On The Road (Destination: Starbucks)

[Carvill John]

Interesting letter from yesterday's Guardian Review:

The Guardian
Saturday October 21, 2006
http://books.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1927605,00.html

Drug-free road-trip

Your Diary (October 14) on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack 
Kerouac's On the Road states that "an unedited version of the 120ft-long 
scroll" will be published next year. You should know that the April scroll 
is being edited, by me, and that the book will include a critical 
introduction correcting the regrettably widely held idea that the novel was 
written in a three-week "Benzedrine-fuelled frenzy".

Kerouac had been planning and making notes towards the novel for at least 
three years prior to April 1951, and while he certainly used Benzedrine at 
times to sustain him during the long writing stints he favoured after the 
creative breakthrough he experienced in 1951, he did not use it to write the 
scroll manuscript of On the Road. "I wrote that book on COFFEE," he told 
Neal Cassady, "remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good 
as coffee for real mental power kicks."

The myth that the book was simply an unmediated confession channelled by 
Kerouac in a drug "frenzy" is one that inflates a legend while neglecting a 
writer whose work, as Ann Douglas has written, "represents the most 
extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American 
writer of his generation".

Howard Cunnell
London

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