by Jack Kerouac
On the Road asks us to consider, if not fully share, perspectives beyond those of white men, but it also endorses the creation of new versions of outsiderness. Kerouac’s representation of America was a response to the disingenuousness of a “cold” war, more ominous in its implicit disavowal of the actual costs of conflict than its explicit counterpart, the “hot” war. In a parallel analogy, two years after the publication of On the Road, Kerouac writes that there are two styles of “hipsterism”: the cool, represented by the “bearded laconic sage,” a person “whose speech is low and unfriendly, whose girls say nothing and wear black,” and the hot, who is “the crazy talkative shining eyed (often innocent and openhearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad looking for everybody, shouting, restless, lushy, trying to ‘make it’ with the subterranean beatniks who ignore him.” Most of the artists of the Beat Generation, he explains, “belong to the hot school, naturally since that hard gemlike flame needs a little heat.” In the logic of war rhetoric, to be “hot” is to be unable to disguise oneself behind masks of secrecy. It is a place of vulnerability and embarrassment, an exposure to all forms of criticism. It was more important for Kerouac to be sincere than “cool.” In 1949, he laments, “Resuming true serious work I find that I have grown lazy in my heart.” He is frustrated with the lack of discipline he observes in his peers and wonders, “Is this the way the world is going to end—in indifference?” When asked by one interviewer what he was looking for, Kerouac answered that he was “waiting for God to show his face.” If on a national level, “truth” was a politicized umbrella term for a particular form of ideology, for Kerouac, writing what he called his “true-story novels” was an act enmeshed in answering the “adolescent question of ‘why do men go on living.’”
On the Road speaks to some urge of its readers, giving them the vocabulary with which to reimagine their daily lives in ways that are felt organically rather than fully articulated. It is something like the sensation of suddenly being shocked by the sight of a large, full moon hovering almost too low to notice, and wondering if anyone else sees it. You are a lucky participant receiving privileged information. As Douglas argues, “In the age that invented the idea of classified information, Kerouac’s effort was to declassify the secrets of the human body and soul.” Kerouac was always interested in honesty, especially to himself, at whatever cost, and often this meant offering a picture of possibility rather than providing a direct guide. In one of the most memorable parts of On the Road, Sal understands that Dean silently acknowledges how “I’d never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence,” and the two men find themselves in an awkward moment of pathos and discovery: “We both felt uncertain of something.” After this quiet exchange in which something “clicked in both of us” (in the scroll, Kerouac writes “both of our souls”), the two men resume their journey. It is what is not said or done that drives On the Road, what cannot be contained, categorized, or commodified. Sal’s newfound commitment to his friend resolves itself in a question about Dean: “He was BEAT—the root, the soul of beatific. What was he knowing?” Rather than wonder “What did he know?,” a more conventional approach to the ways in which we mine each other for ideas that we convert into personal capital, Kerouac’s use of the present participle indicates the open-endedness of knowledge—a creative space of contestation that begins at the edges of subjective experience.
What is so striking at first about reading the scroll manuscript, aside from seeing the original names, the sexually frank language, and certain sections that were ultimately cut, is how little the language actually differs from the published text as a whole. But the feeling of reading it is altogether new. The processes of reading and writing emerge as crucial artistic practices. Kerouac lets us toy with the option that, as he writes in a journal entry, “It’s not the words that count, but the rush of what is said.” In a Village Voice review of The Dharma Bums, Ginsberg discusses On the Road and describes feeling a “sadness that this was never published in its most exciting form—its original discovery—but hacked and punctuated and broken—the rhythms and swing of it broken—by presumptuous literary critics in publishing houses.” The On the Road scroll represents the early stage of Kerouac’s increasingly innovative literary technique. In a letter to Ginsberg the following year, Kerouac wrote that while “sketching,” a method suggested by his friend Ed White, he produced writing that wavered between lunatic confessionals and brilliant prose. He composed the version of On the Road that eventually became Visions of Cody in this style, much to the dismay of publishers, who repeatedly accused him of incoherency. The sense of skating on the edges of consciousness and sanity in language is felt to a much greater degree in the scroll version. Reading it is almost embarrassing, like walking in on someone’s private repertoire of weaknesses. At times it seems excessively raw and uncrafted, but these reactions are exactly right. “And just like you say,” Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg in 1952, “the best things we write are always the most suspected.”
Kerouac’s unique relationship to language was partly the result of his upbringing. As he wrote to a reviewer, “The reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my own language. I refashion it to fit French images.” This duality specific to the first-generation American—being an English-speaking citizen but not having an inherited linguistic facility to generate an incidental attitude toward language—comes through in the visceral force and unexpected tenor of Kerouac’s writing. He seemed to approach words from outside of their expected meanings, as if they were found objects to be appropriated and made new. The writing style used in On the Road, which Kerouac eventually developed into “spontaneous prose,” was heavily influenced by the jazz of the period, “in the sense of a, say, tenor man drawing a breath, and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made…that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind.” In 1950, he writes in his journal, “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America—for reasons which are never deeper than the music. Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of a country.” If reading On the Road is hearing this sound of America leaking out of a window in the distance, experiencing the scroll is like finally stumbling onto the back door of the performance.
In the scroll manuscript, Kerouac writes, “My mother was all in accord with my trip to the west, she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much; she even didn’t say too much when I told her I’d have to hitch hike some, ordinarily it frightened her, she thought this would do me good.” In the published version, this becomes, “My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the West; she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much; she even didn’t complain when I told her I’d have to hitchhike some.” “She even didn’t say too much” more closely evokes spoken language than “she even didn’t complain,” while “ordinarily it frightened her” is the kind of afterthought one inserts while telling a story. The rhythmic immediacy in the vernacular of the first version recalls the improvisational syncopations of jazz. Jack’s restlessness comes through in his repetitiveness, a technique that is prevalent throughout the scroll. Additionally, he uses only one semicolon and so the clauses lack the degree of syntactical hierarchy and causality apparent in the second version. Each sentiment is as important as the next, which parallels the search for “kicks” enacted in the novel. The subtle changes in punctuation not only alter the cadence of the section, but also dilute the effect of the meaning.
From scroll to 1957 edition, dashes and ellipses often become commas. Commas often become semicolons and colons. The flow is interrupted. Following a dash from one point to the next without stopping to construct an architecture of expected logic in a sentence more closely mimes the feeling of actually being on the road with Neal, as does sideslipping through descriptions without cle
ar subordinate clauses. “I jumped around only in my chino pants over the thick soft rug” becomes, in the published version, “I jumped around over the thick soft rug, wearing only my chino pants.” The vigorous equality of all experience in the present moment is curtailed in the second version. Reading the scroll, one understands what Kerouac means when he lists as one of the “essentials” in his “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” “Submissive to everything, open, listening.” At the same time, the scroll is a kind of jive, an insider’s code, a way of changing the rules of ordinary English to critique and revise it, to contest the ways in which language enacts power. More important, it is an ultimate safeguard against co-option. Thelonious Monk once said of his jazz, “We’re going to create something they can’t steal because they can’t play it.” In an era of information control, restructuring the basic tools of communication beyond the purview of the mainstream is a subversive act.
Kerouac seemed to be grasping to know America in a way that would encode a hidden editing process, a way that would recuperate the losses and failures inherent in the very structures of our language. In early 1950, after spending an evening listening to a number of jazz greats, including Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, he understood that an “art that expresses the mind of mind, and not the mind of life (the idea of mortal life on earth), is a dead art.” Like the European avant-garde artists of the preceding decades, Kerouac sought to collapse the distance between life and art. In explaining the importance of 1970s punk band the Sex Pistols, Greil Marcus writes that the band’s record “had to change the way a given person performed his or her commute.” While reading the scroll in a local coffee shop, I recently found myself staring out the window at people going by and realizing, mid-reverie, that On the Road has to change the way a person drinks his or her coffee. It is simultaneously about the most minute details of one’s life and the most monumental, a cartography of human desire in its extreme immensity and insignificance. In his spontaneous prose-infused biography on Kerouac entitled Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a Québécois writer, explains that the question “Who was I?” was at the heart of Kerouac’s project as a writer, because he knew that “the revolution is nothing if not interior.”
Kerouac’s questions of the self must change the way we know America. In one of my shameful memories of being embarrassed by my immigrant parents as a child, I remember criticizing my mother for exposing her foreignness in some way and her saying to me, “We do not blend easily.” As I read On the Road, I think of what they endured—living through two brutal wars and innumerable days of poverty and death—to go to a place where the desire to blend was swiftly replaced by the need to make a space in which survival could mean something personal. On the Road is a kind of map for these spaces. It inspires some vestigial picture of idealism that perhaps only existed in books—something akin to Jay Gatsby’s “orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” At the same time, it is a feeling of comfortable foreignness, of being perfectly outside, of edging, like the Beats, “just another step toward that last, pale generation which will not know the answers either.” Kerouac lets you love to lose yourself. You become attuned to something that is ultimately outside language—some faint hum of knowingness that is only felt, all the way to the deepest core of being. The best way, I think, to experience On the Road is sitting alone by a window, feeling the onrush of a poem, a painting, a song about to happen, head slightly tilted toward invisible forces that ensure, no matter what, that artists will continue to, in Kerouac’s words, “translate the passionate intensity of life.” You are wrapped in a sense of being haunted by people and places and particular moments that drive you, like Kerouac, to “the edges of language where the babble of the subconscious begins,” hoping for access to the secret PAUSE button before the thing that is revealed, so you can keep it going, whatever it is.
“Into the Heart of Things”
Neal Cassady and the Search for the Authentic
George Mouratidis
Writing of the impending release of On the Road at the conclusion of Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac gives a markedly mythologized impression of the unexpected appearance of Neal Cassady at the very moment “Jack Duluoz” is unpacking advance copies of his novel, “all about Cody and me”:
I look up as a golden light appears in the porch door silently; and there stands Cody…Not a sound. I’m also caught red handed…with a copy of Road in my hands…I automatically hand one to Cody, who is after all the hero of the poor crazy sad book. It’s one of the several occasions in my life where a meeting with Cody seems to be suffused with a silent golden light…altho I don’t even know what it means, unless it means that Cody is some kind of angel or archangel come down to this world and I recognize it.
Spanning his Road novels, Kerouac’s representation of his relationship with Cassady is one of contrasts, consisting of various and distinct incarnations of Cassady between which we as readers move in our attempt to establish a sense of his development and changing significance. With the publication of the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, the actual process of Kerouac’s mutable representation of Cassady is further illuminated. We are now given a broader, more cohesive picture of the Cassady figure’s development in Kerouac’s writing; from “Neal Cassady” (the scroll) to “Dean Pomeray” (the immediate second draft of On the Road) to “Cody Pomeray” (the posthumously published Visions of Cody), and then the “Dean Moriarty” of the published On the Road, after which Cassady would reappear as the estranged, almost mythical “old buddy” Cody Pomeray in subsequent novels, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and the abovementioned Desolation Angels. This progression moves from the symbolic to the mythic, from human to vision, marking Kerouac’s gradual separation of the real Cassady from his romantic vision of him. Through his mutable responses to Cassady in his Road novels Kerouac problematizes both the existential concern with “authentic” being particular to the postwar period, as well as the more contemporary preoccupation with authenticity in representation, showing that they are both (and respectively) ultimately unattainable as ends. Through the changing relationship between Kerouac’s and Cassady’s narrational counterparts and their search for “IT,” along with the metamorphosis of Cassady throughout the Road novels, Kerouac underscores the significance of the process of authentication itself—the journey rather than its end—thus demonstrating that that which would be deemed most authentic is actually a becoming rather than being. The publication of the scroll manuscript contributes to this significance of an ongoing process of becoming by showing us as readers that there can be no authentic On the Road, only our perpetual movement between the different versions or “incarnations” of the narrative.
The context of Kerouac and Cassady’s first meeting is quite telling in regard to the personal and symbolic significance the latter would take on in Kerouac’s writing. Kerouac met Cassady in December of 1946, at the end of a yearlong period that saw his hospitalization for thrombophlebitis, the death of his father, Leo (on May 16, 1946), and the annulment of Kerouac’s first marriage to Frankie Edith Parker on September 18. Four years Kerouac’s junior, Cassady came to represent a reaffirmation of the life and vital youth whose inevitable ephemerality Kerouac wished to transcend, a way to challenge and rupture the bondage of Time over the individual. This haunting, suffocating sense of mortality and inevitable loss, which Kerouac would carry throughout his life, goes even further back, to the death, in 1926, of his nine-year-old brother, Gerard, when Kerouac was four. In Cassady, Kerouac also saw the brother whose death was a focal point of his devout Catholic upbringing, a connection reinforced by the fact that Cassady too was a Catholic. While referring to Cassady throughout the Road novels, as well as in their personal correspondence, as his “brother,” Kerouac makes this connection far more explicit in the scroll manuscript: “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 toge
ther and our lives are fuckt up and so there it stands.” Right from the opening line of the scroll Kerouac foregrounds this sense of abandonment and loss, and also the fatherlessness he shared with Cassady, whose own father was an estranged derelict: “I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.” Cassady became a surrogate brother and father, a teacher and guide in Kerouac’s search to reconnect with those he had lost—brother, father, wife, household—a way of staving off the ephemerality that brought about this sense of abandonment and ultimate elusiveness, and a way of transcending the guilt and burden of existing in their wake. “Life is not enough,” Kerouac wrote in an August 1949 journal entry. What Kerouac sought was characterized by a tension between a subjective truth he found in origins—both within and without sociocultural institutions and temporal boundaries—and a sense of an objective reality which always kept such “authentic” truths at a distance, always absent, and, in that absence, romanticized and mythologized.
As both the scroll and the published version of On the Road attest, Cassady’s absence becomes a presence through legend. This resonates with the sense of the authentic, which is established in absence, recognized more according to what it is not rather than what it is. Kerouac’s close friend Hal Chase, who, like Cassady, was also originally from Denver, had shared with Kerouac the letters Cassady had sent him, telling Kerouac all he knew of the nebulous, fast-talking, car-jacking, streetwise womanizer, newly married and fresh out of the reformatory. Cassady was thus immediately established in Kerouac’s mind as the consummate “outsider,” an embodiment of uncompromising individuality, someone who appealed to Kerouac’s own sense of sociocultural displacement. “Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, shit on them all. I’m going to live life my own ‘lazy-no-good’ way, that’s what I’m going to do,” Kerouac wrote in a journal entry of August 23, 1948, and Cassady would become a vehicle through which Kerouac could attempt to lead such an existence. In the same journal entry he first explained that his new novel, On the Road, would be about “two guys” who journey “in search of something they don’t really find,” the central thematic and structural motif that would remain constant throughout the novel’s development, and one which would also come to characterize the relationship between Kerouac and Cassady, especially its depiction in Kerouac’s prose.