On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [23]
On November 2 Taylor thanked Whitehorn for the releases and for his “laborious” work on the novel. “Now it is our turn to do a lot of tedious digging and editing,” she wrote, “and then we reach the next stage. I am afraid you will have to look at it again.”
After receiving the “libel-clearing statement forms” Kerouac secured releases from the “two heroes,” “Dean Moriarty” and “Carlo Marx.” “I can get signatures from everybody,” Kerouac wrote on November 14. Ginsberg signed his release “for the benefit of American literature. X. Carlo Marx, as it were.”
Despite “instantly” signing and mailing the forms Kerouac was frustrated to hear nothing back from Cowley. “Did you receive those two signatures,” he writes on December 23. “I sent them right back; don’t tell me you didn’t get em! Weeks ago.” Kerouac was also frustrated when neither a contract nor the promised list of recommended changes was sent.
The spring of 1956 found Kerouac still waiting. After a series of missed connections he characterized as “malign fate,” Cowley promised to send the list of recommended corrections in time for Kerouac to work on them in Washington’s Skagit Valley, where Kerouac was working as a fire lookout for the summer on Desolation Peak. This delay, added to the already long wait to have the novel published, not surprisingly tested Kerouac’s resolve, and he complained to Sterling Lord on April 10 that the saga was taking on “absurd-martyr-proportions I can’t buy.” More than once he threatened to take On the Road from Viking. Always he relented, convinced that Viking represented his best chance despite the collective dragging of feet on the project that continued through 1956. For the most part he released his anger in letters to Sterling Lord and unsent letters to Cowley.
Kerouac was still anxious in the fall of 1956, writing to Sterling Lord from San Francisco in September to ask “what’s happening now?” “Tell me what you think about the Viking Press situation,” Kerouac asked Lord, “perhaps you might suggest we change the title to WOW and publish it right away.”* On October 7 Kerouac wrote from Mexico City asking Lord to retrieve “Beat Generation” from Cowley. “Tell him I respect his sincerity, but I’m not too sure about the others at Viking and tell him I don’t care…I want that book sold on street stalls, it is a book about the streets. Do what you can…I’ve been through every conceivable disgrace now and no rejection or acceptance by publishers can alter that awful final feeling of death—of life-which-is-death.”
Cowley’s final acceptance report for Viking is undated but would have been written toward the end of 1956. Cowley traced the history of the book. Remembering that the novel had been rejected in 1953 “with the proviso that we’d like to see it again,” Cowley wrote that Viking had subsequently worked to “remove the two great problems of libel and obscenity…. Moreover, Kerouac changed the story to avoid most of the libel danger…and Helen Taylor went over it taking out the rest of the libel, some of the obscenity, and tightening the story.”
Cowley wrote that On the Road is not “a great or even a likable book.” The “wild bohemians” of the novel were like “machines gone haywire…with hardly any emotions except a determination to say Yes to any new experience”
The book, I prophesy, will get mixed but interested reviews, it will have a good sale (perhaps a very good one), and I don’t think there is any doubt that it will be reprinted as a paperback. Moreover it will stand for a long time as the honest record of another way of life.
On New Year’s Day 1957, Kerouac reported to Sterling Lord from Florida that “the m.s. of ROAD is all ready for the printer, please tell Keith and Malcolm to have complete confidence in the libel-clearing thorough job I did on it…they will be pleased.” Traveling to New York by Greyhound bus from Florida, Kerouac turned in the manuscript