by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac does not hide the cost of the road either to those who will head for it or to those for whom, in Carolyn Cassady’s words, a different kind of “responsibility mapped the course.” What is electrifying about the novel is the idea that God, self-realization, and a transforming freedom are out there, through the window where you sit confined at school or at work, maybe where the city ends or just over that next hill. This makes the heart thump and the blood beat in your ears. A religious seeker and a writer of dreams and visions, Kerouac is a source in that sense, if you are fixed on seeking answers, and once that kind of light goes on in your house it’s likely to stay on and you’ll always be looking. He had told Cassady that “I aim to employ all the styles and nevertheless I yearn to be non-literary.” In so consciously disrupting our understanding of what it is we are reading when we read the original scroll version of On the Road, Kerouac’s claim to Cassady that the book “marks complete departure from Town & City and in fact from previous American Lit” seems justified. On the Road is the nonfiction novel, ten years early.
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It would be more than six years before On the Road appeared, but remarkably nobody who was in a position to publish it ever read the scroll manuscript. Kerouac immediately began to revise the novel. As Kerouac biographer Paul Maher notes, “On the Road was now typed onto separate pages to make its appearance more conventional and thus more appealing to publishers…. Jack scribbled annotations on some pages, added typesetting instructions, crossed out passages, and proposed textual insertions…. His cuts to On the Road precede Malcolm Cowley’s suggestion that he shorten the manuscript, contrary to previous biographers’ assertions that Jack had insisted on maintaining the text as he originally wrote it in April 1951.” On May 22, 1951, Kerouac told Cassady that he had been “typing and revising” since he finished the scroll on April 22. “Thirty days on that.” He was, he told Cassady, “waiting to finish my book to write to you.” Kerouac writes that Robert Giroux was “waiting to see” the novel.
There are two known subsequent extant drafts of the novel: a 297-page, heavily revised draft with numerous lines thickly deleted and handwritten inserts on the verso of some pages and a 347-page draft revised by Kerouac and an editor, probably Helen Taylor, from Viking. Both manuscripts are undated. More scholarship is needed to compare and interpret the relationship between the three drafts. While it seems most likely that the 297-page draft is the one Kerouac worked on after finishing the original scroll, it is less clear when the 347-page draft was written. There is evidence that Kerouac and Viking were working from this draft by the fall of 1955. Letters between Kerouac and Malcolm Cowley in September and October 1955 refer to “Dean Moriarty” “Carlo Marx,” and “Denver D. Doll.” These names are only used in the 347-page draft. Page notations in the libel report compiled by lawyer Nathaniel “Tanny” Whitehorn (a lawyer from Hays, Sklag, Epstein & Herzberg who had been hired by Viking to review the manuscript) and submitted to Viking on November 1, 1955, also correspond to the 347-page draft.*
Kerouac also began writing Visions of Cody out of his revisions of On the Road in the fall of 1951, and the relationships between all of these texts are highly complex. While clearly readers will be interested in the differences between the original scroll version of On the Road and the published novel, to speak only about scenes in the original scroll version being “cut” from the published novel elides Kerouac’s redrafting process and serves to marginalize Kerouac from the writing of his own novel. Certainly there are scenes and episodes in the scroll that are not present in the published novel, but that text is the result of a conscious process of redrafting and revision begun by Kerouac and influenced by a number of readers, editors, and lawyers, including Robert Giroux, Rae Everitt, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm Cowley, Nathaniel Whitehorn, and Helen Taylor.
Significant scenes present here but absent in the published novel include a richly comic account of Neal and Allen’s visit to Bill Burroughs in the fall of 1947; a poignant discussion between Jack, Neal, and Louanne as they pass through Pecos, Texas, on the way to San Francisco about “what we would be if we were Old West characters”; a wild, destructive party at Alan Harrington’s adobe house in Arizona during the same journey that reinforces the sense of the speeding Cassady’s out-of-control sexuality; Jack’s second return trip from San Francisco “across the groaning continent” to New York; and Jack and Neal’s visit to Jack’s first wife Edie in Detroit toward the end of Part Three.
As detailed below, there were many reasons for the deletion of these and other scenes, including, as the years passed, Kerouac’s increasing desperation in the wake of the success of Holmes’s Go and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to see the novel published. By September 1955 he was telling Malcolm Cowley that any “changes you want to make OK with me.” The second return trip to San Francisco was cut by Kerouac to streamline the story, while the Detroit section of the novel, in which Edie is represented as fat and wearing overalls, drinking beer, and munching candy, was among a number of scenes also cut by Kerouac on the recommendation of Cowley and Nathaniel Whitehorn, who were fearful of libel suits. Despite Kerouac’s deletion of much of the sexual material and language, in particular the homosexual content, as part of the redrafting process, other scenes that survived into the 347-page draft, including the story of a sodomizing monkey in an LA whorehouse, were later cut for obscenity.
Interestingly, many scenes in the original version that were deleted by Kerouac in the 297-page draft find their way, reworked, into the 347-page draft and into the published novel. For example, early in Part 2 of the scroll, as Neal and Jack make ready to leave Ozone Park for the Christmas 1948 trip back to North Carolina to collect Gabrielle, they are visited by Allen Ginsberg, who asks, “What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Neal has no answer. “The only thing to do was go.” Kerouac has lined through this 26-line scene in the scroll, and it is not present in the corresponding place (page 121) of the 297-page draft. On page 130 of the 347-page draft, however, the scene is restored, with Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx, Hinkle as Ed Dunkel, Neal as Dean Moriarty, and Jack as Sal Paradise. They are in Paterson, New Jersey, preparing to travel to Virginia to pick up Sal’s aunt. After Marx asks the pivotal question, “I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Kerouac has added a handwritten line that, critically, makes the question politically representative rather than simply personal: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?” Kerouac had made a note of this line in his “Rain and Rivers” journal; in the published novel the scene appears with the line added.
Equally important are those passages of rough lyricism in the scroll that Kerouac refines in the redrafting process. The famous image of Cassady and Ginsberg as “roman candles” is polished and reworked in subsequent drafts. In the scroll Kerouac writes,
[Neal and Allen] rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive…but then they danced down the street like dingldodies and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.
Kerouac has made some holographic corrections to the last four words of the text here, including placing the word “yellow” before “roman candles.” In the scroll Kerouac caps and eroticizes the image by linking it to Neal and Allen’s sexual relationship. Allen was “queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have.” Jack is in the same room. “I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to my
self, ‘Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.’” Kerouac has lined through “but I don’t want anything to do with it” on the scroll. On pages 4–5 of the 297-page draft Kerouac has typed the passage about Neal and Allen’s sexual relationship but has then heavily deleted it. Dean is now simply conning Justin Moriarty (Ginsberg) to teach him to write. With Kerouac’s deletions, the candle image has been amended to read:
They rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive, but then they danced down the street and I shambled after because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like yellow spidery roman candles with the blue centerlight across the night.
By hand Kerouac has added, “What would you have called these people in Goethe’s Germany?” On page 6 of the 347-page draft the passage has been redrafted and typed by Kerouac and then further corrected by hand, possibly by Helen Taylor. The corrections are shown below in brackets, and it is the corrected passage that appears in the published novel.
They rushed down the street together[,] digging everything in the early way they had[,] which has later now become [which later became] so much sadder and perceptive and blank[. B] but then they danced down the street like dingledodies[,] and I shambled after as usual [as usual] as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…[,] but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like a [a] spider[s] across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What do you [did they] call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?
In this example of one of On the Road’s best-known passages, we can see how in the complex process of revision and redrafting it is Kerouac who begins tempering the sexual content of his novel. In this instance the excising of the sexual relationship between Neal and Allen serves to obscure the erotic aspect of the image Kerouac is simultaneously trying to refine. Also significant are the later editorial changes that break Kerouac’s single long sentence in two. It is these changes to his sentences, rather than the cutting of scenes, which Kerouac would most strongly object to after the novel was published. He would blame Malcolm Cowley for making “endless revisions” and inserting “thousands of needless commas,” though it is Helen Taylor who very likely made these changes. Prevented from seeing the final galleys before the novel was printed, Kerouac would say that he “had no power to stand by my style for better or worse.”
Is the scroll the real On the Road? This is a natural question, especially as the novel trades so strongly in questions of authenticity, but it is perhaps the wrong one to ask. The scroll does not call into question the authenticity of the published novel but is in dialogue with it and all other versions of the text, including the proto-versions of the novel and Visions of Cody, so that Kerouac’s road novel becomes a twentieth-century Song of Myself. The scroll version of On the Road is, however, a markedly darker, edgier, and uninhibited text than the published book. The original version of On the Road is also, of course, a younger man’s book. Kerouac was still only twenty-nine in the spring of 1951. By the time the novel was published he would be thirty-five.
If the history of the novel from the fall of 1948 to the spring of 1951 is the story of Kerouac’s struggle to access the intimate style of writing so powerfully expressed in the scroll manuscript, what follows is the story of how, in editor Malcolm Cowley’s words, the novel became “publishable by [Viking’s] standards.”
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By June 10, 1951, Kerouac’s brief marriage to Joan Haverty had collapsed; Joan was pregnant and had returned to her mother after Kerouac denied he was the father of the child. In a letter written on that date, when Kerouac was moving from the apartment he had shared with Joan on West Twentieth Street to Lucien Carr’s nearby loft on West Twenty-first, Kerouac told Cassady that the “book is finished, handed in, waiting for the word from Giroux.”
Interviewed in 1997, Robert Giroux told the story of Kerouac’s unrolling the scroll in his office. Giroux insisted that the manuscript would have to be cut up and edited. Kerouac supposedly refused to entertain any such idea, telling Giroux that the “Holy Ghost” had dictated the novel. Kerouac also retrospectively recounted versions of this episode. It is possible Kerouac retyped and revised the scroll after such a confrontation, but the story may well be part of the mythmaking surrounding On the Road.* If it happened the meeting would have taken place in the days immediately after Kerouac completed the scroll and may possibly have first occasioned or encouraged Kerouac’s retyping of the scroll into more conventional form, though I believe Kerouac had already arrived at this decision by himself. On June 24 Kerouac reported that while Giroux had said he liked the book, formally submitted in a conventionally typed format, Harcourt, Brace had rejected it as “so new and unusual and controversial and censorable (with hipsters, weeds, fags, etc.) they won’t accept.” Kerouac was going south with his mother, he told Cassady, “to rest my mind and soul.”
On July 6 Kerouac’s then agent Rae Everitt at MCA wrote Kerouac care of his sister’s address in North Carolina, praising what she called the moments of “sheer magic poetry” in the novel. She commented that she had read the book
long before writing you this letter, but it took a lot of musing about…the musing came in trying to think whether this time I could speak honestly about my reaction to some of the rest of it without having you yank it away from me.
Everitt favored Books 3, 4, and 5 to 1 and 2 because there was a “shape and intensity to Dean and Sal’s” travels. Everitt told Kerouac that the novel began too self-consciously, as if Kerouac were trying to accustom the reader to “this extremely specialized style of writing.” As a result the novel was much too long,
the manuscript pages as they are now are about a page and a half of regular pages, which brings your total page count to roughly 450. Do you want to do this now or leave it [?]
Everitt’s assessment of the page count would indicate a manuscript of around three hundred pages.
On July 16 Kerouac sent a letter to Allen Ginsberg addressed to Allen Moriarty. Allen Moriarty, corrected by hand to Justin Moriarty, is the name Kerouac gives to Ginsberg in the 297-page draft. In the letter Kerouac writes that he is continuing cutting and writing insertions for the novel, and Everitt’s letter may have occasioned these further revisions.
Kerouac fell ill with phlebitis in North Carolina, and from August 11 to the end of the first week in September he was in the Veterans Hospital on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx. From there he wrote to Ed White on September 1 to make arrangements for White’s visit to New York. On the back of some rough inserts in both French and English and headed “On the Road” Kerouac has written, “Yes—Am completely rewriting Neal-epic.” Kerouac’s re-writing may have included some of the handwritten inserts to be found in the 297-page draft of Road, but this is also the time Kerouac begins to write Visions of Cody.
In October and using a new technique he would call “sketching,” Kerouac began to fill the first of nine notebooks that would, when he was finished, amount to 955 handwritten pages. The first page of the first notebook is dated October 1951 and titled “On the Road. A Modern Novel.” On the front of the first notebook is written “Visions of Cody.” Kerouac tells Cassady on October 9, 1951 that he is sending him “these 3 now-typed-up-revised pages of my re-writing ROAD,” and that “since writing that I’ve come up with even greater complicated sentences & VISIONS.”
In the fall of 1951 Kerouac received an offer from Carl Solomon, then an editor at A. A. Wyn, to publish On the Road in their Ace imprint as the first in a three-book contract. Kerouac then tr
aveled west again to visit Neal and Carolyn. He would stay in San Francisco until the spring, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad and continuing his labor on Visions of Cody. Stalling on delivering a manuscript that was becoming more radically experimental by the day, on December 27, 1951, he wrote to Carl Solomon that “I’m not gone off from A. A. Wyn. I’m only gone off to earn money on my own hook so that when I do sell my book it won’t make any difference and anyway it isn’t finished yet.” On March 12, 1952 he told Ed White that he had finished the novel in Neal’s attic. This novel was Visions of Cody.
On March 26, A. A. Wyn wrote to Kerouac care of the Cassady residence at 29 Russell Street, San Francisco:
Enclosed your copy of the signed contract of ON THE ROAD. The first advance of $250 is being sent to your mother…We look forward to seeing the present draft of the manuscript.