For any Jack Kerouac enthusiast or On the Road fan, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's profoundly influential novel is a moment of literary history to celebrate. True to style, the San Francisco celebrations were held in the famed district that embodied the spirit of Kerouac's work -- a panel discussion at the All Saints Church in Haight-Ashbury put on by one of San Francisco's favorite independent bookstores the Booksmith was an event not to have missed. The panel gave the audience a better sense of who Kerouac was and a better understanding of the place of On the Road in the pantheon of American literature. And for many it was a treat to hear personal stories about Kerouac's personal attributes, such as how great his oratory skills were -- as friend Michael McClure said "he fully realized the language" when he read out loud.


John Leland, author of Why Kerouac Matters, started off the evening giving the audience a quick slap in the face, letting us know that On the Road wasn't a book of adolescence coming of age, as is often felt, but that of an adult trying to get his cut of the American dream; a woman to settle down with, a serious job where he could write and make a living and find spiritual fulfillment. Leland stated that this analysis came from the benefit of having 50 years pass with the book being read as a work of literature and not just a window into the fifties. This is especially significant considering Kerouac himself was not in his adolescence when he wrote the novel at the age of 29, and the book wasn't even published till he was 35. Leland quoted Jack's summation of his own book "two Catholic buddies in search of god, and we found it."

Interestingly later in the discussion Barry Gifford discussed how film director Francis Ford Coppola assumed that the book was about the fifties. "It was actually about a couple of years after World War II," Gifford said. Coppola owns the dramatic rights to the novel and Gifford wrote a screenplay for it. When asked why the book hadn't been made into a film yet Gifford said "people didn't see a story in it, but I always did, a story of fathers and sons, the big problem Francis had was all the traveling, it just had to be synthesized." Gifford told us he took the seven trips across the US in the book and summed it to two and a half, several screenplays later and the project has still failed to launch.

"Many people don't get beyond on the road," Michael McClure pointed out during talks, "We've stuck on an American fixation when we try to describe Jack, we don't think of Victor Hugo or Goethe, but Jack was thinking of them." Michael also reminds us of something readers often forget, that Jack didn't start speaking English till the age of 7, growing up speaking dialectical Canadian French. All of this was in an attempt to understand the writer and his writings which has been greatly enhanced with the publication of the scroll for On the Road where both McClure and Gifford state the first sentence of On the Road was changed from "I met Dean not long after my wife and I split up" but to "I went on the road after my father died." Surprisingly, Leland and McClure both stated that Big Sur was their favorite book of Jack's.

The event was more than just a celebration of On the Road, it was a celebration of the man who brought those words to life and his own impression of On the Road, "a powerful and singularly gloomy book, but good," could have described a life, rather than just a book.

Reported by Mahi

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