The unedited 'On the Road'...

[brownie]

From AFP today.

UNCUT EDITION OF KEROUAC'S 'ON THE ROAD' ISSUED 50 YEARS LATER

by Luis Torres de la Llosa

When "On The Road" came out in 1957, Jack Kerouac became the voice of the Beat Generation almost overnight. "Jack went to bed obscure and woke up famous," was how his girlfriend Joyce Johnson put it.

Now, 50 years on, the tale of disaffected youth struggling to find a place in post-war America is to be re-released in its original form, unedited, cruder and more erotic, and with the real names of Kerouac's traveling companions restored.

The novel recounts drug-fueled road trips Kerouac took across America with fellow writers, poets and artists, all narrated in a spontaneous stream of consciousness and set to the strains of bebop jazz.

"On one level, it is a beautifully written, compelling story that is part of a long mythology about the promise of the American frontier," explained Penny Vlagopoulos, professor of literature at Columbia University in New York.

The cult novel has sold four million copies in America alone, and continues to sell at the rate of around 100,000 a year, according to publisher Viking.

The novel tells the story of Sal Paradise -- the author's alter ego -- and his friend Dean Moriarty traveling from New York out west as far as California and Mexico during the late 1940s on spontaneous journeys of discovery.

Kerouac took notes on the trips and according to legend wrote the book in a frantic three week stretch in 1951, fueled by coffee and Benzedrine.

The script is typed on a 36-meter (120-foot) scroll of paper, single spaced and without paragraph breaks.

But when it was first published on September 5, 1957, a good bit of the most explicit sexual content was sliced out and the real names of the characters were swapped for pseudonyms.

The new edition represents the first time average readers will have seen the original manuscript, presented in a "less conventional, more spontaneous" style than the originally-published version, Vlagopoulos explained.

"The reason the original scroll version of 'On the Road' was not published up till now was to avoid lawsuits by those who thought they were defamed or that their privacy had been invaded," said John Sampas, Kerouac's executor.

Beat generation figures such as poet Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and writer William S. Burroughs appear in the novel under their real names instead of their familiar pseudonyms of Carlo Marx, Dean Moriarty and Old Bull Lee.

Other details, such as episodes detailing characters' homosexuality or attraction to underage girls are also back in.

"The published version does not stray drastically from the original, but its more formally experimental style makes the feeling of reading it much more immediate and closer to the literary experience Kerouac had in mind," Vlagopoulos said.

In November, the original manuscript -- bought at auction by a private buyer in 2001 for 2.4 million dollars -- is to go on display at the New York Public Library as part of the exhibition "Beatific Souls: Jack Kerouac's On the Road."

A film version of the novel has also been announced for 2009, to be produced by Hollywood giant Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles, the filmmaker behind Che Guevara biopic "The Motorcycle Diaries."

Academics have long sought to explain the popularity of "On the Road," which for many critics has little in the way of literary merit.

"The idea that one can map out a life that is in some way unmediated by existing social restrictions and responsibilities is still quite resonant," says Vlagopoulos.

Another measure of its popularity is that bookshops report it being one of their most frequently stolen titles.

Kerouac died an alcoholic at the age of 47 in 1969, just 12 years after "On the Road" came out, unable to live with the fame.

As he wrote through the character of Sal Paradise: "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 yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars".

[Rooster_Ties]

The script is typed on a 36-meter (120-foot) scroll of paper, single spaced and without paragraph breaks.

I saw the original scroll on display in the Minneapolis museum of modern art about a dozen years ago (where about 50 feet were unfurled).

Haven't read the tome, I'm afraid.

[Rosco]

At the risk of kicking a sacred cow...

I've always found On The Road to be tedious, poorly written, rambling, repetitive, irritating, shallow, pretentious, uninsightful, misogynist, narcissistic, pointless pseudo-hipster bunk.

And now there's a longer version of it? So... even more tedious, rambling, repetitive, etc, etc

George Shearing my arse.

[JSngry]

Now, 50 years on, the tale of disaffected youth struggling to find a place in post-war America is to be re-released in its original form, unedited, cruder and more erotic, and with the real names of Kerouac's traveling companions restored.

Including

one hopes...

[md655321]

Sorta like the unedited Bitches Brew sessions. On the Road is many things, but concise is certainly not one of them.

I think its a brilliant book, but it undeniably has some rambling and weak parts, as any improvisation of such a length might.

[7/4]

The script is typed on a 36-meter (120-foot) scroll of paper, single spaced and without paragraph breaks.

I saw the original scroll on display in the Minneapolis museum of modern art about a dozen years ago (where about 50 feet were unfurled).

Haven't read the tome, I'm afraid.

Has it been that long? Wow.

I hope the book has paragraph breaks.

[jlhoots]

At the risk of kicking a sacred cow...

I've always found On The Road to be tedious, poorly written, rambling, repetitive, irritating, shallow, pretentious, uninsightful, misogynist, narcissistic, pointless pseudo-hipster bunk.

And now there's a longer version of it? So... even more tedious, rambling, repetitive, etc, etc

George Shearing my arse.

Thanks for your unbiased opinion.

[MoGrubb]

Didn't Kerouac write a book, the Psychedelic Bus, or something like that. It was ok, but, if I'm going to read about hobos, beatniks and/or hippies I'd rather read some John Steinbeck stuff.

[jazzbo]

You are confusing Kerouac with Kesey.

Different writers in many ways.

I'm kindof excited about this new version of On the Road. It was a groundbreaking book!

Edited August 19, 2007 by jazzbo

[7/4]

Didn't Kerouac write a book, the Psychedelic Bus, or something like that. It was ok, but, if I'm going to read about hobos, beatniks and/or hippies I'd rather read some John Steinbeck stuff.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Amazon.com

They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.

Interestingly, Kerouac's big early influence was Thomas Wolfe, an unrelated writer from an earlier generation.

Edited August 19, 2007 by 7/4

[Kalo]

My dad, pretty much a product of the Beatnik era himself and still living the Bohemian lifestyle in Berkeley, CA, at 70 years of age, once said to me that he thought of Kerouac as "a giant eye with no brain."

[Jazzmoose]

My dad, pretty much a product of the Beatnik era himself and still living the Bohemian lifestyle in Berkeley, CA, at 70 years of age, once said to me that he thought of Kerouac as "a giant eye with no brain."

The perfect reporter in other words.

[Rosco]

At the risk of kicking a sacred cow...

I've always found On The Road to be tedious, poorly written, rambling, repetitive, irritating, shallow, pretentious, uninsightful, misogynist, narcissistic, pointless pseudo-hipster bunk.

And now there's a longer version of it? So... even more tedious, rambling, repetitive, etc, etc

George Shearing my arse.

Thanks for your unbiased opinion.

Yeah, sorry for that post. I'd done a shitload of Benzedrine before I sat down at the keyboard.

Had I been straight, I would surely have found room for 'inchoate, racially insensitive, posturing, plotless and vacuous.'

Is there any chance that now the book will be published using the characters' real names that Shearing will actually turn out to be Bud Powell?

[7/4]

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/jack-kerouac/

various On The Road covers

Edited August 21, 2007 by 7/4

[7/4]

This is the one I had. I don't have a copy now.

[Aggie87]

My dad, pretty much a product of the Beatnik era himself and still living the Bohemian lifestyle in Berkeley, CA, at 70 years of age, once said to me that he thought of Kerouac as "a giant eye with no brain."

The perfect reporter in other words.

No comment on the above, but who are you and what have you done with Jazzmoose??

edit - Any relationship to Sean Puffy Combs?

Edited August 21, 2007 by Aggie87

[clifford_thornton]

Yawn.

[jazzbo]

That was my first one that I owned as well (read a library copy some years before buying the paperback).

[BruceH]

"...It just goes on, and on, and on, and seems like it was written in a total hurry. All I know is if I passed in something like this, I'd get a totally bad grade on it."

---Kim Kelly

[7/4]

"...It just goes on, and on, and on, and seems like it was written in a total hurry. All I know is if I passed in something like this, I'd get a totally bad grade on it."

---Kim Kelly

Who is Kim Kelly?

[BruceH]

"...It just goes on, and on, and on, and seems like it was written in a total hurry. All I know is if I passed in something like this, I'd get a totally bad grade on it."

---Kim Kelly

Who is Kim Kelly?

A character from the TV show "Freaks & Geeks."

[JSngry]

"...It goes on, and on, and on on and on, we like the hot butter on the SAY WHAT? the popcorn"

-Vachs Popyulie-

[7/4]

"...It just goes on, and on, and on, and seems like it was written in a total hurry. All I know is if I passed in something like this, I'd get a totally bad grade on it."

---Kim Kelly

Who is Kim Kelly?

A character from the TV show "Freaks & Geeks."

And that was the only Kim Kelly I could think of, but it's been a while since I've seen that show.

[Larry Kart]

FWIW, a piece on Kerouac from my book:

JAZZ AND JACK KEROUAC

[1983]

What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight.

A good place to begin is at a level that might not seem very important at first--the quasi-journalistic, jazz-tinged vignettes that Kerouac sometimes used as scenic backdrops. Here, in The Subterraneans, is Roger Beloit (a character based on tenor saxophonist Allen Eager) “... listening [on the radio] to Stan Kenton talk about the music of tomorrow and we hear a new young tenor man come on, Ricci Comucca, Roger Beloit says, moving back thin expressive purple lips, ‘This is the music of tomorrow?’”

The actual name of the musician involved is Richie Kamuca, not Ricci Comucca, but leave that be. What matters is the way Kerouac has captured a small yet essential twitch of the jazz sensibility. Beloit-Eager, “that great poet I’d revered in my youth,” as Leo Percepied says to us and to himself a few pages later on, was a first-generation white disciple of Lester Young and, of all those players, the one best able to modify Young’s style to fit the more rhythmically and harmonically angular world of bebop; while Kamuca, coming along a half-generation or so behind Eager, was also inspired by Lester Young (and perhaps by Eager as well). Eager was at his peak in the mid- to late 1940s, but “now it is no longer 1948 but 1953 with cool generations and I [i.e., Percepied-Kerouac] five years older.” So the joke, if that’s the way to put it, is that Beloit-Eager’s “This is the music of tomorrow?” remark is steeped in mordant irony, as though he were saying, though he’s too “hip” to be this explicit, ‘Hey, I was ahead of this guy five years ago.”

Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fic¬tional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time.

In Kerouac’s fiction there are a number of other moments like the Beloit-Eager passage--brief, seemingly casual glimpses that take the reader and the narrator into the heart of what Kerouac chose to call, at various times, “Jazz America” (On the Road) or the “Jazz Century” (Book of Dreams). But these glimpses are only glimpses. The narrator happens to be there, and what he sees or overhears doesn’t bring him into direct contact with what he has perceived.

A good example, no less shrewd than the Beloit-Eager vignette, is the narrator’s reminiscence, in Desolation Angels, of Stan Getz sitting in a toilet stall in Birdland, “blowing his horn quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything--(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said),” Marsh being Tristano’s tenor saxophonist of the time. Again, this has meaning within Kerouac’s self-referential fictional world; it’s a thought that ought to occur to Jack Duluoz at the time. But “Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh!” is also, one suspects, exactly what Getz was saying to himself as he sat there in that actual toilet stall.

It would be nice to linger over these precise, attractive insights, but now it’s time to look at the painful stuff, the yearning Kerouac’s heroes have to be part of something they can’t really belong to. At times there is (at least one hopes there is) a deliberate edge of farce to the program, for how can one do anything but gag at stuff like “I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero!” (Visions of Cody), “good oldfashioned jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls” (Visions of Cody), and “wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (On the Road). As Jack Duluoz says in Visions of Cody, referring, perhaps, to Sherwood Anderson’s novel: “Dark laughter has come again!”

Of course this is fiction, and it’s fair, especially in the “true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” case, to put some distance between Kerouac and his narrator, who at that point in On the Road ought to be half a fool. But common sense finally says that this not only fiction but is also, more often than not, exactly what it seems to be--a moonstruck desire to turn jazz into some imaginary black earth-mother and, in the process, shed all sorts of inhibitions, just like those “unashamed…good oldfashioned jitterbugs.”

And Kerouac pushes it even further at times. “You and I,” writes Jack Duluoz to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, “could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians”--a vision that again raises the question of how much distance there is between the narrator and his words, for if “You and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians” is to be taken at anything close to face value (and I can see little reason not to take it that way), it is the self-delusion of a naïve tourist. Jazz has, and always will have, its romantic component, but surely this is a music of overriding emotional realism. So if anyone thinks that there is some intrinsic bond between the music of Charlie Parker or Lester Young and a “weekend climaxed by bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano...and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group…(this from Visions of Cody)--well, James Dean played the bongos, too.

But what of the “jazz” texture of Kerouac’s prose and verse, for which some grandiose claims have been made (Kerouac himself saying of Mexico City Blues: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in a jam session on Sunday”)? The “spontaneous prose” business isn’t worth bothering about in any literal sense, because the “no pause to think of proper word”... “if possible write ‘without consciousness” aspects of the program apparently were not adhered to very often. How “the object is set before the mind” is the point; and in any case it’s the results that matter--that is, do the words, labored over or not, manage to capture the feel of spontaneity?

To a remarkable degree they do, less so in the raggle-taggle verse (Book of Dreams being much superior to the otherwise comparable Mexico City Blues) than in the best of the prose, where Kerouac does at least two things: he captures the sound of all kinds of jazz-related talk, from the hip, ingrown-toenail language of his Subterraneans to Cody Pomeroy’s manic, carnival-barker monologues. And having a wonderful ear for the speech of others, Kerouac also could hear himself, which is where his wish “to be considered a jazz poet” really rests.

What kind of a jazz poet? That brings us back to Roger Beloit-Allen Eager and the other Lester Young-influenced tenor saxophonists Kerouac seemed most fond of, the late Brew Moore (or, as Kerouac always spelled the name, “Brue” Moore). Moore figures most prominently in Chapter 97 of Desolation Angels, which has its moments of fan-like, romantic presumption (“Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time--besides he wants to play a new tune--I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he’s right”). But this dream of participating in the magical “IT” of jazz, “the big moment of rapport all around” (words given to Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody) seems small alongside Kerouac’s ability to sustain the rhythm of a paragraph or a chapter on a series of long, swinging, almost literal breaths. Here Kerouac achieved his dream of a prose that shadows the chorus structure of an improvising jazz soloist. And it is the sound of men like Moore and Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture.

“I wish Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct,” Kerouac writes in Book of Dreams, “but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of quietness.” Listening to Eager or Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, inward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation--as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy “Ah, me,” which would border on passivity if it weren’t for the need to move on, to keep the line going.

Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman’s long line and Thomas Wolfe’s garrulous flow. And I wouldn’t insist that Kerouac’s prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn’t the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching--his “holy flowers floating…in the dawn of Jazz America” and “great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns” stuff--Kerouac’s desire to be part of “the jazz century” led to a prose that was, at its best, jazz-like from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground (as in much of Visions of Cody) or nowhere to be seen (as in Big Sur). And perhaps none of this could come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac’s vision.

“These are men!” wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore--and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter--a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story, too.

[connoisseur series500]

At the risk of kicking a sacred cow...

I've always found On The Road to be tedious, poorly written, rambling, repetitive, irritating, shallow, pretentious, uninsightful, misogynist, narcissistic, pointless pseudo-hipster bunk.

And now there's a longer version of it? So... even more tedious, rambling, repetitive, etc, etc

George Shearing my arse.

Couldn't have said it better. If there is a book that requires some serious editing, it's "On the Road."