The Original Scroll
Edited by Howard Cunnell with Introductions by Howard Cunnell, Penny Vlagopoulos, George Mouratidis and Joshua Kupetz
PENGUIN BOOKS
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the descendant of Breton Canadians, and grew up as part of an alternative culture, speaking a regional, largely oral dialect of French, called Joual. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the subterranean throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country.
Kerouac gathered a wealth of material from his time on the road and his writing was openly autobiographical. He developed his own unique writing style, which he called ‘spontaneous prose’, and used this technique to record the experiences of the Beat Generation, most notably in On the Road and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums.
His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues, and the posthumously published Some of the Dharma and The Book of Sketches. His first orthodox published novel was The Town and the City. Kerouac left several works unfinished, including a portrait of William Burroughs, when he died in 1969.
Dedicated to the memory of
Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg
INTRODUCTIONS
Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road
HOWARD CUNNELL
Rewriting America: Kerouac’s Nation of “Underground Monsters”
PENNY VLAGOPOULOS
“Into the Heart of Things”: Neal Cassady and the Search for the Authentic
GEORGE MOURATIDIS
“The Straight Line Will Take You Only to Death”: The Scroll Manuscript and Contemporary Literary Theory
JOSHUA KUPETZ
Suggested Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text by Howard Cunnell
On the Road: The Original Scroll
Appendix by Howard Cunnell
Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road
Howard Cunnell
“I’ve telled all the road now,” Jack Kerouac said in a May 22, 1951 letter he sent from New York west across the land to his friend Neal Cassady in San Francisco. “Went fast because the road is fast.” Kerouac told Cassady that between April 2 and April 22 he had written a “125,000 [word] full-length novel … Story deals with you and me and the road.” He had written the “whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long … just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs … rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.”
Like everything else about him, the story of how Jack Kerouac came to write On the Road became a legend. Certainly when I read the book at sixteen my friend Alan knew all about it. He had read it first and now he was wearing a white T-shirt and low-hipped Levi’s and listening to George Shearing. This was in a sun-washed white-and-blue seaside town on the south coast of England twenty-five years ago. Kerouac was high on Benzedrine when he wrote On the Road, Alan told me, and he wrote it all in three weeks on a long roll of Teletype paper, no punctuation. Just sat down with bop on the radio and blasted it out and it was all true-life stories, every word, all about riding the roads across America with his mad friend Dean, and jazz, drink, girls, drugs, freedom. I didn’t know what bop or Benzedrine was but I found out, and I bought a bunch of records by Shearing and Slim Gaillard. On the Road be the first book I’d read or heard of with a built-in soundtrack.
After I read On the Road and tried to find other books by Kerouac it was always the same story that I heard. On the dust jacket of my old English copy of Visions of Cody it says that On the Road was written “in 1952 in a few hectic days on a scroll of newsprint.” The story goes that Kerouac grabbed the scroll and raced over to Robert Giroux, the editor at Harcourt, Brace who had worked with Kerouac on The Town and the City, the novel he had published the previous spring. Kerouac rolled the road out in front of him and Giroux, not getting it, asked Kerouac how could the printer work from that? A story that whether true or not perfectly expresses the collision of straight America and a new subterranean hipster generation come to tell you about IT. Books, if not exactly square, certainly didn’t look like this. Kerouac takes the novel away and refuses to revise it and goes on the road again to California and Mexico, and he discovers Buddhism and spontaneous prose and writes more novels fast one after another in little notebooks that nobody dares publish. Years go by before Viking buys On the Road. Allen Ginsberg says that the published novel is not at all like the wild book Kerouac typed in ’51. Ginsberg says that someday when “everybody’s dead” the “original mad” book will be published as it is.
In his May 22, 1951 letter to Neal Cassady, Kerouac had explained that “of course since Apr. 22 I’ve been typing and revising. Thirty days on that,” and Kerouac’s closest friends knew he had been working on the book at least since 1948. Fifty years on from the novel’s eventual publication, however, the defining images of Jack Kerouac and On the Road in the cultural imagination remain his apparent frenzied channeling of a true-life story; the never-ending roll of paper billowing from the typewriter like the imagined road, and the T-shirts Kerouac sweated through as he speed typed hanging to dry in the apartment like victory flags. Kerouac’s clattering typewriter is folded in with Jackson Pollock’s furious brushstrokes and Charlie Parker’s escalating and spiraling alto saxophone choruses in a trinity representing the breakthrough of a new postwar counterculture seemingly built on sweat, immediacy, and instinct, rather than apprenticeship, craft, and daring practice.
We’ve known for a while now that there is much more to it than this, just as the novel is far more spiritual quest than how-to-be-a-hipster manual. On the Road does not appear out of clear blue air. From Kerouac’s writing journals we know that during his travels through America and Mexico from 1947 to 1950 he collected material for a road novel he first mentions by name in an entry dated August 23, 1948. On the Road, Kerouac writes, “which I keep thinking about: [is] about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.”
The impossible romance of the three weeks in April continues to dominate the imagination when we think about Jack Kerouac. The original scroll version of On the Road is the key document in the history of one of the most enduringly popular and influential novels published in the last fifty years, and among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. Here I trace a compositional and publication history of On the Road. The story is about work, ambition, and rejection, but it is also about transformation. These are the years in which Kerouac transforms himself from a promising young novelist into the most successfully experimental writer of his generation. The key texts in this story are the original scroll version of On the Road, and Visions of Cody, which Kerouac began in the fall of the year in which he wrote the scroll. Because the scroll is the wildflower from which the magic garden of Visions of Cody grows, it is the pivotal text in the story of Jack Kerouac and his place in American literature. The story is also, of course, about Neal Cassady.
As Kerouac neared the completion of The Town and the City in the late summer and fall of 1948 he was already thinking about his second book. Kerouac worked on The Town and the City between 1947 and 1949, and the novel was published on March 2, 1950. In the latter half of Kerouac’s first novel can be found many of the themes that will dominate his second, while in the original version of On the Road the reader marks the progress “Jack” makes in The Town and the City. If the style of On the Road can be read as a reaction to and a progression from that of the earlier book, then the original version of Road, which begins with the death of the father just as The Town and the City ends with that death, also shows how Kerouac’s second novel should be read as a sequel to his first.
It would take a full-length book to do justice properly to the amount of writing Kerouac produced between 1948 and 1951 as he worked on his second novel. Writing most often late into the night he filled notebooks, journals, hundreds of manuscript pages, and letters, as well as conversations, with ideas for it. In October of 1948 Kerouac wrote in his journal that his ideas for On the Road “obsess me so much I can’t conceal them.” To Hal Chase on October 19 Kerouac wrote that his work plans “overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers.”
One way of navigating the material is through the three major proto-versions of the novel that Kerouac writes between August 1948 and April 1951. These are the fifty-four-page “Ray Smith Novel of Fall 1948,” the Red Moultrie/Vern [later Dean] Pomery Jr. versions of 1949, of which the longest draft is also fifty-four pages, and “Gone on the Road,” a thirty-page, heavily corrected seven-chapter version featuring Cook Smith and Dean Pomeray that Kerouac typed in Richmond Hill in August of 1950. These stories are where Kerouac gives formal expression to the ideas that fill his dreams and notebooks.
In them, Kerouac is consciously trying to write a novel the way novels had always been written, fusing what he remembers with what he can make. Things must stand for other things. Elaborate backstories and histories must be built to explain why his people take to the road. They are to be half brothers in blood, searching for a lost inheritance, for fathers, for family, for home, even for America. Maybe they’ll be part Comanche to better illustrate what they have lost.* He accumulates and rehearses set pieces in his notebooks. The myth of the rainy night. Versions of the dream of the shrouded stranger. The remembered horror of waking in a cheap Iowa hotel room not knowing who or where he was but only that he was getting old and death was getting nearer. Again and again he returns to the death of the father.
For and against Kerouac as he works is the sweet inviting world outside his window. The writing of the novel, begun before Kerouac first travels on the road with Neal Cassady in December of 1948, is tested, broken, and changed by the subsequent transcontinental trips Kerouac makes with him that will in the end become the story of the book and that Kerouac faithfully records in his travel journals. His focus widens as he moves from New York into the West, then back and farther on into the East and then West again and down into Mexico. The places where the imagined book and the lived experiences intersect are the places where what the book is to become are negotiated. What is being negotiated is the relationship between fiction and truth, where truth is understood by Kerouac to mean, “the way consciousness really digs everything that happens.”
As Penny Vlagopoulos explains in the essay that follows, Kerouac is consciously writing against a monological and fearful cold war culture that encouraged Americans in self-surveillance and self-censorship and the transmission of politically acceptable levels of reality. Working on the novel in 1949 Kerouac often visited John Clellon Holmes and showed him his work-in-progress. Holmes writes,
When he came by in the late afternoons, he usually had new scenes with him, but his characters never seemed to get very far beyond [what]… a well-made novel seemed to demand as a contrast to all the footloose uprootedness to come. He wrote long, intricate Melvil-lian sentences… I would have given anything I owned to have written such tidal prose, and yet he threw it out, and began again, and failed again, and grew moody and perplexed.
Excepting those writers, such as Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Joyce, who clearly influenced him, fiction, even and especially well-made European fiction, was linked in Kerouac’s imagination with both an aesthetic and political culture of self-censorship. The old forms of fiction obscured meaning; stopped you getting at what was underneath. On the Road is the beginning of a process in which Kerouac dismantles and then radically reapplies what he has learned as a fiction writer so that he can, as John Holmes writes, “free the whole range of his consciousness to the page.”
In the “Ray Smith Novel of Fall 1948” Smith, who will reappear as the practiced hitchhiking narrator of The Dharma Bums (1958), barely gets on the road at all. Young Smith decides to travel to California from New York after finding out that his forty-year-old girlfriend Lulubelle has taken up with a man her own age. Ray gets stuck in the rain north of New York City at Bear Mountain because of his foolish dream of thinking he can ride Route 6 all the way to the West Coast. At Bear Mountain, Smith meets Warren Beauchamp, a blond, troubled, privileged Franco-American boy who persuades Ray to travel back with him to New York so that Beauchamp can get money from his family and continue the trip West. The narrative comes to a dead end in a drunken night in New York. Beauchamp’s alcoholic father passes out, and the boys go to Times Square looking for Ray Smith’s friends Leon Levinsky [Allen Ginsberg], Junkey [Herbert Huncke] and a place to stay. Smith meets Paul Jefferson, Lulubelle’s half brother, and eventually Smith and Beauchamp tramp back to Harlem and sleep on Lulubelle’s floor while Lulubelle’s new lover sleeps in Ray’s place in her bed.
In his journal Kerouac writes that he has “no idea where I’m heading with the novel.” On December 1 Kerouac writes a chapter insert titled “Tea Party,” typing the manuscript on December 8. In the story Smith and Beauchamp and various subterranean East Coast hipsters including Junkey and Levinsky meet at Peter Martin’s sister Liz’s apartment to smoke marijuana and inject morphine.
Here Kerouac writes the dream of movement, the journey stalled, and the compensation of drugs that would promote an interior voyage. So that the world might at least appear transformed, just as Liz Martin disguises her apartment as a proletarian slum while the back room is decorated with black and red painted walls and drapes, candles, and “cheap Five-and-Ten Buddhas belching incense.”
In The Town and the City Kerouac traced how the postwar generation had begun to disperse to places that William Burroughs in Junky called “ambiguous or transitional districts.” A transracial, transgendered counterculture had begun to emerge among these small, interlocking New York subterranean communities of writers and artists, street hustlers and drug users, homosexuals, and jazz musicians, but Peter Martin and Ray Smith found only uneasy refuge enclosed and corralled in these transitional districts. They needed to move.
John Clellon Holmes astutely noted that the “the breakup of [Kerouac’s] Lowell-home, the chaos of the war years and the death of his father, had left him disrupted, anchorless, a deeply traditional nature thrown out of kilter, and thus enormously sensitive to anything uprooted, bereft, helpless or persevering.” To Kerouac, this personal sense of loss and restlessness recorded in The Town and the City led to faith in the possibilities of movement, and to a connection with the historic aspirational American belief in movement as the means of self-transformation. From Whitman’s Song of the Open Road to Cormac McCarthy’s bleakly radiant postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), the road narrative has always been central to America’s cultural representations of itself. When in a 1949 notebook Kerouac described his decision to set his second novel on the road, he said it was “like a message from God giving a sure direction.”
The road would occupy Kerouac from the beginning to the end of his writing life. In 1940 he wrote a four-page short story called “Where the Road Begins” that explored the contending attractions of the open road and the joy of returning home again. The Town and the City is in part a road narrative, as Joe Martin, intoxicated by the perfume of spring flowers and “the sharp pungent smell of exhaust fumes on the highway, and the heat of the highway itself cooling under the stars,” and embodying and anticipating a new American generation’s questing need to go, feels himself fated and driven to take a “wild wonderful trip out West, anywhere, everywhere.” In the month of his death Kerouac submitted reworked and previously discarded material from On the Road to his agent Sterling Lord as the novel Pic (posthumously published in 1971).
As Holmes writes, Kerouac, as Americans always have, “hankered for the West, for Western health and openness of spirit, for the immemorial dream of freedom [and] joy.” The on-the-move outsider nation of On the Road dramatizes Kerouac’s strong belief that this elemental American idealism, this faith in a place at the end of the road where you could make both a home and a stand had, in Holmes’s words, “been outlawed to the margins of American life in his time. His most persistent desire in those days was to chronicle what was happening on those margins.”
Kerouac writes from those margins. The love of America that so distinguishes On the Road and Visions of Cody came from Kerouac’s own double sense of himself as both American and French Canadian. This idea of Kerouac as a postcolonial writer is confirmed most particularly by his magic-realist novel Doctor Sax, in which Kerouac writes the French-Canadian experience into the American national narrative in a way similar to Salman Rushdie’s inscription of the Anglo-Indian experience in Midnight’s Children. Interestingly, Kerouac was working on both Road and Sax at the same time and considered merging the two novels. As late as the summer of 1950 he was using a French-Canadian narrator for Road, but only traces remain of Sax in that novel.
More than anything else the story of On the Road returns again and again to Neal Cassady. Cassady was Kerouac’s lost brother returned; the longed-for adventuring Western hero made young again; and the living expression of the Dionysian side of Kerouac’s own dual nature. Cassady, as Kerouac would write in Visions of Cody, was the one “who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling,” but he was also a destructive presence from whose speed-freak con-man mystique Kerouac sometimes felt the need to escape. They met in 1947 but did not ride together until December of 1948, and with each new adventure Kerouac steered the novel further toward him. He was variously named Vern Pomery Jr., Dean Pomery Jr., Dean Pomeray Jr., Neal Cassady, Dean Moriarty, and in Visions of Cody, Cody Pomeray. In the scroll Kerouac makes the connection explicit:
My interest in Neal is the interest I might have had in my brother that died when I was five years old to be utterly straight about it. We have a lot of fun together and our lives are fuckt up and so there it stands. Do you know how many states we’ve been in together?
Kerouac and Cassady made two trips in late December with LuAnne Henderson and Al Hinkle, shuttling family belongings from Rocky Mount, North Carolina (where Kerouac was spending Christmas with his family), to the Kerouac home in Ozone Park, New York. After New Year’s celebrations in New York the four drove to Algiers, Louisiana, to visit Bill Burroughs and his family. Herbert Huncke and Hinkle’s new wife Helen were also staying in Burroughs’s ramshackle house by the bayou. Leaving Hinkle in Louisiana with Helen, Cassady, LuAnne, and Kerouac then proceeded to San Francisco. Kerouac returned to New York alone in February.
On March 29, 1949, Kerouac learned that Harcourt, Brace had accepted The Town and the City. A jubilant Kerouac continued work on On the Road, filling notebook pages with plans and writing to Alan Harrington on April 23 “I start work in earnest on my second novel this week.” Kerouac reports the arrests in New Orleans of Bill Burroughs for drug and weapons possession, and in New York of Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Vicki Russell, and Little Jack Melody after the police raided Ginsberg’s apartment and found drugs and stolen goods. The arrest of his friends, the fear that he might be questioned himself, and the acceptance of his novel led Kerouac to write that he was at a turning point in his life, “the end of my ‘youth.’ ” Kerouac was “determined to start a new life.” In this new version of the novel there would be “no more” Ray Smith. Instead, Red Moultrie, a merchant seaman imprisoned in New York on drugs charges, will look for God, family, and home in the West.
In May, Kerouac traveled to Denver as a soon-to-be-published young novelist with a thousand-dollar advance. Hitchhiking to save money, Kerouac was “itching” to establish the family home he had dreamed about for years. On a late-May Sunday afternoon Kerouac writes that starting “On the Road’ back in Ozone, and here, is difficult. I wrote one full year before starting T & C, (1946)—but this mustn’t happen again. Writing is my work… so I’ve got to move.” On June 2 Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle, his sister Caroline and brother-in-law Paul Blake, and their son Paul Jr. joined Kerouac at the house he had leased at 6100 West Center Avenue in Denver. On June 13 Kerouac writes that he is at “the true beginning” of On the Road.
By the first week of July, Kerouac was alone again. Gabrielle and Caroline and her family were unhappy in the west and had returned home. On July 16 Harcourt, Brace editor Robert Giroux flew to Denver to work with Kerouac on the manuscript of The Town and the City.
Kerouac typed and revised a twenty-four-page handwritten draft of the beginning of a new version of Road titled “Shades of the Prison House. Chapter 1 On the Road - May-July 1949.” The manuscript is marked New York-Colorado, indicating that Kerouac wrote the handwritten draft in Ozone Park and brought it West. “Shades of the Prison House” is informed by Kerouac’s trips with Cassady earlier in the year and the stories Cassady had told him about his boyhood, by Kerouac’s hopefulness for the impending publication of The Town and the City, and by the arrest and imprisonment of his friends in April. Kerouac may also have been remembering his arrest and brief imprisonment as a material witness and accessory after the fact in Lucien Carr’s killing of Dave Kammerer in August 1944. Above all, in this period of fragile optimism, the new version of On the Road was buoyed by Kerouac’s abiding love of God.
In a cell in the Bronx jail overlooking the Harlem River, Red Moultrie leans against the worn bars and watches the red sunset over New York the night before his release. To “the cops [Red] was just another young character of the streets—nameless, anonymous, and beat.” Brown eyes “red in the light of the sun; tall, rocky, dogged, sober-souled,” Red is twenty-seven and “growing older all the time and his life was slipping away.” He plans to go to New Orleans and has ten dollars from “Old Bull” to get there. From New Orleans, Red will drive to San Francisco with his half brother Vern Pomery Jr., and from there Red will go home to Denver to look for his wife, child, and father. Pomery is to be a representation of Cassady, and he appears here for the first time in the projected novel as an idea, a phantom presence on the far horizon of the text.
Red is haunted by “the great realities from the other world which appeared to him in dreams like the dream of the shrouded stranger,” in which he is pursued through “Araby” and seeks refuge in the “Protective City.” Watching the splendid sunset Red decides to follow the direction he sees in the evening sky:
The blushing sunset on this last night in jail was a hint from immense nature telling him that all things could very well return to him if he would only pray … “God make everything right,” he prayed in a whisper. He shuddered. “I’m all alone. I want to be loved, I’ve got no place to go.” Whatever that dark thing was he kept on missing … mattered no more. He had to go home.
In August, Kerouac closed up the house and left Denver to visit Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Francisco. In On the Road Kerouac writes:
I was burning to know what was on his mind and what would happen now, for there was nothing behind me any more, all my bridges were gone and I didn’t give a damn about anything at all.
Kerouac arrived in California as the marriage of Neal and Carolyn seemed to be imploding. Pregnant, Carolyn threw Neal out, and Jack suggested Neal come back with him to New York. They traveled east where they visited Kerouac’s first wife Edie in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Kerouac writes that this “memorable voyage described elsewhere sometime. (In “Rain & Rivers” book).” The “Rain and Rivers” journal, a notebook given to him by Cassady in January 1949, was where Kerouac recorded the majority of the journeys and specific adventures that would come to make up the narrative of the novel. As Kerouac struggles to identify and articulate the themes of his novel in his notebooks and proto-fiction, the narrative is, perhaps unknowingly at first, recorded in these travel journals.
By late August, Jack and Neal had arrived in New York. The two friends walked all over Long Island because, as Kerouac will write in On the Road, they were so used to moving but “there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean and we could only go so far. We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.” On August 25 Kerouac resumed what he calls his “ragged work” on the road novel while with Robert Giroux he continued preparing The Town and the City for publication the following spring. Kerouac typed a fifty-four-page revised double-spaced version of “Shades of the Prison House.” The sunset now appears “goldenly” in an “opening in the firmament between great dark cloudbanks.”
The central joyous source of the universe was always there, and clear as ever, when at last some strange earthly confluence forced the clouds apart, and as if curtains were drawn by arrangement, revealed the everlasting light itself: the pearl of heaven flaming on high.
Red’s long night ends in a list of names and images from Kerouac’s travels and private mythology. Kerouac’s incantation covers pages 49-53, and these pages are single spaced in contrast to the double spacing of the rest of the typescript, suggesting the book to come, the book still to write and imagined in reverberating fragments:
Fresno, Selma, Southern Pacific Railroad; cottonfields, grapes, grapey dusk; trucks, dust, tent, San Joaquin, Mexicans, Okies, highway, red workflags; Bakersfield, boxcars, palms, moon, watermelon, gin, woman …
The typescript ends on the morning of Red’s release. Red hears birds singing “and the Sunday bells at seven did begin to peal.”
On the verso of page 54 Kerouac has handwritten “Foolscap for New Beginning ‘ On the Road’ Aug 25 1949 - Reserving back of these pages for opening of new Part Two - THE STORY JUST BEGINS.” By hand Kerouac begins the new story set where he had just spent the summer, in Colorado. It is 1928. Old Wade Moultrie owns a two-hundred-acre farm worked by his son Smiley Moultrie and Smiley’s best friend Vern Pomery. There was “a touch of the old West” in Old Wade, and when he pulls a revolver on some “young hoodlums” trying to steal his Ford he is shot and killed. This has nothing to do, Kerouac writes, “with our heroes Red Moultrie and Vern Pomery Jr.” In a journal entry for August 29 Kerouac notes:
Resuming true serious work I find that I have grown lazy in my heart … And why that is—for one thing, indirectly speaking, I cannot for instance as yet understand why my father is dead … no meaning, all unseemly, and incomplete.
By September 6 this same journal had become the “Official Log of the ‘Hip Generation,’ ” as he was now calling On the Road. “I haven’t really worked since May 1948,” he writes. “Time to get going… Let’s see if I can write a novel.” The eighteen-page “Hip Generation” story Kerouac then begins to write continues the story he had begun on the back page of the August 25 version of “Shades of the Prison House,” while cutting the jail material.
Red’s mother Mary Moultrie has an affair with Dean Pomery and dies giving birth to Red’s half brother Dean Pomery Jr. Wade Moultrie’s farm has gone to ruin in the years after his death, a death Kerouac intended to stand for the passing of the values of the Old West and for the passing of a kind of moral compass, a north star certainty lost to Kerouac’s fatherless travelers.
Still Kerouac is writing around the road. The road exists in future time, to be traveled when Red gets out of jail or when he and Vern grow up out of the backstory Kerouac constructs in place of the jail episodes. Kerouac is writing the why of the road, not the road itself. He is committed to the aspirational elements of the story even as the events that inspired those elements, bringing his family West, his status as a young novelist with a future, had either collapsed or been made to seem suddenly fragile again. If he could not successfully make a home in the West perhaps the novel might also fail. It was difficult to write about Red’s leaving the prison of life to go back home to his inheritance and to his family when Kerouac was effectively homeless, his dreamed Western home collapsed; his marriage to Edie emphatically over; and the thousand-dollar “inheritance” from Harcourt vanished into the air.
For much of the rest of September Kerouac worked on The Town and the City manuscript at the New York offices of Harcourt, Brace. When this work was finished Kerouac wrote that he was “once more ready to resume On the Road,” before confessing on September 29 that
I’ve got to admit I’m stuck with On the Road. For the first time in years I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I SIMPLY DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE REAL IDEA WHAT TO DO
The next day, and writing that he was not a “hipster… Nor am I Red Moultrie… I am not even Smitty, I’m none of them,” Kerouac claimed to have settled the problem of his inability to write:
The world really does not matter, but God has made it so, and so it matters in God, and He Hath Aims for it, which we cannot know without the understanding of obedience. There is nothing to do but give praise. This is my ethic of “art” and why so.
On October 17, 1949, Kerouac writes that it is still “impossible to say ‘Road’ has really begun.” “I really began On the Road in October of 1948,” he writes, “an entire year ago. Not much to show for a year, but the first year is always slow.” Still, Kerouac thought, the novel was “about to move.” By the end of the month Kerouac writes to “hell with it; don’t worry, simply do.” He trusted that in the “work itself” he would find his way, but writes, “still don’t feel On the Road is begun.”
In November, and writing in the back of his “On the Road Readings and Notes, 1949” journal begun in the spring of that year, where he had made notes for episodes in the novel including “The Tent in the San Joaquin Valley” and “Marin City and the barracks cops-job,” Kerouac writes a “New Itinerary and Plan.” Above a drawn map of America marked with the names of the towns and cities where the action of the novel would take place Kerouac wrote “On the Road” and “Reverting to a Simpler style - Further draft + beginning - Nov 1949.” The novel would begin in the New York jail and move through New Orleans, San Francisco, Montana, Denver, and back to Times Square in New York. The list of characters Kerouac notes includes Moultrie and “Dean Pomeray,” “Slim Jackson,” brother of Pic, “Old Bull,” and “Marylou.”
In notes and manuscript fragments written in the new year Kerouac returned to the themes of loss, uncertainty, and crowding mortality. A ten-page manuscript dated January 19, 1950, handwritten in French and translated by Kerouac (“On the Road ECRIT EN FRANCAIS”) begins
After the death of his father—Peter Martin found himself alone in the world, and after all what is a man going to do when his father is buried deep in the ground other than die himself in his heart and know that it won’t be the last time before he dies finally in his poor mortal body, and, himself a father of children and sire of a family he will return to the original form of a piece of adventurous dust in this fatal ball of earth.
The running theme of the search for the father who is dead and the Father who is God gives us to understand that death, as Tom Clark has written, was “the ground bass of [Kerouac’s] understanding of life, the undertow that moved the deep currents in his work and gave it what Kerouac himself called… ‘that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through.’ ” The deaths of his brother Gerard, his father Leo, his best friend Sebastian. His drowned dead friends among the crew of the SS Dorchester sunk by torpedo on February 3, 1943. War dead, Hiroshima dead. The bomb that had come, as Kerouac writes, was one which could “crack all our bridges and banks and reduce them to jumbles like the avalanche heap.” And it is death, in the form of the dreamed figure of the shrouded stranger, who pursues the traveler across the land.
Long before his readings in Buddhism Kerouac was intuitively attempting to reconcile a worldview that saw his lived experience both as one made painfully meaningless by his hard-wired knowledge of mortality and as one to be celebrated in every detail and at every moment precisely because, as he writes in Visions of Cody, we are soon “all going to die.” Kerouac escapes this encircling loss in the act of writing. To say what happened. To get it down before it is lost. To make mythology from your life and from the lives of your friends. This urgency pushes Kerouac to strip his writing of “made-up” stories. Life’s impermanence and the inevitability of suffering inform and motivate Kerouac’s heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world. What Allen Ginsberg called his “open heart” and Kerouac himself described as being “submissive to everything, open, listening” results in a body of fiction in which the representation of the magical nature of entrancing and life-affirming fleeting detail is the outstanding feature.
In the early months of 1950 Kerouac anxiously looked forward to the publication of his first novel, asking, “Will I be rich or poor? Will I be famous or forgotten?” On February 20 he confesses, “I gloat more & more in the fact that I may be rich & famous soon.” The Town and the City was published on March 2, 1950, and on March 8 Kerouac admits that the “swirl” of publication had “interrupted the work I was doing on Road.” As it became clear to him that The Town and the City would not be a financial success he began again to worry about money and about his mother, who, he wrote, “can’t work forever.” These worries together with the “one-eyed” reception of his novel left him unable to write. On April 3 he writes, “BOOK NOT SELLING MUCH. Wasn’t born to be rich.”
At the invitation of William Burroughs, Kerouac traveled to Mexico City from Denver with Frank Jeffries and Neal Cassady in June 1950. After Cassady left Mexico, Kerouac and Jeffries moved into an apartment on Insurgentes Boulevard across from the house rented by William and Joan Burroughs. Writing to his Denver friend Ed White on July 5 Kerouac explained that he was intent on investigating “all the levels” of “mile-and-a-half-high” consciousness promoted by smoking Mexican marijuana, “particuarly with reference to the many problems and considerations of that second novel I have to write.” The sentences might crack open when he was high.
Kerouac wrote that because when he was smoking marijuana his “deep subconscious thoughts” often came to him in his native Franco-American French, he had created a hero, Wilfred Boncoeur, who was French Canadian but whose ambiguous postcolonial status is suggested by his “English silliness.” Referencing the foundation text of the narrative tradition in which he was consciously working Kerouac wrote that he intended to have Boncoeur travel with a companion named “Cousin” who would act as “Panza to the hero’s Quixote.” Kerouac makes notes for the Freddy “Goodheart” novel in the 120-page “Road Workbook” he kept in Mexico that summer. Boncoeur has been told his father Smiley is dead but “I did not believe it.” When he is fifteen Freddy is told his father was “really alive but nobody knew where,” and he and Cousin go on the road to find him.
Eventually worried that “Freddy” at fifteen would be too young to tell the novel “right,” Kerouac changed tack once more, writing that the novel would still have a French-Canadian narrator but that the “F.C narrator is me.” Kerouac then rejected the idea of writing “auto-biograph straight like Tom Wolfe” because it wouldn’t be “archetypal.” His narrator would instead be the roaming French-Canadian “Cook” Smith.
In his Mexican journal Kerouac wrote:
But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges.
Enough of notes on all this Road business since Oct ’48 (or a year and a half + more) and start writing the thing.
I am.
The Cook is the guy
Back in Richmond Hill in August Kerouac typed the “Private Ms. OF Gone on the Road—COMPLETE FIRST TREATMENT AND WITH MINOR ARTISTIC CORRECTIONS.” “Cook” Smith, “not yet ready for the road, not at all,” wakes up in a boardinghouse room in Des Moines, Iowa, not knowing who or where he is, realizing only in the void of his “hollowed mind” that he is growing older and death is growing nearer. At his job as a short-order cook Smith makes a free hamburger meal for an old black hobo who in return sings Smith a blues about the death of his father. After being in Iowa for months Smith determines to hitch home to his wife Laura in Denver, after God, “with a stroke of fleece upon my mind,” tells Smith she is still his girl. For sixteen dollars traveling money Smith moves a box of mostly European books belonging to his German landlord. In the “sad, red, European light” of Iowa Smith fails to sell the books or even give them away.
On the road west Smith meets a young black man who is also hitchhiking. After watching the man, who may be Slim Jackson, walk out of sight, Smith is picked up by a Texan truckdriver who lets him sleep. Smith then dreams Red Moultrie’s dream of being pursued by a shrouded stranger as he tries to escape from some “Araby-land to the Protective City.”
Waking up Smith is let out by the truckdriver in Stuart, Iowa. There he meets a talkative, free and easy “license-plate thief” who is traveling east to a Notre Dame football game by hitchhiking in the day and stealing cars by night. The young man, whose name is Dean Pomeray, reminds Smith that they had met in Denver, at Welton and Fifteenth. The story ends as Smith and Pomeray sit talking in the waiting room of the telegraph office in Stuart.
“Gone on the Road” further dramatizes Kerouac’s interior struggle to find his own voice and free his creative self from an imprisoning and intimidating European literary tradition. Watched by a bored waitress in a diner, Smith is showered by the old books that fall on his head through a hole in the box he carries them in. Standing under a waterfall of European literature Smith knows that he strikes “an awful pose” to the young American woman watching. This heavy symbolism is smoothed out in the published novel as Sal Paradise, whose own dream of not knowing where he is also takes place at the junction of the east of his past and the west of his future, sits on a bus reading the American landscape in preference to Alain-Fournier’s great novel of boyhood friendship, love, and loss, Le Grand Meaulnes. As Cook Smith joins Dean Pomeray, Kerouac leaves behind the “sad, red, European light,” and the pose of European books to travel “back to everybody” in America.
At the end of the story the frustration Kerouac was feeling after more than two years working on a novel still obstinately stalled boiled over in a direct appeal to God:
Pomeray was too excited to notice any of these things that norm—[Dear God please help me, I am lost]—ally drove him into excited explanations of all kinds.
On the verso of the title page Kerouac wrote his own self-criticism—“Prettifying life like a teahead.”
Kerouac sent “Gone on the Road” to Robert Giroux, who, while not rejecting it outright, suggested Kerouac revise the story. In the fall of 1950 Kerouac was smoking “three bombs a day [and] thinking about unhappiness all the time.” He had once imagined On the Road as one in an ambitious “American Times” series of novels to be “narrated in the voices of Americans themselves.” The ten-year-old African American boy Pic would narrate “Adventures on the Road” while other books in the series would be narrated by “Mexicans, Indians, French-Canadians, Italians, Westerners, dilettantes, jailbirds, hoboes, hipsters and many more.” But where was his voice? Rather than revise “Gone on the Road,” he began again.
On Wednesday, December 20, 1950, Kerouac started handwriting a new version of his road novel titled “Souls on the Road.” The five-page manuscript begins
One night in America when the sun had gone down—beginning at four of the winter afternoon in New York by shedding a beautiful burnished gold in the air that made dirty old buildings look like the walls of the temple of the world… then outflying its own shades as it raced three thousand 200 miles over raw, bulging land to the West Coast before sloping down the Pacific, leaving the great rearguard shroud of night to creep upon our earth, to darken rivers, to cup the peaks and fold the final shore in—a knock came at the door of Mrs Gabrielle Kerouac’s apartment over a drugstore in the Ozone Park section of Greater New York.
At the door is Neal Cassady. The images of the sun going down over the “raw, bulging land” of America, of night coming to “darken rivers, to cup the peaks and fold the final shore” are taken from “Shades of the Prison House,” and will of course resurface in the final paragraph of the published novel. In rearranged sequence the episodes Kerouac writes here, in which “Jack Kerouac” recounts his first meeting with “Neal Cassady” in “an apartment in the slums” of Spanish Harlem and Cassady comes to Ozone Park to ask Kerouac to teach him to write, have all the elements of the opening chapter of the published book.
On the manuscript Kerouac has crossed out the name “Benjamin Baloon” in the line “And Benjamin Baloon went to the door” and replaced it with the name “Jack Kerouac.” Kerouac had originally written that it “was Dean Pomeray” at the door, replacing “Dean Pomeray” with “Neal Cassady.” From page three Ben and Dean become Jack and Neal.
Aside from this momentum, what led to the three-week burst of writing in April 1951? Key influences have to include Kerouac’s mostly friendly competition with John Clellon Holmes (whose novel Go, published in 1952 and featuring portraits of Kerouac and Cassady, Kerouac would read in March 1951), Dashiell Hammett’s locomotive prose, and Burroughs’s own straight-ahead novel in manuscript (then called Junk). Central importance, however, must be given to the long “Joan Anderson and Cherry Mary” letter from Neal Cassady that Kerouac picked up from the front step of his mother’s apartment in Richmond Hill on December 27, 1950. Kerouac’s exuberant same-day reply to Cassady’s urgent story of sexual misadventure, in which he said that he thought it “ranked among the best things ever written in America,” suggests that the effects of the letter on Kerouac were immediate and complex (Joan Haverty also wrote to Cassady on the twenty-seventh, telling him that Jack “read [the letter] on the subway on his way into town… [and] spent two more hours reading it in a café”).
“Souls on the Road” shows that Kerouac had already moved toward autobiographical fiction but had not yet made the critical switch to a first-person narrative. It was Cassady’s long, fast, sexually frank and detailed first-person story, broken and interrupted by what Cassady called his “Hollywood flashbacks,” that confirmed and encouraged Kerouac to push further in the direction he was already headed. What survives of the letter was published as “To have seen a specter isn’t everything…” in Cassady’s book The First Third. The fragment is interesting both for its mixture of confession and boastfulness and for what Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Cassady’s “hustling voice,” a voice brilliantly captured by Kerouac in the novel. Cassady’s prose, as Ferlinghetti notes, is “homespun, primitive [and] has a certain naïve charm, at once antic and antique, often awkward and doubling back upon itself, like a fast talker.”
“All the crazy falldarall you two boys make over my Big Letter,” Cassady told Ginsberg on March 17, 1951, “just thrills the gurgles out of me, but we still know I’m a whiff and a dream. Nonetheless, tho I blush over its inadequacies, I want you to realize the damn thing took up the better part of three straight Benzidrene afternoons and evenings. So I did work hard at it and managed to burn a little juice out of me and if the fucking thing is worth any money thats great.”
Kerouac’s response suggests that what most excited him about Cassady’s letter was what he might do with this method. Kerouac sounded at times as if he were talking to himself; as though he were writing rules for a new method he would soon apply. “You gather together all the best styles… of Joyce, Celine, Dosty & Proust,” he wrote, “and utilize them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style & excitement… You wrote it with painful rapidity & can patch it up later.”
In the ten letters he sent Cassady over the next two weeks, Kerouac took Cassady’s method and amplified it until, as Allen Ginsberg notes, he had developed a style that
was the long confessional of two buddies telling each other everything that happened, every detail, every cunt-hair in the grass included, every tiny eyeball flick of orange neon flashed past in Chicago in the bus station; all the back of the brain imagery. This required sentences that did not necessarily follow exact classic-type syntactical order, but which allowed for interruption with dashes, allowed for the sentences to break in half, take another direction (with parentheses that might go on for paragraphs). It allowed for individual sentences that might not come to their period except after several pages of self reminiscence, of interruption and the piling on of detail, so that what you arrived at was a sort of stream of consciousness visioned around a specific subject (the tale of the road) and a specific view point (two buddies late at night meeting and recognizing each other like Dostoevsky characters and telling each other the tale of their childhood).
Kerouac’s letters, most often read as spontaneous responses to Cassady, are in many of their episodes and details developments of notes and story fragments he had first made on December 13, 1950, also under the title “Souls on the Road.” These notes include thirty-five numbered “memories,” ranging from the story about Kerouac’s mother’s picking “worms from my ass-hole”; his “riding licketysplit” down a street near Lupine Road; and the haunted “One Mighty Snake Hill Castle” on Lakeview Avenue, many of which Kerouac worked into the letters he sends Cassady. This is not to diminish the catalytic importance of the Joan Anderson letter to Kerouac. John Clellon Holmes remembers Kerouac saying, “I’m going to get me a roll of shelf-paper, feed it into the typewriter, and just write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened, all in a rush, the hell with these phony architectures—and worry about it later.” In the scroll Kerouac writes that “in a few years [Cassady] would become such a great writer,” and suggests that this is why he is writing Cassady’s story. After reading the Joan Anderson letter and writing his own series of letters in reply Kerouac was convinced that On the Road should be written in a straight-ahead, conversational style and that he should “renounce fiction and fear. There is nothing to do but write the truth. There is no other reason to write.” The novel would detail Kerouac’s five trips across America since first meeting Cassady in 1947 and would end with the previous summer’s trip to Mexico.
What were Kerouac’s working methods like during those three weeks in April of 1951? Some years later Philip Whalen wrote an account that allows us to imagine the writing practice Kerouac first developed at that time.