On the Road

I am getting tons of my father's mail still. The newsletter from the Society of the Silurians, the organization to which my father had belonged and carried its card as his photo i.d., and which I never had any idea what it even was until this newsletter arrived (the oldest American association of veteran journalists--funny how it was so important to my father to retain that affiliation--is it for journalists who were also veterans, or just oldtimer journalists?), tells me that the NYPublic Library is displaying the actual original scroll of On The Road. http://www.nypl.org/press/2007/Beatific_exhibition.cfm They explain that Kerouac's manuscript was in his agent's vault all these years and was auctioned in 2001, bought by the owner of the Colts (who we had just watched lose a game to the Patriots!) and now, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road it is revealed for the world to see. The article by Patrick Fenton noted how in the 80s Kerouac's books weren't selling well. I suppose that coincides with the height of political correctness/identity politics in academia and other realms of literary awareness, which cringed at his misogyny, occasional eruptions of anti-Semitism and objectivizing views of racial minorities. I cringed a bit at them when I re-read the book about 10 years ago (in the 90s, listening to it on tape) and wondered how all those elements were unnoticed, unnoticeable to me, the female teen who adored this man, turning him into my mystical, mythical big brother, my patron saint accompanying me on my drunken rampages across campus my freshman year, when I was writing my freshman studies thesis on his journey "from Catholicism to Buddhism and back." While identity politics still reigns in academia and the few available American lit openings are for specialists in African-American or ethnic studies, the public ethos has shifted, and Kerouac's impassioned quest for freedom sings to our hearts once again. (Perhaps as the road shuts down and we start to recognize we must stop driving or die.) Now we are able to bracket and historicize his attitudes. The exhibition's section on jazz commented on his fault of primitivizing the African American musical ability, while still acknowledging his deep appreciation and love for their music. The one does not cancel out the other. We have learned to hold the contradictions. They can be quite shocking (he says at one point that Pound may be right about the Jews). The venom that comes out of him at times indicates a true paranoia (probably brought on by drug use, though also clearly inherited from his mother who hated his friends, particularly the Jew, Ginsberg) and at other times he sees how as exiled French-Canadians, his family is like the Jews and others outside American culture, trying to assimilate. But above all, there it was, the scroll, some of it to be seen in a 20-foot-long glass case that ended at a wall with the Robert Frank photo of a highway blown up, the scroll merging into the stripe on the highway. Excellent presentation. But the lights are dim and there are no chairs, so one cannot really try to read, just glance at some representative sections, see the typing and the cross outs (added later; the notes say). I will have to buy the exhibition book (ordering it at some later time, since it would be too heavy to carry on our NYC meanderings). Got the t-shirt, though.