On the Road is on the road: Jack Kerouac's $2.4M scroll is in Santa Fe until May 28, 2007

According to the publicity, "Kerouac is back, Jack." But, in fact, ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac has never been out-of-print in the last fifty years. Its first month saw three printings, and after about 150 paperback editions in over 30 languages it is now considered one of the hippest and most controversial books of the 20th century.

Back in the day, Truman Capote (who adored being the darling of the New York culture-vulture glitterati crowd) decried the book's instant notoriety with an infamous cocktail party critique: "That's not writing--that's typing." Kerouac was hurt by such attacks and was never comfortable with fame or the high-society shindigs that come with it. Sadly, both men were "drinkers with a writing problem."

Kerouac's scroll is 120 feet long, contains about 120,000 words, and was typed single-spaced without margins or paragraphs during a coffee, benzedrine, and jazz-filled three weeks in April of 1951. (See a high-res image from the University of Iowa.) The fragile scroll has a different first sentence than the published book, and uses real names for the book's main characters: the misfit hero Neal Cassady, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and the novelist William S. Burroughs, all changed in future drafts.

Because Kerouac was raised in a print shop and could type at the speed of light, he preferred to feed 12-foot strips of thin teletype paper through his Underwood in order to not break his train of thought. And despite the seemingly "spontaneous" creation of the scroll, Kerouac had been readying On the Road's events and characters for several years, as evidenced by his various notebooks and drafts.

Just as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises spoke to a so-called Lost Generation, Kerouac's book spoke to a young Beat Generation which rose up poor and bewildered and "beat" after the Great Depression and World War II--an opinion that first appeared in the New York Times book review by Gilbert Millstein in 1957, which (literally overnight) made Jack Kerouac famous. Before the NY Times review, he was borrowing bus money from his girlfriend, Joyce Johnson. Afterwards, he was embarrassed to be mobbed at parties: "Women wanted him to make love to them, men wanted to fight him. People kept mixing him up with Neal Cassady" although his identity in the book was that of the narrator, Sal Paradise. (For more background, please read and listen to the reports at NPR.)

The engaging exhibition at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is scheduled through May 28, 2007. About forty feet of the scroll is displayed under glass and a projected video shows Kerouac reading his work in 1959 while Steve Allen plays soft piano jazz. If you haven't seen or listened to Jack Kerouac reading his own work, you're missing an integral, joyful piece of the Beat experience. Additionally, the exhibit features an interactive writing room where visitors may use an antique Underwood typewriter to write spontaneous Kerouac-style "American Haiku" (Kerouac sometimes called them "Pops"; Allen Ginsberg, "American Sentences") or anything else inspired by On the Road.

...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

One of the common misconceptions about Kerouac was that he was primarily a counter-culture author, but when you read On the Road it feels more like a love poem to America than a treatise for rebellion (as co-opted during the 1960s). Personally, at the opening night party on Friday, April 13th, I found myself a little annoyed with the wine and cheese crowd: several "fans" had obviously NOT read On the Road, or did so in college before the LSD scrubbed their gray-matter. Ask them them about The Dharma Bums and their eyes reveal their well-coiffed ignorance. Some of these ritzy folks attend every glitzy opening in Santa Fe, preceded by their money, reputations, and colognes. Sure, our museums and the arts need muy rico patrons, but could these angel-headed hipsters at least figure out who actually wrote Howl before they brag about "loving Beat poetry?" And, for the record, Ms. Snottipants-with-the-engraved-whisky-flask, David Cronenberg (who directed an excellent film adaptation) did NOT write Naked Lunch, despite what you think you know about auteur theory.

Using the old Underwood in the anteroom, I pounded out a few words and posted them on the public wall:
Starting to feel better, and before leaving the exhibition, I took the time to lean over the scroll's protective display case to read various portions--and I could see the corrections and pencil marks Kerouac made throughout his work. His authorial spirit was definitely present, and I (unsurprisingly) felt like hitching a ride on a crowded flat-bed truck and sharing a bottle of rotgut with my fellow lonesome travelers in search of satori.

--RAC