"On the Road" Hits the Highway

Kerouac's 'On the Road' Hits the Highway

RYAN LENZ

Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS - Like the trip that inspired it, the first draft of
author Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is a wandering narrative, told in
a continuous block of text.

Yellowed with age, smudged with editing marks and the author's own
ink-covered fingerprints, the scroll rolls over nearly 120 feet of
paper. It is a relic of a literary phenomenon.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay bought the scroll two years ago for
$2.43 million. Having already been on display in Indianapolis, Irsay
plans to send what may be the Beat Generation's quintessential text
back to the road from where it came.

Beginning this week at the Orange County History Center in Orlando,
Fla., and ending with a three-month stay at the New York Public
Library in 2007, Kerouac's "On the Road" scroll will make a 13-stop,
four-year national tour of museums and libraries.

"My goal all along was to have it and share it with all those who want
to see it, whether it's in this country or other countries," Irsay
said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In a conversation after he brought the scroll with director Cameron
Crowe and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Irsay said they discussed the
manuscript's continued relevance as a chronicle of American discovery.

Kerouac wrote the novel in a coffee-saturated, 21-day typewriter
marathon at a friend's apartment in New York City in 1951. When
finally published six years later, it won critical acclaim as an
unconventional masterpiece, defining a post-World War II generation of
intellectual outlaws on an aimless odyssey across the American
landscape.

But while some - including The New York Times - praised its
publication, others dismissed it. "That's not writing. That's typing,"
author Truman Capote said in a review of Kerouac's book.

"It's the way that it was written that, in many ways, is more
important than what it really is," said Howard Collinson, director of
the University of Iowa Museum of Art, which will show the entire
scroll in 2005. "That it kind of just spewed out of him is what it's
all about."

When Kerouac died, his estate was reportedly valued at less than $100.
The scroll passed hands and wound up in the New York Public Library.
It's a storied life for a rough draft of a classic, said Steven
Taylor, chair of writing and poetics at Naropa University in Boulder,
Colo.

"There's a long, long tradition of displaying literary artifacts that
are treasured," said Taylor, who collaborated with beat poet Allen
Ginsberg on numerous projects. "But the stream of consciousness,
jump-cut, rapid motion of the book will not be as strange as it was to
readers a generation ago."

Irsay and Kerouac share connections - Kerouac was a star football
player in Lowell, Mass., during high school and played briefly at
Columbia University in New York. But Irsay is a businessman.

Still, buying the scroll and sending it on tour has little to do with
profit, he said. Some museums are paying only a minor fee to display
the scroll, mostly to cover the cost of shipping.

"It certainly wasn't something where I'm going to buy this because
someday it will go up in value or I'm going to buy this because I want
to sit and look at it," Irsay said. "I was drawn towards it."

Irsay, a guitarist with a liking for electric Bob Dylan, helped
produce "Colors," a tribute to Ryan White, a boy with AIDS whose legal
struggle to attend a school in Indiana became a national cause in
1985; White died in 1990 at the age of 18.

Irsay inherited the Colts in 1997 when his father passed away. At 44,
he is the NFL's youngest team owner.

The scroll, which was once thought to have been stored in a dorm room
closet, exchanged hands often after Kerouac's death in 1969. It had
been part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library until
the 2001 auction, which was held to pay for debts in Kerouac's estate.

But as frequently as the scroll passed hands during its 53 years,
Irsay, who thinks of himself more as the steward for the scroll than
its owner, said perhaps it is fitting for it to leave him.

"Possessions I hold very lightly in the sense that they're kind of
like very temporary borrowings," he said. "This will be someone else's
and someone else's."