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By Root 1861 0

is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Neal has no answer. “The only thing to do was go.” Kerouac has lined through this 26-line scene in the scroll, and it is not present in the corresponding place (page 121) of the 297-page draft. On page 130 of the 347-page draft, however, the scene is restored, with Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx, Hinkle as Ed Dunkel, Neal as Dean Moriarty, and Jack as Sal Paradise. They are in Paterson, New Jersey, preparing to travel to Virginia to pick up Sal’s aunt. After Marx asks the pivotal question, “I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Kerouac has added a handwritten line that, critically, makes the question politically representative rather than simply personal: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?” Kerouac had made a note of this line in his “Rain and Rivers” journal; in the published novel the scene appears with the line added.

Equally important are those passages of rough lyricism in the scroll that Kerouac refines in the redrafting process. The famous image of Cassady and Ginsberg as “roman candles” is polished and reworked in subsequent drafts. In the scroll Kerouac writes,

[Neal and Allen] rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive…but then they danced down the street like dingldodies and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.

Kerouac has made some holographic corrections to the last four words of the text here, including placing the word “yellow” before “roman candles.” In the scroll Kerouac caps and eroticizes the image by linking it to Neal and Allen’s sexual relationship. Allen was “queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have.” Jack is in the same room. “I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to myself, ‘Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.’” Kerouac has lined through “but I don’t want anything to do with it” on the scroll. On pages 4–5 of the 297-page draft Kerouac has typed the passage about Neal and Allen’s sexual relationship but has then heavily deleted it. Dean is now simply conning Justin Moriarty (Ginsberg) to teach him to write. With Kerouac’s deletions, the candle image has been amended to read:

They rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive, but then they danced down the street and I shambled after because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like yellow spidery roman candles with the blue centerlight across the night.

By hand Kerouac has added, “What would you have called these people in Goethe’s Germany?” On page 6 of the 347-page draft the passage has been redrafted and typed by Kerouac and then further corrected by hand, possibly by Helen Taylor. The corrections are shown below in brackets, and it is the corrected passage that appears in the published novel.

They rushed down the street together[,] digging everything in the early way they had[,] which has later now become [which later became] so much sadder and perceptive and blank[. B] but then they danced down the street like dingledodies[,] and I shambled after as usual [as usual] as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only