A conversation with Brett Sigurdson about Jack Kerouac’s archives.
As a researcher, how do you keep track of all this?
Well, I had plenty of help from Kerouac himself. He seemed to keep everything, and Kerouac took diligent care of his files—no small feat, given the number of times he moved throughout his life. I mean, just look at the length of the finding aid for the New York Public Library’s Kerouac Collection, and then imagine movers packing it up to drive from Orlando to Berkeley in spring 1957, whereby Kerouac had it all packed up again weeks later to be hauled back to Florida. Granted, his archive was much smaller then, but still—what a risk, no?
I bring this up because I’ve thought a lot about luck over the years I spent in the archives for my doctoral dissertation on Kerouac’s life and work (which, by the way, is how “Jess ’Maginary Lines” started). When I came across the random slips of paper on which he jotted down potential book titles for what we know as On the Road—many of them typed on tissue-thin paper and stuffed between notebook pages—I thought, How lucky is it that these scraps survived?
As I’m sure you know from your work on A Remarkable Collection of Angels, remarkable stories can be revealed in the archives. But it takes time and effort to follow the contours of the narratives that such documents divulge. Take the titles Kerouac recorded. From these scraps, I saw that he pondered titles like “Goodnight, Thou Road,” “The Big Sad Road,” “Praying Road Blues,” and—inexplicably—“Snot and Bubblegum.” Aside from the latter, the cumulative list of titles revealed Kerouac’s ongoing conception of the Road narrative, how he considered the spiritual, religious, and cyclical dimensions of the story he wanted to tell. Or needed to tell. His archives indicate that he was obsessed with telling a story of mid-century Americans roaming through the country. He just couldn’t find the right form—the right vehicle, so to speak. Jotting down titles was one of the ways he sought to find the right way to tell this story.
To track the routes, wrong turns, and detours of On the Road’s development, then, I had to pay attention to the stories his archive was telling me in micro and macro senses—what was he experiencing and writing about month to month, year to year, between 1947 and 1951? I had in mind the wisdom of Jim Jones, a Kerouac scholar, who argues that Kerouac will only be taken seriously as a writer if his achievements are framed by comparing the authorized texts to the draft manuscripts, journal entries, and correspondence.
Look, the problem when it comes to Kerouac is that friends, admirers, and critics have told lies and half-truths about Kerouac that have hardened into myth since On the Road’s publication. I believe that careful, considered research into the archive—the kind of research I’m trying to do—is the past, present, and future of Kerouac scholarship. Meaning: the kind of work that I’m doing in this essay is about correcting the errors and erroneous claims of the past for contemporary and future readers and scholars.
