The Wake

Two Sundays ago, I went to Columbia College in downtown Chicago to see a holy relic of the Beat generation: the mythic scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s seminal American novel On the Road. Written in 1951, On the Road is Kerouac’s breakthrough tale of the freewheelin’ Sal Paradise and his outrageous friend Dean Moriarty rambling across the country. It’s a Beatnik bible, hailing the revered gods of sex, drugs, jazz, non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. It’s Kerouac’s push to reach the limits of free expression, a push that has inspired ten thousand road trips and just as many acid trips. Time Magazine places it on a list of All-Time 100 Novels. Translated into multiple languages, read by millions, imitated but never replicated, On the Road is regarded as an incredibly important piece of American literature.

Over a period of twenty days, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on a makeshift scroll, made from tracing paper supplied by Joan Haverty who took it from the apartment of her dead Beatnik boyfriend. The scroll was constructed so he wouldn’t have to break his stream of consciousness by changing the paper in his typewriter. He ended up with a 120-foot-long manuscript, unbroken by paragraph or chapter. The novel was published in 1957, and for decades afterwards, the original scroll manuscript was the stuff of legends in literary circles. It was purchased at Christie’s in 2001 by Jim Irsay for $2.43 million.

In an article titled “Off the Road”, writer James Birmingham compares On the Road to the Vietnam War Memorial. Like Ginsberg’s Howl and the Vietnam Memorial, he says, “the scroll is a litany of names of the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness.” Indeed it is, for if one reads again in this context, Sal Paradise becomes Jack Kerouac himself, Dean Moriarty is Neal Cassady, Old Bull Lee is William S. Burroughs, Carlo Marx is Allen Ginsberg, Rollo Greb is Alan Ansen, Ian MacArthur is John Clellon Holmes, etc. On the Road incorporates a swath of characters cut from the pantheon of the deities of the Beat Generation, detailing their emotions and experiences, gunning to capture their coming-of and the formative exploits that shaped their lives, friendships and literary works. The Beat Generation is regarded as a movement, but originally, it was a group of friends small enough to fit into a couple of booths at a bar. They celebrated a lifestyle that was hedonistic and bohemian, and tried to express the most pure emotions and the basest actions of humanity in a way that made no apologies. And in the process of freeing themselves, they started to destroy themselves.

I didn’t know what to expect when I went to see the scroll. I approached it with an attitude that bordered on religious pilgrimage. I had spent the weekend in the degenerate fashion typical to kids my age, and still I trekked downtown, burnt out and exhausted, to see Kerouac’s scroll, unfurled and in its full glory. I entered Columbia College’s pristine, bright arts center, nervous with anticipation. I paced around the room, looking at the different covers of On the Road in German, French and Chinese. I examined the scroll, which was in a glass case, protected from fingerprints and central air and dust. And as I looked at it, I felt a profound sense of satisfaction in realizing that Kerouac didn’t type this manuscript on a scroll with pretentions of being different or innovative or legendary. He simply had lived a lot in a short amount of time, and was desperate to get it all out on paper, all those conversations and trips and one-night stands. He wasn’t that much older than me. He wasn’t that much different than me. He was a guy who was trying to live his life as full as he could, trying to break free of the rigid, dreary, trudging pattern of responsible living, working, providing and dying. He was just a guy.

The message I’m trying to convey is: live. We all just need to live. Perhaps we’re all too caught up in trying not to screw everything up. We’re all so caught up with succeeding that we’ve forgotten about living. We’re all so afraid of failing that we’ve forgotten that life is short, and that someday soon, too soon, we’re all going to die. So instead, I’ve decided to live, to try and find a way to live any way I can. Go and live.