For reasons bizarre & untold, I’ve been trying to make sacrifices to the Book God via the purchase of  books at full cover, an almost unheard of sin. A few days ago, I acquired the newly released unexpurgated, unedited hardback of Jack Kerouac’s Original Scroll of On the Road. Even now I find this choice inexplicable & can’t explain my actions– I have bad feelings towards the work of all the Beats (except Burroughs, and even then I find his 60s work nearly intolerable) but none so much as Kerouac’s, which I find a mixture of the boring & the offensive.

His personal history– ah, now there’s another story.

Kerouac was a New England boy made on the mean streets of Lowell, MA. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship– and while there, fell in with the dissolute crowd of junkies, queers and 8th Avenue hucksters who contributed mightily to the creation of the Writer of Renown. He died a delusional alcoholic, apparently thinking that Allen Ginsberg was a Nazi agent and trying to fight Kurt Vonnegut’s son, but for a while, Kerouac was the American Dream, what another now-deceased American Writer would have described as “pure Horatio Alger.” He was also French-Canadian; part of an ethnic group of New England immigrants that are often overlooked and forgotten.

So while there’s the Mythic Kerouac, there’s also the Lowell working-class kid who ended up dubiously labeled as a generational spokesman. In previous posts, I’ve written about poor Bob Dylan, Kerouac’s heir in this questionable honor. It’s fascinating that the two midcentury figures saddled with that terrible weight both were of ethnic & family backgrounds as far from the American mainstream as you get could get. (While, of course, remaining a “White.”)

I haven’t gotten through the 100+ pages of critical apparati of the Original Scroll, but the image on the back of the dustjacket is amazing. The most frequently circulated photos of Kerouac play up a young rough with an indistinct, James Dean glamor. The image in question, coming from later in the man’s sad life, was chosen, I assume, because it depicts Kerouac holding one of his famous scrolls. Fair enough, but it’s also the only image I’ve seen of the man (and admittedly I am no student of his iconography) where his ethnic, social, and geographical origins just spill out all over the picture. You can see Lowell, you can see the French-Canadian, you can see the football scholarship.

A great picture: