As he set out, albeit unwittingly, to change the literary landscape, Jack Kerouac started off by going the wrong way.
Sixty years ago this month – July 17, 1947, to be exact – Kerouac, then 25, left his mother's house in the Ozone Park district of Queens, New York, on the first of four treks around the United States and into Mexico that would lead to the publication 10 years later of his autobiographical novel On The Road.
September will mark the book's half century. It remains a steady seller. Biographies and critical studies of the father of the Beat Generation appear regularly. Kerouac, who was already developing a drinking problem when he hit the highways, died in 1969, aged 47.
As he tells it in On The Road, he'd been "poring over maps" and thought he'd hitchhike to the West Coast along "one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles... To get to 6, I had to go up to Bear Mountain."
Kerouac took the 7th Ave. subway to the end of the line at 242nd St. and then a trolley to Yonkers. "Five scattered rides" took him to Bear Mountain, where it began to rain "in torrents... I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool... I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes, damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plant-like sieves not fit for the rainly night of America and the raw road night."
He got a lift south with someone who told him, "There's no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you'd be better going across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburgh...
"And I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow."
It was a rocky start to an odyssey that would resonate through the years and put generations of beatniks, hippies, call them what you will, out there with hope in their hearts and faith in their thumbs.
Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On The Road in 1951, in three Benzedrine-fuelled weeks, with no margins or paragraphs, on a single scroll of paper almost 37 metres long. Certainly, such a scroll exists. It was bought in 2001 by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million (U.S.). It's comprised of pieces of tracing paper taped together and was typed from the notebooks in which Kerouac had written segments of the book as they happened.
The manuscript went through several painful revisions, cuts and rejections before being accepted by Viking Press. To mark its anniversary, the original "scroll" version is being published in book form. Several excised scenes, involving sex and drugs, have been restored.
By the time his book appeared, Kerouac was a sadder, wiser man who never came to terms with what he'd wrought. Or with the teenagers who would show up on his doorstep and wonder why he didn't want to go wandering with them.
They'd have done better seeking out Neal Cassady, the basis for Dean Moriarty in On The Road, and who, until his death in 1968, never really came off it.
