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Kerouac manuscript goes on... and on... at Texas exhibit

BY R.A. DYER

McClatchy Newspapers

AUSTIN, Texas - The first words read, "I first met Neal after my father died." Later -- 119 feet, 8 inches later -- it reads, "eaten by dogs." The yellowing manuscript has no chapter or paragraph breaks. The sentences are single-spaced.

And so the helter-skelter typewritten words pour forth, one after another, on the original typewritten manuscript of Jack Kerouac's generation-changing novel, "On the Road." The manuscript is one of the most famous in 20th-century American literature.

And now, if you make your own Kerouac-like road trip to the University of Texas at Austin, you can view it firsthand.

"In their lives, art and their love for jazz, the Beats wanted to improvise, to leap into the unknown, the unscripted, the unconventional," said Molly Schwartzburg, curator of the exhibit "On the Road with the Beats," which continues at UT's Harry Ransom Center through Aug. 3.

The famous counterculture literary movement of the 1940s and 1950s was characterized by jazz-influenced poetry, avant-garde prose, and a rejection of suburban life that would ultimately set the stage for the radical politics of the 1960s. Schwartzburg said another striking feature of Beat literature was its emphasis on place -- that is, the literary focus on unusual settings like big-city jazz clubs, exotic religious temples or the open road.

The exhibition includes items from the Harry Ransom Center's permanent collection, including letters and notebooks from Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, some of William S. Burroughs famous "cut-up" manuscripts in which he rearranged the chronology of his narratives, postcards, photographs, and first-edition books and posters.

But it's the scroll manuscript of "On the Road" that anchors the exhibit. Kerouac began work on it 57 years ago.

Schwartzburg said the manuscript spent several years in the filing cabinet of a publisher before going to Kerouac's family after the author's death in 1969. It then to the New York Public Library. Finally it was auctioned to a private collector, who has loaned it to UT until June 1.

The scroll is about the same size as a very thick roll of paper towels. About 48 feet is reeled out at the Harry Ransom Center in a custom-made oblong cabinet. Kerouac's penciled notations are visible.

He started writing it April 2, 1951, and finished about three weeks later. Kerouac then began making revisions and ended up writing two more versions before "On the Road" was published in 1957.

The completed novel, for instance, does not begin with "I first met Neal after my father died" but rather "First met Dean not long after my wife and I split up."

Both "Neal" and "Dean" refer to Kerouac's real-life buddy Neal Cassady, who was a fixture of the Beat movement and a star in his own right in Tom Wolfe's acclaimed book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

The phrase "eaten by dogs" at the end of the scroll is actually a handwritten note by Kerouac not included in final published version of "On the Road." Schwartzburg said it may mean that part of the scroll was literally eaten by a pet -- in this case a cocker spaniel owned by one of Kerouac's friends.

Online: Exhibit information, www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2008/beats

IF YOU GO

The Harry Ransom Center is at 21st and Guadalupe streets on UT's southwest side. It is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed Mondays. Admission is free.