Jack Kerouac and His Style

• Published in: Books in Canada Vol. 35; no. 5; p. 11
• Main Author: Robertson, Ray
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto Canadian Review of Books Ltd 01.07.2006
• Subjects: Kerouac, Jack; Poetry
• ISSN: 0045-2564

Now, with the publication of Book of Sketches, non-scholars have easy access to the notebooks that [Jack Kerouac] carried around with him from the summer of 1952 until the end of 1954. Unfortunately, without the sort of background outlined above-providing the chronological context of the sketches and explicating their role in the evolution of Kerouac's style-Book of Sketches is, as a purely reading experience, less than absorbing, even for dedicated Kerouacians. In place of such a background, we get, instead, a very short introduction by visual artist George Condo whose comments range from the staggeringly banal ("Read this Book of Sketches and you'll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was"), to the simply erroneous ("These poems just breathe and flow"-the frontispiece to the entire collection, reproduced in Kerouac's own hand, reads: 'Book of Sketches: Proving that sketches ain't verse But Only What Is'), to the frankly bizarre ("Only Jack and Vincent Van Gogh told the inner truth"). Penguin's marketing strategy seems to have been to ignore both what Book of Sketches actually is (linguistic sketches) and what their value is (historical and scholarly) in favour of what they want them to be (previously unpublished poems) and hope that no one notices. Approximately six months later, Kerouac abandoned the inaugural, conventional draft of On the Road he'd begun in 1948 and started an entirely new version of what became the published text of 1957. "A complete departure from Town & City," as he described it to [Neal Cassady], "and in fact from previous American Lit," it would be written all in one continuous paragraph of about 120,000 words, using all of the original names, places, and events. It was almost immediately rejected by Harcourt, Brace, the publisher of The Town and the City, because, Kerouac told Cassady, "Harcourt expected me to write AGAIN like Town 6- City and this thing [is] so new and unusual and controversial and censorable (with hipsters, weed, fags, etc.) they won't accept." Angry but unbowed-he insisted, "On the Road is a very great book, but I may have to end up daring publishers to publish it... and if [publishers] insist on cutting it up to make the 'story' more intelligible I'll refuse"-Kerouac continued not so much rewriting the manuscript as redefining and refining his new style, in the process transforming the earlier material from "just a horizontal study of travels on the road" to "a vertical, metaphysical study" of Cassady (now the hero of the book).