On the Road Hits the Road: Kerouac on Tour

SARATOGA SPRINGS - It’s been heralded as one of the most important novels of the 20th century, and one of the greatest cultural works to be born in America.

Historian Douglas Brinkley likens its original form to first edition literary documents like Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

You could make a reasonable argument that the newly opened exhibition displaying Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript of “On the Road” is the most historically significant event in the Spa City since George Washington and Alexander Hamilton visited the healing springs at
High Rock in 1783.

Approximately one-third of the 120-foot long scroll is “unrolled” and on display at the
Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. It is exhibited in a case that
was specifically built for the piece, according to a museum spokesman.

“I was influenced by the youthful, romantic notions of ‘On the Road,”‘ said Jim Irsay,
who registered the winning bid for the scroll at $2.4 million dollars at Christie’s auction
last year in New York City.
Irsay is also the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team.
As his team prepares for a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers Monday night, Irsay was waxing poetic about Kerouac.

“It’s that feeling of getting in an automobile and just traveling across the country. It’s about people who have freedom, who have the ability to dream,” Irsay said.

Shortly after its publication in 1957, Kerouac’s great American novel, “On the Road,”
defined an entire generation, as well as influencing it. The effect on popular culture created lyrical reverberations that continue to be felt and celebrated today.
Oct. 21, marks the anniversary of the author’s death.

In the late 1940s, Kerouac criss-crossed the country documenting his journey in notebooks.
In 1950, his debut novel, “Town & the City,” was published. But it was another theme and
style that was percolating in Kerouac’s creative consciousness.

“I have another novel in mind - ‘On the Road’ - which I keep thinking about,” he wrote
in his notebook in July, 1948. “(About) two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find.”

It all came together during a three-week typing frenzy in April 1951. He sat down in a Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife, Joan Haverty, and began typing:

“I first met met (sic) Neal not long after my father died ... I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.”

For the next three weeks, Kerouac did little else, other than type his manuscript and take
brief respites for sleep, pea soup and a lot of coffee.
To create a seamless flow, he taped together sheets of paper, eventually ending up with a 120-foot long, 9-inch wide scroll. Similar to the type that architects used, the paper
originally belonged to William Cannastra.

Cannastra grew up on a tree-lined street in the shadows of the Mount Pleasant baseball
fields in Schenectady. Haverty, who grew up in Delmar befriended Cannastra and the pair shared an apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan.

Cannastra’s exploits were legendary among his friends, but his wild behavior had a deadly
result. One October night in 1950, he was killed in a New York City subway station during alcohol-induced hi-jinks.
A month later, Kerouac and Haverty were married and hitchhiked from Manhattan
to Delmar during the Thanksgiving holidays. The marriage however would be short-lived.

“From Apr. 2 to Apr. 22 I wrote a 125,000 (word) full-length novel averaging 6 thous.
a day,” Kerouac wrote in a posthumously published letter written at his mother’s house,
dated May 22, 1951. “Of course since Apr. 22 I’ve been typing and revising.”

After splitting with Haverty, Kerouac’s typing and revising took place at friend Lucien Carr’s loft (whose son Caleb, is a best-selling contemporary author), and at his mother’s home in the Richmond Hill section of Queens.

“He was the best mama’s boy in America,” said John Tytell, “beat” scholar and author of a pair of definitive beat generation books. Tytell will deliver a lecture on the beats at the Tang
on Wednesday.

No matter where Kerouac’s “road” took him during the 1940s and ‘50s, he would always
end up back at his mother’s house either in Richmond Hill, or in nearby Ozone Park.
Tytell was instrumental in getting a plaque commemorating Kerouac placed at the
Ozone Park location. The bureaucratic process took a decade.

The interior of the Richmond Hill home is basically “one little bedroom and a tiny kitchen,” Tytell said. “It’s amazing, given the size, that he was able to work and write at that small kitchen table.”
Today, the home is a volunteer ambulance corps, an idea that Kerouac would have been especially fond of, according to Tytell.

By the end of 1951, Haverty returned to Delmar and gave birth to a daughter, Jan.
For most of his life, Kerouac publicly denied that the girl was his daughter, although
privately he seemed to come to the realization that Jan was his.

“A baby girl born in Albany, New York, says ‘Mommy’ for the first time,” Jan Kerouac
wrote in her 1981 novel, “Trainsong.” After she began getting recognized as a word-stylist in her own right, it was difficult to deny the connection.

In Mexico, meanwhile, Kerouac’s friend and aspiring writer William Burroughs had
accidentally killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, late in 1951. He was attempting
to shoot a champagne glass on top of her head. The gun misfired and Vollmer, who grew
up in the affluent Loudonville suburbs, was killed instantly.

Burroughs, Vollmer and other Kerouac acquaintances and friends appear in the scroll manuscript of “On the Road” under their real names. For the published version, their names,
as well as those of Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke and protagonist Neal Cassady have been changed for legal reasons.

Also changed is the first paragraph references to his father’s death. It was replaced for publication by inferences to his disintegrating marital status.

“Visions of Cody is probably closest to the original manuscript,” Tytell said of the book that
was published in the 1970s after Kerouac had passed away.

“It’s also the most experimental work that he did,” Tytell continued. “The spontaneous bop prosody that was ‘On the Road’ was truncated by in-house editors at Viking.” Forty feet of it are on display at the Tang.

There are approximately 15 words to each line, and across every 10th line pencil marks
correct grammatical nuances (“the” becomes “these” for example), or in some cases, delete entire sections altogether. The scroll is single-spaced with taped seams. It is without
paragraphs of any kind.

Yellowed and creased by time, it is nonetheless an everlasting testament of Kerouac’s frenzy and the times in which he lived. It was also something of a show-piece. Its author would proudly take it everywhere and share it with friends, be-bop era jazz club enthusiasts and astonishing editors, often rolling it out - like a road - for all to enjoy.

“I was influenced early on by writers,” the scroll’s owner Irsay said from his Beverly Hills
hotel this week. “Particularly Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas.”
The literary lineage led him to the beats. He also has a fondness for music.

“If you trace back the influences of say a Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, you would find Robert Johnson, or Jelly Roll Morton,” Irsay said. “Underneath it all were Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady,” he added.

Before bidding on the manuscript, he consulted some in-the-know friends.
“We talked - Hunter Thompson and Cameron Crowe and Douglas Brinkley - about where
in the scheme of things ‘On the Road’ fits in. I think clearly it is a cultural piece
representing the Holy Grail of the beats,” Irsay said. “And you have to remember the (conservative) times of the 1950s. To me, all human beings are artists. It doesn’t matter what you do. Life is a work of art, and these people (the beats) in their time had the courage as seed planters to experience and write about their life.”

The scroll will travel fittingly on the road, making stops across the country until its 50-year publication anniversary in 2007, according to Irsay. A recently constructed case will enable future exhibitions to display all 120 feet of it, including the very last part of the scroll which has been soaked in myth and legend about a missing piece that was eaten by Lucien Carr’s dog during Kerouac’s re-typing phase in 1951.

While Irsay laughed when the mystery surrounding the allegedly chewed off bit surfaced, he acknowledged: “It’s somewhat true that he had a little bite of history.”

Wednesday at the Tang, Tytell will discuss the cultural resurgence of beat interest.
He will also talk about the “movement’s” central characters, who were once little more than a community of aspiring writers sharing a common belief, that history shows, have influenced an entire culture.

“The scroll is of significant cultural importance,” said Tytell, although sadly added, “the avalanche of fame (that it brought), Kerouac was totally unprepared to handle.”

“Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed,” Burroughs wrote in his book of essays,
“The Adding Machine,” published in the 1980s. “They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes.
Woodstock rises from his pages.”

Kerouac himself seemed to sense the importance of his work.
From his notebook entries dated Nov. 25, 1951: “10 years. 50 years, 100 years from now, maybe the work that I’ll do...will mean a lot.”

“On the Road” has sold more than 3.5 million copies in the United State and continues to sell tens of thousands of copies each year, nearly a half-century after its release.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
originally published in The Saratogian, Oct. 20, 2002.