On the Road: The Original Scroll
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was written in three weeks, between April 2 and April 22, 1951; famously typed on a single roll (individual leaves of tracing paper spliced together with tape). There were no paragraph breaks, it was a single column of text that just went and went, like a road. The novel wasn’t published until 1957, six years after it was written. Jack Kerouac, meanwhile, rewrote the story in a completely different, almost Joycean style (eventually published in 1972 as Visions of Cody), even as he helped its eventual publisher, Viking, rework the original draft extensively. This involved, outside of choosing the paragraph breaks, streamlining the story, avoiding libel suits by changing the names and identities of the characters, and avoiding obscenity charges by removing several of the more startling, and hilarious, scenes. Well, here’s the big news: 56 years later, Viking has finally published, for the general public, On the Road: The Original Scroll. Was worth the wait’ For me (I was born in 1958 and I’ve waited my whole life for this) it definitely was. What a kick! I laughed with Jack, I cried with Jack. Was Jack a great writer? Undeniably he was. There is now a trifecta of versions of On the Road: the novel as released in 1957, Visions of Cody and now The Original Scroll. Which one is the “real” book? Which one is the “best” one? You’ll have to read them all before you can decide.
the pearl was there
“[Neal] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
and yet you live
“And I had many a romantic fancy then, and sighed at my star. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
New Orleans glowed orange bright
“There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
the stars
“At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
a handful of crazy stars
“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
where Frisco fogs are born
“There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary Potato Patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
the manuscripts of the snow
“Great snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Neal had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head stuck out the window with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
real mental power kicks
“Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks.”
—Jack Kerouac, in a 1951 letter to Neal Cassady; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.
the beautiful dream of life
“More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself—a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.”
—Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.