On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [6]
In a cell in the Bronx jail overlooking the Harlem River, Red Moultrie leans against the worn bars and watches the red sunset over New York the night before his release. To “the cops [Red] was just another young character of the streets—nameless, anonymous, and beat.” Brown eyes “red in the light of the sun; tall, rocky, dogged, sober-souled,” Red is twenty-seven and “growing older all the time and his life was slipping away.” He plans to go to New Orleans and has ten dollars from “Old Bull” to get there. From New Orleans, Red will drive to San Francisco with his half brother Vern Pomery Jr., and from there Red will go home to Denver to look for his wife, child, and father. Pomery is to be a representation of Cassady, and he appears here for the first time in the projected novel as an idea, a phantom presence on the far horizon of the text.
Red is haunted by “the great realities from the other world which appeared to him in dreams like the dream of the shrouded stranger,” in which he is pursued through “Araby” and seeks refuge in the “Protective City.” Watching the splendid sunset Red decides to follow the direction he sees in the evening sky:
The blushing sunset on this last night in jail was a hint from immense nature telling him that all things could very well return to him if he would only pray…“God make everything right,” he prayed in a whisper. He shuddered. “I’m all alone. I want to be loved, I’ve got no place to go.” Whatever that dark thing was he kept on missing…mattered no more. He had to go home.
In August, Kerouac closed up the house and left Denver to visit Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Francisco. In On the Road Kerouac writes:
I was burning to know what was on his mind and what would happen now, for there was nothing behind me any more, all my bridges were gone and I didn’t give a damn about anything at all.
Kerouac arrived in California as the marriage of Neal and Carolyn seemed to be imploding. Pregnant, Carolyn threw Neal out, and Jack suggested Neal come back with him to New York. They traveled east where they visited Kerouac’s first wife Edie in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Kerouac writes that this “memorable voyage described elsewhere sometime. (In “Rain & Rivers” book).” The “Rain and Rivers” journal, a notebook given to him by Cassady in January 1949, was where Kerouac recorded the majority of the journeys and specific adventures that would come to make up the narrative of the novel. As Kerouac struggles to identify and articulate the themes of his novel in his notebooks and proto-fiction, the narrative is, perhaps unknowingly at first, recorded in these travel journals.
By late August, Jack and Neal had arrived in New York. The two friends walked all over Long Island because, as Kerouac will write in On the Road, they were so used to moving but “there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean and we could only go so far. We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.” On August 25 Kerouac resumed what he calls his “ragged work” on the road novel while with Robert Giroux he continued preparing The Town and the City for publication the following spring. Kerouac typed a fifty-four-page revised double-spaced version of “Shades of the Prison House.” The sunset now appears “goldenly” in an “opening in the firmament between great dark cloudbanks.”
The central joyous source of the universe was always there, and clear as ever, when at last some strange earthly confluence forced the clouds apart, and as if curtains were drawn by arrangement, revealed the everlasting light itself: the pearl of heaven flaming on high.
Red’s long night ends in a list of names and images from Kerouac’s travels and private mythology. Kerouac’s incantation covers pages 49–53, and these pages are single spaced in contrast to the double spacing of the rest of the typescript, suggesting