On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [4]
In The Town and the City Kerouac traced how the postwar generation had begun to disperse to places that William Burroughs in Junky called “ambiguous or transitional districts.” A transracial, transgendered counterculture had begun to emerge among these small, interlocking New York subterranean communities of writers and artists, street hustlers and drug users, homosexuals, and jazz musicians, but Peter Martin and Ray Smith found only uneasy refuge enclosed and corralled in these transitional districts. They needed to move.
John Clellon Holmes astutely noted that the “the breakup of [Kerouac’s] Lowell-home, the chaos of the war years and the death of his father, had left him disrupted, anchorless, a deeply traditional nature thrown out of kilter, and thus enormously sensitive to anything uprooted, bereft, helpless or persevering.” To Kerouac, this personal sense of loss and restlessness recorded in The Town and the City led to faith in the possibilities of movement, and to a connection with the historic aspirational American belief in movement as the means of self-transformation. From Whitman’s Song of the Open Road to Cormac McCarthy’s bleakly radiant postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), the road narrative has always been central to America’s cultural representations of itself. When in a 1949 notebook Kerouac described his decision to set his second novel on the road, he said it was “like a message from God giving a sure direction.”
The road would occupy Kerouac from the beginning to the end of his writing life. In 1940 he wrote a four-page short story called “Where the Road Begins” that explored the contending attractions of the open road and the joy of returning home again. The Town and the City is in part a road narrative, as Joe Martin, intoxicated by the perfume of spring flowers and “the sharp pungent smell of exhaust fumes on the highway, and the heat of the highway itself cooling under the stars,” and embodying and anticipating a new American generation’s questing need to go, feels himself fated and driven to take a “wild wonderful trip out West, anywhere, everywhere.” In the month of his death Kerouac submitted reworked and previously discarded material from On the Road to his agent Sterling Lord as the novel Pic (posthumously published in 1971).
As Holmes writes, Kerouac, as Americans always have, “hankered for the West, for Western health and openness of spirit, for the immemorial dream of freedom [and] joy.” The on-the-move outsider nation of On the Road dramatizes Kerouac’s strong belief that this elemental American idealism, this faith in a place at the end of the road where you could make both a home and a stand had, in Holmes’s words, “been outlawed to the margins of American life in his time. His most persistent desire in those days was to chronicle what was happening on those margins.”
Kerouac writes from those margins. The love of America that so distinguishes On the Road and Visions of Cody came from Kerouac’s own double sense of himself as both American and French Canadian. This idea of Kerouac as a postcolonial writer is confirmed most particuarly by his magic-realist novel Doctor Sax, in which Kerouac writes the French-Canadian experience into the American national narrative in a way similar to Salman Rushdie’s inscription of the Anglo-Indian experience in Midnight’s Children. Interestingly, Kerouac was working on both Road and Sax at the same time and considered merging the two novels. As late as the summer of 1950 he was using a French-Canadian narrator for Road, but only traces remain of Sax in that novel.
More than anything else the story of On the Road returns again and again to Neal Cassady. Cassady was Kerouac’s lost brother returned; the longed-for adventuring Western hero made young again; and the living expression of the Dionysian side of Kerouac’s own dual nature. Cassady, as Kerouac would write in Visions of