On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [9]
At the invitation of William Burroughs, Kerouac traveled to Mexico City from Denver with Frank Jeffries and Neal Cassady in June 1950. After Cassady left Mexico, Kerouac and Jeffries moved into an apartment on Insurgentes Boulevard across from the house rented by William and Joan Burroughs. Writing to his Denver friend Ed White on July 5 Kerouac explained that he was intent on investigating “all the levels” of “mile-and-a-half-high” consciousness promoted by smoking Mexican marijuana, “particuarly with reference to the many problems and considerations of that second novel I have to write.” The sentences might crack open when he was high.
Kerouac wrote that because when he was smoking marijuana his “deep subconscious thoughts” often came to him in his native Franco-American French, he had created a hero, Wilfred Boncoeur, who was French Canadian but whose ambiguous postcolonial status is suggested by his “English silliness.” Referencing the foundation text of the narrative tradition in which he was consciously working Kerouac wrote that he intended to have Boncoeur travel with a companion named “Cousin” who would act as “Panza to the hero’s Quixote.” Kerouac makes notes for the Freddy “Goodheart” novel in the 120-page “Road Workbook” he kept in Mexico that summer. Boncoeur has been told his father Smiley is dead but “I did not believe it.” When he is fifteen Freddy is told his father was “really alive but nobody knew where,” and he and Cousin go on the road to find him.
Eventually worried that “Freddy” at fifteen would be too young to tell the novel “right,” Kerouac changed tack once more, writing that the novel would still have a French-Canadian narrator but that the “F.C narrator is me.” Kerouac then rejected the idea of writing “autobiograph straight like Tom Wolfe” because it wouldn’t be “archetypal.” His narrator would instead be the roaming French-Canadian “Cook” Smith.
In his Mexican journal Kerouac wrote:
But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges.
Enough of notes on all this Road business since Oct ’48 (or a year and a half + more) and start writing the thing.
I am.
The Cook is the guy
Back in Richmond Hill in August Kerouac typed the “Private Ms. OF Gone on the Road—COMPLETE FIRST TREATMENT AND WITH MINOR ARTISTIC CORRECTIONS.” “Cook” Smith, “not yet ready for the road, not at all,” wakes up in a boardinghouse room in Des Moines, Iowa, not knowing who or where he is, realizing only in the void of his “hollowed mind” that he is growing older and death is growing nearer. At his job as a short-order cook Smith makes a free hamburger meal for an old black hobo who in return sings Smith a blues about the death of his father. After being in Iowa for months Smith determines to hitch home to his wife Laura in Denver, after God, “with a stroke of fleece upon my mind,” tells Smith she is still his girl. For sixteen dollars traveling money Smith moves a box of mostly European books belonging to his German landlord. In the “sad, red, European light” of Iowa Smith fails to sell the books or even give them away.
On the road west Smith meets a young black man who is also hitchhiking. After watching the man, who may be Slim Jackson, walk out of sight, Smith is picked up by a Texan truckdriver who lets him sleep. Smith then dreams Red Moultrie’s dream of being pursued by a shrouded stranger as he tries to escape from some “Araby-land to the Protective City.”
Waking up Smith is let out by the truckdriver in Stuart, Iowa. There he meets a talkative, free and