JACK KEROUAC’S ON THE ROAD: IN THE CINEMA and IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Having read On The Road half a dozen times the odds were stacked against liking the new film adaptation, and the bookies are seldom wrong. Director Walter Salles had a difficult task capturing Jack Kerouac’s poetic prose, so didn’t bother, instead he went for a stylised fashion-shoot/drinks commercial/pop video look and threw in some extra tits and arse.   

I don’t know how Sam Riley gets these parts; someone must think he’s kinda cute. He was okay as Ian Curtis in Control but as menacing as a bag of greasy chips as Pinkie in Brighton Rock, and here as Sal Paradise (Kerouac's pseudonym) his whole shtick is to look vacant and watery eyed. Jack might’ve been shy but was keen-eyed, even when drunk or stoned, famously logging everything in his prodigious memory. Whenever he’s a bit off his head in the film Salle shakes the camera, just to make it clear. Genius. Riley, I’m told, didn’t bother to read the novel and neither it seems did he listen to how Jack spoke, choosing to adopt a flat, generic American accent. His opposite number Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriaty (real life Neal Cassady) was better - faint praise - but where was the drive, the burn-burn-burn? Kirsten Dunst was well cast as Camille and Viggo Mortensen got the easy but entertaining role of Old Bull Lee.

It makes no real difference what the film’s like, there’ll always be the book, but the worse thing is it won’t encourage many to read Kerouac. There was one short scene when Sal receives Carlo Marx’s (Allen Ginsberg’s) poem Denver Doldrums. He reads the lines, they appear on the screen, and it came alive. People will now be discovering Ginsberg; will they pick up On The Road or Visions of Cody? The film adaptations of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's Howl worked as they used the classic Beat Generation texts to create something new and interesting. Salles only creates a poor imitation. 

Jack’s novel has shifted in meaning for me over the years. When I first read it I honed in on the energy, the excitement, the free-wheeling search for kicks. It’s like the opening scene in Easy Rider when Peter Fonda throws his watch to the ground and kick-starts his bike. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey, the experience. On The Road reads much sadder and gloomier nowadays. Jack’s lonely quest for love and belonging in a world “where we’re all going to die anyway” rises closer to the surface.

The original manuscript of On The Road is currently on display in the British Library and is amazing to see. According to legend, Jack wrote it in one three-week spontaneous burst of inspiration and perspiration at his kitchen table to tell his new wife about his travels. To negate the need to interrupt his flow he taped together sheets of tracing paper, loaded up the typewriter and off he went, fuelled on coffee and Benzedrine. When he unravelled the 120 foot long scroll for his publisher he was told where to go and had to wait another six years and make many changes before it finally saw publication. The truth isn’t quite as dramatic as research now shows On The Road was worked on for years until he typed that version. Although punctuated it’s written as one solid block of text with no paragraphs which makes it difficult to read within the special glass case in the library; it was nigh impossible for my eye to follow the next line. Made it like reading a Burroughs cut-up.

Howard Cunnell, editor of On The Road – The Original Scroll (published in 2007) gave a very persuasive lecture at the British Library the other weekend when he argued the exaggerated myth Jack created around his spontaneous prose technique harmed him as it enabled critics to easily dismiss him and his style. Truman Capote’s put-down “That’s not writing, that’s typing” is almost as well-known as any of Jack’s lines. However, the main thrust of Cunnell’s hour-long talk was to champion Visions of Cody as “the real On The Road” and as Kerouac’s masterpiece. The link between the two – both centred on Neal Cassady and covering much of the same ground but in a different style - is complicated so I won’t recount it here but will read Cody again. When I read it 20 years ago I didn’t get it at all – thought it was a mess - and remains the only main Kerouac book I’ve read just once. Salles’s film didn’t inspire but the British Library has.

On The Road: Jack Kerouac’s manuscript scroll is on display at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB until Thursday 27^th December 2012. Admission free. 

MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY'S SEARCH FOR A KOOL PLACE (2011)

Too old to be beatniks and too young to be hippies, Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters bridged the counterculture gap with their On The Road inspired, drug fuelled, 1964 journey across America in a psychedelic school bus.

Their notion was to film the trip from Kesey’s home in La Honda to New York and make a movie along the way. Parts of their adventure has already been cemented in the minds of every wannabe freak thanks to Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but the film never materialised as the Pranksters spent over forty years trying to forge hundreds of hours of video and audio tape into some semblance of order. The idea it might have been easier to pass the footage to someone that knew what they are doing seems to have taken an awfully long time to dawn but recognised documentary makers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have now completed the job, offering us a ride upon the bus. Destination: Further.

The film starts with a stiff History Channel style narration to introduce the swashbuckling Ken Kesey - the ventriloquist loving, football playing, medical drug experimenting, bestselling author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - and his chief cohorts before settling in to a more fluid journey. Thereon in the film uses the archival material (plus a couple of subtle re-enactments) along with commentary from the participants. The voiceovers are out of shot so you never get to see them in their grizzled old age, instead seemingly staying the age of the footage.

The events unravel like a hipster’s soap opera with relationships, drugs, freak-outs, mental institutions, mishaps, fun, happiness, sadness, acid tests, and the invention of tie-dye. Now, if one was going to carry a vast quantity of hallucinogenic drugs across the country they’d be advised to do it as inconspicuously as possible. Painting a bus in psychedelic colours; scrawling “Weird Load On Board” across the front licence plate; standing on the top of it banging instruments to the personal soundtrack inside fragile minds; stopping travel, wouldn’t be wise. The police regularly pull them over but this being 1964, and hippies and drug culture not yet headline news, the Pranksters gibber something about making a film, show their recording equipment as evidence, and go on their merry way leaving behind mildly amused law enforcement officers. LSD wasn't illegal but marijuana possession could result in a very lengthy stretch as Neal Cassady already knew only too well. It must’ve been a thrill to have the real life protagonist of On The Road behind the wheel but being a speed freak (of both kinds) he would’ve driven me mad with his endless incomprehensible babbling. When they get to New York they meet up with Jack Kerouac at a party who sits puffy faced and grouchy in his chair, disgusted by the uncouth shenanigans surrounding him.

I used to think it would’ve been brilliant to have been on the bus. Nowadays, being somewhat less adventurous, I’m not sure I could've handled it mentally (let alone glugging acid from a carton of a orange juice), so being able to hitch a lift for 103 minutes is the more palatable way to travel, even if it makes me squarer than I'd like to think.

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search For A Kool Place is released on DVD by StudioCanal.

BEAT SCENE ISSUE 62

Charles Bukowski may be the cover star of the Beat Scene 62 but it’s the new nine page interview with Carolyn Cassady that steals the issue for me. She’s written and spoken many times about her husband Neal Cassady and lover Jack Kerouac but I’m never less than fascinated by their relationship. I still can’t grasp the hold Neal had over people – Carolyn in particular. Even his portrayal in On The Road isn’t flattering: a con-man and a rat who abandons a sick Jack in Mexico; and that’s without the bigamy and constant philandering she had to deal with. Maybe she was hip and I’m squarer than I’d care to admit.

Continuing the spouses theme, Richard Brautigan’s first wife Virginia Aste is also interviewed. There’s a good article about Kerouac and his time in Detroit with his first wife Edie Parker (who Carolyn memorably refers to as a weirdo and a nut case). Bukowski gets his coverage - reviews and extracts from a couple of newish books. Dan Fante writes about his father, John Fante, and fellow writers blacklisted by Hollywood during the 40s.

Loads of other stuff as usual within its 64 advert-free pages. Four pounds stirling.

www.beatscene.net