Now that's *raw* sewage!

The TLS reviews the newly-released original manuscript of On the Road, a book I have never read and expect never to read — but I must now say that if I had to read it, I'd much rather have the "original scroll."  Is this kind of thing really still happening? — I mean, can you really still suppress the unbowdlerized version of a widely-read novel for 50 years?

The most striking feature is that the scroll uses the real names of characters who were lightly disguised in On the Road.  The real-life Neal Cassady returns to usurp the legendary Dean Moriarty, as if by right.  Where On the Road begins, "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness . . .", the scroll opens, "I first met met [sic] Neal not long after my father died . . . I had just gotten over a serious illness". On the Road's Carlo Marx is the scroll's Allen Ginsberg; Dean's three wives, Marylou, Camille and Inez, feature in the scroll under their real names, Carolyn Robinson, Luanne Henderson and Diane Hansen, whom Neal married in New York while still husband to Carolyn (the legality of his marriage to Luanne is likewise questionable, since she was underage at the time). . . . On the Road is a non-fiction novel, predating In Cold Blood by nine years. [. . .]  [Malcolm] Cowley had worked hard to persuade an increasingly disorganized Kerouac that Viking could not publish a "novel" in which living people were depicted stealing, committing adultery and indulging in illegal sexual acts.

So the buggery is excised, names are changed, fig leaves are applied where needed and, as the reviewer puts it: "It might have been paternal feeling towards his young author that led Cowley to excise many mentions of women as 'whores'.  Now they are back, and the rampant misogyny of the early Beat Generation is as plain as can be."  What sense would a book, "improvised" over three weeks, that contains all these elements make without them?  What strange confusion it must have sown in the minds of young readers.  Nothing can make your skin crawl like a shoddy cover-up.  But on the other hand, it's easy to underestimate the strength of taboos, or their auras, even when they're utterly absurd: the absurdity is the last thing you encounter when you break them, like hope creeping out of Pandora's box.

Still: sounds like a marvelously ugly, hateful all-American text.  Tasty, like Rocky Mountain oysters dipped in ketchup.  I never made it past Kesey and Ferlinghetti as a teenager: I don't think Kerouac or Cassady ever seemed much like kindred spirits; they seemed more antsy than zany.  On the road with a bunch of semi-closeted misogynists?  Sounds pretty boring to me.  I think I'll read popular science books and Camus instead.