On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [17]
long before writing you this letter, but it took a lot of musing about…the musing came in trying to think whether this time I could speak honestly about my reaction to some of the rest of it without having you yank it away from me.
Everitt favored Books 3, 4, and 5 to 1 and 2 because there was a “shape and intensity to Dean and Sal’s” travels. Everitt told Kerouac that the novel began too self-consciously, as if Kerouac were trying to accustom the reader to “this extremely specialized style of writing.” As a result the novel was much too long,
the manuscript pages as they are now are about a page and a half of regular pages, which brings your total page count to roughly 450. Do you want to do this now or leave it [?]
Everitt’s assessment of the page count would indicate a manuscript of around three hundred pages.
On July 16 Kerouac sent a letter to Allen Ginsberg addressed to Allen Moriarty. Allen Moriarty, corrected by hand to Justin Moriarty, is the name Kerouac gives to Ginsberg in the 297-page draft. In the letter Kerouac writes that he is continuing cutting and writing insertions for the novel, and Everitt’s letter may have occasioned these further revisions.
Kerouac fell ill with phlebitis in North Carolina, and from August 11 to the end of the first week in September he was in the Veterans Hospital on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx. From there he wrote to Ed White on September 1 to make arrangements for White’s visit to New York. On the back of some rough inserts in both French and English and headed “On the Road” Kerouac has written, “Yes—Am completely rewriting Neal-epic.” Kerouac’s re-writing may have included some of the handwritten inserts to be found in the 297-page draft of Road, but this is also the time Kerouac begins to write Visions of Cody.
In October and using a new technique he would call “sketching,” Kerouac began to fill the first of nine notebooks that would, when he was finished, amount to 955 handwritten pages. The first page of the first notebook is dated October 1951 and titled “On the Road. A Modern Novel.” On the front of the first notebook is written “Visions of Cody.” Kerouac tells Cassady on October 9, 1951 that he is sending him “these 3 now-typed-up-revised pages of my re-writing ROAD,” and that “since writing that I’ve come up with even greater complicated sentences & VISIONS.”
In the fall of 1951 Kerouac received an offer from Carl Solomon, then an editor at A. A. Wyn, to publish On the Road in their Ace imprint as the first in a three-book contract. Kerouac then traveled west again to visit Neal and Carolyn. He would stay in San Francisco until the spring, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad and continuing his labor on Visions of Cody. Stalling on delivering a manuscript that was becoming more radically experimental by the day, on December 27, 1951, he wrote to Carl Solomon that “I’m not gone off from A. A. Wyn. I’m only gone off to earn money on my own hook so that when I do sell my book it won’t make any difference and anyway it isn’t finished yet.” On March 12, 1952 he told Ed White that he had finished the novel in Neal’s attic. This novel was Visions of Cody.
On March 26, A. A. Wyn wrote to Kerouac care of the Cassady residence at 29 Russell Street, San Francisco:
Enclosed your copy of the signed contract of ON THE ROAD. The first advance of $250 is being sent to your mother…We look forward to seeing the present draft of the manuscript.
On April 7, Kerouac replied to Solomon, suggesting that Wyn publish an abridged paperback version of On the Road that would include a 160-page “sexy narrative stretch” about Cassady that Kerouac planned to excerpt from his manuscripts. The narrative Kerouac refers to, “I first met Neal Pomeray in 1947…,” corresponds to the last section of the published Cody. Kerouac may have been trying to prepare