by Jack Kerouac
On April 7, Kerouac replied to Solomon, suggesting that Wyn publish an abridged paperback version of On the Road that would include a 160-page “sexy narrative stretch” about Cassady that Kerouac planned to excerpt from his manuscripts. The narrative Kerouac refers to, “I first met Neal Pomeray in 1947…,” corresponds to the last section of the published Cody. Kerouac may have been trying to prepare Solomon for what he knew would be the shock of the rest of Visions of Cody, writing that “my only fear is you wouldn’t publish full ROAD [Cody] in hardcover…believe me, Carl, the full ROAD will make Wyn a first rate reputation.” Telling Solomon not to worry about sacrificing reputation for profit Kerouac wrote, “Let’s do 2 editions.”
On May 17 Kerouac told Ginsberg that he had sent the manuscript to Carl Solomon and that he expected it to arrive by May 23. On May 18 Kerouac gave Ginsberg a high-spirited explanation of the “sketching” technique he had used to change “the conventional narrative survey” of On the Road to the “big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds” of Cody:
Now here is what sketching is. In the first place you remember last September when Carl first ordered the Neal book and wanted it…Sketching came to me in full force on October 25th…-so strongly it didn’t matter about Carl’s offer and I began sketching everything in sight, so that On the Road took its turn from conventional narrative survey of road trips etc. into a big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds. Sketching (Ed White casually mentioned it in 124 the Chinese restaurant near Columbia, “Why don’t you just sketch in the street like a painter but with words”) which I did…everything activates in front of you in myriad confusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social etc. and slap it all down shameless, willynilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing. Traditional source: Yeats’ trance writing, of course. It’s the only way to write.
The novel, Kerouac told Ginsberg, was “all good”:
We can show Road to Scribners or Simpson or Farrar Straus [Stanley Young] if necessary, change title to Visions of Neal or somethin, and I write new Road for Wynn.
What Ginsberg then read and what Kerouac had sent Carl Solomon at Wyn was indeed the manuscript of Visions of Cody and not On the Road. Kerouac’s attempts to prepare the ground for his revolution in prose went unheeded. In Cody, Kerouac’s command of his adopted language appears magical. It is a novel in which, as Holmes would later write, “the words were no longer words, but had become things. Somehow an open circuit of feeling had been established between his awareness and its object of the moment, and the result was as startling as being trapped in another man’s eyes.”
At the time Holmes read the novel with a kind of angry disbelief. Writing that he sometimes wished Kerouac “would blunt the edge” of his writing so that it might be given the recognition it deserved, Holmes later remembered
going out to walk by the East River, cursing Kerouac in my head for writing so well in a book which, I was firmly convinced, would never be published…. I recall that I cursed him, rather than the publishers, or the critics, or the culture itself that was excluding him. Some years later, I reread Cody with a feeling of amazement at my own confusion that was fully as great as my shame.
Allen Ginsberg also read the novel in the context of its commercial potential. “I don’t see how it will ever be published,” he told Kerouac on June 11. Some of the writing was “the best that is written in America,” but Kerouac’s book was also “crazy in a bad way.” It was “mixed up chronologically”; the surreal sections refused “to make sense” and the “Taperecords are partly hangup” and should be shortened.
Solomon was even more horrified than Ginsberg. On July 30 he sent a blistering letter to Kerouac care of his mother’s Richmond Hill address:
We’ve had a reading of ON THE ROAD and, though we understand it to be merely a “present draft,” we are thoroughly bewildered by almost everything you’ve done since the opening 23-page sample and the prospectus. The subsequent 500 pages are so utterly unlike the novel you began and which we were expecting [after having contracted for it] that they seem to have no relation to each other…. At present, some ninety-five per cent of what follows page 23 seems to us a thoroughly incoherent mess.*
Kerouac added a handwritten note to Carolyn Cassady: “This is the reception On the Road [Cody] is getting – Ginsberg + Holmes are even more irritated – it’s undoubtedly a great book.” In reply to Solomon on August 5, Kerouac conceded that the “new vision” of Visions of Cody (which he was still calling On the Road) is “going to be considered unprintable for a while to come,” but this was because of the shortsightedness of publishers. To label the book “incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death.”
This is what will happen: “On the Road [Cody]” will be published…and it will gain its due recognition, in time, as the first or one of the first modern prose books in America; not merely a “novel,” which is after all a European form…And all you will have succeeded in doing is putting another cookbook on your list to fill the gap I leave. You can spin a thousand neat epigrams to prove that any cookbook is better than the wild visions of Neal Pomeray and the Road. But not when the worms start digesting, brothers and sisters.
I didn’t write “On the Road” [Cody] to be malicious, I wrote it with joy in my heart, and a conviction that somewhere along the line somebody will see it without the present day goggles on and realize the freedom of expression that still lies ahead.
Solomon’s reply to Kerouac’s “masterful cudgelling” on August 5 accepted that “you may be entirely accurate in accusing us of lack of vision, and of tastes molded by television. However, we have never claimed to be prophets…[O]ur rejection of [Cody] in 1952 may well, as you feel, mark us for ridicule twenty-five years later.” Writing that he was obliged to judge manuscripts by the standards of the day, Solomon wrote that the novel, “after the point when you discovered your ‘sketching’ technique, is simply an experiment we do not understand.” Visions of Cody would not be published until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death.*
For Kerouac the years immediately after the failure to get On the Road or Visions of Cody published are marked by obscurity and ragged wandering between North Carolina, San Francisco, Mexico, and New York. In the summer of 1952 he left Mexico and returned to Rocky Mount, where he worked for a short time in a textile mill. In the fall he returned to the West Coast and worked on the railroad, living for the most part in a San Francisco skid row hotel room and saving to go back to Mexico. Remarkably, although he was rejected, alone, poor, and homeless, the flow of brilliant work that had started with On the Road and Visions of Cody continued. His writing flew. In Mexico in the summer he finished Doctor Sax. In the West he wrote “October in the Railroad Earth.” Back in Richmond Hill in the New Year he wrote Maggie Cassidy. On his thirtieth birthday on March 12, 1952, Kerouac, on his way to Mexico from San Francisco, wrote to John Holmes:
I have completely reached my peak maturity now and am blowing such mad poetry and literature that I’ll look back years later with amazement and chagrin that I can’t do it anymore, but nobodys going to know this fact for 15, 20 years, only I know it, and maybe Allen.
In July 1953, Malcolm Cowley began to take an active interest in Kerouac’s work after receiving a letter from Allen Ginsberg. As Steve Turner notes, Ginsberg had worked in advertising and journalism for years, and his approach to Cowley was not accidental. A hugely significant and influential figure in the story of twentieth-century American literature, Malcolm Cowley had championed Hemingway in the 1920s and done much to recover the listing reputation of William Faulkner by editing The Portable Faulkner for Viking in 1946. Born in 1898 and enlisting, like Hemingway, in the ambulance service during the First Worl
d War, Cowley had been literary editor of The New Republic, succeeding Edmund Wilson, from 1929 to 1944, and would become president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1956. A literary adviser to Viking, Cowley, who had been among the foremost literary historians of the Lost Generation writers of the 1920s and who would write that remembered writers “do not come forward singly…they appear in clusters and constellations that are surrounded by comparatively empty years,” was in this sense a good man to have in Kerouac’s corner. But Cowley never really understood Kerouac’s work and was often patronizingly hostile to it, and he did not support Kerouac’s plans for what Cowley called “the interminable” Duluoz Legend.
In his July 6 letter Ginsberg reported to Cowley that Kerouac had asked that Ginsberg try to “set his affairs in order.” Ginsberg wrote that Kerouac “is well and working on another version of On the Road. (I understand you were not aware that he intended to continue work on this book).”
Calling Kerouac “the most interesting writer who is not being published today,” Cowley replied on July 14 that the “only manuscript of his that I have read with a chance of immediate publication is the first version of On the Road. As much of the second version as I saw contained some impressively good writing but no story whatsoever.” Cowley’s reply suggests that what he had seen was the second draft of Road and sections of Visions of Cody, while Ginsberg’s comment that Kerouac was working on “another version” of On the Road raises the possibility that Kerouac had begun work on a third draft. By the fall the second draft was under consideration at Viking. In his in-house memorandum of October 20 editor Malcolm Cowley wrote:
On the Road is an account of some trips across the continent in the years 1947–9. It was written almost breathlessly by the author working day and night on a 100-foot-long roll of artist’s paper. I think he finished it in three weeks, handed it in to his (then) editor at Harcourt, Bob Giroux, and had it rejected. Later he did a good deal of rewriting on this conventionally typed draft, and this summer he went through the draft making many small cuts and some additions. We have it now, with the author’s permission to change it any way we please---though I think he is making a few additional changes of his own, especially cutting out the second return from San Francisco and moving one Denver chapter to the West Coast. These sound like good changes that will tighten the story.
I think it is the great source document of life among the beat or hip generation. Faults: the author is solemn about himself and about Dean. Some of his best episodes would get the book suppressed for obscenity. But I think there is a book here that should and must be published. The question is whether we can publish it and what we can or must do to make it publishable by our standards. I have some ideas, all for cutting.
Viking rejected the 297-page draft of Road in November 1953.
On Cowley’s recommendation, in the summer of 1954 Arabelle Porter, editor of New World Writing, accepted for publication Kerouac’s “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” a fusion of material taken from Road and Cody and credited with being selected from The Beat Generation, a novel completed in 1951. In his letter of thanks dated August 6, 1954, Kerouac told Cowley that On the Road was now retitled “Beat Generation.” This was the title Kerouac would prefer until the fall of 1955. The book had been at Little, Brown for a “long time,” he said, and had been rejected there. It was now under consideration at Dutton. In September, Sterling Lord, who had now become Kerouac’s agent, told Cowley that “On the Road, or The Beat Generation, as he now calls it, is still unsold.” On August 23 Kerouac told Ginsberg that he had called the novel “The Beat Generation,” “hoping to sell it…Littleshit Little Brown Seymour Lawrence” had turned the novel down.
Though it was his first publication in five years, Kerouac used the name Jean-Louis when “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was published in April 1955. Kerouac told Cowley that he had used the name “because I have an ex-wife who is continually trying to get me in the workhouse for non-support.” Kerouac also pointed out that he wasn’t using a pseudonym, as his full name was “John [Jack] [Jean-Louis] Kerouac.” Cowley had hoped that the publication of extracts from On the Road would help in getting a contract for the complete novel, and replied that “I did think it was wrong of you to change your name because John Kerouac is a good name for literary purposes, and by signing your work Jean-Louis you miss the reputation that you have already built up.”
After “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was published Kerouac furiously tried to generate interest in his work and was frustrated not to hear any good news about the fate of his many manuscripts. By July 4 Kerouac was “about ready to jump off a bridge,” as he wrote to Cowley after the two had met in New York.
Cowley wrote to Kerouac on July 12 with the news that Peter Matthiessen had accepted Kerouac’s “The Mexican Girl” episode of On the Road for publication in The Paris Review. “The Mexican Girl” was later chosen by Martha Foley for The Best American Short Stories of 1956 anthology. Cowley told Kerouac that “On the Road is still being considered by Dodd, Mead. If it comes back from them Keith [Jennison, an editor at Viking] and I will take another crack at getting it accepted by Viking.” Cowley also offered to write a foreword to On the Road so that Viking might consider it more favorably. He told Kerouac that he had written to the National Institute of Arts and Letters asking if they could send Kerouac some money through the Writers’ and Artists’ Revolving Fund. Meanwhile, he said, “don’t get downhearted. Better times are coming.”
Cowley’s “warm and beautiful” letter “really made me feel good,” Kerouac told Sterling Lord on July 19. “I would rather have [On the Road] at Viking any day, because of the integrity of such a foreword.” He expressed his thanks to Cowley on the same day, telling him that “your letter made me feel good, and warm, and better than anything in years.” He “hopes Dodd, Mead hurries up and gets the manuscript back to you.” A foreword by Cowley would give the book “literary class and a literary kick in the ass…S’what I want, to be published by Viking.” He wrote that he would use his own name again, but “Sterling and I agreed on JACK Kerouac rather than JOHN which I think is more natural.” From Mexico in August Kerouac wrote Cowley “having just heard the good news” that he had received an award from the National Institute.
You have been very kind, have exhibited divinely-inspired gentleness…have kept quiet and tranquility in yr. heart and helped helpless angels.
Kerouac wrote to Cowley on September 11 saying, “I’m glad you got the Sal Paradise ms at last. You and Keith just gotta succeed.”
On September 16 Cowley replied with good news. Writing that he thought On the Road is “the right name for the book,” Cowley told Kerouac that the book was now “being very seriously considered” by Viking and that there was “quite a good chance that we will publish it.” Publication depended, wrote Cowley, on “three ifs”:
if we can figure out what the right changes will be (cuts and rearrangements); if we can be sure that the book won’t be suppressed for immorality; and if it won’t get us into libel suits.
In an undated in-house memo on the “libel aspects” Cowley restated his worries about the “principal difficulties” of obscenity and libel, but argued that many of the characters involved in the narrative “are not the sort who bring libel suits—in fact, many of them have read the manuscript and are rather proud to be described in it, or so I gather.” What worried Cowley more were the points where “respectable” characters enter the story. Denver D. Doll would have to be “changed beyond recognition.” Cowley did not believe that “Old Bull Balloon” (Burroughs) would sue: “the original of the figure comes from a fairly prominent family—courts of law are what he would like to stay at a very long distance from.” Cowley wanted a second opinion before he could be sure that the book was safe for publication, and Viking called in lawyer Nathaniel Whitehorn.
If it remains unclear when, precisely, Kerouac wrote the 347-page draft, Kerouac’s letter on September 11, 1955, may indicate tha
t he had sent Cowley the new draft at this time, or that the manuscript was returned to Cowley from Dodd, Mead, and he had let Kerouac know. What is clear is that by then the 347-page draft of the novel was the one Cowley was reading. Justin W. Brierly, the Denver luminary who groomed promising young local boys for Columbia University and a figure Kerouac satirizes at length in the original version, is disguised as Beattie G. Davis in the 297-page draft. It is only in the 347-page draft that Kerouac calls him Denver D. Doll.
Agreeing with Cowley that the novel should be called On the Road and not Beat Generation, on September 20 Kerouac breezily outlined the steps he had already taken to avoid libel. These included making Denver D. Doll “an instructor at Denver Univ. instead of Denver High School.” He had changed “the name of the Mexican whorehouse city from Victoria to ‘Gregoria.’” He was on close terms with “‘Galatea Buckle’ who is only proud of being in a book.” Kerouac also told Cowley:
Any changes you want to make okay with me. Remember your idea in 1953 to dovetail trip No. 2 into Trip No. 3 making it one trip? I’m available to assist you in any re-arranging matters of course
Cowley did not think Kerouac was taking the issue of libel seriously. Writing on October 12 care of Allen Ginsberg’s address in Berkeley, where Kerouac was visiting, Cowley told him that the manuscript had been with the lawyer Viking had hired for two weeks. Cowley explained that because the novel was primarily a record of experiences,