On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [16]
In this example of one of On the Road’s best-known passages, we can see how in the complex process of revision and redrafting it is Kerouac who begins tempering the sexual content of his novel. In this instance the excising of the sexual relationship between Neal and Allen serves to obscure the erotic aspect of the image Kerouac is simultaneously trying to refine. Also significant are the later editorial changes that break Kerouac’s single long sentence in two. It is these changes to his sentences, rather than the cutting of scenes, which Kerouac would most strongly object to after the novel was published. He would blame Malcolm Cowley for making “endless revisions” and inserting “thousands of needless commas,” though it is Helen Taylor who very likely made these changes. Prevented from seeing the final galleys before the novel was printed, Kerouac would say that he “had no power to stand by my style for better or worse.”
Is the scroll the real On the Road? This is a natural question, especially as the novel trades so strongly in questions of authenticity, but it is perhaps the wrong one to ask. The scroll does not call into question the authenticity of the published novel but is in dialogue with it and all other versions of the text, including the proto-versions of the novel and Visions of Cody, so that Kerouac’s road novel becomes a twentieth-century Song of Myself. The scroll version of On the Road is, however, a markedly darker, edgier, and uninhibited text than the published book. The original version of On the Road is also, of course, a younger man’s book. Kerouac was still only twenty-nine in the spring of 1951. By the time the novel was published he would be thirty-five.
If the history of the novel from the fall of 1948 to the spring of 1951 is the story of Kerouac’s struggle to access the intimate style of writing so powerfully expressed in the scroll manuscript, what follows is the story of how, in editor Malcolm Cowley’s words, the novel became “publishable by [Viking’s] standards.”
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By June 10, 1951, Kerouac’s brief marriage to Joan Haverty had collapsed; Joan was pregnant and had returned to her mother after Kerouac denied he was the father of the child. In a letter written on that date, when Kerouac was moving from the apartment he had shared with Joan on West Twentieth Street to Lucien Carr’s nearby loft on West Twenty-first, Kerouac told Cassady that the “book is finished, handed in, waiting for the word from Giroux.”
Interviewed in 1997, Robert Giroux told the story of Kerouac’s unrolling the scroll in his office. Giroux insisted that the manuscript would have to be cut up and edited. Kerouac supposedly refused to entertain any such idea, telling Giroux that the “Holy Ghost” had dictated the novel. Kerouac also retrospectively recounted versions of this episode. It is possible Kerouac retyped and revised the scroll after such a confrontation, but the story may well be part of the mythmaking surrounding On the Road.* If it happened the meeting would have taken place in the days immediately after Kerouac completed the scroll and may possibly have first occasioned or encouraged Kerouac’s retyping of the scroll into more conventional form, though I believe Kerouac had already arrived at this decision by himself. On June 24 Kerouac reported that while Giroux had said he liked the book, formally submitted in a conventionally typed format, Harcourt, Brace had rejected it as “so new and unusual and controversial and censorable (with hipsters, weeds, fags, etc.) they won’t accept.” Kerouac was going south with his mother, he told Cassady, “to rest my mind and soul.”
On July