This post is by W. David Hall, the Director of the Kenyon Review’s Young Writers Program.
Was anyone else disappointed that Viking’s On The Road: The Original Scroll was not published as a scroll? To be honest, I didn’t expect anything more than what they put into print–the obligatory introductions and the unedited manuscript itself–until I saw the author photo on the back. There’s the man himself, Jack Kerouac, one of my literary heroes, disheveled, head bowed reverently as he holds the scroll as it drapes from one hand to another, nearly scraping the floor. (Sure, the inside back flap of the book jacket claims that the scroll he is holding may actually be Dharma Bums, and, sure, I could travel to Lowell, Massachusetts, New York City, Chicago, and other places to see the scroll itself, but you get the idea“) Fans and scholars alike should have been able to hold it that way as well.
Here’s why: not only is the 120-foot roll of taped Teletype paper part of the enduring myth behind On The Road, it represents a spiritual aspect of writing that we are quickly losing, if it hasn’t vanished already. Scrolls are sacred. Even today, ignoring the “scrolling” feature on Microsoft Word, some rabbis will spend hours praying over a scroll, choosing the right ink and writing instruments, and opening themselves up to the holy act of transferring holy words to paper. Who of us among the non-rabbinical can claim the same devotion to preparation before the act of writing? I am guilty of composing on a laptop, its screen crowded with a virtual clock, calendar, weather update, newsfeed, even a Google search box, not to mention the two dozen little icons that can connect me with RealPlayer and ICQ and such. I wake up, make the coffee, open my document, and start typing amid all this chaos, hoping (but not praying) that I can achieve enough clarity of thought that I can write something I can consider decent. But now I’ve got that picture of Jack, wrapped in the sacredness of the scroll, to guide me back to my favorite moleskin notebooks and funky Cadoozle mechanical pencils (my choice of sacred writing instruments) and to a connectedness with writing that should be more Torah than Toshiba.
I tried an experiment this summer. During the first session of Young Writers, I taught a genre workshop on The Beats, starting with a section of On The Road. What I wanted to do was have everyone write stream-of-consciousness travel stories on scrolls, and was able to find quite a few discounted rolls of fax paper at a Kenyon bookstore clearance sale. The problem was the preparation. I didn’t have access to any typewriters (the idea didn’t come to me until after the program had started), and writing by hand–in the manner of the rabbis–left smears and frustration. We ended up writing those pieces in our notebooks, and I know my students got something out of that exercise, but I consider it a failure. I had become too removed from that act of preparation for the scroll to be significant. How cool would it have been to have the scroll to show, to pass that legacy along to another generation, to have it return the spiritual to my own writing?