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“…here I was in Denver. He let me off at Larimer Street. I stumbled along with the most wicked grin of joy in the world, among the old bums and beat cowboys of Larimer Street.”
~Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The legend of Jack Kerouac has descended upon Denver once again. Unlike his initial arrival in 1947 in the car of a “Denver businessman of 35, who went 70 mph,” this arrival comes in the form of the original manuscript of his American literary classic, On the Road.
The manuscript, a 120-foot scroll, went on display at the main branch of the Denver Public Library on Jan. 5 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. The occasion was accompanied by a series of events Jan. 5-7 that highlighted Kerouac’s ties to Denver and illuminated the city’s rich literary and musical history.
The manuscript’s unique form embodies the frantic search for identity, meaning and truth by American youth following World War II. The novel that resulted is as equally hopeful as it is despondent as it chronicles the cross-country travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.
On display until March 31, the scroll is on loan from James Irsay, owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts and Kerouac enthusiast, who purchased the document at an auction in 2001 for $2.4 million. It has been displayed with several photographs from the era when Kerouac roamed the streets of Denver and provides a touching reference to the yellowed document’s place in American history.
The weekend was hosted by David Amram, distinguished composer, longtime friend and collaborator of Kerouac, and Audrey Sprenger, sociologist and former professor at the University of Denver, now at the State University of New York at Potsdam.
Well-known in the lore of American literature, the first draft of On the Road was written in three weeks during April 1951 at a downtown hotel in New York. In an attempt to create a new form of writing through stream-of-conscious thought, Kerouac taped pages of paper together so that the nuisance of changing sheets wouldn’t disrupt his thought process.
The final product was 120 feet of single-spaced work devoid of parenthetical breaks as Kerouac felt grammatical conventions to be inhibitive. Pencil notations can be found in the margins and each character’s given name is included rather than the ultimate pseudonyms given to such noteworthy individuals as Allen Ginsburg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs and Carolyn Cassady.
In contrast to popular belief, Kerouac indeed produced several revisions, at times reluctantly, and usually at the request of publishers who were shocked by the novel’s frank descriptions of drug use, sexuality and racial integration, all distressing topics to the buttoned-down establishment of the 1950s. Viking Press, which finally published the novel in 1957, has planned a 50th anniversary release for later this year that is truer to Kerouac’s original work contained on the scroll.
The celebration kicked off Jan. 5 with a screening of the 1959 beat movie, “Pull My Daisy,” written and narrated by Kerouac and scored by Amram – who makes a humorous cameo as a shifty musician.
Initially, the film was meant as a lark, a sort of home movie portrayal of the life Kerouac and his friends were leading at the time. The plot involves a young couple hosting a dinner party attended by a prominent family and a crew of roguish poets. The erratic behavior of this mod squad, played by the likes of Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, and Amram, disrupts the evening and is entertainingly narrated by Kerouac with his cool word play.
The film was shown at the Blair-Caldwell branch of the Denver Public Library in Five Points, the African American section of Denver, north of LoDo where Kerouac explored the jazz nightlife while living in Denver during the late 1940s. To provide additional entertainment for the evening, Amram and Denver musicians Artie Moore and Tony Black performed several be-bop jazz tunes from Kerouac’s time.
A program of readings and jazz was then held the following afternoon to mark the unveiling of the manuscript. An overflow crowd was entertained by readings from On the Road by Amram, Sprenger, and others. Among the notable readers were the widow and son of the novel’s hero, Neal Cassady – the mystical “Beat” protagonist and Denver native. Carolyn Cassady provided recollections of the accounts that make up Kerouac’s fictional autobiography while son, John, an accomplished songwriter, read a long-lost letter written by his father to a friend in the mid-1940s. The letter offered a glimpse of Cassady’s abstract, stream-of-conscious thought that greatly influenced Kerouac’s style, known as spontaneous prose.
The final event of the weekend was a walking tour of Denver that traced the prominent locations Kerouac and Cassady frequented.
While Denver has changed a great deal since the 1940s, the essence of the sights and sounds that inspired some of the richest passages in American literature remain.
Perhaps the most poignant portion of the walk came at Sonny Lawson Ball Park on the corner of 22nd and Welton across from the day-laborer center.
As the tour listened to a reading from On the Road, a cluster of Denver’s homeless population passed by. Watching the three men shuffle by, heads down, walking in bent fashion, vividly recalled Kerouac’s esteem for the down-and-out, the individuals at society’s margins.
He often portrayed these holy wanderers in divine terms and it was this conviction that lead to him to coin the term “beat” for his generation. It is a term with dual meaning: in one sense, he referred to those that are downtrodden, battered, weary, and forgotten, yet he also combined a meaning from his French-Catholic upbringing, the notion of “beatific” which implies a saintly or benevolent quality.
A blissful hedonism of youth pervades On the Road and can account for some of the novel’s alluring quality, though it is not its most lasting trait. On the Road is about possibilities, whether they be truth, love, or God, each can still be found somewhere on the American road as long as one is looking with the right kind of eye. In three weeks of April 1951, stopping only to buy cigarettes and change his t-shirt, Kerouac churned out a masterpiece that has inspired more than just this writer to abandon all that is proper or by-the-book and take to open road of America to find the line between which failure and greatness lies. Until March 31, that line stretches 120 feet and lies in Denver.
For more information, visit www.denverlibrary.org/fresh or call 720-865-1206.
