On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [12]
Kerouac’s letters, most often read as spontaneous responses to Cassady, are in many of their episodes and details developments of notes and story fragments he had first made on December 13, 1950, also under the title “Souls on the Road.” These notes include thirty-five numbered “memories,” ranging from the story about Kerouac’s mother’s picking “worms from my ass-hole”; his “riding licketysplit” down a street near Lupine Road; and the haunted “One Mighty Snake Hill Castle” on Lakeview Avenue, many of which Kerouac worked into the letters he sends Cassady. This is not to diminish the catalytic importance of the Joan Anderson letter to Kerouac. John Clellon Holmes remembers Kerouac saying, “I’m going to get me a roll of shelf-paper, feed it into the typewriter, and just write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened, all in a rush, the hell with these phony architectures—and worry about it later.” In the scroll Kerouac writes that “in a few years [Cassady] would become such a great writer,” and suggests that this is why he is writing Cassady’s story. After reading the Joan Anderson letter and writing his own series of letters in reply Kerouac was convinced that On the Road should be written in a straight-ahead, conversational style and that he should “renounce fiction and fear. There is nothing to do but write the truth. There is no other reason to write.” The novel would detail Kerouac’s five trips across America since first meeting Cassady in 1947 and would end with the previous summer’s trip to Mexico.
What were Kerouac’s working methods like during those three weeks in April of 1951? Some years later Philip Whalen wrote an account that allows us to imagine the writing practice Kerouac first developed at that time.
He would sit—at a typewriter, and he had all these pocket notebooks, and the pocket notebooks would be open at his left-hand side on the typing table—and he’d be typing. He could type faster than any human being you ever saw. The most noise that you heard while he was typing was the carriage return, slamming back again and again. The little bell would bing-bang, bing-bang, bing-bang! Just incredibly fast, faster than a teletype…Then he’d make a mistake, and this would lead him off into a possible part of a new paragraph, into a funny riff of some kind that he’d add while he was in the process of copying. Then, maybe he’d turn a page of the notebook and he’d look at that page and realize it was no good and he’d X it out, or maybe part of that page. And then he’d type a little bit and turn another page, and type the whole thing, and another page, and he’d type from that. And then something would—again, he would exclaim and laugh and carry on and have a big time doing it.
Kerouac worked in what Holmes remembered as a “large, pleasant room in Chelsea.” His notebooks and letters and a “Self-Instruction” list “sat at side of typewriter as chapter guide.” The paper Kerouac used was not Teletype paper but thin, long sheets of drawing paper belonging to a friend, Bill Cannastra. Kerouac had inherited the paper when he moved into Cannastra’s loft on West Twentieth Street after Cannastra’s accidental death in the New York subway. When did Kerouac first flash on an image in his mind of the paper joined together? A long roll of paper like the remembered road that he could write fast on and not stop. So that the paper joined together became an endless page.
It is clear that the scroll is something consciously made by Kerouac rather than found. He cut the paper into eight pieces of varying length and shaped it to fit the typewriter. The pencil marks and scissor cuts are still visible on the paper. Then he taped the pieces together. It’s not known whether he taped each sheet on as he finished it, or waited until he had finished the whole thing before taping the sheets together.
The scroll is, for the most part and contrary to mythology, conventionally punctuated, even to the extent that