I find a cup of tea somehow and now it’s time for my date with the scroll, which is part of an exhibit in a small gallery behind the Boott Cotton Mills museum, and to get to it you have to go past ancient reanimated spindles manically wheezing, the ghost-clatter of vanished industry, rather appropriate. And yes it ended badly for Jack but that’s forgotten, banished when you see the scroll, which is like an encephalogram of the man in his mental prime: 119 feet of tracing paper cut and shaped and taped together for the typewriter to record 21 days of peak literary-electrical activity. Jack banged it out and what a typist he was, 100 words a minute and nearly typo-free, as the scroll testifies, on an endless fecund skate-seam of inspiration. Coffee or Benzedrine — who cares, really? “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” wrote Walter Pater, and you could say that On the Road is music constantly aspiring to the condition of prose.
3) Beat or be beaten
As a gang, as a coterie, don’t you resent the Beats now, just a little? I do. These buffoons, splashing about and giving each other blowjobs, heedlessly redistributing the freedom and greatness of America, throwing everything out of whack. Sal and Dean in someone else’s car: “. . . the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm of the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.” What a pair of turbocharged pains-in-the-ass. If you want to see Dean Moriarty today, turn on Fox 25 at 7 or 11 any weeknight and catch yourself a Seinfeld rerun: he’s Cosmo Kramer, clown user-up of life, Zen slapstick artist, making his own weather everywhere he goes. “Nature? Nature doesn’t DO it for me, man.”
And the writing, all that hyped-up argy-bargy I’m-so-sweaty writing — where did that go? Not into literature. As writers, the Beats influenced only themselves, and then, generally, for the worse. No — their stuff (uniquely for printed matter) went straight out into the ether where it was received by the young Lou Reed, the young Bob Dylan, the young Patti Smith, the young Jim Morrison, who read On the Road in one sitting and then repeated the experience the following day. Jack could really write (“Trumpets bit the drowsy air . . .” Beat that!) but what happened with his book wasn’t about good writing. Down in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin saw something about Kerouac in Time magazine: “I said ‘Wow!’ and split.” Sudden, total — like a command from within the brain. The images took form: the Great World Snake that Sal mumbles of in On the Road, as a bedtime fancy to spook a lover, would soon be rasping its seven-mile length across the blown-mind landscape of the Doors’ “The End.”
His Beat compadre Allen Ginsberg was wily and resilient, a survivor, but Jack himself was ill-fitted to lead this instantaneous prophet’s army. He called the hippies “Communists” and with his drunk on he’d bait Jews and gays, his ego in full retreat. And he couldn’t get the squares to like him either. As John Leland writes in his excellent new book Why Kerouac Matters (Viking):
