On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [11]
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Aside from this momentum, what led to the three-week burst of writing in April 1951? Key influences have to include Kerouac’s mostly friendly competition with John Clellon Holmes (whose novel Go, published in 1952 and featuring portraits of Kerouac and Cassady, Kerouac would read in March 1951), Dashiell Hammett’s locomotive prose, and Burroughs’s own straight-ahead novel in manuscript (then called Junk). Central importance, however, must be given to the long “Joan Anderson and Cherry Mary” letter from Neal Cassady that Kerouac picked up from the front step of his mother’s apartment in Richmond Hill on December 27, 1950. Kerouac’s exuberant same-day reply to Cassady’s urgent story of sexual misadventure, in which he said that he thought it “ranked among the best things ever written in America,” suggests that the effects of the letter on Kerouac were immediate and complex (Joan Haverty also wrote to Cassady on the twenty-seventh, telling him that Jack “read [the letter] on the subway on his way into town…[and] spent two more hours reading it in a café”).
“Souls on the Road” shows that Kerouac had already moved toward autobiographical fiction but had not yet made the critical switch to a first-person narrative. It was Cassady’s long, fast, sexually frank and detailed first-person story, broken and interrupted by what Cassady called his “Hollywood flashbacks,” that confirmed and encouraged Kerouac to push further in the direction he was already headed. What survives of the letter was published as “To have seen a specter isn’t everything…” in Cassady’s book The First Third. The fragment is interesting both for its mixture of confession and boastfulness and for what Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Cassady’s “hustling voice,” a voice brilliantly captured by Kerouac in the novel. Cassady’s prose, as Ferlinghetti notes, is “homespun, primitive [and] has a certain naïve charm, at once antic and antique, often awkward and doubling back upon itself, like a fast talker.”
“All the crazy falldarall you two boys make over my Big Letter,” Cassady told Ginsberg on March 17, 1951, “just thrills the gurgles out of me, but we still know I’m a whiff and a dream. Nonetheless, tho I blush over its inadequacies, I want you to realize the damn thing took up the better part of three straight Benzidrene afternoons and evenings. So I did work hard at it and managed to burn a little juice out of me and if the fucking thing is worth any money thats great.”
Kerouac’s response suggests that what most excited him about Cassady’s letter was what he might do with this method. Kerouac sounded at times as if he were talking to himself; as though he were writing rules for a new method he would soon apply. “You gather together all the best styles…of Joyce, Celine, Dosty & Proust,” he wrote, “and utilize them in the muscular rush of your own narrative style & excitement…You wrote it with painful rapidity & can patch it up later.”
In the ten letters he sent Cassady over the next two weeks, Kerouac took Cassady’s method and amplified it until, as Allen Ginsberg notes, he had developed a style that
was the long confessional of two buddies telling each other everything that happened, every detail, every cunt-hair in the grass included, every tiny eyeball flick of orange neon flashed past in Chicago in the bus station; all the back of the brain imagery. This required sentences that did not necessarily follow exact classic-type syntactical order, but which allowed for interruption with dashes, allowed for the sentences to break in half, take another direction (with parentheses that might go on for paragraphs). It allowed for individual sentences that might not come to their period except after several pages of self reminiscence, of interruption and the piling on of detail, so that what you arrived at was a sort of stream of consciousness visioned around a specific subject (the tale of the road) and a specific view point (two buddies late at night