The 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” occasions one very important publication and several that are less so. “On the Road: The Original Scroll” (Viking, 408 pages, $25.95) not only fulfills the legend of Kerouac’s 22-day typing spree, but provides a manuscript preferable to that published, in cleaned up form, in 1957.

Not that the scroll should supplant the book. Written on a long makeshift ream between April 2 and 22, 1951, and based on three years of false starts and notebook entries, the scroll was a first draft, written at great speed because, apparently, the book was not going to get written any other way. According to legend, Kerouac told his editor, Robert Giroux, that “There’ll be no editing on this manuscript. . . . This manuscript has been dictated by the holy ghost.” But Kerouac then spent the next 30 days making revisions, and in ensuing months he started writing other versions.

The book that Viking brought out six years later, in 1957, was edited with one eye on possible obscenity and libel charges and another on narrative efficiency. As scroll editor Howard Cunnell explains in his long and useful introduction, Kerouac anticipated these concerns in his own, early revisions. Then, as he grew desperate to get the book published, he became craven and impatient, telling editor Malcolm Cowley to make changes at will. But Cowley worked closely with Kerouac, and the final version of the book is probably as legitimate as any other work that goes through the publishing mill.

But what if Giroux had accepted the scroll sight unseen, way back in 1951? We would have a better book, for three reasons.

First, much more so than the final version, the scroll reads as single, propulsive prose breath. There are no paragraph breaks. The reason the scroll is a legend, indeed, has little to do with benzedrine or the holy ghost. It was coffee, not “benny,” that fueled Kerouac’s sprint. Rather, the reason we remember the anecdote about the continuous typing is that it evokes the road itself. Robert Rauschenberg tapped into the same metaphorical possibility in 1953, with “Automobile Tire Print,” in which his friend John Cage literally drove down a 23-foot scroll after bathing his tire with inky black paint. Cage’s Model A Truck became a printing press.

Second, the explicit material that Kerouac had to take out deserves to be in. This is tame stuff by today’s standards, much of it describing homosexual relationships crucial to Kerouac’s plot. In the 1957 version, the jealous friendship between Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady seems gay, but it’s helpful and funny to find out that Kerouac actually heard them going at it: “I was in the same room, I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to myself, ‘Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.'”

Third, the material Kerouac took out was often replaced with overworked imagism. For example, the homosexual scene above follows directly from the famous passages about “dingledodies” and roman candles. In the scroll, Kerouac writes that the mad people he loves “never yawn or say a commonplace thing … [sic] but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” The odd reference to roman candles is borne out by the sexual imagery that follows: “Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt.”

My old Penguin Classic has nothing about queer experimentation, but its roman candles are

fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everbody goes ‘Aww!’ What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?

Perhaps this imagery works as a diminuendo, as forgettable noise to give the reader time to digest the more substantial lyricism that precedes it: “They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank.” But as writing, the juxtaposition of such verbal fireworks and an allusion to Goethe do little to distinguish Kerouac from his immature fans.

Defensiveness, about Kerouac’s style and his youthful appeal, colors almost all the critical material published for this anniversary. Paul Maher Jr. has written a sensible biographical guide, “Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of ‘On the Road'” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 320 pages, $15.99). But he begins his book with a claustrophobic rebuttal to “the sly putdown by critics of Kerouac as a ‘Neanderthal of the typewriter.'” Another scholar, contributing an essay to the critical apparatus that prefaces the scroll manuscript, attempts to make Kerouac fashionable by claiming him as a good structuralist, who allegorically abandoned New Criticism when he had his narrator abandon road maps.

Most provocative, John Leland’s pop-scholarly”WhyKerouacMatters” (Viking, 206 pages, $23.95), suggests that Kerouac was no rebel, but a lover of tradition. There is some truth to this. Kerouac was a romantic who also loved bebop, and he felt as complicatedly about the wild Neal Cassady as Nick Carraway felt about Gatsby. But surely complicated feelings are the point. When Mr. Leland compares “On the Road” to “The Purpose Driven Life,” we have to wonder who he is trying kid.

Nothing argues better for a critical reevaluation of Kerouac than the scroll itself. Despite his purple passages, Kerouac was often a crisp, well-observed storyteller, and in the original manuscript we find more crispness and less purple. Mr. Leland, of the present commentators, at least realizes that Kerouac’s popularity with youth might not last forever. The scroll, then, nudges us toward an interpretation that might last to the book’s 100th anniversary: that “On the Road” is an absorbing novel with an amazingly high rate of incident and a naggingly honest brand of sentimentality.

blytal@nysun.com