On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [24]
On February 24 Cowley wrote to Kerouac turning down his new novel “Desolation Angels.” He wrote, “Meanwhile On the Road is going through the works at a good rate—pretty soon it will all be set up in type—and then the salesmen will go out on the road with ‘On the Road,’ and I hope they sell a lot of copies.”
With the contracts signed and the book in production Kerouac found himself isolated by Viking. Writing from Berkeley in July, and worried about how the forthcoming Howl obscenity trial set for August would affect On the Road, Kerouac complained about the “eerie silence” to Sterling Lord. “I’m real worried because you never write any more, as tho something was wrong, or is it just my imagination? I wrote a long letter to Keith Jennison, also no answer. Is ON THE ROAD going to be published? And if so, what about the final galleys I have to see, and what about the picture of me, and isn’t there some kind of promotion or business going on I should know about. I tell you I am lonesome and scared not hearing from anybody.”
After the small literary magazine New Editions published “Neal and the Three Stooges,” an extract from Visions of Cody, in July, Kerouac sent a copy to Cowley, pointedly writing that he thought Cowley would be “amused to see my ‘untouched’ prose in print.” Kerouac was writing to ask when he would be sent the final galleys of On the Road, but was interrupted in his writing by the delivery of advance copies of the novel. As described in Desolation Angels, Neal Cassady knocked on the door in Berkeley just as Kerouac was unpacking the books. Feeling that he had been caught “red-handed,” Kerouac gave Cassady, “the hero of the poor crazy sad book,” the first copy.
The cultural tensions that can be read in all of these exchanges and negotiations, the mixture of excitement and distaste shown by senior figures at Viking toward Kerouac and his work, the attempts to manage and commodify his wild book and Kerouac’s enthusiastic vulnerability and complicity in that process, and the half-apprehended sense on all sides that literary and cultural history were about to be made would all be publicly played out in the reviews of On the Road that began to appear after the novel was finally published on September 5, 1957.
In Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson describes how just before midnight on September 4 she and Kerouac went to a newsstand at Sixty-sixth and Broadway to wait for copies of the New York Times to be delivered. When the papers came off the delivery truck, and the old man at the newsstand had cut the string that kept the newspapers in bales, Joyce and Jack bought a copy and read Gilbert Millstein’s review of On the Road under a street lamp and then over again and again in Donnelly’s bar on Columbus Avenue.
Millstein’s review, in which he called the book “an authentic work of art,” announced On the Road as “a major novel,” and its publication “an historic event.” Praising Kerouac’s style and technical virtuosity, Millstein argued that the excesses of Sal and Dean, their “frenzied pursuit of every sensory impression,” were made and intended by Kerouac primarily “to serve a spiritual purpose.” It may be that Kerouac’s generation, Millstein wrote, did “not know what refuge it is seeking, but it is seeking.” It was in this spiritual sense, Millstein argued, that Kerouac had taken the most challenging and difficult of the paths available to the postwar American writer identified by John Aldridge in his study, “After the Lost Generation.” Kerouac, in Aldridge