On The Road again

I visited Lowell today to see the "original" scroll, the first draft of Jack Keroac's On The Road. I haven't really been a Kerouac fan, but felt it was my duty as a writer and Lowellian. Having tried a few times to read On The Road, Dharma Bums and Town and the City, I was disappointed that none of them grabbed me, and I was still missing what all the fuss is about. I'm not old enough to know the people who say he was nothing but a bloated drunken bum, but there seem to be more memories in Lowell of his vomit than of his contribution to literature or history. I own my share of black turtlenecks, and enjoy jazz and a poetry reading, but felt a little guilty that as a Lowellian, I never felt the need to ride the Kerouac bandwagon, but I wasn't ready to dismiss it either.

So before I left for the exhibit today, I read Louis Menand's article in The New Yorker, Drive, He Wrote. I'm no scholar, and have apparently been buying into the stereotype of The Beats, and not known them well enough. Bop is the best. I've read my Ginsburg and my Corso etc. but didn't know much about them other than their well publicized exploits. Menand's article made two points that sent my view of Kerouac right over the falls.

On defining The Beat Generation, Menand writes, "Irony was the the highbrow virtue of the day, and the Beats had none." At this, I realized that I never quite got the Kerouac novels because I expected that irony, because you almost always do with what is established as "literature." Add to that Kerouac's staus as spokesman for the Beats, however reluctant, and all I could ever wonder was "What is he trying to be?" But without the irony, his work suddenly gains a sincerity I'm sorry I missed, and look forward to revisiting.

The second interesting point in the article was that the scroll, in all its sinlge-spaced persistence, was actually edited again and again over 6-10 years before it was published. But it's not just that the book wasn't actually coughed up in the legendary caffinated 21 days. It's that Kerouac planned his road trips specifically as fodder for his work, and then very deliberately chose the "this happened then that happened format," maybe not only-or not at all-as a rebellion against form, but to be true to form. "The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form," Menand writes.

Reading this made me so happy. Suddenly I can recognize more than the cobblestoned landscape of Kerouac's stories. Now he's just a writer in love with humanity, specifically humanity in America in an era I didn't know. Perhaps he was simply interested in defining life as he knew it at the time, a literary goal I hope to share.

Now that the search for irony and the presumption of pretense was gone, I began to see Kerouac the man and the writer through the exhibit I visited yesterday and not only began to see what all the fuss is about, but felt like maybe I could be a part of it someday too.

Maybe by the time I write the novel of our generation, global warming will have made us The Heat Generation. The Scroll's next stop is The New York Public Library, where many of his notes will be included in the exhibit.