On The Road

[stilltrucking]

Cut and Paste

The novel that launched the Beats, the hippies and designer jeans turns 50. But this legendary 'joyride' is actually the saddest book you'll ever read—even with God on every page. Time for another look.
By David Gates
Newsweek



But Viking has the real goods—not just "On the Road" itself but the hitherto-unpublished "scroll manuscript," a 1951 draft that Kerouac typed without a paragraph break on thin drawing paper (not Teletype paper) taped together in a single 120-foot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.

It wasn't a publicity stunt, but it helped create the legend anyway: the manic genius pounding away, bug-eyed and sweating, channeling a masterwork out of nowhere and everywhere, only to have it neutered and normalized by repressive editors in New York. (Though not so neutered and normalized that hipsters refused to read it.) In fact, this wasn't Kerouac's first try at the book, and as soon as he finished it, he began cutting and revising on his own initiative. On the title page of the next draft—and not the last—he hand-wrote two further changes: "On the Road" instead of "The Beat Generation," and "Jack" Kerouac instead of "John."

Still, Kerouac greatly improved the book's most-quoted passage: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles across the night." Or so the scroll has it. The published version goes on: " ... like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' " This is Kerouac finding his true voice and true subject: beyond the trite Roman candles to the explosion, the spiders, the stars—and then the deflationary exhalation. If only he'd lost the "fabulous."

But 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.

Leland doesn't try to finesse Kerouac's lapses in writing and common sense: when the boys go to Mexico, he quotes Sal's highfalutin riff about "the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world," then notes that in reality Sal and Dean are "white guys looking for weed and cheap teenage prostitutes." Yet by giving "On the Road" the close, alert reading regularly afforded to a novel by a mainstream writer, he reveals an intricacy and coherence hidden to those who approach Kerouac as a knuckle-dragger who got lucky.

Leland examines the symbiotic, doomed relationship of Sal and Dean from angle after angle, as if turning a gem under the loupe. He argues persuasively for Sal/Jack's underlying conservatism—Ginsberg himself spoke of Kerouac's "family values"— and like Millstein he puts Kerouac's Christian faith in its proper place: at the center of the novel. Kerouac's true children, he speculates, may not be the hippies but the Jesus freaks. Kerouac called the book "a story of two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him." Among the poor, he might have added, and mostly in pain and disappointment. Their capacity for acceptance and forgiveness—how badly would you have to behave to lose Sal's friendship?—belies Podhoretz's notion of their lurking psychopathic violence. In the last paragraph, Sal has come off the road and sits by the Hudson River at sunset: "In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?" That is, a holy fool and an omnipresent compassion. For secular highbrows, Kerouac had pitched them a hanging curve.

Leland's book should be a head-snapper and a groundbreaker. But how do you correct 50 years of misreading? The book for which "On the Road" is mistaken nourishes more happy delusions than the real one, in which all schemes for "kicks" end in disaster, or in frantic satiation that's still unsatisfying. It's close in spirit to Samuel Johnson's utterly pessimistic "Rasselas"—or to Samuel Beckett's compulsive pursuits of nothing. In the novel conjured up out of Kerouac's words and young readers' wishes—does anybody over 21 read it anymore?—Sal Paradise simply liberates himself from his aunt's cozy home, lights out for the territory and finds himself. (Forget the God part.) If Sal can do it, so can they. After half a century, they still try, though they have to find their territory: Kerouac's was vanishing, from America and from his own miserable life, by the time his book came out. Some of these seekers revel in what they find out there, and in there. But Kerouac knew that wasn't the end of the story.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek

The rest of the article is here.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20111361/si ... ek/page/0/

[Arcadia]

Kerouac called the book "a story of two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him."

funny!

[Artguy]

Ya I just picked up the scroll version..have'nt opened it yet...maybe in another 50 years....