Even as the last year on earth is upon us (well, according to the Mayans), Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, newly released on Penguin Classics as On The Road: The Original Scroll, an autobiographical tale of id-fiends recklessly traversing the continent numerous times, still retains its message of self-discovery, vanity, instinct, and whimsy. On The Road: The Forgotten Scroll re-introduces the proto-hipster lifestyle with as much relevance today as it did 70 years ago.
The newer, unedited version includes some great forwards by well-regarded authors as well as a nice alternate ending. It’s a little racier, a little edgier, and applies more four-letter words, but the tale remains the same.
This book is crazy hip. It always has been. Read it aloud over a slammin’ Coleman Hawkins 33. It’s still a transformative work that turns perfectly normal college students into trendy hipsters who forgo life in a cubicle to work menial jobs and wax poetic about the lives they left behind.
Beatniks came of age during The Great Depression, and saw the fatality of the American Dream. Suddenly, life didn’t seem so prescribed. On New Year’s in 1948, Kerouac asks Al Hinkle, “‘What you going to do with yourself, Al?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Al said. ‘I just dig life.’” This thought seems increasingly relevant today, as college students enter a sparse workforce and young professionals receive pink slips only a few years into their careers. The idea of ‘letting go’ is rebellious, revolutionary … if to a conforming general public, lazy. It’s easier to become artsy and reject societal norms when that other life has seemingly become unavailable. But that’s what makes the ideals of Kerouac’s self-discovery attractive, and On The Road romantic.
“And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.”
Kerouac, for the entirety of the novel, electively reduces himself (and others) to life as hobo, drug addict, drunk, sex fiend and criminal. The author hangs around with the likes of poet Allen Ginsberg and one of the most colorful personalities in modern literature, Neal Cassaday. One last dime in the pockets of Kerouac and Cassaday means one last beer at the bar while Bebop makes their bodies convulse wildly and they scope out the next woman to “make.” They view youth as a luxury that should be wholly consumed. Worry seems a sin.
Hardships barely get passing mention. Kerouac rarely delves into his own mental state, leaving things more fantastical. Kerouac talks of being hungry or experiencing tragedy—once he’s in a hotel room and hears a man shoot his wife. But shit happens. There is no whining. Even in his darkest, loneliest times, Kerouac never sounds pathetic. We believe that he truly appreciated his life on the road.
Kerouac seemed to be the only person who understood Neal Cassaday, and it’s obvious why. Without Cassaday, Kerouac is a family man who works a steady job, makes a decent wage, and lives a semi-normal life. Without Kerouac, Cassaday is a raving lunatic with every problem in the world. They need one another to ruin the routines they’ve constructed.
“With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road. Prior to that I’d always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. Neal is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles”
Kerouac only entertains the idea of making sense—only desire without the confines of reason can motivate Kerouac to take cross-country trips with $50 in his pocket. He sees sensibility as a convention that should be abandoned, like his use of paragraphs. He wrote this book on a scroll, for christ sakes—a book editor’s nightmare and a publisher’s delight.
Kerouac’s success and cult following made his work a classic and his style, ironically, a convention. In fact, Kerouac’s work lives in irony. Kerouac knew he wanted to sell his stories — for money — to the corporate machine. How could you be a successful author in the 1940s and ’50s without eventually plugging back into the system? How would you sell your work? The release of On The Road: The Original Scroll proves Kerouac was willing to have his work heavily censored to achieve that goal. (Editors even chopped off Book 5, Kerouac’s On The Road conclusion, which he proposed to publishers after losing his original conclusion … purportedly to a hungry dog.)