by Jack Kerouac
[j]ust changing the names of the characters and changing a few of their physical characteristics aren’t enough to prevent a libel suit if the character can still be recognized by the details that we name…. I had better warn you again that this question of libel is serious…. The changes you mentioned in your letter aren’t nearly enough. You had better be thinking of some further changes that would keep (Doll) from bringing suit.
For characters like Moriarty, Cowley wrote, “the safest course might be to get the original of the character to sign a release.” Again, Cowley repeated that these were “serious difficulties.”
Two days later Kerouac fired back another optimistic letter. Reporting that Allen Ginsberg had “just made a sensation” reading “Howl” at the “Six Poets at the Six Gallery” event on October 7, Kerouac said that the problem of libel would be “easily solved.” He would “speedily” obtain libel releases and if this was not possible he would “make the appropriate requisite changes…There is no question that you’ll have all my cooperation.” Kerouac’s eventual response to Viking’s concerns about the possibility of Brierly’s bringing a libel suit is to cut from the 347-page manuscript the majority of scenes in which Denver D. Doll appears.
After seeing the publicity generated by the Six Gallery reading Viking was keen to get Kerouac’s novel into production. Tanny Whitehorn sent libel release forms to Helen Taylor at Viking on October 31. They were to be signed “by as many of John Kerouac’s friends who may have anything to do with ‘On the Road’ as he can possibly get.” Whitehorn delivered his report on the novel the following day.
Whitehorn’s 9-page report listed page-referenced instances in the 347-page manuscript where characters who had already been disguised by Kerouac might still be able to identify themselves and take exception to the way they had been portrayed. Next to the various names and page references on his copy of the report Kerouac has added handwritten notes indicating the course of action he had taken. Next to Denver D. Doll’s name Kerouac has written, “Doll removed except for most casual references.” “Out” is written next to many of Whitehorn’s notes. Whitehorn objects to a reference to “Jane walking around in a benzedrine hallucination.” Jane was Joan Vollmer Burroughs, and she had been accidentally shot dead by William Burroughs in September 1951. Next to Whitehorn’s note Kerouac has written “Jane dead.”
On November 2 Taylor thanked Whitehorn for the releases and for his “laborious” work on the novel. “Now it is our turn to do a lot of tedious digging and editing,” she wrote, “and then we reach the next stage. I am afraid you will have to look at it again.”
After receiving the “libel-clearing statement forms” Kerouac secured releases from the “two heroes,” “Dean Moriarty” and “Carlo Marx.” “I can get signatures from everybody,” Kerouac wrote on November 14. Ginsberg signed his release “for the benefit of American literature. X. Carlo Marx, as it were.”
Despite “instantly” signing and mailing the forms Kerouac was frustrated to hear nothing back from Cowley. “Did you receive those two signatures,” he writes on December 23. “I sent them right back; don’t tell me you didn’t get em! Weeks ago.” Kerouac was also frustrated when neither a contract nor the promised list of recommended changes was sent.
The spring of 1956 found Kerouac still waiting. After a series of missed connections he characterized as “malign fate,” Cowley promised to send the list of recommended corrections in time for Kerouac to work on them in Washington’s Skagit Valley, where Kerouac was working as a fire lookout for the summer on Desolation Peak. This delay, added to the already long wait to have the novel published, not surprisingly tested Kerouac’s resolve, and he complained to Sterling Lord on April 10 that the saga was taking on “absurd-martyr-proportions I can’t buy.” More than once he threatened to take On the Road from Viking. Always he relented, convinced that Viking represented his best chance despite the collective dragging of feet on the project that continued through 1956. For the most part he released his anger in letters to Sterling Lord and unsent letters to Cowley.
Kerouac was still anxious in the fall of 1956, writing to Sterling Lord from San Francisco in September to ask “what’s happening now?” “Tell me what you think about the Viking Press situation,” Kerouac asked Lord, “perhaps you might suggest we change the title to WOW and publish it right away.”* On October 7 Kerouac wrote from Mexico City asking Lord to retrieve “Beat Generation” from Cowley. “Tell him I respect his sincerity, but I’m not too sure about the others at Viking and tell him I don’t care…I want that book sold on street stalls, it is a book about the streets. Do what you can…I’ve been through every conceivable disgrace now and no rejection or acceptance by publishers can alter that awful final feeling of death—of life-which-is-death.”
Cowley’s final acceptance report for Viking is undated but would have been written toward the end of 1956. Cowley traced the history of the book. Remembering that the novel had been rejected in 1953 “with the proviso that we’d like to see it again,” Cowley wrote that Viking had subsequently worked to “remove the two great problems of libel and obscenity…. Moreover, Kerouac changed the story to avoid most of the libel danger…and Helen Taylor went over it taking out the rest of the libel, some of the obscenity, and tightening the story.”
Cowley wrote that On the Road is not “a great or even a likable book.” The “wild bohemians” of the novel were like “machines gone haywire…with hardly any emotions except a determination to say Yes to any new experience”
The book, I prophesy, will get mixed but interested reviews, it will have a good sale (perhaps a very good one), and I don’t think there is any doubt that it will be reprinted as a paperback. Moreover it will stand for a long time as the honest record of another way of life.
On New Year’s Day 1957, Kerouac reported to Sterling Lord from Florida that “the m.s. of ROAD is all ready for the printer, please tell Keith and Malcolm to have complete confidence in the libel-clearing thorough job I did on it…they will be pleased.” Traveling to New York by Greyhound bus from Florida, Kerouac turned in the manuscript to Cowley on January 8. The signed contract between Viking and “John” Kerouac, for a novel “tentatively entitled On the Road,” is dated January 10, 1957. Kerouac received $1,000 against all earnings, with $250 due on signing, $150 on acceptance, and the balance of $600 in payments of $100 for six months. The royalty agreement saw Kerouac receive 10 percent on all copies sold up to 10,000, 12.5 percent up to 12,500, and 15 percent thereafter. Kerouac reported to John Clellon Holmes on January 10 that he would be signing “contract tomorrow for sure with Viking.”
On February 24 Cowley wrote to Kerouac turning down his new novel “Desolation Angels.” He wrote, “Meanwhile On the Road is going through the works at a good rate—pretty soon it will all be set up in type—and then the salesmen will go out on the road with ‘On the Road,’ and I hope they sell a lot of copies.”
With the contracts signed and the book in production Kerouac found himself isolated by Viking. Writing from Berkeley in July, and worried about how the forthcoming Howl obscenity trial set for August would affect On the Road, Kerouac complained about the “eerie silence” to Sterling Lord. “I’m real worried because you never write any more, as tho something was wrong, or is it just my imagination? I wrote a long letter to Keith Jennison, also no answer. Is ON THE ROAD going to be published? And if so, what about the final galleys I have to see, and what about the picture of me, and isn’t there some kind of promotion or business going on I should know about. I tell you I am lonesome and scared not hearing from anybody.”
After the small literary magazine New Editions published “Neal and the Three Stooges,” an extract from Visions of Cody, in July, Kerouac sent a copy to Cowley, pointedly writing that he thought Cowley would be “amused to see my ‘untouched’ prose in print.” Kerouac was writing to ask when he would be sent the final galleys of On the Road, but was interrupted in his writing by the delivery of advance copies of th
e novel. As described in Desolation Angels, Neal Cassady knocked on the door in Berkeley just as Kerouac was unpacking the books. Feeling that he had been caught “red-handed,” Kerouac gave Cassady, “the hero of the poor crazy sad book,” the first copy.
The cultural tensions that can be read in all of these exchanges and negotiations, the mixture of excitement and distaste shown by senior figures at Viking toward Kerouac and his work, the attempts to manage and commodify his wild book and Kerouac’s enthusiastic vulnerability and complicity in that process, and the half-apprehended sense on all sides that literary and cultural history were about to be made would all be publicly played out in the reviews of On the Road that began to appear after the novel was finally published on September 5, 1957.
In Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson describes how just before midnight on September 4 she and Kerouac went to a newsstand at Sixty-sixth and Broadway to wait for copies of the New York Times to be delivered. When the papers came off the delivery truck, and the old man at the newsstand had cut the string that kept the newspapers in bales, Joyce and Jack bought a copy and read Gilbert Millstein’s review of On the Road under a street lamp and then over again and again in Donnelly’s bar on Columbus Avenue.
Millstein’s review, in which he called the book “an authentic work of art,” announced On the Road as “a major novel,” and its publication “an historic event.” Praising Kerouac’s style and technical virtuosity, Millstein argued that the excesses of Sal and Dean, their “frenzied pursuit of every sensory impression,” were made and intended by Kerouac primarily “to serve a spiritual purpose.” It may be that Kerouac’s generation, Millstein wrote, did “not know what refuge it is seeking, but it is seeking.” It was in this spiritual sense, Millstein argued, that Kerouac had taken the most challenging and difficult of the paths available to the postwar American writer identified by John Aldridge in his study, “After the Lost Generation.” Kerouac, in Aldridge’s words, had stated “the need for belief even though it is upon a background in which belief is impossible.” This need for belief was also what John Clellon Holmes had privileged in “This Is the Beat Generation,” an article commissioned by Millstein for the Sunday New York Times in 1951 and from which he also quoted in his review of On the Road. Holmes had argued that the difference between the “Lost” and “Beat” generations was in the latter’s “will to believe even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms.” “How to live,” Holmes wrote, then became much more “crucial than why.”
If Millstein’s identification of On the Road as a novel concerned most strongly with the search for affirmation in the context of a spiritually barren and fearful American society was an attempt to establish the ground on which the novel would be discussed, his view was challenged by less sympathetic reviewers who, while they could not ignore the exhuberant beauty and freshness of Kerouac’s style, would not concede the seriousness of his spiritual purpose and intent. In the New York Times on Sunday, September 8, David Dempsey argued that “Jack Kerouac has written an enormously readable and entertaining book but one reads it in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow—the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives.”
Other cultural critics were more openly hostile. Reviewing the novel for the New York World-Telegram & Sun, Robert C. Ruark argued that On the Road was not much more than a “candid admission” that Kerouac “had been on the bum for six years.” Kerouac’s “snivelling” characters, wrote Ruark, were “punks” who needed a kick “in the pants.” In the New Leader on October 28, William Murray argued that the novel was certainly significant and important in the context of the “mood and meaning” of its time, but Kerouac “is most certainly not an artist, for that would imply a discipline and unity of purpose which his writing does not reflect.” On the Road was important, Murray continued, “because it communicates directly in a non-literary way an emotional experience of our time.”
What Viking publicity director Patricia McManus called the novel’s “resounding, if mixed, effect” in an in-house memo dated February 6, 1958, led to On the Road’s quickly going through three editions. In an earlier, prepublication memo, McManus had anticipated, “judging by advance readings,” that the novel would “stirup considerable lively discussion, pro and con.” By January 1958, McManus reported, “at least two colleges have adopted it for modern literature courses (how the schools are using it hasn’t yet been ascertained…perhaps for after-curfew reading).”
The controversy over Jack Kerouac and On the Road became the focal contest in a larger cultural war in which Kerouac’s insistence that he was on a spiritual quest, his liminal working-class, French-Canadian status, and his apparently out-of-nowhere emergence as the mythologizer and reluctant figurehead of a countercultural generation defined by opposition to cold war politics and ideology made him an open target. Kerouac’s novel, written six years earlier and concerned with the “hot” and exuberant youth of the late 1940s, was mistakenly seen as direct social commentary on the “cool” youth culture of the late 1950s. Kerouac’s technical success in collapsing the distinction between fiction and nonfiction also meant that the intended and conscious thematic and structural kinships On the Road shares with canonical American novels including, most obviously and notably, Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby, went largely unnoticed, while many readers, because it suited them to do so, simply confused Kerouac with Dean Moriarty. In his, “The Cult of Unthink,” published in Horizon, September 15, 1958, Robert Brustein linked Kerouac with the “glowering” and inarticulate “tribal followers” of Marlon Brando and James Dean. The “Beat Generation,” Brustein argued, was surly and discontented, “of much muscle and little mind” and “prepared to offer violence with little provocation.” “It is not so long a jump,” Brustein continued, “from the kick-seeking poet to the kick-seeking adolescent who, sinking his knife into the flesh of his victim, thanked him for the ‘experience.’”
Kerouac, a lifelong pacifist who had thrown down his rifle and walked off the field while in navy boot camp, replied to Brustein on September 24, a week before publication of the emphatically spiritual and pacific The Dharma Bums on October 2:
None of my characters travel “in packs” or are a “juvenile gang” ensemble or carry knives. I conceived On the Road as a book about tenderness among the wild young hell-raisers like your grandfather in 1880 when he was a youngster. I have never exalted anyone of a violent nature at any time…Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise were completely spiteless characters, unlike their critics.
Notwithstanding his attempts to engage his critics in serious debate, Kerouac found to his cost, as Joyce Johnson writes, that what most interviewers wanted was to get the “inside story on the Beat Generation and its avatar.” specifically, or course, these interviewers wanted Kerouac to explain the meaning of “Beat,” the word that began to be heard everywhere. “Beat,” Johnson writes, was
first uttered on a Times Square street corner in 1947 by the hipster-angel Herbert Huncke in some evanescent moment of exalted exhaustion, but resonating later in Jack’s mind, living on to accrue new meaning, connecting finally with the Catholic, Latin beatific. “Beat is really saying beatific. See?” Jack so earnest in making his point so the interviewer can get it right, respecting the journalistic search for accuracy although he knows accuracy is not the same as truth.
Again and again, Johnson writes, Kerouac “will go through this derivation with increasing weariness…the words slurring progressively.” So began the nightmare of what Johnson called Kerouac’s “awful success.” Kerouac’s drinking, always heavy, became uncontrolled, and the novel he had begun nearly ten years before in Ozone Park condemned him to his fate as the mythological “King of the Beats,” which is where we began.
This account is a contribution to an ongoing counternarrative intended to displace mythology and recover Kerouac as a writer, first and always. “That is how I remember Kerouac,” William Burroughs wrote, �
��as a writer talking about writers or sitting in a quiet corner with a notebook, writing in longhand…You feel that he was writing all the time; that writing was the only thing he thought about. He never wanted to do anything else.”
Rewriting America
Kerouac’s Nation of “Underground Monsters”
Penny Vlagopoulos
Often, if you go into a bookstore in New York City, you will find Kerouac not on the shelves, but rather behind the cash register counter. As legend has it, alongside the Bible, On the Road is one of the most frequently stolen books. Books are not usually items deemed worthy of criminal behavior, but Kerouac continues to inspire a level of defiance that suggests his outlaw terrain spreads across generations. Although his most famous novel arose from the particular conditions of the era in which it was written, it acts as a kind of blueprint for translating the upheavals and aftershocks of its historical moment into vital, perennial concerns. At the heart of this quality is a directive to the reader to pursue the more elusive questions of our lives by excavating the places that define us as if we are discovering them for the first time—as outsiders. Kerouac dedicates Visions of Cody, his experimental account of traveling with Neal Cassady, to “America, whatever that is.” Perhaps more than any other novelist of his generation, he approaches America’s ambiguities as a venture imbued in the creative process of, as he puts it in On the Road, “rising from the underground.” The years Kerouac spent writing about his experience on the road were, in a sense, an exploration in nation building from below.
“One night in America when the sun had gone down” begins a proto-draft of On the Road from 1950. This image ultimately makes its way to the last paragraph of the published version, but read as a beginning, it brings to the forefront the novel’s panoramic scope, which contextualizes the “pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself” as a “sad drama in the American night.” On July 4, 1949, Kerouac writes in his journal of his plans to go from Mexico to New York and feels a “heavy melancholy, almost like pleasure” that he describes thus: “The big American night keeps closing in, redder and darker all the time. There is no home.” While Kerouac could never renounce places and people in his life that constituted his sense of a home—most notably his mother, to whom he always returned, and his birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts—he always felt the unique combination of exuberance and despair at being homeless in one’s native land. The breaking-point intensity of much of Kerouac’s writing, which often asks the reader to linger between intellectual assessment and emotional release, evinces just how much was at stake for Kerouac in constructing a vocabulary that could adequately account for the relationship between the individual and the nation.