On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [35]
I look up as a golden light appears in the porch door silently; and there stands Cody…Not a sound. I’m also caught red handed…with a copy of Road in my hands…I automatically hand one to Cody, who is after all the hero of the poor crazy sad book. It’s one of the several occasions in my life where a meeting with Cody seems to be suffused with a silent golden light…altho I don’t even know what it means, unless it means that Cody is some kind of angel or archangel come down to this world and I recognize it.
Spanning his Road novels, Kerouac’s representation of his relationship with Cassady is one of contrasts, consisting of various and distinct incarnations of Cassady between which we as readers move in our attempt to establish a sense of his development and changing significance. With the publication of the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, the actual process of Kerouac’s mutable representation of Cassady is further illuminated. We are now given a broader, more cohesive picture of the Cassady figure’s development in Kerouac’s writing; from “Neal Cassady” (the scroll) to “Dean Pomeray” (the immediate second draft of On the Road) to “Cody Pomeray” (the posthumously published Visions of Cody), and then the “Dean Moriarty” of the published On the Road, after which Cassady would reappear as the estranged, almost mythical “old buddy” Cody Pomeray in subsequent novels, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and the abovementioned Desolation Angels. This progression moves from the symbolic to the mythic, from human to vision, marking Kerouac’s gradual separation of the real Cassady from his romantic vision of him. Through his mutable responses to Cassady in his Road novels Kerouac problematizes both the existential concern with “authentic” being particular to the postwar period, as well as the more contemporary preoccupation with authenticity in representation, showing that they are both (and respectively) ultimately unattainable as ends. Through the changing relationship between Kerouac’s and Cassady’s narrational counterparts and their search for “IT,” along with the metamorphosis of Cassady throughout the Road novels, Kerouac underscores the significance of the process of authentication itself—the journey rather than its end—thus demonstrating that that which would be deemed most authentic is actually a becoming rather than being. The publication of the scroll manuscript contributes to this significance of an ongoing process of becoming by showing us as readers that there can be no authentic On the Road, only our perpetual movement between the different versions or “incarnations” of the narrative.
The context of Kerouac and Cassady’s first meeting is quite telling in regard to the personal and symbolic significance the latter would take on in Kerouac’s writing. Kerouac met Cassady in December of 1946, at the end of a yearlong period that saw his hospitalization for thrombophlebitis, the death of his father, Leo (on May 16, 1946), and the annulment of Kerouac’s first marriage to Frankie Edith Parker on September 18. Four years Kerouac’s junior, Cassady came to represent a reaffirmation of the life and vital youth whose inevitable ephemerality Kerouac wished to transcend, a way to challenge and rupture the bondage of Time over the individual. This haunting, suffocating sense of mortality and inevitable loss, which Kerouac would carry throughout his life, goes even further back, to the death, in 1926, of his nine-year-old brother, Gerard, when Kerouac was four. In Cassady, Kerouac also saw the brother whose death was a focal point of his devout Catholic upbringing, a connection reinforced by the fact that Cassady too was a Catholic. While referring to Cassady throughout the Road novels, as well as in their personal correspondence, as his “brother,” Kerouac makes this connection far more explicit in the scroll manuscript: “My interest in Neal is the interest I might have had in my brother that died when I was five years old to be utterly straight about it. We have a lot of fun together and our lives are fuckt up and so there