P writing on drugs? Re: On The Road (Destination: Starbucks)

[pynchonoid]

The legend that Pynchon wrote GR on drugs and couldn't
remember what he was doing comes from a notorious
crank with a long-standing personal grievance, so I'd
say it's time to give up this one, too. 

--- Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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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