On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [26]
Kerouac, a lifelong pacifist who had thrown down his rifle and walked off the field while in navy boot camp, replied to Brustein on September 24, a week before publication of the emphatically spiritual and pacific The Dharma Bums on October 2:
None of my characters travel “in packs” or are a “juvenile gang” ensemble or carry knives. I conceived On the Road as a book about tenderness among the wild young hell-raisers like your grandfather in 1880 when he was a youngster. I have never exalted anyone of a violent nature at any time…Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise were completely spiteless characters, unlike their critics.
Notwithstanding his attempts to engage his critics in serious debate, Kerouac found to his cost, as Joyce Johnson writes, that what most interviewers wanted was to get the “inside story on the Beat Generation and its avatar.” specifically, or course, these interviewers wanted Kerouac to explain the meaning of “Beat,” the word that began to be heard everywhere. “Beat,” Johnson writes, was
first uttered on a Times Square street corner in 1947 by the hipster-angel Herbert Huncke in some evanescent moment of exalted exhaustion, but resonating later in Jack’s mind, living on to accrue new meaning, connecting finally with the Catholic, Latin beatific. “Beat is really saying beatific. See?” Jack so earnest in making his point so the interviewer can get it right, respecting the journalistic search for accuracy although he knows accuracy is not the same as truth.
Again and again, Johnson writes, Kerouac “will go through this derivation with increasing weariness…the words slurring progressively.” So began the nightmare of what Johnson called Kerouac’s “awful success.” Kerouac’s drinking, always heavy, became uncontrolled, and the novel he had begun nearly ten years before in Ozone Park condemned him to his fate as the mythological “King of the Beats,” which is where we began.
This account is a contribution to an ongoing counternarrative intended to displace mythology and recover Kerouac as a writer, first and always. “That is how I remember Kerouac,” William Burroughs wrote, “as a writer talking about writers or sitting in a quiet corner with a notebook, writing in longhand…You feel that he was writing all the time; that writing was the only thing he thought about. He never wanted to do anything else.”
Rewriting America
Kerouac’s Nation of “Underground Monsters”
Penny Vlagopoulos
Often, if you go into a bookstore in New York City, you will find Kerouac not on the shelves, but rather behind the cash register counter. As legend has it, alongside the Bible, On the Road is one of the most frequently stolen books. Books are not usually items deemed worthy of criminal behavior, but Kerouac continues to inspire a level of defiance that suggests his outlaw terrain spreads across generations. Although his most famous novel arose from the particular conditions of the era in which it was written, it acts as a kind of blueprint for translating the upheavals and aftershocks of its historical moment into vital, perennial concerns. At the heart of this quality is a directive to the reader to pursue the more elusive questions of our lives by excavating the places that define us as if we are discovering them for the first time—as outsiders. Kerouac dedicates Visions of Cody, his experimental account of traveling with Neal Cassady, to “America, whatever that is.” Perhaps more than any other novelist of his generation, he approaches America’s ambiguities as a venture imbued in the creative process of, as he puts it in On the Road, “rising from the underground.” The years Kerouac spent writing about his experience on the road were, in a sense, an exploration in nation building from below.
“One night in America when the sun had gone down” begins a proto-draft of On the Road from 1950.