by Jack Kerouac
*In the cast of characters in a manuscript titled “‘On the Road’ as reconceived Feb 15, 1950” Chadwick “Chad” Gavin, Brooklyn baseball player, scholar, jailbird, and roamer, is half brother to Dean Pomeray Jr. Pomeray is a “hipster, hot-rod racer, chauffeur, jailbird, and teahead.” The men are “half-brothers in blood; each 1/16th Comanche.”
*One side of the cover page of the 297-page draft of On the Road has the carefully written holograph title “The Beat Generation” crossed through and “On the Road” written less carefully above it. On the other side of the title “On the Road” is typed in caps and there is a thickly deleted five-word subtitle, the first three words reading “On the Road.” Below the title Kerouac has typed “by John Kerouac” and deleted the “John,” handwriting “Jack” above it in caps. In the lower-right-hand corner of this page Kerouac has typed his name with the “John” once again crossed through. Below this his address is typed as care of “Paul Blake,” Kerouac’s brother-in-law, with a partly legible address in North Carolina. This address is thickly deleted and by hand Kerouac has written “c/o Allen Ginsberg 206 E. 7th St. New York, N. Y.” On a separate page Kerouac has handwritten titles for the five books of the novel: “Get High and Stay High” (above a typed, deleted, illegible, alternate title), “I Can Drive All Night,” “A Hundred and Ten Miles an Hour,” “The Bottom of the Road,” and “Can’t Talk No More.”
The double-spaced text begins with a heavily edited eight-page opening paragraph that begins “I first met Dean not long after [typed] my father died and I thought everything was dead [handwritten].”
The 347-page draft is typed, double spaced on nonuniform paper. The text is edited with additions and deletions by Kerouac and more heavily by an editor at Viking, possibly Helen Taylor. In the bottom right-hand corner of page 347 is typed “JEAN-LOUIS c/o Lord & Colbert 109 E. 36th St. New York, N. Y.” The manuscript begins “I FIRST MET DEAN not long after my wife and I split up.”
*Interviewed in the documentary On the Road to Desolation (David Steward, dir., BBC/NVC Arts Co-production, 1997), Giroux said: “I would say in the first half of 1951, I was at my desk at Harcourt, Brace, and the phone rang and it was Jack, and he said, ‘Bob, I’ve finished it!’ and I said, ‘Oh great, Jack, that’s wonderful news.’ He said, ‘I want to come over.’ I said, ‘What, right now?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I have to see you, I have to show you…’ I said, ‘Okay, come on, come over to the office.’ We were on Forty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. He came into the office looking…high, looking, you know…drunk, and he had a big roll of paper, like a paper towel like you use in the kitchen, big roll of paper under his left arm, and he was, you know…This was a great moment for him, I understood that. He took one end of the roll and he flung it right across my office like a big piece of confetti, right across my desk, and I thought, ‘This is a strange manuscript. I’ve never seen a manuscript like this.’ And he looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I said, ‘Jack, you know you have to cut this up. It has to be edited.’ And his face flushed, and he said, ‘There’ll be no editing on this manuscript.’ I said, ‘Why not, Jack?’ He said, ‘This manuscript has been dictated by the Holy Ghost.’”
*The “Visions of Cody” revised typescript in the Berg Collection has the holographic title page: “Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac ’ 51-52.” A second holographic title page reads “On the Road,” written in ink and canceled, and retitled “Visions of Neal (Cody)” in pencil. The first page of the typescript is titled “Visions of Enal.” The typescript has 558 leaves. There is no extant draft of On the Road in excess of 347 pages.
*Ginsberg contributed an introduction titled “The Great Rememberer,” writing that “I don’t think it is possible to proceed further in America without first understanding Kerouac’s tender brooding compassion…Bypassing Kerouac one bypasses the mortal heart, sung in prose vowels; the book a giant mantra of appreciation and adoration of an American man, one striving heroic soul.”
*From London in April 1957, and impressed by the Teddy Boy culture he found there, Kerouac wrote to Sterling Lord that “maybe it would double the sales to change the title to ROCK AND ROLL ROAD.”