On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [8]
In November, and writing in the back of his “On the Road Readings and Notes, 1949” journal begun in the spring of that year, where he had made notes for episodes in the novel including “The Tent in the San Joaquin Valley” and “Marin City and the barracks cops-job,” Kerouac writes a “New Itinerary and Plan.” Above a drawn map of America marked with the names of the towns and cities where the action of the novel would take place Kerouac wrote “On the Road” and “Reverting to a Simpler style – Further draft + beginning-Nov 1949.” The novel would begin in the New York jail and move through New Orleans, San Francisco, Montana, Denver, and back to Times Square in New York. The list of characters Kerouac notes includes Moultrie and “Dean Pomeray,” “Slim Jackson,” brother of Pic, “Old Bull,” and “Marylou.”
In notes and manuscript fragments written in the new year Kerouac returned to the themes of loss, uncertainty, and crowding mortality. A ten-page manuscript dated January 19, 1950, handwritten in French and translated by Kerouac (“On the Road ECRIT EN FRANCAIS”) begins
After the death of his father—Peter Martin found himself alone in the world, and after all what is a man going to do when his father is buried deep in the ground other than die himself in his heart and know that it won’t be the last time before he dies finally in his poor mortal body, and, himself a father of children and sire of a family he will return to the original form of a piece of adventurous dust in this fatal ball of earth.
The running theme of the search for the father who is dead and the Father who is God gives us to understand that death, as Tom Clark has written, was “the ground bass of [Kerouac’s] understanding of life, the undertow that moved the deep currents in his work and gave it what Kerouac himself called… ‘that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through.’” The deaths of his brother Gerard, his father Leo, his best friend Sebastian. His drowned dead friends among the crew of the SS Dorchester sunk by torpedo on February 3, 1943. War dead, Hiroshima dead. The bomb that had come, as Kerouac writes, was one which could “crack all our bridges and banks and reduce them to jumbles like the avalanche heap.” And it is death, in the form of the dreamed figure of the shrouded stranger, who pursues the traveler across the land.
Long before his readings in Buddhism Kerouac was intuitively attempting to reconcile a worldview that saw his lived experience both as one made painfully meaningless by his hard-wired knowledge of mortality and as one to be celebrated in every detail and at every moment precisely because, as he writes in Visions of Cody, we are soon “all going to die.” Kerouac escapes this encircling loss in the act of writing. To say what happened. To get it down before it is lost. To make mythology from your life and from the lives of your friends. This urgency pushes Kerouac to strip his writing of “made-up” stories. Life’s impermanence and the inevitability of suffering inform and motivate Kerouac’s heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world. What Allen Ginsberg called his “open heart” and Kerouac himself described as being “submissive to everything, open, listening” results in a body of fiction in which the representation of the magical nature of entrancing and life-affirming fleeting detail is the outstanding feature.
In the early months of 1950 Kerouac anxiously looked forward to the publication of his first novel, asking, “Will I be rich or poor? Will I be famous or forgotten?” On February 20 he confesses, “I gloat more & more in the fact that I may be rich & famous soon.” The Town and the City was published on March 2, 1950, and on March 8 Kerouac admits