Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (44 page)

The house, despite a couple of decades of labor, was still enough incomplete that from time to time he would glance up from his work or reading to see above in some unfinished juncture a flying squirrel looking down on him and his plump cat. Rather common creatures not often seen, the squirrels weren’t an annoyance but a blessing of harmony between his quarters and theirs, a separation they — and other critters — sometimes failed to acknowledge; but such occurrences were another reason he went into the woods to live.

At the point where his small lawn joined the gravel lane was a shoulder-height tree stump weathered gray, and atop it Canary had placed a concrete figure of a seated Buddha that so blended with the weathered stump, the statue appeared to be an outgrowth of it, as if the Enlightened One had risen from the heart of the old beech to felicitate the home in the woods.

In the 1970s, Canary entered Indiana University to study philosophy but left before his first year was complete to, in the words of the old license plates,
WANDER INDIANA.
He returned a couple of years later and began study of Asian languages and cultures, especially things Tibetan, and even more especially, ancient Buddhist religious texts and the handmade papers they were set down on. Over seven or eight years, he gathered up enough hours for a doctorate, although his broad pursuits — which some professors saw as unfocused — left him with a more useful bachelor of arts. During those years, he worked on what could have become a dissertation: a translation of a short biography of Padmasambhava, the legendary teacher said to have brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century.

Canary’s interest widened from translation of Tibetan texts to the conservation and preservation of the paper containing the sacred inscriptions, marvelous calligraphy often executed in a liquid-gold ink on heavy sheets dyed indigo to create an exotic beauty that makes even the most mundane utterance appear holy and worth deeper consideration, something the Western World has lacked since monks ceased creating elaborately decorated initial letters in Christian gospels written on vellum. Canary is particularly aware of the demise of that legacy, in part because among the many objects in his home is an old Linotype machine requiring molten lead to cast its letters, and in part because his work at the library sometimes includes restoring damaged figures on medieval manuscripts, exacting work often necessitating use of a microscope.

Among the nearly half-million volumes and seven-million pages of manuscript in the Lilly Library are twenty-thousand miniature books (some that would fit inside a garbanzo bean). There is also a virtually mint copy of the Double Elephant Edition of Audubon’s
Birds of America,
a book large enough to be opened safely only by two people — or perhaps one Canary. (The 435 hand-colored etchings in the four volumes, one per sheet, depict each bird life-size — even the turkey and great heron. To display the illustrations in their entirety, two librarians every seven days open the exhibit case to turn a page; just after I happened to see there the last etching, it was time to start again at the beginning. Several citizens had come by once a week for eight and a half years to view all the birds.)

Jim took us into the vault to show treasures: Virginia Woolf’s inky corrections on page proofs of
Mrs. Dalloway;
a nicely bound copy of Arnold Bennett’s
Old Wives’ Tale
that only a close look revealed to be a hand-lettered, working manuscript; a file labeled
VONNEGUT, K., REJECTION LETTERS.
(I, commiseratingly, read all ninety of them, including a once-crumpled refusal used as a coaster for a highball glass.) There was also a pen sketch of Sherlock Holmes drawn by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator perhaps wanting to see for himself the face of his creation.

To stand in the narrow aisles of the Lilly vault, containing so much evidence of the labors in making literature, is to be reminded how a manuscript — arduously, haltingly, confoundedly — proceeds from the frailties and unacceptabilities of inception to a finished book able to stir humankind long past those anguished hours of initial composition. In file after file were phrases inked over, sentences crossed out, paragraphs expunged, new words scribbled in only to be lined through with yet another try for the best sentence. Those acid-free boxes held slips of lives revealing someone finding a way through darkness, each writerly mind driven more by hope or necessity than certainty of outcome. On a messed page, in a stain or crumple or angrily scratched-off phrase, we might see the promise of eventual triumph, but the writer would remember struggle. Stopping repeatedly to read labels on the cartons — Hemingway, Conrad, Durrell, Frost, Lawrence, Maugham, Wharton, Synge, Pound — I had to be pushed along. The Lilly Library is a place that can transform a bibliophile — before he can say
Jack Kerouac!
 — into a blithering bibliomaniac.

Inside a heavy case inside a locked cabinet inside the vault (I counted seven locks between it and the world beyond the library front door) lay the thing that had acquainted me with Jim Canary: that single paragraph of typed words which, if unrolled on a football field, would reach from one goal line almost halfway to the other, even without the few inches chewed off by Kerouac’s friend’s spaniel. It is the most famous manuscript of
On the Road
but not the only one. Canary calls it “Jack-in-the-Box.”

Q and I elsewhere had seen the front thirty-six feet of it. In the vault, I asked Jim if I might heft the case — why, I’m not sure. Perhaps it had to do with my first book. After I finished the seventh and last draft of it, I stacked them all up on a bathroom scale: fifty pounds exactly. There, before me, were four years of my life reduced to avoirdupois: 1,461 days become eight-hundred ounces. Was that all? It seemed insufficient for the labor expended until I realized the evidential weight of the four years preceding my writing the book, excluding some canceled checks, a few letters, and a dozen snapshots, was zero.

When I hoisted Jack-in-the-Box, I felt the weight of a portion of Kerouac’s life — twenty days if we count only the typing of the scroll, several years if we count his notebooks and various abandoned versions, and about a third of a century if we consider the time it took the man to become the writer he was in 1957.

3

Spontaneous Bop

I
WAS EIGHTEEN
when
On the Road
came out. I saw the book, I liked the title, I respected what I knew of its contents, but I didn’t read it for some time because then I was more in the thrall of the Beat poets, especially Lawrence Ferlinghetti (
A Coney Island of the Mind
) and, in a much lesser way, Allen Ginsberg (
Howl
), works my teachers considered worthless if not trash; to the teenage brain, of course, there is no higher commendation. My sense of language was then too innocent and uninformed for me to see the undigested ideas and hurried assemblage in so much Beat writing, and if I did notice an occasional solecism (rife in Kerouac’s novels), I defended it as proof of spontaneous creation — a howling artistic challenge to the rigidities and conformities dulling the ’50s. With nescient ideas about the interweavings of form and content, I would argue halfheartedly that the Beats were important for
what
they said rather than
how
they said it. Instinct was of more consequence than craftsmanship. After all, somebody besides musicians needed to do something about that bland, insipid decade.

Nevertheless, I was at the same time suspicious of acquaintances who materially pretended life as a hipster, whose self-indulgence masqueraded as revolution (a confusion perfected in the decade following). In a classroom or at a bar, they might spout Kerouac or Ginsberg, but any abiding interest in discovering avenues of mind beyond mere revolt against wearing khaki trousers or spindling and mutilating an IBM card — 
that
passion faded quickly. Indeed, soon enough, nearly all of them were headed back toward the faubourgs they had reviled a couple of years earlier. Their return, their capitulation, may have been for the best.

But something not for the best was our miscomprehension of “spontaneous” artistic creation. The more notorious Kerouac’s four manuscript scrolls became, the more fables about them increased: he didn’t slow down for punctuation; he could write a novel in a couple of weeks while on Benzedrine, cigarettes, and booze; a single draft was all he needed. Those untruths led us to wrongful notions about literary genesis, inspiration, structures, and the role of self in writing. (On those last two, it seems to me, much American poetry still hasn’t recovered.)

If only we’d known the truth: Jack Kerouac did not simply sit down at his Underwood typewriter one morning, stick in the front end of a “Teletype” roll, and, over the following nineteen days, bang out a novel that brought him instant fame and challenged the lives of an entire generation.

If only we’d known the truth: Kerouac worked at the book for more than a decade and executed several drafts of
On the Road,
both short ones and long, including a version in French. With remarkable dedication through those years, he also kept notebooks and sketchbooks — words and drawings — to sharpen perception and feed his memory and imagination when he sat down at the typewriter. By the time
On the Road
got into print, Kerouac had written ten other works, one of them published to good reviews if modest sales. We of my age, only a few years behind the big Beats, simply did not understand what Allen Ginsberg called “spontaneous bop prosody.” We had no idea of actual writerly methods, and we bought into the bogus “first thought — best thought, first draft — best draft.” Today, I’m not sure the Beat writers wanted us to understand; I think they encouraged us to see them, again in Ginsberg’s words, as “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection.” Indeed. Those “desolation angels” got us believing in a divine afflatus waiting to flow out of whoever was blessed. Weren’t writers more chosen than made? Genius was inspiration, and to have to toil was proof of one’s lack of celestial exaltation. Wasn’t artistic conception immaculate? We knew, goddamnitall, you had it or you didn’t.

If only we’d known the truth: Kerouac labored hard and he worked long and accepted eminent editorial counsel to make
On the Road
publishable. The title, the author wrote later, came at the insistence of an editor (the value of those three words is incalculable, worth more, some readers have said, than all the other words following them). If John Kerouac (not yet Jack in the early versions) was angelheaded, his was a damned sweaty seraphic noggin that did not simply open to some heavenly tap. The truth is there were more drafts than draughts, and his angelhead was dedicated to rethinking, rereading, reworking, revising, rewriting, reshaping, replacing, removing, rebuilding, restructuring, renaming, reducing, rehearsing, reviewing, and then doing it all again. For those reasons, I must admit now — even considering the affection I hold for him and my appreciation of what he accomplished — I often wish his expression had turned out better, especially his influential
The Dharma Bums.
But then, in
On the Road,
I’ll come upon a passage describing some gone hepcat blowing a hot crazy sax, and, oh dad, lay it on us!

The evening of the day Q and I saw the front end of the scroll in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s hometown on the banks of the Merrimack River, we joined Jim Canary for a tour of some of the taverns the novelist knew too well. In one, the Rainbow Café, we sat at the bar, I on the very spot Kerouac preferred — so the bartender said. A couple of stools away was the only other patron, a millworker, a man in his fifties who cleaned the interior of huge boilers. For a few minutes he watched us intently, listening, then said excitedly, “I recognize you!” and he pointed our way. “You’re that guy! That guy in the paper!” Q and Jim looked at me, but I was not that guy. That guy was Canary. “In the paper,” the man said with some excitement. “I saw your picture in the paper!”

On the Road
meant nothing to the worker, but the celebrity of a man in the news did. To come face-to-face in your very own hangout with a face appearing in print that very day! I did what I think Jack might have done: I bought the fellow a drink, and he soon was telling us about his job. I asked if he knew the name Jack Kerouac, and the workman said, “I think that’s one I’ve heard.” Then to the bartender, “Was he in here the other night?” And the bartender said, “He’s here every night.”

None of Canary’s three sons, all in their twenties, has really inquired about the
OTR
scroll, although one of them once did ask a friend of Jim’s, “Is Dad, like, famous?” I don’t know, but for a fellow who set out for the woods to translate Buddhist texts in quietude, Jim’s path has, at least for a while, gone off in a direction of some celebrity, one that often pulls him out of his woody hollow and onto the road — if air travel may be so considered.

Did Kerouac ever imagine a later life for his typed scrolls? Did he ever — in those hours (to use his phrase) “atop an Underwood” of tapping out words a hundred a minute with amazing accuracy, slowing only to check a notebook beside him, once in a while stopping to insert another of the eight rolls of
draftsman’s tracing paper,
and all the while hoping his novel would fulfill the promise of his first published book — did he then imagine his words sailing through space, on the road for people to read not his words but to look at his typing? As he assembled his scrolls, was there any thought about icons or artifacts?

What we do know about him then are some of his thoughts just before his first novel,
The Town and the City,
came out in 1950 when he confessed in a notebook, “I gloat more & more in the fact I may be rich & famous soon.” But the book sold fewer copies than he hoped, and he later wrote, “Wasn’t born to be rich.”

I would like to tell him about Jack-in-the-Box. I’d like to say, So now, Ti Jean, your manuscript is clipping along at nearly the speed of sound and soon it will touch down at an airport where security guards will x-ray it in its case, and they’ll take it and its conservator aside to have him prove he is not transporting some ingeniously disguised weapon of terror, and as they reach for the brittle paper, he will say, “You can’t touch that!” and one of the guards will pause, then light up with recognition and tell his colleague who’s also looking closely at the densely typed words, “I know this thing! I saw a teevee special about it! This is a Dead Sea Scroll!” and then he will okay Jim to carry the “holy words” on through to their exhibition. What do you make of that, Ti Jean? Has your afflatus at last become divine?