Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road
The New York Public Library
Nov. 9, 2007 - March 16, 2008
According to our excellent tour guide, Keith, Jack Kerouac loved the New York Public Library main branch -- who doesn't, really? -- and always wanted his papers archived there. His wish came true as the Library was able to buy the majority of it from his third wife and heir, Stella Sampas.
One thing they didn't get was The Scroll, the 120-foot typewritten initial draft of On the Road. This celebrated icon of Kerouac and the Beat Generation belongs to James Irsay, owner of the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts, who bought it at auction for $2.43 million in 2001.
In town only until the Feb. 22, The Scroll is itself on the road, an international tour that began in 2004 and ends next year. (Last year was the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication.)
Enormously popular and influential, Kerouac doesn't get a lot of respect. Like J.D. Salinger and Charles Bukowski, he's someone you read in high school and college, perhaps inspiring a crazy road trip or two, and then toss aside for more sophisticated literary reading (or maybe no reading at all).
Like everyone else, I read On the Road and Dharma Bums at age 15. I tried and failed to read his other, stylistically looser, books. But maybe most of all, I enjoyed Ann Charter's biography. More than his words, we love Kerouac for the sad, crazy life he lead and his memorable circle of talented friends.
It's this life, that's on display, illustrated by everything Jack held onto. There's a valentine he did at 11 years old for his mother, who he took care of and sometimes lived with his entire life. There are photos of his friends, including Sebastian Sampas, a friend from his Lowell, Massachusetts, high school days and brother to Kerouac's third wife; Henri Cru, who he met at Horace Mann in the Bronx, where he took mandatory catch-up classes before enrolling at Columbia; and, of course, the famous personages central to the 1940s Beat golden age, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the latter with whom he shared an apartment on Morningside Heights, and Neil Cassidy, the larger-than-life figure that inspired On the Road. There are notebooks, including one with a long list of every woman he'd slept with (none of the men were included). Also on display are Kerouac's religious-themed paintings, some depicting his infatuation with Buddhism, and others his return to Christianity. You can also listen to a recording of Charlie Parker, whose energetic be-bop improvisations served as a model for Kerouac's writings.
This brings us back to The Scroll, half of which is rolled out in its single-spaced one-long-paragraph glory. If you want to read it, you're better advised to get your hands on the bound volume that was released last year.
According to legend, it took Jack three weeks in 1951 to finish the scroll, cranking it out at a Benzedrine-fueled 100+ words per minute from an walk-up apartment in Chelsea. Initially rejected, it wasn't published for another seven years and numerous revisions. Sentences were shortened, paragraphs added, characters names put in code (the original, really a fictionalized memoir, used the names of the real people -- Neil, Allen, Bill, etc.)
A very different book about a time in Kerouac's life a decade prior, On the Road when it was released deeply resonated with an America tired of the starched shirt white-bread Eisenhower years (incidentally, before becoming President, Ike was president of Columbia University). This America was yearning for some fun -- the open road, sex, boozing, even some bohemianism. The book was a sensation, beginning with fawning review in the New York Times that compares the "Beat Generation" to Hemmmingway's Lost Generation. A few months later, the word beatnik was coined by a journalist to describe how these crazy new bohemians, like Sputnik, flew into your party, drank your liquor and quickly whizzed off.
Kerouac was a celebrity. And like many, he couldn't take the attention, felt misunderstood and proceeded to drink himself to death. It took him a little more than 10 years -- enough time to bitterly see Ginsberg and Cassidy take staring roles in the hippie sixties.
On a happier note, maybe the most surprising artifacts on display are Kerouac's fantasy sports games. As a teen, he invented a horse-racing game played with marbles and a baseball game played with cards, the later he continued to entertain himself with throughout his life. Not only that, but as a teen, he invented newspaper stories about the races, written and laid out in the style of racing form. All, presumably, without the help of Benzedrine.
For a Saturday afternoon, the show wasn't exactly packed with people. I'm sure there were crowds during its opening weeks, but I don't think it's a blockbuster hit. Not that I like crowds, but it would be nice to think of more people rediscovering their adolescent infatuation with Kerouac and company -- and with this beautiful (and beatific) treasure of a Library. They'll get another chance as the NYPL has an even bigger Burroughs archive, which will likely get its own show before too long.
More on Kerouac's scroll by Vanity Fair and the Boston Globe.
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