On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [19]
Kerouac added a handwritten note to Carolyn Cassady: “This is the reception On the Road [Cody] is getting – Ginsberg + Holmes are even more irritated – it’s undoubtedly a great book.” In reply to Solomon on August 5, Kerouac conceded that the “new vision” of Visions of Cody (which he was still calling On the Road) is “going to be considered unprintable for a while to come,” but this was because of the shortsightedness of publishers. To label the book “incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death.”
This is what will happen: “On the Road [Cody]” will be published…and it will gain its due recognition, in time, as the first or one of the first modern prose books in America; not merely a “novel,” which is after all a European form…And all you will have succeeded in doing is putting another cookbook on your list to fill the gap I leave. You can spin a thousand neat epigrams to prove that any cookbook is better than the wild visions of Neal Pomeray and the Road. But not when the worms start digesting, brothers and sisters.
I didn’t write “On the Road” [Cody] to be malicious, I wrote it with joy in my heart, and a conviction that somewhere along the line somebody will see it without the present day goggles on and realize the freedom of expression that still lies ahead.
Solomon’s reply to Kerouac’s “masterful cudgelling” on August 5 accepted that “you may be entirely accurate in accusing us of lack of vision, and of tastes molded by television. However, we have never claimed to be prophets…[O]ur rejection of [Cody] in 1952 may well, as you feel, mark us for ridicule twenty-five years later.” Writing that he was obliged to judge manuscripts by the standards of the day, Solomon wrote that the novel, “after the point when you discovered your ‘sketching’ technique, is simply an experiment we do not understand.” Visions of Cody would not be published until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death.*
For Kerouac the years immediately after the failure to get On the Road or Visions of Cody published are marked by obscurity and ragged wandering between North Carolina, San Francisco, Mexico, and New York. In the summer of 1952 he left Mexico and returned to Rocky Mount, where he worked for a short time in a textile mill. In the fall he returned to the West Coast and worked on the railroad, living for the most part in a San Francisco skid row hotel room and saving to go back to Mexico. Remarkably, although he was rejected, alone, poor, and homeless, the flow of brilliant work that had started with On the Road and Visions of Cody continued. His writing flew. In Mexico in the summer he finished Doctor Sax. In the West he wrote “October in the Railroad Earth.” Back in Richmond Hill in the New Year he wrote Maggie Cassidy. On his thirtieth birthday on March 12, 1952, Kerouac, on his way to Mexico from San Francisco, wrote to John Holmes:
I have completely reached my peak maturity now and am blowing such mad poetry and literature that I’ll look back years later with amazement and chagrin that I can’t do it anymore, but nobodys going to know this fact for 15, 20 years, only I know it, and maybe Allen.
In July 1953, Malcolm Cowley began to take an active interest in Kerouac’s work after receiving a letter from Allen Ginsberg. As Steve Turner notes, Ginsberg had worked in advertising and journalism for years, and his approach to Cowley was not accidental. A hugely significant and influential figure in the story of twentieth-century American literature, Malcolm Cowley had championed Hemingway in the 1920s and done much to recover the listing reputation of William Faulkner by editing The Portable Faulkner for Viking in 1946. Born in 1898 and enlisting, like Hemingway, in the ambulance service during the First World War, Cowley had been literary editor of The New Republic,