of his Columbia friends vaguely discussed among themselves.  In a nutshell, Kerouac et al. were disturbed by the atomic bomb and by the new world in which the spectre of imminent nuclear annihilation haunted everyone every day.  And so they were going to do something and do it through literature.  But their “New Vision,” just like its later incarnation “beat,” was undefined.  One of them, Lucien Carr, later said “New Vision” was deliberately left undefined.

During this early period Kerouac heard a Times Square street junky named Herbert Huncke use “beat” to refer to his life in the street—“beat,” as in beat-up, beaten-down, and down-and-out.  Kerouac thought he heard something impish and rebellious in Huncke’s use of “beat,” and so began to apply it to this “New Vision” in a way that transformed “beat” into something rebellious: beat-down, yes, but refusing to be down-and-out. Yet, as “beat” replaced “New Vision,” the name-change was cosmetic only and the concept remained as nebulous as ever.

The brains of the "Beats": (L-R) Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr at Columbia University.

Kerouac’s purported attempts in the fifties to define “beat” in his various writings and interviews began with what appeared to be a kind of nibbling around the edges of an idea but devolved quickly into snarky double-talk.

The Beats' inability or refusal to coherently define “beat” opened my eyes and at some point I had a Gestalt moment: Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s branding Cassady’s way-of-being as “beat” justified their palling-around with him, justified their aping him whenever the mood struck them and using him for their own purposes (literary for Kerouac, sexual for Ginsberg), meanwhile pitching the “beat” lifestyle as an intellectual product, all of which was nothing more or less than the rationalization of boorishness and irresponsibility—act like licentious teenagers or nihilists, or in Cassady/Moriarity’s case a drunken sailor on shore leave, and in any event without restraint or remorse; label the cretinous behavior as “beat”; babble in double-talk that “beat” is an intellectual construct and, if it has to be explained at all, you’ll never “get it”; and then see how many people freeze under this barely-veiled threat to their own intellectuality.

I fell for it in my own way.

Kerouac and Ginsberg had to have been two of the most fucked-up Ivy-Leaguers in history for having admired a guy like Cassady in the first place, chased him back and forth cross-country just to be around him, and then written books and poems about him as if he were a saint or a genius instead of a low-class fistfight-starting career-criminal sex fiend parvenu who never accomplished anything that anyone with any horse-sense, then or now, would call success.

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Before Kerouac arrived on the literary scene, it wasn’t completely unheard of for a writer to write a first draft without bothering to get grammar and punctuation or even syntax exactly right.  But Kerouac seems to have invented the vomit-whatever-is-in-your-head-don’t-worry-about-anything writing method that has become orthodoxy, not only for psychotherapists who counsel their patients to keep a journal but for teachers in professional creative-writing workshops—let it flow, let it all just come out, don’t filter, don’t edit, don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation or syntax or anything, just get it down on paper.  Kerouac called this “spontaneous prose.”

Jack Kerouac and his scroll, 1950

Years ago I stumbled upon Kerouac’s theory of “spontaneous prose” in a 1955 letter to Malcolm Cowley, an influential critic who helped Kerouac sell his manuscript to Viking.  Part of the letter had been reprinted in Advice to Writers: a Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights (Vintage Books, 2000), one of my bathroom books.

“Never did tell you my theory of writing.  If it isn’t spontaneous, right unto the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised, by which the paradox arises, we get what a man has hidden, i.e., his craft, instead of what we need, what a man has shown, i.e., blown (like jazz musician or rose)—

"The requirements for prose & verse are the same, i.e., blow—What a man most wants to hide, revise, and un-say is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for—Every doctor knows, every Prophet knows the convulsion of truth.—Let the writer open his mouth & yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence—”

Kerouac submitted his book to Viking, a major publisher in New York that had John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow, among others, as clients. Since Kerouac would have known that all other books at Viking and at any other big publishing house would go through an editing and polishing process, he surely would have known that these processes would erase from his prose any evidence of spontaneity. Therefore he is saying implicitly to Cowley in this letter that when a writer blows his work it ought to remain unedited and raw: unhidden, unrevised, and said irrecoverably once, the way it comes. Kerouac handed to Viking his raw 120-foot-long blown scroll—a bushel of strawberries that Viking turned into a big pink smoothie.

It took nearly fifty years but in 2006 we finally got our hands on the "spontaneous prose" of Jack Kerouac's masterwork, On the Road, with On the Road: The Original Scroll. The scroll demonstrates what the polished 1957 On the Road could not: Kerouac’s creation was not the simple, unimaginative novel, On the Road, about a traveling narcissistic Ivy League dilettante pseudo-rebel and his pals who wanted to live without rules and boundaries set by others.  In my view, based on my close reading of it, the scroll was about blowing.  If the scroll had remained unedited, this blowing theme would have been reflected in three ways—(1) in the story of people letting it all just come out, unfiltered and unedited, etc.; (2) in the act of Kerouac's three weeks of blowing; and (3) in the novel's prose style and structure. Instead, the editors at Viking squandered the opportunity to publish a true work of art and began to remake it into something they thought might become saleable. In contrast to the polished writing we ultimately find in 1957's On the Road, Kerouac—the man and writer—is blowing the scroll, coming out unfiltered and unedited, not worrying about consequences—i.e., grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax, whether it made any sense, or whether anyone but Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg would ever read it. And all the while he's telling a tale about lives that are lived by letting it all just come out, unfiltered and unedited, not worrying about consequences. Imagine a book about the clarity of water written on crystal-clear water you poured out of a pitcher. The scroll was both medium and message.  By the time Viking finished polishing On the Road in 1957, the medium and message had been lost—smoothed to smithereens, really.  At least that’s my best guess for why I still don’t “get" the 1957 novel.  Because I “get” the scroll.

Watts Towers

When Kerouac was writing it, the emerging Scroll was performance art.  Today, the completed Scroll is a work of avant-garde art, like the Watts Towers or the Vietnam War Memorial on the Washington Mall.  Take them or leave them as art.  But they are also cultural landmarks.  They are artifacts of history.  They are history.  Sadly, Viking remade Kerouac’s work-of-art into a watered-down, mass-market, poor-man’s version of the scroll that bears little resemblance to the original except in the story and characters, the two weakest elements of the scroll.

A novel like Last Exit to Brooklyn, a masterpiece of American nihilism, is what On the Road might have become if Kerouac had had a forward-thinking editor and a novelist’s imagination.  Better yet, we and our elders would’ve had the scroll on our bookshelves and in our backpacks all these years if Viking had had the guts, the insight, and the foresight to leave it the hell alone.

Insight: Remember the way Rock ‘N Roll sounded in the movies in the sixties and on TV shows like "Dragnet," how it sounded like some grown-up’s lame idea of what Rock ‘N Roll was supposed to sound like because that’s the way it sounded to them because they were listening through a Frank Sinatra/Doris Day/Benny Goodman/Les Brown filter?  The grown-ups didn’t “get” Rock ‘N Roll. Viking’s editors didn’t “get” the scroll because they weren’t prepared to think outside the box.  Or maybe they just weren’t prepared to try and sell a book that required readers to think outside the box.  Whatever.  They edited the scroll the way they would’ve edited any manuscript from a conventional-but-undisciplined writer, like Thomas Wolfe for example, who worried himself almost to suicide trying to be disciplined.  Kerouac, on the other hand, consciously rejected discipline.

You don’t take a manuscript like the scroll and edit it, much less edit it until it sounds conventional.  You don’t polish it: that defeats the purpose.  On the Road doesn’t sound like Kerouac “letting it all just come out.”  It sounds very Les Brown to my Rock ‘N Roll ears.  Or I should say it sounds very Les Brown to my John Coltrane bop ears.  No wonder I never “got” On the Road.  All there had ever been to “get” was the parallel between, on the one hand, the way the raw, unedited scroll sounded in the reader's head as a result of Kerouac's having blown it like a jazz musician; and, on the other hand, the raw, unedited manner in which he and his associates lived their lives.  Once Viking had polished the raw, unedited scroll into On the Road, all that remained was a pointless story of men acting like incorrigible children and scofflaws.  There was nothing left to “get.”

Bingo.

You and I and everyone else must separate 1957’s On the Road from the scroll because when Kerouac waxes about On the Road he’s talking about the scroll.  I defy anyone to read the two versions and see On the Road any longer—if he or she ever did—as an exemplar of “spontaneous prose.”  While the scroll is patently spontaneous, we can now see that On the Road is everything Kerouac said he was trying to avoid. (See Note 2.)

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Hemingway at work on For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The First World War (1914-1918) blew the minds of untold thousands of people in Europe, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos in Paris and T.S. Eliot in England.  It turned their world inside out and turned them and many others fatalistic.  Gertrude Stein, referring to the American expatriates, told Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation."  These writers were “lost” because they were disillusioned and set back on their heels: How could a war like that have happened?  In a world where that could happen, what's the point of life?  Their rejection of this world and the people who had run it into a ditch was visceral and unconscious.   From their American exclaves in Europe they reacted with downbeat anti-heroic stories, novels, and poems.

A generation later, the atom bomb blew the minds of a lot of people, once the enormity of what it meant for the future of humanity had set in.  A new generation of thinkers and writers, including the Beats, became fatalistic.

In my humble opinion, however, the Beat Generation was simply a post-WWII, self-important, and inferior version of the Lost Generation.  From my background reading I know I’m not alone in this assessment.

I see two key differences between the Lost Generation and the Beats. The first is that despite its being a reaction to WWI, the Lost Generation had no social or political agenda.  The war had affected their psyches, but Hemingway and his pals only saw themselves as what they were—individual writers trying to move the literature ball downfield from where Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, Ibsen, Twain, Tennyson, and the other nineteenth century greats had left it.  The Beats, on the other hand, reacted to the atom bomb, not viscerally and unconsciously, but with a willful and purposeful rejection of the way the world worked, intending to reflect this rebellion in their writing.

The second key difference is the level of talent.  Hemingway and the writers of the Lost Generation had an ocean of talent and, except for Ginsberg, the Beats had a cozy swimming hole and delusions of grandeur.  (See Note 3.)

 

Fashion-forward display at "The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion and Rock 'N Roll" at SF's Palace of the Legion of Honor, 16 July 2017

The members of the Lost Generation talked quite a bit about the slings and arrows of the writing life and sometimes about their literary forebears.  But they didn't talk much about writing: they wrote.  The Beats, apart from Kerouac and Ginsberg, seem to have talked more than they wrote.  All of the Beats saw themselves as leaders of a movement and an elite social underground.  They were smarter and better than everyone else because they were the only ones who could see that the rest of us lived the lives society expected us to live.  The rest of us did what we were told.  The Beats weren’t going to do that.  They were going to do the opposite.  Ironically, whereas the Lost Generation produced critically-acclaimed world literature, the Beats, with the exception of Ginsberg and arguably Kerouac's Scroll, did the opposite and on a small scale.

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More irony: Kerouac disdained the "Hippy movement" when it came around.  It’s ironic because the Beats were closer to the Hippies than Kerouac cared to believe.  With their willful and purposeful rejection of society, responsibility, and plain old-fashioned rules, the Hippies could have been the Beats' philosophic offspring.

Display of books considered popular among members of the Sixties Generation (or their professors) at "The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock N' Roll" at SF's Palace of the Legion of Honor, 16 July 2017

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[1] Kerouac taped sheets of tracing paper or teletype paper (accounts differ) together end-to-end to create a scroll he could feed through his typewriter so he wouldn’t have to stop writing every few minutes to change paper and hence stop his creative flow. “The Scroll” ended up as one paragraph 120 feet long.  Except for some missing edges gnawed by a dog who must have been looking for the definition of “Beat,” The Scroll is housed in the New York Public Library.

[2] I feel like I’m the kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  What were people looking at all these years?  Did they really think On the Road was “spontaneous prose”?  Did they believe it just because Kerouac said it was?  (Or rather, seemed to say it was.)  From my first reading of it I knew something was out of whack, that there was some kind of disconnect between what the book was supposed to be and what it was.  I just couldn’t put my finger on it until I began reading The Scroll and saw for the first time what Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” really looked like.   But in the end, like Faust and Joe Hardy, Kerouac sold his soul to the Devil.  He wanted to be published so badly he surrendered his pioneering art to the men with blue pencils.  He stood aside (or put up a weak fight) as Viking edited all the spontaneity and "the convulsion of truth" out of his writing, made it "crafty and revised, … precisely what Literature [was not] waiting and bleeding for."

[3] Ironically, it was the Lost Generation who produced literary grandeur, from the twenties to the forties: The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front,"To Brooklyn Bridge," The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the first of The Cantos, Look Homeward, Angel, and the U.S.A. trilogy.  Allen Ginsberg’s slim poetry collection, Howl, stands as the only piece of outstanding literature the core Beats ever published.  One might make a case for William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, but Burroughs was on the periphery and didn’t consider himself one of the Beats.  And I suppose one could now make the case for The Scroll, a better title for which would be On the Road: the Restored Text, although even in its restored state I'm reluctant to call it "outstanding literature.”   I'll withhold final judgment until I've reread it at least once or twice.