On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [3]
For and against Kerouac as he works is the sweet inviting world outside his window. The writing of the novel, begun before Kerouac first travels on the road with Neal Cassady in December of 1948, is tested, broken, and changed by the subsequent transcontinental trips Kerouac makes with him that will in the end become the story of the book and that Kerouac faithfully records in his travel journals. His focus widens as he moves from New York into the West, then back and farther on into the East and then West again and down into Mexico. The places where the imagined book and the lived experiences intersect are the places where what the book is to become are negotiated. What is being negotiated is the relationship between fiction and truth, where truth is understood by Kerouac to mean, “the way consciousness really digs everything that happens.”
As Penny Vlagopoulos explains in the essay that follows, Kerouac is consciously writing against a monological and fearful cold war culture that encouraged Americans in self-surveillance and self-censorship and the transmission of politically acceptable levels of reality. Working on the novel in 1949 Kerouac often visited John Clellon Holmes and showed him his work-in-progress. Holmes writes,
When he came by in the late afternoons, he usually had new scenes with him, but his characters never seemed to get very far beyond [what]…a well-made novel seemed to demand as a contrast to all the footloose uprootedness to come. He wrote long, intricate Melvillian sentences…I would have given anything I owned to have written such tidal prose, and yet he threw it out, and began again, and failed again, and grew moody and perplexed.
Excepting those writers, such as Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Joyce, who clearly influenced him, fiction, even and especially well-made European fiction, was linked in Kerouac’s imagination with both an aesthetic and political culture of self-censorship. The old forms of fiction obscured meaning; stopped you getting at what was underneath. On the Road is the beginning of a process in which Kerouac dismantles and then radically reapplies what he has learned as a fiction writer so that he can, as John Holmes writes, “free the whole range of his consciousness to the page.”
In the “Ray Smith Novel of Fall 1948” Smith, who will reappear as the practiced hitchhiking narrator of The Dharma Bums (1958), barely gets on the road at all. Young Smith decides to travel to California from New York after finding out that his forty-year-old girlfriend Lulubelle has taken up with a man her own age. Ray gets stuck in the rain north of New York City at Bear Mountain because of his foolish dream of thinking he can ride Route 6 all the way to the West Coast. At Bear Mountain, Smith meets Warren Beauchamp, a blond, troubled, privileged Franco-American boy who persuades Ray to travel back with him to New York so that Beauchamp can get money from his family and continue the trip West. The narrative comes to a dead end in a drunken night in New York. Beauchamp’s alcoholic father passes out, and the boys go to Times Square looking for Ray Smith’s friends Leon Levinsky [Allen Ginsberg], Junkey [Herbert Huncke] and a place to stay. Smith meets Paul Jefferson, Lulubelle’s half brother, and eventually Smith and Beauchamp tramp back to Harlem and sleep on Lulubelle’s floor while Lulubelle’s new lover sleeps in Ray’s place in her bed.
In his journal Kerouac writes that he has “no idea where I’m heading with the novel.” On December 1 Kerouac writes a chapter insert titled “Tea Party,” typing the manuscript on December 8. In the story Smith and Beauchamp and various subterranean East Coast hipsters including Junkey and Levinsky meet at Peter Martin’s sister Liz’s apartment to smoke marijuana and inject morphine.
Here Kerouac writes the dream of movement, the journey stalled, and the compensation of drugs that would promote an interior voyage. So that the world might at least appear transformed, just as Liz Martin disguises