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King''s ransom: here''s one thing that''s already great about UT: at the Humanities Research Center, you can see some of the most extraordinary cultural artifacts of all time. All you have to do is ask.

Article Excerpt
Here's one thing that's already great about UT: Center, you can see some of The most extraordinary cultural artifacts of all time. All you have to do is ask.

WHEN I WAS A STUDENT at the University of Texas at Austin in the early nineties, a story got around about the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. It didn't qualify as campus legend; too few people had heard it. It was more like a rumor, and it went like this: If you rode up to the fifth floor of the HRC--that is, if you could find the HRC, which was a chore before $14.5 million in renovations were completed this spring--you could fill out a request form and then be allowed to look at the journal Jack Kerouac kept while he was writing On the Road. That's right: the very journal, written in Kerouac's own hand in a small, spiral-bound notebook that was no doubt kept in the back pocket of his dirty blue jeans while he was, literally, on the road. [paragraph] But there was one thing you had to keep in mind. To see the journal, you had to have a valid reason. And if you weren't writing a biography of Kerouac or making a documentary on the Beats and you didn't feel comfortable lying, you could still get in if you remembered the magic word. Write "inspiration" in the space marked "purpose of research," and the keys to the kingdom were yours. [paragraph] I didn't give the story much thought at the time. But a few years later, when I was between careers and in possession of plenty of free time, I went by the HRC to suss things out. It happened that the rumor was true. A particularly helpful librarian pointed me not just to Kerouac's journal but to other items in the Kerouac collection. In papers obtained from the widow of Neal Cassady, Kerouac's friend and role model, were dozens of letters Kerouac wrote while he was struggling to find his voice. The stream-of-consciousness flow was there in his prose but none of the confidence. That changed, though, with the letters he wrote after On the Road was published. Suddenly his signature was taking up half a page.

An afternoon at the HRC turned into a week. I'd arrive in the morning, think of an artist, mad ask for the moon. Half an hour later, I'd be holding a handwritten draft of Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night or a letter from jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker written during his court-ordered dry-out at a California mental hospital. (Parker's handwriting was immaculate; each g looked like it had taken five minutes to write. But the message was less deliberate: "Man--please come right down here and get me out of this joint. I'm about to blow my top!")...

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