On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [14]
There are two known subsequent extant drafts of the novel: a 297-page, heavily revised draft with numerous lines thickly deleted and handwritten inserts on the verso of some pages and a 347-page draft revised by Kerouac and an editor, probably Helen Taylor, from Viking. Both manuscripts are undated. More scholarship is needed to compare and interpret the relationship between the three drafts. While it seems most likely that the 297-page draft is the one Kerouac worked on after finishing the original scroll, it is less clear when the 347-page draft was written. There is evidence that Kerouac and Viking were working from this draft by the fall of 1955. Letters between Kerouac and Malcolm Cowley in September and October 1955 refer to “Dean Moriarty” “Carlo Marx,” and “Denver D. Doll.” These names are only used in the 347-page draft. Page notations in the libel report compiled by lawyer Nathaniel “Tanny” Whitehorn (a lawyer from Hays, Sklag, Epstein & Herzberg who had been hired by Viking to review the manuscript) and submitted to Viking on November 1, 1955, also correspond to the 347-page draft.*
Kerouac also began writing Visions of Cody out of his revisions of On the Road in the fall of 1951, and the relationships between all of these texts are highly complex. While clearly readers will be interested in the differences between the original scroll version of On the Road and the published novel, to speak only about scenes in the original scroll version being “cut” from the published novel elides Kerouac’s redrafting process and serves to marginalize Kerouac from the writing of his own novel. Certainly there are scenes and episodes in the scroll that are not present in the published novel, but that text is the result of a conscious process of redrafting and revision begun by Kerouac and influenced by a number of readers, editors, and lawyers, including Robert Giroux, Rae Everitt, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm Cowley, Nathaniel Whitehorn, and Helen Taylor.
Significant scenes present here but absent in the published novel include a richly comic account of Neal and Allen’s visit to Bill Burroughs in the fall of 1947; a poignant discussion between Jack, Neal, and Louanne as they pass through Pecos, Texas, on the way to San Francisco about “what we would be if we were Old West characters”; a wild, destructive party at Alan Harrington’s adobe house in Arizona during the same journey that reinforces the sense of the speeding Cassady’s out-of-control sexuality; Jack’s second return trip from San Francisco “across the groaning continent” to New York; and Jack and Neal’s visit to Jack’s first wife Edie in Detroit toward the end of Part Three.
As detailed below, there were many reasons for the deletion of these and other scenes, including, as the years passed, Kerouac’s increasing desperation in the wake of the success of Holmes’s Go and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to see the novel published. By September 1955 he was telling Malcolm Cowley that any “changes you want to make OK with me.” The second return trip to San Francisco was cut by Kerouac to streamline the story, while the Detroit section of the novel, in which Edie is represented as fat and wearing overalls, drinking beer, and munching candy, was among a number of scenes also cut by Kerouac on the recommendation of Cowley and Nathaniel Whitehorn, who were fearful of libel suits. Despite Kerouac’s deletion of much of the sexual material and language, in particular the homosexual content, as part of the redrafting process, other scenes that survived into the 347-page draft, including the story of a sodomizing monkey in an LA whorehouse, were later cut for obscenity.
Interestingly, many scenes in the original version that were deleted by Kerouac in the 297-page draft find their way, reworked, into the 347-page draft and into the published novel. For example, early in Part 2 of the scroll, as Neal and Jack make ready to leave Ozone Park for the Christmas 1948 trip back to North Carolina to collect Gabrielle, they are visited by Allen Ginsberg, who asks, “What