The Ragged Promised Land

Last September, just a few scant months before absconding from the Dante’s Inferno of North Beach, I wrote, produced, and directed a 70-minute live presentation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road.

The Ragged Promised Land was first presented to an SRO crowd at Veusvio Cafe, a San Francisco landmark next door to City Lights Books. One month later my terrific cast and I reprised the show at The Beat Museum. (I was surprised at the scores of professional actors to be found in S.F.)

I was immensely proud of the work I did on Promised Land, perhaps more proud of this accomplishment than anything I’ve ever done as a writer. But I was unable to enjoy one moment of the process. My health, already damaged, was rapidy deteriorating. Psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis was running rampant through an alcohol-ravaged body. I had long since stopped eating, content with a few nibbles of a sandwich every 24 hours. I was battling an almost-constant fever and lived in a run-down residential hotel with inadequate heat.

This weekend I discovered something I thought I had lost: the introductory remarks I wrote for the show. The remarks that I read followed an opening recitation of the first chapter of Kerouac’s Big Sur by Jim Reese, a remarkable San Francisco-based thespian and theater director:

                                                             ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The words you just heard are, of course, from the pen of Jack Kerouac. They are not derived from his most famous work, “On the Road”, but rather from the opening chapter of “Big Sur”, arguably Kerouac’s finest of all his autobiographical novels, a brutally honest depiction of alcoholism, the high demands of fame, and of failed paths on a spiritual journey. When he wrote “Big Sur” in October 1961, exactly eight years away from his own demise at the age of 47, Kerouac, as friends and biographers depict him, was a middle-aged drunk living in Florida with his mother, undergoing, Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “his own crucifixion.”

“The road had finally come to collect its toll. Life had had its way with him. Kerouac spent most of his adult life in nomadic, often pointless, quests, on the road. There was most often a westward momentum to his journeys, “the golden goal,” as he called it, the end of the continent, the ragged promised land. He would travel until there was no more land, only ocean, and then race back to his mother’s home on the East Coast before starting all over again. In this presentation honoring the 50th anniversary of “On the Road”, we have extrapolated material from the new scroll edition that highlight and focus on Kerouac’s adventures in California between 1948 and 1951, the years of his life that “Road” covers.

“On the Road” was written in 1951 but wasn’t published by Viking until 1957. We’ve already heard what a toll the fame had on Jack for all of the book’s popular—but not necessarily critical—success.

“Before we move along, I’d like to take a moment to address a few myths about Kerouac and “On the Road”. First of all, he did not write the book in a Benzedrine-fueled three-week frenzy. Yes, he did write what became the first draft in three weeks after years of note-taking and false starts, and he was, he wrote to friends, fueled by lots and lots of coffee. And that scroll was not 120 feet of teletype paper but, rather, neatly taped-together tracing paper. Another myth, of sorts, is that Vesuvio, where we are all gathered this evening, was, as I have heard many a tourist refer to it, Jack Kerouac’s bar. Although he spent some notable time here, along with other literary giants, this is largely untrue. For instance, Kerouac wrote more than once of savoring the joys of drinking wine from a paper bag in Washington Square Park or on the steps leading to Coit Tower. So, if Jack only stepped through these doors twice in his lifetime, it doesn’t matter because the mythology is what endures; this is Jack’s Bar because, as Eugene O’Neill wrote, if history teaches us anything it is that the truth is irrelevant.

“The voice of Kerouac you are about to hear is not the voice that wrote “Big Sur.” It is a young Kerouac on the search of meaning in a post-World War II America, soon to be disillusioned, for sure, especially by his often fickle friend and alter ego Neal Cassady, but also a youthful, exuberant boy from Lowell, Massachusetts, a football star, a pseudo-intellectual, a hedonist, a young man with an unhealthy love/hate relationship with his mother, a writer with an almost morbid fear and awareness of death, one of the spiritual Benzedrine rushes that kept him propelling forward, forever on the road, forever running and running … to the Ragged Promised Land and back. Over and over again. Until there was only silence.”