by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s composition of the scroll manuscript in April 1951 was coterminous with numerous works in existentialist literature. In The Rebel (1951), a book in which he argues that perpetual opposition is what brings about a reaffirmation of life in the midst of mass conformity, Albert Camus writes, “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” Camus is best known for his novel The Outsider (1942). In this novel and in similar fiction the central focus for what is most often an “antihero” is the search for such an essence of being, for the authentic. In Cassady, Kerouac saw the potential for attaining such authenticity, an existence that was totally subjective and impulsive, outside the boundaries of the conservative social institutions and cultural norms—dominant at the time—above all, an existence that transcended the constrictions of objective immutable Time and its regimentation of experience and expression. “I want uninterrupted rapture,” Kerouac writes in one of his On the Road workbooks, “Why should I compromise with anything else, or with the ‘Bourgeois’ calm of the backyard lawn.” This fervent desire, however, provides the counterpoint to the calm he simultaneously sought in his personal relationships and in a more centered domestic existence as a household patriarch, an ideal picture splintered by that ephemerality he so wished to transcend.
In Kerouac’s work, the search for the authentic is thus part of the dualism that marks his life and writing, a dualism between two distinct but nevertheless intertwined imperatives—domesticity and “kicks,” tradition and progressiveness, nostalgia and possibility—an ambivalence on both a personal as well as a broader sociocultural level of significance. Kerouac’s nostalgia was for an American past he romanticized and mythologized, the prewar America of the Depression, the westward expansion, and the Old West, which he imbued with “glee,” “honesty,” “spitelessness,” and “wild selfbelieving individuality.” This desire to reconnect with “old American whoopee” was at the same time intimately linked to his idyllic yet haunted youth in Lowell, Massachusetts. By locating the imperatives of individuality and innocence both in his own and America’s past, the authenticity Kerouac sought pointed him outside the social and cultural mainstream, as well as indicating a displacement from his own historical time.
In the different versions of Kerouac’s road narrative we see this sense of authenticity as something that is a presence only in its conspicuous absence, as something presupposed, and which only exists in its potentiality; as long as the ideal of authenticity remained intact, so too did the possibility of its realization. The quality of life which, for Kerouac, existed outside objective boundaries is incumbent in the socioculturally transgressive pursuit of authenticity, the search for the beckoning “pearl” handed to the traveler on the road, the promised “paradise” at the end of the journey: “the pearl was there, the pearl was there,” as “Jack Kerouac”/Sal Paradise states, but always just out of reach. The attainability is all built on Jack/Sal’s faith, and his movement driven by it, rather than any knowledge of its imminent realization. With the pursuit of the imponderable “IT” the only way to go is in a decentralized fashion, to go “every direction” and never be “hung up.” However, we see that Jack/Sal is indeed hung up. “Neal Cassady”/Dean Moriarty’s refrain of “We know time” is a call to spontaneity, to living totally subjectively in and for the moment. In so doing, he suspends the authority of Time over the individual: “Now is that time [emphasis added],” Neal/Dean echoes the Charlie Parker classic. This rupture of regimented time, however, is also a means through which Kerouac, via his narrational counterpart, expresses his desire to rupture the ephemerality of history—that of his own personal life and that of America’s legendary past as it existed in his imagination.
Kerouac mediates the search for authenticity through his changing representations of Neal Cassady. Through him, he expresses the instability and restlessness of his own life, the ambivalences and dualism he struggled with. Neal/Dean always moves, oscillating between “worklife plans,” marriage and family, on the one hand, and going “mad” and pursuing “IT” on the other. Jack/Sal, however, is less irreverent and uncompromising in such movements between these two dynamics, often finding this liminality a psychological and emotional impasse. His view along such an authenticating road is—like Kerouac’s own view of postwar America and of Cassady himself—always Janus-like.
We see Kerouac’s image of Cassady progress along an arc. Beginning in myth, legend, and ideal, Cassady becomes a reality through Kerouac’s personal experience of him. However, as their relationship begins to break down, Kerouac retreats into myth and legend in his representation of Cassady. In this progression there is a simultaneous forward movement informed by a retrospective gaze, a recapping of losses and impossibilities. This dualism is exemplified in a section of the scroll manuscript where Jack is “staggering back east in search of [his] stone” in the wake of his disillusionment with his idealized West and with Neal—a section of the journey that is missing in the published novel but corresponds with Kerouac’s “Rain and Rivers” journal as published in Windblown World (2005). Kerouac explains in the scroll the reason and purpose of such a searching journey:
All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard’s train to Westchester—but without hangovers. And I had many a romantic fancy then, and sighed at my star. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.
Here Kerouac acknowledges authenticity’s unattainability and the loss of the ideal form it may take or upon which it is projected, while at the same time underscoring the inevitability, if not the necessity, of dealing with such a realization.
Kerouac first establishes Neal/Dean as the embodiment of the potentiality for authenticity when he locates him on the social and cultural margins through his criminality, as a “young jailkid shrouded in mystery.” His impulsiveness and excitability, his openness and unselfconsciousness pointed to new possibilities of experience, not so much due to who Neal/Dean was as by what he symbolized—the yet to be known, the West yet to be reached by Jack/Sal.
The journey from New York to San Francisco in the hope of finding “IT” through the pursuit of “kicks” is the significant event in the relationship between Kerouac and Cassady’s narrational counterparts. Highlighting the importance of the movement and fluidity of the search itself, aptly, they listen to Dexter Gordon’s “The Hunt” before setting off: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” This trip, both in the scroll and published versions, is the point where Kerouac’s vision of Cassady begins to unravel, when Neal/Dean—as the embodiment of and vehicle for a potential authenticity—is doubted: “I lost faith in Neal that year [emphasis added],” Jack/Sal states upon being immediately abandoned in San Francisco. Writing in his “Rain and Rivers” journal, Kerouac describes his disillusioning departure from San Francisco not in terms of rejection or failure but as catharsis, as having “escaped from the compulsiveness of Neal’s mystique and hashisch”—a realization that the “real” Cassady and the significance Kerouac projects onto him are two distinct entities. Kerouac makes this imminent separation explicit in the scroll manuscript right at the advent of this pivotal journey: “You always expect some kind of magic at the end of the road. Strangely enough Neal and I were going to find it, alone, before we finished with it [emphasis added].”
Only after he is doubted does Neal/Dean become “great”—a greatness that separates him from the absolute zenith of physicality and vitality he represented as the commanding, rhapsodizing, mad mystic behind the wheel. It is when Neal/Dean is seen as human that Jack/
Sal’s ideals shift. The more he is reminded that Neal/Dean is not impervious to time, age, and mortality, the higher, distant, and less humanly accessible the representative image. By the third section of the narrative, Kerouac compares Neal/Dean with Rabelais’ larger than life “Gargantua,” burning across the land. At this juncture Neal/ Dean becomes the “Holy Goof,” a consequence of the romantic vision’s unraveling—destitute, with bandaged thumb, never more part of the corporeal world, yet never more distinct from it in a humbled saintliness. By the end of the novel, a burned-out Neal/Dean “couldn’t talk any more,” fading away around the corner and slinking back across the country. It is here that Kerouac’s vision of Cassady in the Road novels begins to take on a more complex, deeper form.
The presentation of Dean Moriarty as well as Kerouac’s treatment of events in On the Road is a mythic, idealized retelling—the legend—but one which can only occur after the “facts” are distinguished from the romantic vision of Cassady. The scroll manuscript and the published novel frame the metamorphosis of Kerouac’s response to Cassady, while in Visions of Cody, the events recounted and the people in them, like Cassady, are mostly separated from the mythological, visionary passages.
The Neal of the scroll is, in comparison with the Dean of the published version, less mythologized, more human. Neal’s boyhood in Denver and his personal relationships—most notably those with Allen Ginsberg, Louanne Henderson, and Justin W. Brierly—are explained in more explicit detail, providing a broader context and background for Neal. The material omitted from the published version raises the profile of other characters in the story, lessening Neal’s centrality to the narrative action, especially that of Jack’s journey. He is still, however, conspicuous in his absence, with Kerouac’s compulsion early on in the scroll manuscript to “set the stage about Neal.” The resultant demystification of the Cassady character—when read against the published version—in turn changes the nature of the Kerouac figure’s relationship with the story’s authentic antihero to one that is more distant, one more dependent on physical absence, giving a more realistic impression of the unraveling personal relationship depicted in the narrative.
While the role of Denver D. Doll in the published version is marginal, that of its real counterpart in the scroll, Justin W. Brierly, is major, especially given his real-life relationship with Cassady. A highschool English teacher, lawyer, Realtor, and entrepreneur, Brierly was a prominent and well-connected Denver personality during the time the scroll was written. He was also Cassady’s one-time mentor and sponsor while Cassady was in the reformatory. Writing to Ed White on August 6, 1953, Kerouac refers to the scroll version of On the Road as “the novel in which Justin has big role, real big…I spose Cassady will sue.” Brierly presents a stronger link to Cassady’s actual past and private life, presenting them in greater depth. Neal’s failure as Brierly’s protégé, for instance, provides a context for the “war with social overtones,” alienating him from his Denver friends, something never properly explained in the published novel. While Neal’s status as an outsider is augmented by this displacement, it would not be until the published version that this outsider status would be fully mythologized.
The hindsight offered at various points throughout the scroll underscores a knowing acceptance of the failure of Jack’s vision of Neal, and so illuminates Jack’s problematic relationship with his own expectations and the ambivalent nature of his search for authenticity. Just as Kerouac wrote The Town and the City, as he said, to “explain everything,” in the scroll version we see the beginning of Kerouac’s explanation of Cassady and his significance. After completing the scroll, Kerouac attempted to rewrite the same story, but instead composed an entirely different book, a novel he would eventually and aptly title “Visions of Neal.”
In this new version of On the Road, which Kerouac began in May 1951, the mythologizing of Neal Cassady is increased while at the same time eventually becoming distinguished from Cassady himself. Corresponding with Cassady that October, Kerouac reassures him, “I am sending you these 3 now-typed-up-revised pages of my writing ROAD…to show you that ‘Dean Pomeray’ is a vision [emphasis added].” By April, 1952, Kerouac had completed yet another version of On the Road while staying with Cassady and his family in San Francisco. In a letter of May 18, 1952, Kerouac informs Ginsberg (also his literary agent at the time), “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.” He even tells Ginsberg, “If necessary change the title to Visions of Neal or something.” Among numerous criticisms of this new version of On the Road in a June 11, 1952, letter to Kerouac, Ginsberg observes, “1. You still didn’t cover Neal’s history. 2. You covered your own reactions.” Kerouac’s new novel was certainly no biography but a cartography, both interior and exterior, of his own changing vision of Cassady and the personal significance he held for Kerouac; it was also a way for him to explore his own personal relationship with those significances. This new version of On the Road would eventually be published as Visions of Cody.
As Kerouac reconciles his complex responses to Cassady in Visions of Cody, we see the sense of authenticity shift from the existential to the representational. Kerouac examines Cassady as a phenomenon, in a prose style that is an exploratory multifaceted expanse. He problematizes the idea of the authentic in Visions of Cody by giving Cody Pomeray broader dimensions and thus a fuller representation. This offers more to the reader, more Blakean “minute particulars,” than a symbolic significance would. One therefore feels that one’s experience of this treatment is much more authentic because it is more sensorial, more evocative, even though it is the representation of Cassady furthest from the truth and closest to mythology and divinization. Cody is made to speak in various and distinct ways that deviate from Kerouac’s consideration of the real-life Cassady and their unraveled personal relationship—ways which can thus be considered “inauthentic.” Here, Cody becomes more a vehicle through which Kerouac could illustrate his own particular impression of the world. Now, however, rather than distinguishing Cassady from this world, Kerouac merges him into this broader vision, “the way consciousness really digs everything that happens” as Ginsberg would later say of Kerouac’s “deep form.” Kerouac now presents Cassady in the same way his polyvalent and panoramic sensorium acknowledges the world. Only after Kerouac examines in every possible detail and from every possible aspect his vision of Cassady and the romanticized landscapes and idealized projections that he symbolizes and of which he is part does Kerouac’s statement that “Cody is the brother I lost” come to take on its full meaning. Kerouac understands that his romantic vision—of his own and America’s past, and of authenticity—is ultimately unrealizable when focused on one particular person, place, or period. Cody is the vision and ideal whose elusiveness and loss Kerouac now accepts. He has to move through and unravel his vision of Cassady in order to relinquish it, to separate it from Cassady himself. “Cody is not dead,” Kerouac writes. “He is made of the same flesh and bone as (of course) you and me.” The Cassady figure is just another human being among innumerable others, extraordinary because they are all extraordinary, as is the world for Kerouac, now reborn and unfolding, and unfolded by him. Toward the end of Visions of Cody Kerouac writes, “But Cody isn’t great because he is average…Cody can’t possibly be average because I’ve never seen him before. I’ve never seen any of you before. I myself am a stranger to this world.” To “accept loss forever,” as Kerouac prescribes in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” is to get it all down now, and thus immortalize the world and the people in it, before they pass with the inevitable ephemerality of time and mortality. At the conclusion of his “vertical metaphysical” examination of Cassady in Visions of Cody, Kerouac writes, “I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss—I am made of Cody too.”
Whether or not the Cassady in Kerouac’s prose corresponds with the way Cassady reall
y was is of lesser significance than the subjective truth Kerouac found in the vision of authenticity he eventually separated from Cassady, and from a sense of an imposed objective reality. In light of the textual nuances and contrasts that the scroll manuscript provides, what remains most significant is the acceptance of the loss of a romantic vision and its personal significance. Commenting on his father’s death as fictionalized in The Town and the City Kerouac says, “George Martin is dead and gone. I don’t even remember if Leo Kerouac was really completely like that. It was all in my head.” Kerouac’s Road novels mark just such a realization of the fallibility of an embodied vision of the authentic.
In the period before writing the scroll, as Kerouac was working toward a new prose style, what was key was the rejection of an objective factualism and a consequent receptiveness to a subjective impulsive truth that is immediate and, above all, true for the author himself: “People aren’t interested in facts,” writes Kerouac in a December 1949 journal entry, “but in ejaculations.” What would, in this sense, be deemed authentic is how true Kerouac was to his own responses and experiences, both interior and exterior. Kerouac’s writing out of his vision of the authentic was a way for him to find his own place within it—a vision now not projected only onto Cassady, but implicating him in it. This writing out illuminates a sense of authenticity in that actual process itself. What Kerouac saw in Cassady, as mutable as it was, is thus as authentic as what Kerouac saw in the world, and what he found in a more open and direct relationship with it.