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On the Road. The Original Scroll

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The 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" is commemorated by the release of three major volumes. They are a designated 50th Anniversary edition; "On The Road: The Original Scroll", the long-awaited controversial release of the uncensored 120-foot alleged "teletype roll" on which Kerouac blazingly blasted out his masterwork in just three weeks, six years before its publication; and a handsome Library of America edition, "Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960", edited with textual notes by historian Douglas Brinkley, featuring Road and four other of his best known novels along with selections from his journals. (See separate review).
Whether this literary blitz will lead to a grand revival of interest in Kerouac's work by both old and new generations has yet to be seen. But it secures his reputation as a major American writer because his voice resonates with the great poignant prose of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck, celebrating the wonders and adventures of youthful travels on the open road. In the book's first major favorable review, Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times praised "On The Road" as being to the Beat Generation what Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" was to its precedent bohemian Lost Generation.
Millions of readers and generations of authors have been influenced by the "On The Road", typically discovered by readers in their adolescence. Almost everyone who has read the book remembers when and where they first encountered it, the way one indelibly recalls the loss of virginity.
Praise for Kerouac's work is far from universal. Many academics, critics and other writers dismiss him as a primitive and pretender, his writings merely ramblings of a drunken bum, and already are expressing displeasure at his being included as an author worthy of the high-brow Library of America collection. Truman Capote, an early inductee into the series, famously scoffed of Kerouac's prose, "It isn't writing. It's typing." But like his detractor, "On The Road" and Kerouac's other books have withstood the great test of time.
It has been known for decades Road was begun in 1948. Rough draft segments of Road are found in Kerouac's journals he kept since a youngster in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, now collected and edited by Brinkley in the recent book "Windblown World".
Before the long-delayed publication of "On The Road" in 1957, what commonly is referred to as the full "first draft" was typed out at 100 words a minute during three weeks in April 1951 on a 120-foot length of paper often called a "teletype roll". It is one long, single-spaced, unbroken paragraph. Some say Kerouac wrote it on a Benzedrine binge; others point to a letter Kerouac wrote to Cassady saying it was just "coffee" that fueled his mind. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that speed really was the driving factor, in the end, this is just more pieces of minutiae and trivia permeating the Kerouac mythology, and really doesn't seem to matter.
In 2001, the original scroll was purchased at a Christies' auction in New York by Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay for $2.43 million, a world record for a manuscript. After his successful bid, the following day Irsay allegedly was offered twice the price for it, and has said that he was prepared to pay as much as $10 million.
A good friend of Brinkley, Irsay dispatched his private jet to pick him up and accompany him to the auction as an "advisor". Irsay helped organize an extensive tour of the scroll, now encased in a long glass topped and sided table, with the scroll unfurled several feet and connected to two adjacent Torah-like cylinders which curators may occasionally carefully wind to reveal another segment of the text. It has been restored by adding backing and treating the front with a preservative. After a final tour date in 2009, Irsay plans to donate it to Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.
The "scroll" has hundreds of hand-written edits by Kerouac and many sections of lines deleted by cross-outs. John Sampas, Kerouac's literary executor, told MSNBC these would not be included in Viking's "uncensored" release. The original famous opening line of "On The Road" stating Kerouac first met Moriarty soon after Kerouac separated from his wife appears in Scroll recounting he first met Cassady after the death of Kerouac's father. The actual scroll ends abruptly, without the long, haunting Wolfeian paragraph closing the novel, pertaining to unsuccessful searches for Neal Cassady's father in Denver. The scroll was entrusted to his friend Lucien Carr for safekeeping, and Carr's dog chewed up the end. "Original Scroll" appendages a supposition of several pages in an effort to complete the manuscript and show its last words were close to the 1957 first edition. This was written by editor Howard Cunnell and is somewhat a leap of faith.
Sampas has claimed Viking's 1957 "censorship" was due to explicit references to sex and drugs. The "F" word was scratched out by Kerouac on the first page of the scroll text but interestingly does appear in The Original Scroll, although Sampas averred scratch-outs would not be included. The scroll was published despite potential libel problems involving characters' real names. Cassady and Ginsberg signed releases for their pseudonymous inclusion in Road. Neal Cassady's wife, Carolyn, who did not, lives in Great Britain, where libel verdicts are easier to obtain, and angrily denounced as a "travesty" plans to publish the scroll.
Four Kerouac scholars put Original Scroll together. Cunnell filled gaps and made calls on original deletions, corrected spelling, inserted paragraph breaks, and edited it for a more cohesive read. Cunnell, Joshua Kupetz, Penny Vlagopoulus and George Mouratidis wrote superbly insightful introductory background material and analysis, the book's first 97 pages.
An enduring question about the scroll concerns whether it actually was typed onto teletype paper. There are arguments for and against this. Carr, a news editor at New York's United Press International bureau, supplied Kerouac with teletype paper in the early 1950s. Some say the "scroll" was taped together in 12-foot segments.
Scroll examiners including Cunnell say portions of it have a scored line down one side, suggesting it may have been hand-ruled and cut to fit the platen of Kerouac's typewriter, indicating it was not teletype paper. However, Cunnell in Original Scroll also makes some errors, not the least of which is that the Burroughs house in Algiers was located next to a bayou. In fact it is about two blocks from the river and miles from the nearest bayou.
Brinkley in "Windblown World" acknowledges Carr gave Kerouac teletype paper, but refers to the scroll as "Japanese art tracing paper". In a 1979 New York Times article, Cassady biogarhper ("Holy Goof") William Plummer wrote that Kerouac "fed into his typewriter a bulky roll of Chinese art paper". The paper used also has been referred to variously as onion-skin, "nearly translucent", and as architectural drafting paper. Kerouac told fellow beat writer John Clellon Holmes that he planned to write the manuscript on "a roll of shelf paper."
In her bitter "Nobody's Wife", (2000), Kerouac's second wife Joan Haverty quotes him saying "'See what I found in that cabinet over there? This whole big roll of paper the same width as typing paper.'"
Gerald Nicosia's critical biography "Memory Babe" states Kerouac found "20-foot sheets of Japanese art paper" in the same apartment Kerouac shared with Haverty - whose previous tenant was her friend Bill Cannastra, beheaded in a subway accident. The apartment was in the same building as that of Carr. This may be Brinkley's "Japanese art paper" postulation source. Cunnell maintains the roll was taped together from eight pieces of very thin sheets owned by Cannastra.
After Kerouac presented the scroll to publisher Robert Giroux in 1951, unfurled it in his office and exclaimed "Here's my novel!" Giroux was shocked by the one long unbroken single-spaced paragraph and rejected it outright. Startled by the format and complaining printers would not be able to compose from it, Giroux said it "felt rubbery, like Thermo-fax paper."
The back dust jacket photo of "Scroll" shows Kerouac holding long, unfurled footage of a paper roll, connected to a large roll of paper, clearly not taped together. The book speculates that Kerouac used this particular roll for his second novel, The Dharma Bums.
The Road scroll now is yellowed with age the way foolscap or newsprint-type teletype paper degrades quickly due to acid content. While this continuing literary mystery deserves proper forensic examination, in the end, it too, really doesn't matter.
"On The Road: The Original Scroll" is well worth buying and reading, and ultimately, may appear to some (as initially it did to me) to be a better, more contextually significant book than "On The Road" as published that fateful day of September 5, 1957. The astute introductions alone are worth the price of admission and provide a rich history of the several drafts of the book ultimately published as Road. Reading the actual scroll text is a revelation worthy of the long wait and lends great insight into the factual material of the evolution of the subsequent drafts.
But after reading "Scroll", more than 35 years after I first encountered "Road", in re-reading the text of the common edition as we know it today, my feelings remain quite mixed. True died-in-the wool fans will undoubtedly at some point place both books next to each other so they can plainly see the differences. In some ways, the 1957 version is more easily readable, with its paragraph breaks, tighter more grammatical sentences, and the indisputable polish of a much-revised text more likely at that time to have garnered the public acclaim (and disdain) for its content. My penultimate feeling is the two books should not be compared for quality, and that each can stand on their own feet for what they are: Writings of a genius who is less significant for his description of "kicks" compared to the deep themes of the loss of his father and brother he sought to find in Neal Cassady, and, in later books, his pantheistic interwining of Catholic and Buddhist spirituality. The works of Jack Kerouac, like a grand old cypress tree refusing to break in a hurricane, have withstood ravages of the ages, and placed him amongst the immortals.

Somehow I imagined the scroll to be an incomprehensible mess that editors had to sift through in order to create something that could be published as a novel. I was very far from the truth.

The Original Scroll is an example of excellent writing. Yes, it's missing paragraphs, but the style is sharp like a knife's edge. Kerouac's text has power to concentrate reader's imagination and then send it flying into a thousand of directions at once.

I think I actually prefer the scroll to the classic editions of On the Road. The scroll feels very real and easy to understand.

On the Road - the original road trip. The book that took the Beat movement mainstream and fused literature and the youth culture inextricably in the 50s and 60s - presented here as the legendary scroll manuscript Kerouac initially produced. It's readable and electric. The act of reading this familiar and envigorating story anew makes it fresh again. The differences are small (in the scroll Kerouac uses real names instead of of the pseudonyms used in the published novel; the scroll is sexier and feels a bit edgier and more breathless) - but enough to make me experience it in a raw new way. Kerouac's quest for Cassady is a story that puts me in touch with what life's all about: freedom, friendship, creativity, partying, love - and the wanderlust questing nature of the human soul. It's never been more needed - or more pertinent.

This is a great way to reconnect with this great classic. If you've never read it, I wouldn't hesitate to read this over the published one. This version makes it easier to reconnect the novel's/memoir's action with history. Highly recommended

The continent "groans" again and again.

The night is too often "sad," the cities are "mad" or "wild" and "sad" some more. New York is the "edge of the continent," and San Francisco, too and sometimes they're the "rim of the world," or some similar allusion.

Jack Kerouac and his friends, hanging outside New York City's Harmony Bar, would be considered drunks and losers by the standards of most. The author's muse and messiah, Neal Cassady, is a fellow too easily distracted, undisciplined and, by today's measurements, a candidate for depression medication.

In the recently released "scroll" version of "On the Road," Cassady's criminal bent and complete disregard for his friends' concerns or the safety of strangers are drawn in much starker contrast than they are in the (we now know for sure) much toned-down Viking Press version of the 1950s.

But it works and wonderfully so.

Whatever the personal flaws of the roadgoers, and they are multiple, whatever the prosodic sins of their faithful secretary Jack, equally numerous, The Scroll is blessed with energy and truth and dynamism, a beatific rhythm and sound that hold up, even though 50 years on we've read it all before.

But where what was once novel becomes cliché with the passing of time, The Scroll takes on enhanced value as snapshot of a country long-disappeared.

The Scroll contains a hundred pages more than the edited "On the Road," and that's a lot of adventure and resulting ruminations, as Kerouac takes us to Denver and San Francisco, and back out to New York and down to North Carolina, back up again, and then down through Louisiana back up to San Francisco, New York again and finally through Texas to damp and sexy San Antonio before shooting through "biblical" Mexico, now gone, too.

Even the "normal" people in this frantic tome, those with wives and jobs they stick with are not like us anymore, working on ships and in factories as they do, residing in company towns and city centers.

The Scroll is a sweeping panorama of America and of thought beaten out on teletype paper by a guy on speed; maybe drug speed, maybe coffee, but probably something else that burned out of Kerouac like heavy kerosene and which caused his death when the last vapors rose from his being and poofed into the dusty firmament.

It has politics without the jeremiads and program points, just whole manifestoes in a masterful word-stroke such as "sullen unions," a flavor and entire reality nailed to the mind's wall.

"The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. There's no defense. Poor people have their lives interfered with ad infinitum by these neurotic busybodies. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to their satisfaction."

It is loving landscape portraiture as in this passage laid down about Neal, his "whore wife" Luanne (meant here as flattery), and Jack's departure from New Orleans:

"Port Allen -- Poor Allen -- where the river's all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River -- a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees down, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Venice and the Night's Great Gulf out. So the stars shine warm in the Gulf of Mexico at night. From the soft and thunderous Carib comes electricity, and from the continental Divide where rain and rivers are decided come swirls, and the little raindrop that in Dakota fell and gathered mud and roses rises resurrected from the sea and flies on back to go and bloom again in waving mells of the Mississippi's bed, and lives again."

The passage lies almost exactly at the book's midpoint; stands as strong backbone to all the word swirling before and after, a fine spine, like the Mississippi in its marriage with the landscape.

Everywhere lively applications, symbols, poetry pulled from the very map that is America, multiple magic in Missouri and Mississippi, no invention with Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Potash, and Venice, just the natural ordering of an evident and obvious song about the land itself.

Early on in this passage the prose become unnecessary, the point made, ripe for a Sixth Avenue editor's pen. But gripped by the author's sweaty hand, we are yanked along, pointed here and there on the keyboard toward ecstatic sites he has taken the time to see for us.

Can the Carib be both soft and thunderous? Does the oscillation between them make electricity? On paper it does. Is there such a thing as a mell or does his lazy resort to something that sings make it go down so much easier, and isn't that part of the job?

Mell is a swell on the Mississippi and we know that, even if we didn't before.

It is not easy to sift through all the postmodern swill that has come after and still be awed at the pure audacity of Kerouac; the audacity to make up words, to appear at his New York editor's office sweating and stinking of chemical ooze with a manuscript written on 120 feet of rolled paper demanding respect of The Scroll as if it were plumbed from Dead Sea depths.

So goes it with the aspiring philosopher whom, even if he is a bum, still philosophizes for all of us and not just for those of high brow and intentions:

"death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced -- tho we hate to admit it -- in death. But who wants to die. More of this later."

Beyond bum philosophy or travel writing The Scroll renders social commentary still relevant today:

"On the sidewalk characters swarmed. Everybody was looking at everybody else. It was the end of the continent no more land. Somebody had tipped America like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this."

There's that "end of the continent" bit while "sadness and madness" appear elsewhere in a vignette of Kerouac's entitled "October In the Railroad Earth," as "end of the land sadness end of the land gladness" not precisely alike, but essentially the same literary trick.

Yet if you're hip to all of this, if you can dig it and know time, then it's not lack of imagination so much as your favorite band playing the same songs at a second show. And Kerouac likened his writing to "blowing," which is what the trumpeters and saxophoners of his time did, in fact, do.

And then there's Neal; stripped of Dean Moriarity's mask and draped in a legend Cassady came to embody for three generations of misspent youths, stealing four cars at a roadhouse party outside Denver, denied entry into the homes of kith and kin alike, boy to his father's bum and disappeared dad, wrangler, brakeman, seducer of everybody else's girlfriends (and boyfriends), absentee father himself.

Says "Naked Lunch" author William Burroughs of Cassady when they visit him in the Louisiana swamps, "He seems to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence."

Pretty smart fellow Bill Burroughs, as were they all, in spite of their nasty habits.

Cassady floats free of all preconceived notions regarding expected behavior, free of the bars others attempt to bind him with through holy judgments...part-time N.Y. hipster and happy pervert to Kerouac's ambiguous French-Catholic curiosities.

"He lived with Diane in a coldwater flat in the East Seventies. When he came home at night he took off all his clothes and put on a hiplength Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy chair to smoke a waterpipe loaded with tea. These were his coming-home pleasures: together with a deck of dirty cards. 'Lately I've been concentrating on this deuce of diamonds. Have you noticed where her other hand is? I'll bet you can't tell. Look long and try to see.' He wanted to lend me this deuce of diamonds, which depicted a tall mournful fellow and a lascivious sad whore on a bed trying a position. 'Go ahead man, I've used it many times!'"

Drunken romantics bound early to your graves. Who should purchase your peddlings? A dank Detroit theater is no palace at 4 a.m. and an alley is an alley is an alley in the crappy part of a marginal Texas town. Or is it? Throwing down your challenge, your example was enjoyment. "Man can you dig the beauty and kicks!"

"We wandered out and negotiated several dark mysterious blocks. Innumerable houses hid behind verdant almost jungle-like yards we saw glimpses of girls in front rooms, girls on porches, girls in the bushes with boys. "I never knew this mad San Antonio! Think what Mexico'll be like. Lessgo! Lessgo!"

Yet for all its ebullience, "On the Road" is but a marginally successful search for joy that, at bottom, asserts something is not right in these sojourners nor in the America which spawned them.

"Looking at snapshots of Cassady's children," Kerouac writes, "I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth and well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness of the riot, or our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. Juices inform the world, children never know."

Nightmare and dream sit on different sides of the same coin and to know one, you must be familiar with the other.

The extension of the Mexico trip, trimmed to a classical dénouement in the edited version, renders the American break with an organic world wrought by the big bomb drops on Japan.

It is mentioned vaguely, as if to do so more emphatically might conjure another nuclear massacre, but in this passage we hear it and understand that, for all their rebellion and dissociation, the roadgoers are tainted by food from the same poisoned factory farm.

The indigenous peoples they saw, "knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know."

Jack and Neal and the third wheel rolling with them are no heroes. They are car escapees from the psychic slaughter unleashed in their homeland, a sudden clanking folly from America with its three broken bozos inside. And the choice has been the same for half a century now: to be with them or against them.

Lead the way you lost and lonely bozos.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the original scroll found its way into print. Jim Irsay paid a cool $2.4 million for the scroll back in 2001. Fortunately, he was generous enough to send the scroll on the road for a 13-stop tour which will be completed next year at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.

It is important to have the scroll now in print as it differs significantly from the 1957 edited version we have all come to know over the past 50 years. Regarded as the seminal work of the Beat Generation, On the Road recounts Jack Kerouac's journeys across America in the late 40's and early 50's, where he met up with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and many others who formed an underground literary movement, that took its beat to some extent from the Be-bop jazz of the era.

In Neal Cassady, known as Dean Moriarty in the 1957 version, Kerouac found his alter ego, a person who lived in the here and now, seemingly oblvious to the world around him. The two covered a lot of ground together, assuming the lives of hobos at times, hopping trains as they criss-crossed the country in search of soulmates. To many influential figures of the era, Cassady appeared to embody the perpetual state of being found in Buddhism. He would have as strong an influence on Ginsberg as he had on Kerouac.

Kerouac went onto write Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and many other accounts of his travels and relations with the Beat generation. Some of these stories are captured in a new Library of America edition of Jack Kerouac. But, it is On the Road that captured the imagination of a new generation, which treated this book like a Bible for the open road in the 60s, including Francis Ford Coppola, who bought the screen rights to the book in 1968, and is finally making it into a movie with Walter Salles directing.

I read the standard version of ON THE ROAD years ago - and loved it. But having just read the unbroken by paragraph or chapter rush of the scroll version, it's like the literary equivalent of a Wellesian cinematic long take. And it makes a difference, a big difference in the book. It is no longer a book, it is the very onrush of Life and it is trip that carries you along whether you want to go or not. There is a truly hypnotic appeal in this unbroken narrative that is, yes, diluted in the standard version. The real names are welcome, the more explicit sexuality is welcome - but it is the literary long-take that makes this original version so complelling and irresisitable. (And just as an aside, as there would be no true Abbott without Costello and vice versa...there probably would not have been a Kerouac without Cassidy. Or if there were, he probably would have been lame and tame and not much remembered. But Kerouac's writing of the "Holy Goof" Cassidy smacks of a synergy that comes pure from Heaven - or Hell, if you disapprove the admittedly madcap lifestyle of the book's main hero.) Anyway - back to my main point - the unbroken scroll reads like how it was meant to be...for in its FORM is its very meaning...and that is that Life is a road and a rush and a journey and a thing to be explored, adventured into, seeking, searching...for Life is Movement and this book is the most mobile book ever written. A must...like a breath of fresh air! Like the wind blowing your hair through the open window of an immortal car on an unending drive. An Odyssey for our times - still! Thanks, Jack!

I have read the edited version of On the Road and always thought it very good, but it was not until I picked up the scroll that the full power of the text resonated within me. It's amazing how many beautiful passages were cut! It's electrifying to read the long paragraphs and the long sentences as they originally came forth from his mind. It's also much more satisfying to read the actual names of the characters in the book so that people not well versed with the Dulouz legend don't have to figure out and wonder who the characters are: (eg, instead of "Carlo Marx" you get Allen Ginsberg"). The unedited scroll is really superior in every way. I cannot think of one thing that I prefer in the edited version. Anytime anyone reads On the Road from here on out, they should read this version.

Note: It's not drastically different, but the small differences go a long, long way... In this version, you feel that you are there with Kerouac writing it. You can sense when his energy waxes and wanes. This one is definitely more poetic. Instead of a clean novel, it's a mad rush of energy. It's the book that Kerouac intended. It's the manuscript that made everyone excited and now you can better see why...

This version is so superior to it's predecessor it hardly seems like the same book. Gone is the 1950's whitewashed sterile version and in it's place we have the gritty, raw, real story of life in a changing post war America. My hesitation in giving this book a 5 star review is no reflection on Kerouac's brilliant prose but on the fact that the editors chose to include a 100+ page introduction that amounts to a long winded, over analysis of the Beat movement that likely would have horrified Kerouac himself.

"The Scroll" is preceded by about 100 pages of interpretive text that nicely lays out the context and significance of Kerouac's project. The unedited scroll itself is a great read that much more clearly expresses his vision than the over-edited version that was eventually published.

Just wanted to let people know something. When I first ordered the book, I was slightly concerned that it would be an interersting artifact, but difficult to physically read because of the aging, torn, coffee-stained, scotch taped, etc. manuscript. But I am happy to report: The text is presented in "regular" print, not photos of the original scroll. Plus, what a pleasure to read this classic work of greatness without the "false names" like Cody, Carlo Marx, etc...but the REAL NAMES like Neal and Allen. I've said it before and I'll say it again: in my opinion, Jack Kerouac is the greatest writer of all time.