Jack, Act 2

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960
Edited by Douglas Brinkley
Library of America, 864 pp., $35

Consider Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac, each an American writer of the 20th century and both now enshrined by the Library of America in its iconic series of major literary works. Although "Papa" Hemingway has long been considered a member of American literature's varsity team, "Ti Jean" Kerouac is fresh off the bench, an eager young newcomer to the roster of legends that includes William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Paine. Upon reflection, it's clear that Hemingway and Kerouac are like teammates in several respects. Both men wrote in torrents, especially in the springtime of their lives. Famed Viking Press editor Malcolm Cowley, though not particularly enamored of Kerouac's prose style, played a key role in each of their careers. Both writers also suffered from drink and died prematurely: Hemingway of a self-inflicted shotgun wound in Idaho at the age of 61, the 47-year-old Kerouac in 1969 of an esophageal hemorrhage in St. Petersburg, Fla. And both men had public and private selves that were markedly at odds with each other.

Kerouac's recent canonization has been fueled by the 50th anniversary of "On the Road," his second published novel and the book that established his reputation, for better or worse, as the voice of his generation. The Library of America has bound this beloved tale of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty's frenetic journeying together with four other Kerouac "road" books -"The Dharma Bums," "The Subterraneans," "Tristessa," "Lonesome Traveler" - and excerpts from his 1949-54 journals. It is a handsome, heavy tome, worthy of the masters.

The Hemingway-Kerouac football analogy is appropriate because both men played the sport, the former in Oak Park, Ill., just before World War I, and the latter, first at Lowell High School in the late 1930s, and then at the Horace Mann School in New York. Kerouac, whose school chums called him "Memory Babe" and who was good enough to earn a football scholarship to Columbia University, was an explosive and mercurial scatback who caught passes and returned kicks for touchdowns, but was undersized even for that era and considered undisciplined in his practice habits.

Of further interest in the comparison is the evidence, via letters, interviews, and other people's reminiscences, that Hemingway, the macho avatar of "the Lost Generation," was a self-serving bully - vain, misogynistic, dismissive of other artists, even impotent. Yet he consciously projected and cultivated an image of a virile, compassionate stoic who would leave behind far more than he took from this world.

The idea of Jack Kerouac also differs radically from his true self, but in the opposite manner. Because of the buzz that accompanied "On the Road," much of it generated by camp followers who hadn't bothered to read the book, Kerouac was perceived as a hip, free-loving iconoclast with an outlaw's distaste for conformity. In fact, by the time "On the Road" was published, in 1957, 10 years after the book was conceived, its author was a conservative, 35-year-old man without a driver's license, a devout Roman Catholic who lived with his mother most of the time. After being anointed "King of the Beats" and saddled with the useless freight of widespread bohemianism in the 1960s, Kerouac would expend nearly all of his remaining energy trying to convince critics, interviewers, and seekers that he was "actually not 'beat' but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic." But no one listened; the irony that his work commanded such a large audience yet was misread turned the optimistic, energetic kid from Lowell into a sullen and sodden crank. Being misunderstood is what killed him.

People are listening now. In these five books, Kerouac's readers will experience the trembling virtuosity of his style, and explore the social and spiritual consciousness that shines through the banality of his subject matter (including the holiness of the poor, interracial love affairs and friendships, and an authentic concern for the natural environment) while grasping the Proustian breadth of Kerouac's mournful self-examination. As he wrote in an August 30, 1950, letter to his future third wife, Stella Sampas: "I want to revisit the mysteries of my past, which is my job."

Kerouac is often mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, but his roots run deep into the literary tradition. Kerouac devoured Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Joyce, Celine, and others, then filled dozens of notebooks with earnest imitations of his countrymen William Saroyan, Theodore Dreiser, and Thomas Wolfe. By the time Kerouac wrote the books contained in the Library of America volume, he had reached all the way back to Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau in his preoccupations. Reflecting the social history of a particular time and place captured in Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," Kerouac catalogs his days working on the railroad in "Lonesome Traveler": "Despite the fact I was a brakeman making 600 a month I kept going to the Public restaurant on Howard Street which was three eggs for 26 cents 2 eggs for 21 this with toast (hardly no butter) coffee (hardly no coffee and sugar rationed) oatmeal with dash of milk and sugar the smell of soured old shirts lingering above the cookpot steams as if they were making skidrow lumberjack stews out of San Francisco ancient Chinese mildewed laundries with poker games in the back among the barrels and the rats of the earthquake days."

With prose like this, Kerouac would have died on the vine in the arid climate of academia, but now his reputation is thriving there. The current Kerouac fervor has been driven, in part, by the unveiling of the "scroll version" of "On the Road" (published by Viking last month), the 1951 draft that Kerouac typed in three weeks on a 120-foot roll of taped-together, 12-foot sections of semi-translucent paper. Jim Irsay, the offbeat, flamboyant owner of the Indianapolis Colts, purchased the scroll for $2.4 million in 2001, later sending this curious

Jay Atkinson's most recent books are "Legends of Winter Hill" and a new novel, "City in Amber," due next month. He teaches writing at Salem State College.

artifact and its curator, Jim Canary, on a national tour that has included a stay at Lowell's Boott Museum that continues until Oct. 14.

The strength of this "new" version of Kerouac's signature work is the freshness and accuracy of the author's original vision. In the 1957 edition of "On the Road," fears of libel compelled Kerouac's editors to change the names of the characters in this "true-story novel" and expurgate some of their actions. (For example, Neal Cassady, a.k.a. Dean Moriarty, is less idealized here, and his gay hustling is more boldly depicted.) By gathering five of Kerouac's books into one volume but using the template of their previously published editions, the Library of America has passed on an opportunity to fulfill Kerouac's stated ambition. He always planned to re-insert his "pantheon of uniform names," compiling his books into a single, autobiographical epic he called the "Duluoz Legend." Despite Kerouac's ascendancy in the literary firmament, that particular wish remains unsatisfied.

The other oddity here is the choice of Douglas Brinkley as editor. Somehow the popular historian has become the arbiter of all things Kerouac; he edited a volume of Kerouac's extensive journals titled "Windblown World," which was published in 2004. In 1998, Brinkley was also granted nearly exclusive access to the Kerouac archive for the purpose of writing the definitive biography. While other scholars have been starved of material, Brinkley has yet to produce his manuscript, which is overdue. Commissioning Brinkley to comment on such a wild-hearted artist seems to me the equivalent of sending an accountant to Woodstock to tally up the empty beer bottles.

Paul Marion, a Lowell poet and editor of "Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac," has stated that the hero of the 1938 LowellLawrence football game felt that he never got his due from either organized sports or organized literature. Through his selection to the Library of America series, Kerouac can rest assured that he belongs on the same playing field with Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and the other stalwarts of American letters.