Kerouac's "On the Road" [Archive]

SittingBull47

29th June 2009, 05:02

Hey guys, long time no see. I'm curious to see who else here has read Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, and if so, what it meant to them. It's surely influential, so much so that it inspired me to take a journey around america with the aim of visiting every place that he went to. Anyone else feel similarly attached to On the Road, or any other works by Kerouac?

p.s. - In case anyone's interested, a have a travel/photoblog which you can see here. (www.aroadvision.blogspot.com) I've begun my trip last tuesday, and am currently in Rapid City, SD (not a place Kerouac stopped) staying with a friend from Couchsurfing.org. Traveling ain't easy.

x359594

29th June 2009, 17:29

In my view On the Road: the Original Scroll is vastly superior to the edited and redacted version published in 1957. In his introduction to the recently published scroll, Howard Cunnell, who edited the manuscript for publication (this version is not the unadulterated scroll but rather a reader-friendly version), describes how Kerouac taped together sheets of drafting paper to create the 120 foot long scroll on which he typed the first complete draft of the book in three weeks in April 1951 with the assistance of his second wife, Joan Haverty who brewed copious amounts of coffee for the task (Contrary to popular myth Kerouac was not high on Benzedrine when he wrote the book.)

Kerouac conceived of the idea for a road book while revising his first novel The Town and the City (published in 1950) in 1948, and produced three drafts before deciding to change direction and write what would be the first of his "true story "novels. The immediate inspiration for telling the story as it happened came from a 13,000 word letter that Kerouac received from Neal Cassady near the end of December 1950. This was the legendary "Joan Anderson and Cherry Mary" letter, a comic account of Cassady’s sexual escapades. Cassady, of course, would be the central character of On the Road.

Contrary to popular belief, On the Road was not the first of Kerouac’s work written in spontaneous bop prosody. He didn’t hit on that until autumn 1951 when he started writing Visions of Cody which he described as a "vertical" treatment of the same material covered in On the Road. Visions of Cody was not published until 1972 and is regarded as Kerouac’s best work by many. Rather, On the Road is a work in transition from the style of The Town and the City to the spontaneous visionary style of later works such as the aforementioned Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans and Dr. Sax.

How does the scroll version of On the Road compare to the standard version? It’s better and deeper and stylistically superior. Long flowing sentences are kept in tact, not broken into shorter sentences or cluttered with commas, and the theme of the novel, the search for lost fathers, finally emerges from the shadowy sub-text of the earlier publication. The scroll begins, "I first met Neal after my father died…" not "I first met Dean after my wife and I split up…", and the end answers the beginning, "…I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady." Also, the restoration of material cut for 1950s censorship reasons gives a much fuller portrait of Cassady and the whole Beat milieu of the late 1940s -early 1950s.