Kerouac's "On the Road"

[Michael Haskins]

There has been a lot of press recently on the release of the original scroll version of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript.

You want to get depressed? I lost, in Hurricane George, 1998, a first edition of "On the Road." Yeah, it was beat up, but that’s because I’d read it so often and somehow kept it with me on my moves around the country. But that’s a whole other blog.

I was born after Kerouac began his journey with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. The travels produced more books than "On the Road." I grew up on the fringes of the Beatnik generation. My interest in writing came from them. That is also the reason I was never into the hippie movement in the '60s. I didn’t want to drop out, I wanted to create, and I wanted to experience life, to live life, like the men and women who roamed the pages of "On the Road," "Big Sur," "Mexico City Blues," and so many others.

I have read the different newspaper accounts of the scroll edition, the NY Times, the LA Times, and a few others that have shown up on blogs. Years ago, I worked on a Boston newspaper, as a weekend copyboy, and know what a scroll really looks like, how heavy it is. I helped change out scrolls on wire service machines, back in those days. I also learned to write on a manual typewriter, where most of you have probably never used one – probably never seen one.

Before computers and the Internet, news stories came from wire services – AP, UPI, Reuters – via a machine that filled the newsroom with clatter 24/7. When you cut-and-paste today, you probably don’t know where the term came from. Back in the days before computers, when a reporter had to edit his/her copy he had to literally cut the copy and paste it together with the corrections.

What we do today, what I’ve done already on this copy, is not cut-and-paste. You know why? Because there’s no white glue to lick off my fingers. And there are no drops of spilled glue on the keyboard or desktop.

Today, I write a few pages, go have a café con leche and then come back and do a little rewrite. I enjoy the rewriting, probably because I did it years ago when cut-and-paste was necessary and it was work. Today, it is really enjoyable, especially if it makes what I am writing better. Ah, I think to myself, a breeze.

When Kerouac sat down to write “On the Road,” he loaded the scroll into his manual typewriter and began writing. Because it was, I am told, a stream of consciousness, his editing was probably limited to spelling (maybe).

I’ve spent too much time daydreaming, since reading the press on Kerouac. It was a whole different world then. While you may not think writing is easy today (and I agree, it ain’t) it was a lot more work in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Journalists certainly put a lot more thought into what they typed onto that sheet of paper, because if they got it wrong, it was a messy, time-consuming cut-and-paste project to fix it. Today, it’s a few keystrokes and, like magic (believe me) the correction/addition goes smoothly into place and there’s no mess.

Imagine, if you will, how much more Hemingway could’ve written with a laptop on the Pilar or in Africa or on the bar top at the Floridita. Or Michener or Faulkner . . . or Kerouac.

The scroll edition of “On the Road” will be read by a lot of people, young and old, but there will be a few of us withering Beats who will smile and remember our times and adventures; I will do that, but I will also think of the scroll as in unraveled on the floor and see Kerouac hitting the return bar on his typewriter, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. I will laugh at the scene of him standing on his head so fresh blood would move to his head and help him get rid of his hangover. I don’t know if it worked for him, but it only made me sicker!

If you want to know more about the Beats, go to my friend Mark Howell's new blog: http://www.abouthebeats.blogspot.com