What does Penguin's new 'amplified edition' of On the Road for the iPad contribute to our appreciation of the novel?
To read On the Road in one of its original formats – hardback or paperback – is to embark on an adventure of the imagination. As the pages turn, the story swells: Dean Moriarty grows ever more "mad", Carlo Marx becomes more sick with love for him, Old Bull Lee more menacingly sage. Meanwhile the narrator, Sal Paradise, continues his endearingly naive pursuit of the soul of America, the "Promised Land", and all that jazz. The bonus at the end of this mystic quest is to land at the perfect party, with unlimited beer and endless talk about everything from Buddhism to balling. "Girls", as they are almost always called, have a clearly defined role in Kerouacean scripture.
To read On the Road on an iPad in Penguin's new "amplified edition" is to find the imagination grounded by facts and technological distraction. "The Book" is only one of five treats to choose from – the others are "The Author", "The Trip", "The Beats" and "Publication". On reaching line 10 of "The Book", the reader is interrupted by the appearance of a blue bar next to the name of Chad King. Touch the bar and you are offered a "bio" – not of Chad, a fictional character, but of Hal Chase, the real-life figure who provided the model. A familiar photograph shows Chase and Kerouac hamming it up on the campus at Columbia University, where they met in the 1940s. Nothing in the bio suggests that Chad and Chase are separate entities. Exit the flighty imagination and return to earth. No sooner have you chosen to hide the Chad/Chase interloper than you're presented (at line 15) with another blue bar, containing the tempting information that the fictional Dean Moriarty is in fact something many readers find more exciting: a real person, who went by the name of Neal Cassady. The option to ignore those blue bars exists, but just you try.
On the Road is a book with a complex and colourful history, and the amplified edition does a good job of presenting it to the reader who aspires to become a mini-scholar for the duration of the trip. Maps dated 1947, 1949 and 1950 mark out the journeys Kerouac made, either alone or in the passenger seat of some dubiously acquired saloon. The journeys were condensed at the insistence of his editor at Viking, Malcolm Cowley; events were shuffled to create the hint of a story; the ending was changed to depict the narrator breaking up with his wife (in the version originally presented to Cowley, they were newly married). On the Road asks to be read as a novel, in other words – not as a minutely adjusted slice of life.
Among the subsidiary material is a video interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti – who takes a characteristically hard-nosed view of Kerouac and the Beat generation – and another with Carolyn Cassady, once wife of Neal (they were divorced in 1963, five years before his death) and lover of Jack. The most interesting section for many will be "Publication", which offers nine pages of "memos and letters from behind the scenes". These include internal memoranda passed between Cowley and doubtful colleagues, and letters between him and the author. "I think it is the great source document of life among the beat or hip generation," Cowley told fellow editors in a memo dated 20 October 1953. Kerouac wanted to call the book "Beat Generation" but in this, as in other matters, he bowed to the experienced editor's judgment. The reaction of some early critics is also given (Cowley accurately predicted "mixed but interested reviews"), together with a selection of comparisons between the established version and the unedited "original scroll", which Penguin published four years ago. A charming display of covers from various foreign editions (En el camino, Sur la route, etc) completes the publication background.
All this is worth having. It amounts to a virtual On the Road encyclopedia (though I didn't learn a single new fact while reading). Contained within it is "The Book", which still has a kick 60 years after Kerouac typed the first coherent draft on a taped-together roll of drawing paper (there were earlier versions dating back to the 1940s, with leading characters called Ray Smith and Vern Pomeroy). Admirers of any classic work rightly wish to deepen their knowledge of the revered object, and the amplified edition provides a starting point. As for reading what we must insist on calling "The Novel", one ought, as with any travelling companion, to choose carefully. Get a paperback, stick it in your pocket and just go.
• James Campbell's This Is the Beat Generation is published by Vintage.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/22/on-the-road-jack-kerouac-ipad-app
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