by Jack Kerouac
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 “autobiograph 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.
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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.
He would sit—at a typewriter, and he had all these pocket notebooks, and the pocket notebooks would be open at his left-hand side on the typing table—and he’d be typing. He could type faster than any human being you ever saw. The most noise that you heard while he was typing was the carriage return, slamming back again and again. The little bell would bing-bang, bing-bang, bing-bang! Just incredibly fast, faster than a teletype…Then he’d make a mistake, and this would lead him off into a possible part of a new paragraph, into a funny riff of some kind that he’d add while he was in the process of copying. Then, maybe he’d turn a page of the notebook and he’d look at that page and realize it was no good and he’d X it out, or maybe part of that page. And then he’d type a little bit and turn another page, and type the whole thing, and another page, and he’d type from that. And then something would—again, he would exclaim and laugh and carry on and have a big time doing it.
Kerouac worked in what Holmes remembered as a “large, pleasant room in Chelsea.” His notebooks and letters and a “Self-Instruction” list “sat at side of typewriter as chapter guide.” The paper Kerouac used was not Teletype paper but thin, long sheets of drawing paper belonging to a friend, Bill Cannastra. Kerouac had inherited the paper when he moved into Cannastra’s loft on West Twentieth Street after Cannastra’s accidental death in the New York subway. When did Kerouac first flash on an image in his mind of the paper joined together? A long roll of paper like the remembered road that he could write fast on and not stop. So that the paper joined together became an endless page.
It is clear that the scroll is something consciously made by Kerouac rather than found. He cut the paper into eight pieces of varying length and shaped it to fit the typewriter. The pencil marks and scissor cuts are still visible on the paper. Then he taped the pieces together. It’s not known whether he taped each sheet on as he finished it, or waited until he had finished the whole thing before taping the sheets together.
The scroll is, for the most part and contrary to mythology, conventionally punctuated, even to the extent that Kerouac presses the space key before each new sentence. It runs in a single paragraph. Like the published novel it’s structured in five parts. As to the myth that his work was fueled by Benzedrine, we have what Kerouac told Cassady: “I wrote
that book on COFFEE, remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks.” By his own account Kerouac averaged “6 thous. [words] a day, 12 thous. first day, 15,000 thous. last day.” In a letter to Ed White written when Kerouac estimated he had completed 86,000 words he writes, “I don’t know the date nor care and life is a bowl of pretty juicy Cherries that I want one by one biting first with my cherry stain’d teeth.—how?”
Kerouac dramatically collapses the distinction between writer and narrated “I,” all the while utilizing established techniques of fiction writing, including double-perspective narration, to control the progress of the text. Headlong, intimate, discursive, wild, and “true,” with improvised notations—dots and dashes—to break sentences so that they pile upon themselves like waves.
There’s an exciting difference here to most everything you’ve read before; the unmatched intimacy of what Allen Ginsberg called Kerouac’s sincere and sweetly connecting “heart-felt speech.” Maybe you’re dazzled at first by Neal’s incandescent energy burning up everybody and everything around him, but you also understand that at the heart of the novel is Jack’s quest and that he’s asking the same questions that keep you awake at night and fill your days. What is life? What does it mean to be alive when death, the shrouded stranger, is gaining at your heels? Will God ever show his face? Can joy kick darkness? This quest is interior, but the lessons of the road, the apprehended magic of the American landscape described like a poem, are applied to illuminate and amplify the spiritual journey. Kerouac writes to be understood; the road is the path of life and life is a road.