On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [2]
The impossible romance of the three weeks in April continues to dominate the imagination when we think about Jack Kerouac. The original scroll version of On the Road is the key document in the history of one of the most enduringly popular and influential novels published in the last fifty years, and among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. Here I trace a compositional and publication history of On the Road. The story is about work, ambition, and rejection, but it is also about transformation. These are the years in which Kerouac transforms himself from a promising young novelist into the most successfully experimental writer of his generation. The key texts in this story are the original scroll version of On the Road, and Visions of Cody, which Kerouac began in the fall of the year in which he wrote the scroll. Because the scroll is the wildflower from which the magic garden of Visions of Cody grows, it is the pivotal text in the story of Jack Kerouac and his place in American literature. The story is also, of course, about Neal Cassady.
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As Kerouac neared the completion of The Town and the City in the late summer and fall of 1948 he was already thinking about his second book. Kerouac worked on The Town and the City between 1947 and 1949, and the novel was published on March 2, 1950. In the latter half of Kerouac’s first novel can be found many of the themes that will dominate his second, while in the original version of On the Road the reader marks the progress “Jack” makes in The Town and the City. If the style of On the Road can be read as a reaction to and a progression from that of the earlier book, then the original version of Road, which begins with the death of the father just as The Town and the City ends with that death, also shows how Kerouac’s second novel should be read as a sequel to his first.
It would take a full-length book to do justice properly to the amount of writing Kerouac produced between 1948 and 1951 as he worked on his second novel. Writing most often late into the night he filled notebooks, journals, hundreds of manuscript pages, and letters, as well as conversations, with ideas for it. In October of 1948 Kerouac wrote in his journal that his ideas for On the Road “obsess me so much I can’t conceal them.” To Hal Chase on October 19 Kerouac wrote that his work plans “overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers.”
One way of navigating the material is through the three major proto-versions of the novel that Kerouac writes between August 1948 and April 1951. These are the fifty-four-page “Ray Smith Novel of Fall 1948,” the Red Moultrie/Vern [later Dean] Pomery Jr. versions of 1949, of which the longest draft is also fifty-four pages, and “Gone on the Road,” a thirty-page, heavily corrected seven-chapter version featuring Cook Smith and Dean Pomeray that Kerouac typed in Richmond Hill in August of 1950. These stories are where Kerouac gives formal expression to the ideas that fill his dreams and notebooks.
In them, Kerouac is consciously trying to write a novel the way novels had always been written, fusing what he remembers with what he can make. Things must stand for other things. Elaborate backstories and histories must be built to explain why his people take to the road. They are to be half brothers in blood, searching for a lost inheritance, for fathers, for family, for home, even for America. Maybe they’ll be part Comanche to better illustrate what they have lost.* He accumulates and rehearses set pieces in his notebooks. The myth of the rainy night. Versions of the dream of the shrouded stranger. The remembered horror of waking in a cheap Iowa hotel room not knowing who or where he was but only that he was getting old and death was