On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [10]
“Gone on the Road” further dramatizes Kerouac’s interior struggle to find his own voice and free his creative self from an imprisoning and intimidating European literary tradition. Watched by a bored waitress in a diner, Smith is showered by the old books that fall on his head through a hole in the box he carries them in. Standing under a waterfall of European literature Smith knows that he strikes “an awful pose” to the young American woman watching. This heavy symbolism is smoothed out in the published novel as Sal Paradise, whose own dream of not knowing where he is also takes place at the junction of the east of his past and the west of his future, sits on a bus reading the American landscape in preference to Alain-Fournier’s great novel of boyhood friendship, love, and loss, Le Grand Meaulnes. As Cook Smith joins Dean Pomeray, Kerouac leaves behind the “sad, red, European light,” and the pose of European books to travel “back to everybody” in America.
At the end of the story the frustration Kerouac was feeling after more than two years working on a novel still obstinately stalled boiled over in a direct appeal to God:
Pomeray was too excited to notice any of these things that norm—[Dear God please help me, I am lost]—ally drove him into excited explanations of all kinds.
On the verso of the title page Kerouac wrote his own self-criticism—“Prettifying life like a teahead.”
Kerouac sent “Gone on the Road” to Robert Giroux, who, while not rejecting it outright, suggested Kerouac revise the story. In the fall of 1950 Kerouac was smoking “three bombs a day [and] thinking about unhappiness all the time.” He had once imagined On the Road as one in an ambitious “American Times” series of novels to be “narrated in the voices of Americans themselves.” The ten-year-old African American boy Pic would narrate “Adventures on the Road” while other books in the series would be narrated by “Mexicans, Indians, French-Canadians, Italians, Westerners, dilettantes, jailbirds, hoboes, hipsters and many more.” But where was his voice? Rather than revise “Gone on the Road,” he began again.
On Wednesday, December 20, 1950, Kerouac started handwriting a new version of his road novel titled “Souls on the Road.” The five-page manuscript begins
One night in America when the sun had gone down—beginning at four of the winter afternoon in New York by shedding a beautiful burnished gold in the air that made dirty old buildings look like the walls of the temple of the world…then outflying its own shades as it raced three thousand 200 miles over raw, bulging land to the West Coast before sloping down the Pacific, leaving the great rearguard shroud of night to creep upon our earth, to darken rivers, to cup the peaks and fold the final shore in—a knock came at the door of Mrs Gabrielle Kerouac’s apartment over a drugstore in the Ozone Park section of Greater New York.
At the door is Neal Cassady. The images of the sun going down over the “raw, bulging land” of America, of night coming to “darken rivers, to cup the peaks and fold the final shore” are taken from “Shades of the Prison House,” and will of course resurface in the final paragraph of the published novel. In rearranged sequence the episodes Kerouac writes here, in which “Jack Kerouac” recounts his first meeting with “Neal Cassady” in “an apartment in the slums” of Spanish Harlem and Cassady comes to Ozone Park to ask Kerouac to teach him to write, have all the elements of the opening chapter of the published book.
On the manuscript Kerouac has crossed out the name “Benjamin Baloon” in the line “And Benjamin Baloon went to the door” and replaced it with the name “Jack Kerouac.” Kerouac had originally written that it “was Dean Pomeray