“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserable weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” So begins Jack Kerouac’s second novel On The Road, one of the most famous American books of the twentieth century. The original manuscript of this hugely influential novel will be on display in UCD from the 4th – 27th of February. It is composed of eight twenty-foot strips of teletype paper, taped together to form a continuous scroll.
“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserable weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” So begins Jack Kerouac’s second novel On The Road, one of the most famous American books of the twentieth century. The original manuscript of this hugely influential novel will be on display in UCD from the 4th – 27th of February. It is composed of eight twenty-foot strips of teletype paper, taped together to form a continuous scroll.
Using a manual typewriter in the loft of his New York home, Kerouac spent three physically exhausting weeks in the spring of 1951 composing the work. It was to become one of the seminal novels of the era and propel him to unwanted fame and notoriety. The typed text is single-spaced and contains the author’s own alteration in pencil. Owned by a private collector, the scroll has toured around US colleges since 2004. This is the first opportunity to see it in Ireland, where it will be displayed along with multiple original editions of the novel, maps, photographs, records books and other memorabilia exploring the novel’s creation and context.
Kerouac reputedly composed the novel over twenty drug-fuelled days of continuous typing, attempting to move away from the stilted, clichéd prose of his early literary efforts. He explained in an interview with the Paris Review that “I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing, speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.”
The novel, based on the adventures of Kerouac’s lifelong friend Neal Cassady, can be read as an exploration of the American Dream and the possibilities it offered- the archetypal ‘road-trip’ novel. Influenced by the rhythms of jazz and by Buddhist philosophy, it contains vivid portraits of many of Kerouac’s friends, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the writer William Burroughs. Although the edited version of the novel replaces these names with pseudonyms, they remain intact in the manuscript version, showing the autobiographical intensity of Kerouac’s most popular novel. It became synonymous with the so-called ‘beat’ generation, a group of artists coexisting in the 1950s subculture of urban America, although Kerouac himself rejected the notion of such a cohesive group. He dismissed the ‘beat’ generation as “just a phrase I used in the 1951 written manuscript of On The Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks.”
The novel’s eventual publication in 1957, six years after its completion, attracted huge interest- Gilbert Milstein said that it was “a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in any age”. Not all reviews were so kind; Kerouac struggled to cope with the glare of the media attention suddenly focused on him and the vicious critical attacks on his work. Truman Capote reportedly sneered that composing a novel in three weeks was merely typing, not writing. Although Kerouac never stopped writing, a lifetime of heavy drinking took its toll and he died in 1969 at just 49.
Kerouac has had a huge influence on popular culture, cited by figures as diverse as Bob Dylan and the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. His reaction against the conservative materialism of 1950s culture remains clearly relevant, and the electric zest and enthusiasm for life he displays have inspired generations of readers. The manuscript is to stop touring in 2009. This could be a final chance to see the genesis of a vital and exuberant novel.
