a couple three would be less than several couple

[Robert Mahnke]

Luc Sante's review in the New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago
(8/19/07) suggested it was an improvement upon the version ultimately
published.

 

The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished
product, though, is that while we know ''On the Road'' as a novel -- the
great novel of the Beat Generation -- the scroll is essentially nonfiction,
a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It
is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of
affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of
gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to
music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

 

* * * * *

 

Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and
cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac
altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs
and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel
appears here -- the ellipses are Kerouac's -- as ''the only people that
interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a
commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the
night.'' In the novel he inserts ''mad to be saved,'' while the roman
candles become ''fabulous'' and they are ''exploding like spiders across the
stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes
'Awww!' '' Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the
pudding, Kerouac then adds, ''What did they call such young people in
Goethe's Germany?'' None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters
the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more
authentically literary thereby.

 

In the scroll the use of the word ''holy'' must be 80 percent less than in
the novel, and psalmodic references to the author's unique generation are
down by at least two-thirds; uses of the word ''beat,'' for that matter,
clearly favor the exhausted over the beatific. While such things may not
assist the Kerouac legend or brand name, they help the book immeasurably.
The scroll clarifies the book's connection to the past -- to Mark Twain and
tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas -- and underlines the
features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative,
Robert Frank's great photographic road book ''The Americans.'' The novel
that ''On the Road'' became was inarguably the book that young people needed
in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our
time.

 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CEED61130F93AA2575BC0A9619
C8B63&n=Top/Features/Books/Book%20Reviews

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of kelber at mindspring.com
Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2007 6:37 PM
To: 
Subject: Re: a couple three would be less than several couple

 

Speaking of Kerouac, has anyone read On The Road: The Original Scroll? Is it
different enough from the edited version to warrant reading?

 

Laura  

 

-----Original Message-----

>From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>

>Sent: Sep 16, 2007 4:06 PM

>To: pynchon-l at waste.org

>Subject: a couple three would be less than several couple

> 

>Perusing the new Library of America edition of "On the Road" I came across

>the expression "several couple."

> 

>A fellow from Mississippi whom Sal meets traversing America hasn't "seed
his

>sister"  in "several couple" years.

> 

>(Kerouac--Road Novels--1957-1960, p. 23)

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