On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [5]
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 it stands. Do you know how many states we’ve been in together?
Kerouac and Cassady made two trips in late December with LuAnne Henderson and Al Hinkle, shuttling family belongings from Rocky Mount, North Carolina (where Kerouac was spending Christmas with his family), to the Kerouac home in Ozone Park, New York. After New Year’s celebrations in New York the four drove to Algiers, Louisiana, to visit Bill Burroughs and his family. Herbert Huncke and Hinkle’s new wife Helen were also staying in Burroughs’s ramshackle house by the bayou. Leaving Hinkle in Louisiana with Helen, Cassady, LuAnne, and Kerouac then proceeded to San Francisco. Kerouac returned to New York alone in February.
On March 29, 1949, Kerouac learned that Harcourt, Brace had accepted The Town and the City. A jubilant Kerouac continued work on On the Road, filling notebook pages with plans and writing to Alan Harrington on April 23 “I start work in earnest on my second novel this week.” Kerouac reports the arrests in New Orleans of Bill Burroughs for drug and weapons possession, and in New York of Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Vicki Russell, and Little Jack Melody after the police raided Ginsberg’s apartment and found drugs and stolen goods. The arrest of his friends, the fear that he might be questioned himself, and the acceptance of his novel led Kerouac to write that he was at a turning point in his life, “the end of my ‘youth.’” Kerouac was “determined to start a new life.” In this new version of the novel there would be “no more” Ray Smith. Instead, Red Moultrie, a merchant seaman imprisoned in New York on drugs charges, will look for God, family, and home in the West.
In May, Kerouac traveled to Denver as a soon-to-be-published young novelist with a thousand-dollar advance. Hitchhiking to save money, Kerouac was “itching” to establish the family home he had dreamed about for years. On a late-May Sunday afternoon Kerouac writes that starting “‘On the Road’ back in Ozone, and here, is difficult. I wrote one full year before starting T & C, (1946)—but this mustn’t happen again. Writing is my work…so I’ve got to move.” On June 2 Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle, his sister Caroline and brother-in-law Paul Blake, and their son Paul Jr. joined Kerouac at the house he had leased at 6100 West Center Avenue in Denver. On June 13 Kerouac writes that he is at “the true beginning” of On the Road.
By the first week of July, Kerouac was alone again. Gabrielle and Caroline and her family were unhappy in the west and had returned home. On July 16 Harcourt, Brace editor Robert Giroux flew to Denver to work with Kerouac on the manuscript of The Town and the City.
Kerouac typed and revised a twenty-four-page handwritten draft of the beginning of a new version of Road titled “Shades of the Prison House. Chapter 1 On the Road-May-July 1949.” The manuscript is marked New York–Colorado, indicating that Kerouac wrote the handwritten draft in Ozone Park and brought it West. “Shades of the Prison House” is informed by Kerouac’s trips with Cassady earlier in the year and the stories Cassady had told him about his boyhood, by Kerouac’s hopefulness for the impending publication of The Town and the City, and by the arrest and imprisonment of his friends in April. Kerouac may also have been remembering his arrest and brief imprisonment as a