On the Road with Jack Kerouac

Or, what to do while your book is just about to be published

What you see above is Jack Kerouac’s little notebook from 1953. The SK is short for “Sketchings.” The notebook is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library where I’m researching the drawings that writers made along with their jottings. In Kerouac’s case, there are maps as well drawings of edible as well as poisonous mushrooms, plants, etc. At that time, Kerouac’s On the Road was still in the future: it would be published four years later. In his sketches here, he is an observer of scenes and even his dreams and certainly of nature around him. He is also anxious. One entry reads: “dear God, please making me a writer again.”

Talking of anxiety, I have a new book coming out in two weeks. A writer-friend told me that when he was younger Don DeLillo had advised him that when you are in this situation, the best thing you can do for your sanity is to be working on a new project. Have the next book mapped out, let it absorb your attention. This is difficult, of course, but that is the reason why I’ve been spending time with writers’ notebooks and their nature drawings. I’m working on The Green Book, the final volume in my trilogy; first it was The Blue Book, and then The Yellow Book, and now a citizen’s report on climate change in The Green Book.

It is not easy to focus. For instance: You think, what will the reviews of my novel be like? Will that particular editor send it to X, under the impression that, well, X is Indian or maybe Pakistani, and therefore of course is the right person to review. But X has a history very different from yours and will not be interested in the book. In fact, X, anxious about proving his authenticity in this part of the world, will want to impose his sense of reality over yours and will scold you for not having written the book he wants you to write. Rather, the book he would himself want to write. But X has not written a book! No, X hasn’t. It makes X very bitter. And now this thought makes you bitter. You are unable to work on your new project. You have angry thoughts. And that is where Kerouac comes to your rescue. He teaches you “to drive out angry thoughts.”

The rock of yr gladness! Thank you, Jack.

I saw that in one of his entries in SK11, Kerouac has recorded a visit to an astrologer. He has made drawings of “Blanche Fortunetelling’s cards of me.” She told him that he was “inwardly disturbed.” (Me too, me too, I cried in the silence of the library.) Back in my youth, when I was unable to get a room in the Delhi University hostel, and nothing else seemed to be going right in the world, an uncle of mine back in the village in Champaran said that I should put a bit of saffron in my navel every day. I hadn’t heard of anything stranger than this but I was taken with this suggestion because this uncle of mine, my father’s second cousin, had been giving advice also to the Chief Minister of Bihar at that time, Jagannath Mishra. When I next went for my interview with the hostel administrator, I was careful to do what my uncle had instructed. It didn’t help. I have written about this in my 2002 literary memoir Bombay-London-New York. As I said, I’m now nervous about this new novel coming out. Will it find readers? Why should any reader or reviewer agree with this no doubt kind-hearted and, most important, wise reviewer? Tastes differ, this is a free country, to each her own, etc.

I asked a close, loving relative in Patna what I should do. She spoke to a priest who said I should make an offering of rice to the needy on a Monday. Monday is two days from now.