On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [7]
Fresno, Selma, Southern Pacific Railroad; cottonfields, grapes, grapey dusk; trucks, dust, tent, San Joaquin, Mexicans, Okies, highway, red workflags; Bakersfield, boxcars, palms, moon, watermelon, gin, woman…
The typescript ends on the morning of Red’s release. Red hears birds singing “and the Sunday bells at seven did begin to peal.” On the verso of page 54 Kerouac has handwritten “Foolscap for New Beginning ‘On the Road’ Aug 25 1949-Reserving back of these pages for opening of new Part Two-THE STORY JUST BEGINS.” By hand Kerouac begins the new story set where he had just spent the summer, in Colorado. It is 1928. Old Wade Moultrie owns a two-hundred-acre farm worked by his son Smiley Moultrie and Smiley’s best friend Vern Pomery. There was “a touch of the old West” in Old Wade, and when he pulls a revolver on some “young hoodlums” trying to steal his Ford he is shot and killed. This has nothing to do, Kerouac writes, “with our heroes Red Moultrie and Vern Pomery Jr.” In a journal entry for August 29 Kerouac notes:
Resuming true serious work I find that I have grown lazy in my heart…And why that is—for one thing, indirectly speaking, I cannot for instance as yet understand why my father is dead…no meaning, all unseemly, and incomplete.
By September 6 this same journal had become the “Official Log of the ‘Hip Generation,’” as he was now calling On the Road. “I haven’t really worked since May 1948,” he writes. “Time to get going…Let’s see if I can write a novel.” The eighteen-page “Hip Generation” story Kerouac then begins to write continues the story he had begun on the back page of the August 25 version of “Shades of the Prison House,” while cutting the jail material.
Red’s mother Mary Moultrie has an affair with Dean Pomery and dies giving birth to Red’s half brother Dean Pomery Jr. Wade Moultrie’s farm has gone to ruin in the years after his death, a death Kerouac intended to stand for the passing of the values of the Old West and for the passing of a kind of moral compass, a north star certainty lost to Kerouac’s fatherless travelers.
Still Kerouac is writing around the road. The road exists in future time, to be traveled when Red gets out of jail or when he and Vern grow up out of the backstory Kerouac constructs in place of the jail episodes. Kerouac is writing the why of the road, not the road itself. He is committed to the aspirational elements of the story even as the events that inspired those elements, bringing his family West, his status as a young novelist with a future, had either collapsed or been made to seem suddenly fragile again. If he could not successfully make a home in the West perhaps the novel might also fail. It was difficult to write about Red’s leaving the prison of life to go back home to his inheritance and to his family when Kerouac was effectively homeless, his dreamed Western home collapsed; his marriage to Edie emphatically over; and the thousand-dollar “inheritance” from Harcourt vanished into the air.
For much of the rest of September Kerouac worked on The Town and the City manuscript at the New York Offices of Harcourt, Brace. When this work was finished Kerouac wrote that he was “once more ready to resume On the Road,” before confessing on September 29 that
I’ve got to admit I’m stuck with On the Road. For the first time in years I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I SIMPLY DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE REAL IDEA WHAT TO DO
The next day, and writing that he was not a “hipster…Nor am I Red Moultrie…I am not even Smitty, I’m none of them,” Kerouac claimed to have settled the problem of his inability to write:
The world really does not matter, but God has made it so, and so it matters in God, and He Hath Aims for it, which we cannot know without the understanding of obedience. There is nothing to do but give praise. This is my ethic of “art” and why so.
On October 17, 1949, Kerouac writes that it is still “impossible to say ‘Road’ has really begun.” “I really began On the Road in October of