Archives Tragic

At Borders last week I fell into purchasing a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the road. I was in one of those “I want to buy a book and I don’t much care what it is” kind of moods. Borders is good at taking advantage of people in that vulnerable state. On the road was on a temptation table at the front of the store and was going cheap. Kerouac’s book is a bit outside my normal reading but, I told myself happily, were it not for impulse purchases like these one might never try anything new. And it was from the introduction to the book that I discovered something else new to me: the story of the Kerouac having typed the novel in a three-week burst in 1951 on to one continuous scroll of paper.

A rapid typist and impatient of the time it takes to feed fresh sheets of paper into the typewriter, Kerouac typed the work on to twelve-foot long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed at the left margin to fit the machine. After three weeks work he taped the sheets together and the result was a manuscript 120 feet long. He wrote frenteticaly, coffee his main stimulant (he later denied having been high on Benzedrine). Sweat-soaked T-shirts were hung out to dry in his New York apartment, “like victory flags”, several a day. The bang of the typewriter and the “never-ending roll of paper billowing from the typewriter like [an] imagined road” have become part of one of the great dreams of American creativity in the twentieth century.

The scroll

For some time it has been known that the story of the novel having been created in three weeks is a myth in the sense that there was a long process of production. Three major proto-versions of the novel were written before 1951 and after the scroll manuscript was complete it was extensively re-worked and edited by Kerouac and his publisher. The novel did not appear in print until 1957.

Extensive manuscript material fed into the writing. Kerouac filled many notebooks and journals during travels across America in the late 1940s with friends, and a fellow writer who visited Kerouac during those three magical weeks saw Kerouac copying material directly from pocket notebooks arranged on the table next to the typewriter. The triggers for the burst of creative energy in 1951 that produced a version “satisfying to him” were autobiographical material and letters to Kerouac written by friends who were characters in the book. These friends’ actual names appear in the scroll and were only changed to fictitious names later. So the scroll version of the book was not fiction so much as a “memoir” blended from Kerouac’s and other people’s written records.

For all that, the scroll is still a major artifact of American literary history. It is owned now by a private collector (one of those rich Americans who enjoy owning football teams as well as literary manuscripts) and cared for by a conservator from Indiana University. In 2007, fifty years after publication of On the road, the scroll itself went on the road and toured major American centres. Also in 2007 Viking Press, the original (initially reluctant) publisher, published the original scroll version as a book.

There has been some research on the interplay between all these Kerouac-ian texts, but it has been suggested that more could still be done. (I’m afraid I don’t know where the letters, journals and non-scroll drafts are held but they seem to be extant.) Can archivists contribute to an understanding of literary production, and of the relationship between that and the symbolic and aesthetic nature of literary manuscripts? Or can it all be left to literary scholars? Perhaps it can. The world has not come to a halt because few archivists have tried to investigate the nature of human creativity and artistic expression through recordkeeping.

Yet there is a thread of archival scholarship that seeks to understand the recordkeeping behavior of individuals - why people create the records that they do, and how knowledge of that can make a difference to the work of archivists. One archivist, Catherine Hobbs, has reminded her colleagues that while documenting the public lives and accomplishments of writers - or anyone - is familiar work for archivists and is important, “expression of character” should also be an indicator of the significance of records. Understanding the character or feeling of the writer is an essential part of the understanding of his/her published work, she suggests.

More generally, she says, character, personality, intimacy of all sorts, belief, psychology, spirituality: all need to be taken into account in documenting “our complex inner humanity”. Not just in relation to writers, I think she means, but all of us.