Back on the Road

At the end of January I travelled to Birmingham to see the manuscript scrollof Jack Kerouac's On the Road on its European tour, only to find out that I was a day late: the exhibition at the Barbar Institute of Fine Arts had closed the previous day. As a solace, I spent a productive afternoon working on some manuscripts of John Drinkwater's poetry in the University of Birmingham Library, and I bought a copy of the catalogue Jack Kerouac: Back on the Road, prepared by R.J. Ellis.

The catalogue is not the nicest-looking item, nor is it very well written (it mainly seems to consist of the extensive captions used in the exhibition), but it is very informative and it has a large number of interesting images of the scroll as well as photographs of Kerouac, different book covers and some other items that were included in the exhibition. The catalogue provides an overview of the biographical background to the narrative of On the Road, an elucidation of the circumstances under which the novel was written, and the life of the text before it finally appeared in print in 1957, when the book was published by Viking in New York.

That version of On the Road was substantially different from Kerouac's original outpouring on the typewriter, writing the novel in about twenty days in April 1951, fuelled (it is alleged) by nothing more than numerous cups of coffee. Those differences, though significant from a textual point of view, do not greatly alter the themes and structure of the novel; they can largely be described as tinkering with the language, with one exception, and that is the changing of the name of the real-life Neal Cassady to Dean Moriarty. Before Kerouac produced this revised version, however, the On the Road project was the subject of more radical alterations: in fact, it was revised several times, taking on at times radically different forms, one of which was a version which Carl Solomon was considering for Ace Books in January 1952. While Solomon believed he was getting a revision of the original, by now "legendary" typescript, Kerouac had produced something much wilder and much more experimental, and what Kerouac had offered was a radically altered set of fragmented prose pieces, which during a period of burgeoning creativity, had emerged from the linear plot of the scroll to form a series of interpolated narrative collages, which its author at one point likened to James Joyce's Ulysses. When Kerouac became aware that Solomon would probably not take the new On the Road, he typed another, more compact and straight version for a pulp paperback, also promising a longer, but still essentially novelistic version for possible hardback publication.

All of this suggests quite clearly that On the Road was not a text (or not one text), but a project that came to exist in quite different emanations. Although ultimately the aim was to publish a book, the production of On the Road was much more conceptual, never striving towards one specific form, but resembling the work of a painter who time and again paints the same identical setting or theme.

On the opposite side of these revisions, lies the original creation. Much has been made of the sponteneity of On the Road, both in its final form (final meaning simply "published", because in a sense, bearing in mind Donald Reiman's concept of "versioning", publication in 1957 merely put a halt to the successive creative reimaginings of On the Road) and in the typescript's unique form. Not long before he typed the book during those three weeks in 1951 in Joan Haverty's appartment in Queens, New York, he had announced: "I'm going to get me a roll of shelf-paper, feed it into the typewriter, and just write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened, all in a rush, the hell with these phony architectures and worry about it later". What he meant by "worry about it later" probably took on quite a different meaning from what he himself had anticipated. However, he was not exactly creating his book novel ex nihilo either, but used extensive notes and diary entries that he had made during his four cross-country journeys.

In the mean time, I have managed to follow the scroll to Dublin, where it was displayed at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. Apart from appreciating the document's remarkable features, I was also able to determine another aspect which slightly qualifies the question of spontaneity. The scroll, it is now believed, consisted of tracing paper (rather than shelf-line paper or teletype paper) which Kerouac cut to size along the side to make it fit the typewrite platen and pasted together in twelve sections to form a continues typescript of 119 feet and 8 inches to form (in Allen Ginsberg's words) "a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself". These sections, however, were pasted together after the typing was finished. The typing at bottom and top of sections 1 and 2 does not cross the place where the two sheets were taped together. The typed text does not flow parallel to the paper's edge, but is slightly oblique; it was impossible to feed the paper through the typewriter in a straight manner, and because of this one would expect the typed, densily lineated text to run across the divide if the sheets had been pasted together from the start. As this is not the case, the typing was completed before the sections were pasted together. This sounds only logical: how otherwise would Kerouac have anticipated that he needed 36 1/2 meters of paper to complete his book?

The scroll has since travelled to the Russell Library, Maynooth College (National University of Ireland), and will now soon return to the United States.