***

At the very end of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, his mid-twentieth century chronicle-novel-memoir of the Beat Generation, there's a phrase that has stuck in my mind. It occurs in the book's long concluding lyrical riff about the flow of daily life, the melancholy of time and memory, and the geographic immensity of the American continent in which our minute trails of wandering are scratched. It goes: "...and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old..."

That memento mori of a thought and the landmark book in which it appears was published precisely fifty years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. A half-century later, we do in fact know what happened, at least to almost everybody in On the Road, and for the no doubt dwindling band of us who read Kerouac's book in its crisp first edition, we have long since donned the "forlorn rags of growing old."

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road has been marked by a small spate of memorabilia, including a new edition of the 1957 book; a Library of America volume collecting Kerouac's early novels; John Leland's dubious Why Kerouac Matters; a reissue of Joyce Johnson's sober Beat memoir, Minor Characters; and Canadian novelist Ray Robertson's vivid imagining of Kerouac's post-Road farewell journey, What Happened Later. Perhaps most interesting of all, Kerouac's publisher, Viking, has issued a book version of the now legendary "scroll" on which Kerouac composed the first draft of On the Road in 1951. I'll get to that in a minute.

But first, like a slightly embarrassed Ancient Mariner tugging at the Wedding Guest's sleeve, I have a little literary tale to tell. I first read Kerouac's On the Road because of a decidedly negative book review. I was 16 years old, a highschool student in Chicago, Illinois with literary aspirations. An older relative of mine, perhaps recognizing a budding artistic sensibility, had given me a subscription to The Saturday Review of Literature. That's where, in autumn 1957, I read a review of Jack Kerouac's recently published On the Road. The reviewer (who can be allowed the obscurity of namelessness) just hated it, describing Kerouac's stories of his and his friends' madcap adventures across America as tiresome, amateurish, and jejune (I had to look up "jejune" in the dictionary).

However, the reviewer made one big mistake. To underscore his critical point, he quoted sizeable chunks of Kerouac's breathless prose. In one passage, the book's narrator, Sal Paradise, recounting the story of the novel's hero, Dean Moriarty, and his many road companions, declares that:

"...they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'"

Those quotes were enough. Since the mid-twentieth century was still an age of literacy, I had read books by most of the major contemporary writers and I'd never seen prose quite like the quoted paragraphs of Jack Kerouac. I didn't hesitate. I put down the magazine with its hatchet job on Kerouac, got on the neighbourhood bus, and went straight downtown to Chicago's biggest bookstore, Kroch and Brentano's to buy a copy of the book. Within the hour, reading the opening pages of On the Road on the bus home, I was in Jack Kerouac's America.

It was an America different from the one portrayed in two contemporaneous critical novels about the country, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, about the constrictions of corporate life, and Grace Metalious's steamy bestseller, Peyton Place, a potboiler whose lusts exploded the myth of sedate small town life. Instead , Kerouac wrote about a generation of young men just a couple of years younger than their immediate literary forebears, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and James Jones, whose lives and writing had been shaped by World War II. Kerouac's road buddies were spiritual seekers--of experience, of the Zeitgeist, of a meaningful life outside the orthodoxies of corporations and conventional suburban living. Its notions of adventure and the possibility of a movement or generation one might join were immensely appealing to an adolescent; so too were the intimations of sex, jazz, and various intoxicants. Most important was its post-war existential insistence that the meaning of life was to be found in the urgent intensity of living it.

There's one more turn to the story. I put together a pamphlet of my own poems, sketches, and vignettes, which I called How the Night Comes to Me, stuck it in an envelope, along with a note explaining that I was a 16-year-old who had read On the Road and wanted to be a writer, and I sent it to Kerouac at his publisher's address in New York. In retrospect, it seems like a daring thing to have thought up and done. I find myself rather admiring that now-vanished adolescent who, apparently, had been me.

A week or so later, I received a postcard from Jack Kerouac. Far from being a perfunctory acknowledgement of fan mail, the message, which filled the card from edge to edge with typewriting, was an enthusiastic welcome to the literary world, and news that he'd passed on my writing to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others who were part of the burgeoning Beat literary movement. "Dear Stan, You neednt ever worry about... my great wild admiration of your poetry," it said, and was signed "Jack." Every teen wannabe writer should be so lucky. Soon, Ginsberg also wrote to me, delighted that a Chicago teenager had been turned on by their writing. Shortly afterwards, I was on the road myself, but that's another writer's story.

As it turned out, through accidents of geography, circumstance, and temperament, I became friends with Ginsberg who, until his death in 1997, I regarded as one of my teachers, in life as well as in literature. I also got to know, however peripherally, most of the other writers of the Beat Generation, including the hero of On the Road, "Dean Moriarty," who in real life was Neal Cassady (though by the time I met him much of his fabled youthful charm had worn off). The only one I didn't meet in person was Kerouac himself, but I never forgot his generosity. I followed his work and, inevitably, the rumours of his unhappy personal decline, which ended in his death at age 47 in 1969, a mere dozen years after the publication of his most famous novel.

Today, On the Road, is a "modern classic," and though its romanticism has frayed, and the writing has worn quite a bit less well than might have been hoped, it's still surprisingly readable. It also stands as one of the three generation-naming-and-defining North American novels of the twentieth century, along with Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Douglas Coupland's Generation X. Because of its status, and the myths that have grown up around it, that makes the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), intelligently edited and introduced by British writer Howard Cunnell, both informative and useful.

The myth of On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a single roll of teletype paper, unpunctuated, in a white-hot, Benzedrine-fuelled rush, and that it had been mangled into the form of a conventional (read: less exciting, less authentic) novel by the straightlaced (read: "square," "uptight") editors in New York who published it a full half-dozen years after its composition. Like most literary myths, this one contains various grains of truth and half-truth, all of which editor Cunnell efficiently sorts out for us.

The brief version is this. There was and is a "scroll," not of a single roll of teletype paper but of pieces of paper Kerouac taped together. The text is unparagraphed, but pretty much conventionally punctuated (and Kerouac himself formatted it into chapters and paragraphs in subsequent drafts). It was written in a rapid three weeks in April 1951, but a lot of it had been presaged in the author's notebooks, and the chemical stimulants, according to Kerouac, were no stronger than coffee. And it was a hard sell. Before it was published six years later, Kerouac had reeled off an additional half-dozen (also unpublished) books.

The interesting thing about "the original scroll" is that it's pretty close to the eventually published book. The editors toned down some of the references to homosexuality (a subject Kerouac was squeamish about in any case), figuring that the drugs, jazz, and heterosexual bedhopping were more than enough "kicks" for readers of the day. They also slightly slowed the pace by inserting various commas here and there, but other than that, any claim that Kerouac's intentions or his "spontaneous" prose were distorted by his editors is false.

There's one difference between the scroll and the published book. The scroll uses the real names of the people in the story. What that does is to change the genre of the book. On the Road: The Original Scroll is a memoir rather than the "autobiographical" novel it became. Kerouac didn't have to "make it up"; it all happened mostly as Kerouac told it during those magical weeks of spring 1951. In the end, the differences don't matter all that much, though it's nice to get an answer to the question so frequently asked of novelists, "How autobiographical is it?" In this case, the answer is: "Totally."

Vancouver, Oct 19, 2007. Stan Persky teaches philosophy at Capilano College in North Vancouver, B.C. His new book, Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education (New Star, 2007) has just been published. This review first appeared in Books in Canada.

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