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On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Hardback Classics)

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It's so great to come back to this book and, though I've only read a little, the extra details of seeing characters names and Kerouac's own sentence rhythms bring it to life in a new way. Plus I love all the details and extra stuff that fill out formerly minor characters.

The awful thing is the introductory essays. The first is good and well researched - it just tracks the history of the various drafts. The others are so pretentious and couched in literary theory jingo - intertextuality, text, deconstruction - and so laboriously written they're surely enough for Kerouac to take a benny, exhume himself and get back on the road and as far away from civilization as possible. (Although to be fair he's pretty far away from it under the ground, but hope you get the point.)

It's very funny, very ironic, when you think he was writing in reaction to the pretentious, elitist literary world that preceded him; and here his fine book is, at its rawest, preceded by these essays. No disrespect to the writers; maybe this is what was asked for and they can write much better than this, but...

Anyway, like I say the text - I mean book - is as good as ever; maybe better.

XXXXXX

I'd like to add as a postscript that, since finishing the book, I believe this is a must for any lover of Kerouac's writing. There is tons of additional material and scenes and, really, this book in all its more-primitive glory supersedes the 1957 published text.

In light of the new film be prepared for a great many misreadings of On the Road by the kind of people one wouldn't normally consider to be enemies of this book: the kind of people who aren't corporate tub-thumpers and aren't necessarily comfortable with the rewards of the American dream (good job, new car, nice house in the suburbs) because of a nagging feeling that there should be more to life than what they own or how they live. But in this failure of imagination, failure to see beyond consumerism and failure to understand that you are not what you buy, they feel the need to condemn outsiders, weirdos, freaks, and, yes, Beats. Kerouac very early worked out that modern America was not going to fulfil his spiritual needs and that corporate America's main function was to make square pegs fit into round holes and damn the consequences. Whereas writers like Updike, Cheever, and Roth decided to fight from within, Kerouac perceptively decided this was a mug's game which would only lead to stasis and the sort of curmudgeonly negativity which would end up creating an army of suburban misanthropes. For me On the Road, and more recently Into the Wild, queries whether living by the rules of the American Dream or consumer capitalism can lead to fulfilment. Can living simply, and with less, lead to better physical and mental health? Is living with less ultimately more fulfilling? Never dogmatic or proselytizing, unlike On the Road's many sneering critics, Kerouac suggests possibilities, a new way of living, a live and let live approach to life unbound to the inexhaustible beast that is consumer capitalism. Neither revolutionary, nor difficult, it still seems that On the Road still makes an awful of people feel uncomfortable.

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.

What a joy to come back to this after 15 years! 'On the Road' got me hitchhiking round Britain in my early 20's in search of adventure. Admittedly, Newport Pagnell services didn't quite have the romance of Kerouac's endless America vistas, but the spirit was there.

Much has been made of 'On the Road''s experimental nature, and one would expect 'the original scroll' to embody some sort of bebop cataract of overflowing verbiage. In fact, what's self-evident is that Kerouac falls squarely into the American tradition of taut, muscular economy embodied by writers such as Hemingway. Sure, there are passages expositing the ecstatic 'beat' philosophy - but the best bits of 'On the Road' show that Kerouac has a precise, painterly eye for description and a good ear for the rhythms of real speech.

Someone should do a book on Beat writers and lists, because, by golly, there are lots of them. Ginsberg gave us Old Testament Biblical lists in 'Howl' of the 'best minds of [his] generation'. Burroughs lists the features and inhabitants of the nightmarish Interzone in 'Naked Lunch'. Kerouac is no exception - but I like Kerouac's euphoric Whitmanesque lists the best.

The lack of paragraphing is a little annoying and doesn't really add much to the reading experience - the real appeal of this edition lies elsewhere. Most obviously, get 'Bill Burroughs' and 'Allen Ginsberg' instead of 'Old Bull Lee' and 'Carlo Marx' - the original scroll is transparently an act of self-mythologization. Episodes are included that didn't survive the editing process and the whole text has a rougher, more immediate feel to it.

Downsides? Kerouac can come across as something of a misogynist. In the Beat World, women principally seem to be either wives or prostitutes. The wives exist to stop our 'free-spirited' heroes from spending all the family budget on whiskey and disappearing for two-months. The prostitutes break your heart and steal your whiskey money. Tellingly, Kerouac uses the same verb ('balling') to describe making love and driving a car very fast down the freeway. It's also a little hard to see Neal Casady as the 'American Saint' Kerouac followed, not least because hipster slang just sounds daft now - you real gone daddy!

In truth, if you haven't read the original published version I'd go for that one. The 'Original Scroll' does broaden our experience of 'On the Road' but it seems odd to see it as some sort of ur-text. It's true that Kerouac originally refused to have the manuscript edited - but this does not necessarily mean that this is the 'authentic' text.

If you have read the novel already there's a veritable feast to enjoy here. Straight from the fridge, baby!

In an interview for Radio Canada conducted in 1967 entitled 'Le sel de la semaine' (`The Salt of the Week'), Jack Kerouac was asked by his interviewer, Fernand Séguin, `Qu'est-ce que Jack Kerouac pense de Jean Kerouac?' (What does Jack Kerouac think of Jean Kerouac?) This was his answer:

I am tired of myself. Well, I know I'm a good writer. A great writer. I'm not a courageous man. But one thing I know how to do is to write stories. And that's all.

Indeed, as proven by On the Road and Kerouac's other novels, poetry and fragmented verse and prose that was not all. This novel, either in its revived or artificially tailored form, expresses notions that cannot simply be measured by saccharine expressions of visceral emotion portrayed through analogues of the reader's personal experience. Kerouac himself had no desire to prostrate himself in front of public exclamations of glory and success. He found scrutiny and examination testing and thus had no intention to impress his readership with his own brilliance. His will was to simply use his skills to elucidate and convey his observances as vividly and as honestly as possible, and to take some satisfaction that his efforts were not in vain. When he did find himself bathed and comforted by praise he found it unsettling:

Kerouac ambiguously craved the public acclaim [...] and that helped to destroy him. He once said that fame was, "like old newspapers blowing down Bleeker Street." But in a 1957 article in the Village Voice, Howard Smith observes Kerouac after reading from his work at the Village Vanguard: "The applause is like a thunderstorm on a July night [...] He is a prince of the hips, being accepted in the court of the rich Kings...He must have hated himself in the morning - not for the drinks he had, but because he ate it all up the way he never really wanted to."

- Ron Sukenick, Down and In

Bohemianism's tendency for dramatic revelation and its unnatural obsession with the aesthetic (that is often at the heart of most modern readings of On the Road and braces a high proportion of its modern popularity), is placed at the far end of Kerouac's spectrum of interpretation. It is pertinent for us as readers to understand the novel's almost voyeuristic nature and distance ourselves from a movement that was born out of a distortion of Beat fascination - a movement that is experiencing a potent revival today. On the Road is not a rallying, galvanising romp through mid-20th Century America, but an account of a desperate struggle for an understanding of God, Earth and self that is never fully realised. Embracing a range of doctrines: Orientalism to the admiration of a wayward and equally lost hedonist, Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty), Sal Paradise (Kerouac) races and stagnates through a process of awkward and undignified realisation - an acknowledgement of the fact that there seems to be no real answer to any of life's promises and questions. Kerouac's intentions were not to beatify literature but to expose its limitless bounds. So our admiration of the aesthetic of Kerouac's writing should be simultaneously tempered by detailed analysis of his writing. It should become a necessary tool of our comprehension: as a reader we lack the insight of creation and so we must delve deep into the nuance of expression to locate an understanding. It is foolhardy to focus merely on the art and to deny the context. Kerouac himself was as much a literary critic as drinker or womaniser. It is a fact that Kerouac was stimulated by academia in his teenage years and continued to nurture his intellect throughout his life and career. He was also an accomplished football player, underlining the integral symbiosis of experience and contemplation; an alliance that enriched both his writing and his relation to the universe. It is therefore important to take heed of the initial introduction to this novel; to take a moment to pick through the writers' observances. They are not pompous, misleading or attempting to undermine understanding, but merely concerned with the same problem that Kerouac wrestles with - the question of his own identity, his relationship with God and his responsibility as an individual. If one denies analysis and chooses simply to immerse himself in the tangible he will never be able to experience an intimate mysticism. He will never experience the feel of the rhythm of the 'IT'.

I teach her Christianity.
We neck a little later [...]
I just don't know [...]
I'm a fool in Love with God. Yes

- Kerouac, Satori in Paris.

On the Road is an honest, terrifying, draining and beautiful piece of writing. And should be enjoyed both on the aesthetic and theoretical level.

First read, a version of this book in 1983 whilst travelling around Europe alone on a motorcycle, loved it so much I re-read it back to back twice. After a long gap I decided to try it again, did not relise there were so many different versions, the first one I got (cause it was the cheapest) seem as far as I could remember Have alot of bits missing, the version :- original scroll appears as close to what I had first read but some names I think are different. Anyway its still a good read and hard to put down once started as the energy of the time is transmitted straight onto the pages. Buy the original scroll, its worth the extra.