No American novel of consequence has had a more tortuous or mythologized path to publication than On the Road. Jack Kerouac supposedly composed it in a days-long bout of frenzied typing, feeding a continuous scroll of paper into his typewriter to avoid breaking the flow of inspiration. Yet as Kerouac scholar Isaac Gewirtz has written, this is accurate but not true. The myth of the novel’s composition neglects the larger context of its long gestation and even longer struggle to reach print.
The accurate part is this: On April 2, 1951, Kerouac sat down in his then-wife Joan Haverty’s apartment in Manhattan and began banging out his first draft. He had on hand several rolls of drafting paper of just the right size for his Remington manual. He’d made the discovery, he told her, that they would “save me the trouble of putting in new paper, and it just about guarantees spontaneity.” For 20 days straight, Kerouac typed so furiously that his T-shirts became soaked with sweat. By April 22, he had completed a 125,000-word draft typed in an eye-straining, comma-starved, single-spaced format, with no paragraphs or page breaks. The resulting scroll was 120 feet long. As an object to be read, it was utterly impractical, but Kerouac had unintentionally replicated the format of the books of antiquity before the invention of the codex. In transcribing his peripatetic cross-country adventures, Kerouac brilliantly married the method to the matter: he wrote fast because, as he put it in one of his notebooks, the “road is fast.” Movement and speed were of the essence. On the Road reads like a pilgrimage without a shrine at the end, an Odyssey without an Ithaca. All the subsequent talk, though, about “spontaneous bop prosody” obscures the fact that the book took years to write and then underwent an even longer process of revision.
The true part is this: On August 23, 1948, Kerouac wrote in his notebook that he had “another novel in mind—‘On the Road’—which I keep thinking about: about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.” At the time, he was finishing the final chapters of The Town and the City, an autobiographical novel about the life of his French-Canadian family. The completed manuscript would be acquired the following year by Robert Giroux, a Maxwell Perkins–grade editor at Harcourt, Brace who worked with T. S. Eliot and many other notables. He and Kerouac enjoyed a close and warm working relationship, spending months editing and revising the plus-size manuscript while Kerouac occupied an empty office at Harcourt for weeks at a time.
A few years older than Kerouac, Giroux had graduated from Columbia in 1936. Kerouac had gone there, too, on a football scholarship, but dropped out in 1942. After stints in the merchant marine and the U.S. Navy Reserve, he’d returned to New York and begun to associate with a colorful circle of aspiring young writers, petty thieves, drug addicts, and unclassifiable reprobates. Together, they would become known as the Beats, chief among them Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, Hal Chase, and John Clellon Holmes. It was Huncke, a heroin-addicted adept of the lower depths, who first introduced the group to the notion of being “beat,” as in defeated by the harsh conditions of life. It was Kerouac who would apply the word in its uppercase form to this nascent literary movement and subsequently expand the concept to encompass the idea of “beatific,” asserting that the Beats were on a religiously inspired vision quest.
Cultural critics have interpreted the Beat movement as a response to the grim postwar atmosphere created by the atomic bomb, the discovery of the death camps, and the advent of the Cold War, and later as a revolt against the ’50s regime of social conformity. In the ’40s, though, the early Beats were simply a bunch of guys, albeit three of them geniuses, with simpatico literary interests who got off on their rash and aimless adventures together. They were familiar scuffling artistic types who would have fit easily into the Parisian world of La Vie Bohème, but some of them were seriously bent in a way that would make any détente with bourgeois existence impossible. Their milieu was an unusual one in which the criminals really wanted to be writers and the writers really wanted to emulate the criminals.
Among them was Neal Cassady, a muscular, wired, fearless, reckless cowboy-like figure out of the American West. He was also a charismatic sociopath, a motor-mouthed car thief, and a con man whose charm was exceeded only by his amorality. Born in 1926, quite literally on the side of the road, Cassady had been carelessly cared for by his alcoholic father, growing up in flophouses and fleabag hotels and doing stints in reformatories in the Denver area. By his late teens, he was reputed to have stolen hundreds of cars, and he could drive them the way Chuck Yeager could fly a fighter jet, all the while unspooling an endless monologue on whatever subjects his perpetually firing neurons lighted on. Free of any formal education after grammar school, he had spent many hours in Denver libraries reading promiscuously and would drop the names of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Proust into his spiel for effect. Of all the unlikely things, he wanted to be a writer.
In 1946, Cassady drove a stolen car to New York City with his teenage bride, the overripe LuAnne Henderson, to meet the members of the Morningside Heights crowd, whom he had heard about from a friend in common. Kerouac first encountered Cassady that December in the newcomer’s cold-water flat in Spanish Harlem. Characteristically, Cassady answered the door in the nude. Thus began a literary bromance to rival those of the fictional Natty Bumppo and Chingachook or Huck Finn and Jim. Over the next five years, Kerouac ricocheted across the continent several times by bus, train, thumb, and car, usually with Cassady at the wheel, since Kerouac, ironically enough, never procured a driver’s license. It was these trips that provided Kerouac with the raw material of On the Road, and it was Cassady, fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in the novel, who gave him the energy and artistic courage to realize his lyrical and ecstatic vision of American life.
In his 2007 book, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road, Gewirtz traced Kerouac’s evolving conception of the novel from the surviving false starts, partial drafts, proto-versions, and notebooks. In the four years between his first embryonic notion for the book to the day he started to type the scroll, Kerouac struggled to find the right authorial voice. Style was a considerable problem. “I find that I want a different structure as well as a different style in this work,” Kerouac wrote in his notebook, “each chapter as a line of verse in the general epic poem.” He would find a good part of the solution in emulating the jazz innovators of bebop, especially the improvisational geniuses Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America—for reasons that are never deeper than the music,” he continued. “Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of the country.”
When Kerouac began typing his first full draft, whatever spontaneous bop prosody he practiced was undergirded not simply by years of contemplation and trial runs but by detailed notes. The road to finally writing On the Road had been carefully mapped out. A significant amount of the scroll edition was copied, either verbatim or close to it, from the notebooks and from the earlier partial drafts of the novel. Kerouac had also executed a tremendously detailed “character chronology” spanning 1946 to 1951, as well as chapter outlines. Despite the myth of his novel’s sweat-soaked, 28-day birth, Kerouac’s preparations indicate that he was a highly ordered and self-conscious literary artist. Contra Truman Capote’s vicious quip, this wasn’t typing, it was writing.
Soon after finishing the scroll, Kerouac went to Giroux’s office to show him the book, elated and exhausted by what he had achieved. “He was in a very funny, excited state,” Giroux recalled. Kerouac unfurled the scroll right across the office “like a piece of celebration confetti.” Startled by the yards of typescript on his floor, Giroux said the worst possible thing: “But Jack, how are we ever going to edit this?” He really meant: How could the words on the unwieldy scroll ever make their way to a typesetter and printer? But Kerouac took it the wrong way and fell into a rage. “This book has been dictated by the Holy Ghost!” he yelled. “There will be no editing!” He rolled the scroll back up and stormed out of the office.
So began another odyssey, the years-long travels of On the Road around New York in search of a publisher. Kerouac quickly retyped the novel as regular typescript that could be submitted to publishers. It made the rounds at Harcourt; Little, Brown; E. P. Dutton; Dodd, Mead; the paperback publisher Ace Books; and the Viking Press, none of which reacted with enthusiasm. A rejection from a Knopf editor was probably typical: “This is a badly misdirected talent. … This huge sprawling and inconclusive novel would probably have small sales and sardonic indignant reviews from every side.”
Enter literary critic Malcolm Cowley, a consulting editor at Viking. On July 3, 1953, Allen Ginsberg, acting as Kerouac’s agent, wrote to Cowley on his friend’s behalf. “I am interested in Kerouac and his work,” Cowley responded. “He seems to me the most interesting writer who is not being published today.” Cowley had already read not only On the Road but also Doctor Sax, Kerouac’s novel of his Lowell, Massachusetts, boyhood, and what Cowley described as “a second version” of On the Road, probably an early draft of Visions of Cody, published after Kerouac’s death. He believed that only “the first version of On the Road” had a chance of publication by Viking. He invited Ginsberg to visit him at the Viking offices.
Viking was not a welcoming port for young Turks: The average age of the five editorial principals—Cowley, Pascal Covici, Ben Huebsch, Marshall Best, and the founder, Harold Guinzburg—was in the 60s. The aimless adventures of a tribe of luftmenschen would have struck four of them as outré and Kerouac’s breathless style as undisciplined. Moreover, On the Road reeked of potential legal trouble. The original draft was sexually explicit for the time, and some of that sex was homosexual. There was a vivid description in the original version of Cassady giving a traveling salesman a “monstrous huge banging” in a hotel room while Kerouac watches from the bathroom. Censors were still eager to prosecute books that offended. In the decade before, Edmund Wilson’s far tamer novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, had been banned as the result of a complaint lodged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Worse, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the ban on appeal. And even as Kerouac was seeking a publisher for On the Road, another hot-potato novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, was collecting a long list of emphatic rejections, including one from Viking.
The potential for On the Road to attract libel suits held even greater risks. The original version used the characters’ real names and included numerous instances of drug addiction, grand theft auto, bigamy, grand larceny, and even a borderline case of statutory rape. Viking could not have known at the time that the people Kerouac wrote about would have been more likely to sue if they’d been portrayed as responsible, law-abiding citizens. A run of bad legal luck might hobble and even sink a privately held firm like Viking.
Cowley nevertheless made a vigorous and dogged case for the book. What was it about On the Road that moved him to undertake a years-long campaign to persuade his nervous employer to set aside its reservations and publish it?
Cowley’s purpose, though, was blunted by Kerouac’s insistence that the piece be attributed to “Jean-Louis,” because he was worried that his ex-wife would confiscate his fee for child support if his real name appeared.
At the most basic level, he must have enjoyed reading it. Cowley liked the book’s prose style and was attracted by what Kerouac himself described as “the raciness and freedom and humor of jazz instead of all that dreary analysis and things like ‘James entered the room and lit a cigarette. He thought Jane might have thought this too vague a gesture.’ ” Indeed, “dreary analysis” was precisely the quality that Cowley disliked about so much of the work of the postwar writers. At bottom, though, Cowley supported the novel because it allowed him to engage his generational sense of the progress of American literature. Proof of this can be found in the first paragraph of the catalog copy that he later wrote for On the Road:
After World War I a certain group of restless, searching Americans came to be called “The Lost Generation.” This group found its truest voice in the writings of the young Hemingway. For a good many of the same reasons after World War II another group, roaming America in a wild, desperate search for identity and purpose, became known as “the Beat Generation.” Jack Kerouac is the voice of this group, and this is his novel.
But Kerouac wasn’t the first voice. Even in 1953, the Beat Generation had become a visible thing, and much of the credit for that must be given to John Clellon Holmes. Of all the original core members of the Beats, Holmes was the one we would today call the adult in the room. Although he participated in the Beat revels of dissipation, he held himself at a distance and took cool note of their costs and casualties, terming them “futility rites.” Kerouac coined the phrase “Beat Generation” while crashing at Holmes’s Lexington Avenue apartment. The words appeared in print for the first time in Holmes’s 1952 roman à clef, Go, the first novel of the Beat scene. Go, while full of eye-opening behavior, had none of the breakthrough energy of On the Road and generated little attention. But then an editor at the New York Times Magazine, Gilbert Millstein, asked Holmes to write what would become a famous essay exploring the temper of his anxious cohort. “This Is the Beat Generation” was the subject of puzzled Sunday breakfast discussions across the land, and the Beats entered the national conversation.
Cowley certainly would have been aware of Holmes’s essay. The generational shift it illustrated would be a strong selling point for On the Road, but first he had to persuade Viking to publish it—an effort that ultimately took four years and involved pulling every string available to him as a literary insider. His was a two-pronged strategy: to win Viking over, he first would have to change the climate of literary opinion in the outside world. To accomplish this, he sought to have On the Road serialized in places where it, and Kerouac, would be noticed. In late 1953, he wrote to Arabel Porter, the editor of the influential mass-market literary magazine New World Writing, about “a very long autobiographical novel by John [sic] Kerouac, called On the Road (or alternatively Heroes of the Hip Generation). It’s about the present generation of wild boys on their wild travels between New York, San Francisco, and Mexico City. … Of all that beat generation crowd, Kerouac is the only one who can write, and about the only one who doesn’t get published.” In April 1955, Porter’s magazine published an account of a frantic jam session titled “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” Cowley’s purpose, though, was blunted by Kerouac’s insistence that the piece be attributed to “Jean-Louis,” because he was worried that his ex-wife would confiscate his fee for child support if his real name appeared.
Next Cowley did what only he among all book editors could have done: write a public endorsement of Kerouac that would be noticed. In the final chapter of his 1954 book, The Literary Situation, he assessed the “individual and nihilistic” rebellion of “the beat generation” and then wrote, “It was John Kerouac who invented [that] phrase, and his unpublished long narrative, On the Road, is the best record of their lives.” It takes a special brand of self-confidence to question the judgment of one’s employer in a book published by that employer.
The following year, 1955, he persuaded Peter Matthiessen, then the fiction editor of a lively new literary magazine called The Paris Review, to accept an excerpt titled “The Mexican Girl,” about a romantic idyll Kerouac had with a migrant farm worker. He also cajoled the American Academy and Institute to fork over $200 to Kerouac from its Artists’ and Writers’ Revolving Fund for those in urgent financial need. The serializations—which later included “A Billowy Trip in the World,” published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry in July 1957—and news of the grant had an effect. One editor, even one as eminent as Cowley, who stood up for a book might have been overruled, but when editors elsewhere started signing on, Viking took notice.
Meanwhile, Cowley did his best to keep Kerouac’s spirits up. He gave the writer regular shots of good news about the serializations and the grant. The amount of money was modest but desperately needed, since Kerouac’s painful phlebitis required penicillin treatments he could ill afford. Kerouac’s torments were multiplied by rejections of his other typescripts that were making the rounds of publishers, including Viking. A stark entry in the chronology at the front of the Viking Critical Edition of On the Road tells the painful tale: “1951–1957: Writes twelve books, publishes none.” These books included the novels Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Visions of Gerard, The Dharma Bums, and Visions of Cody, all of which would eventually be published, but only after On the Road created a market for them. Worse yet, it fell to Cowley to decline this new work, further demoralizing Kerouac. He had to; to go to bat for another, lesser novel by Kerouac while maneuvering to publish a book he had so publicly praised would have muddied the waters. Besides that, Cowley did not really connect with Kerouac’s other novels. He turned them down with blunt comments on their deficiencies.
Kerouac fell into despair. “I think the time has come for me to pull my manuscripts back,” he wrote to his agent, Sterling Lord, in January 1955, declaring that “publishing to me … is like a threat over my head, I know I’ll write better when that whole arbitrary mess is lifted out of my thoughts.” He quickly changed his mind, though. Perhaps the most poignant expression of his mood came in 1956, when he told Lord that he’d “been through every conceivable disgrace now and no rejection or acceptance by publishers can alter that awful final feeling of death—of life-which-is-death.” He instructed his agent to pull Beat Generation, as it was then being called, back from Cowley. Luckily, that didn’t happen.
By this time, Cowley had made considerable progress with Viking by garnering the support of some younger staffers in reaching a new consensus. But the real reason for the changing climate at Viking was the arrival of Thomas Guinzburg, the son of the founder and the firm’s heir apparent. He would remember that “when I got there, I helped to get that one [On the Road] published because I was at the right age to, and my father was perhaps more tolerant or perhaps respected my conviction that it was a book that was worth it.”
In September 1955, Cowley wrote Kerouac one of the most hedged-about “acceptance” letters in publishing history:
On the Road … is now being seriously considered, or reconsidered, by Viking, and there is quite a good chance that we will publish it, depending on three ifs: if we can figure out what the right changes will be (cuts and rearrangements); if we can be sure that the book won’t be suppressed for immorality; and if it won’t get us into libel suits.
Kerouac assured Cowley that he had already changed the actual names of the characters and obscured any identifying details. In regard to editing, he reconsidered his stance of Pentecostal inviolability. On the immorality question, he was flippant: “What can I say, the true story of the world is a French movie. You know, I know.” But he would cooperate. The word “acceptance” above is in quotes for a reason. In most cases, a publisher that has decided to publish a book will have agreed on an advance and other terms with the author or agent beforehand and drafted a contract. None of these formalities were discussed in this instance, let alone executed. The obligation to clear the hurdles represented by those ifs fell to Kerouac alone. He had merely moved from an authorial purgatory of waiting into a legal limbo.
Worse yet, it fell to Cowley to decline this new work. He had to; to go to bat for another, lesser novel by Kerouac while maneuvering to publish a book he had so publicly praised would have muddied the waters.
The first two ifs were dealt with in a reasonably painless if leisurely fashion. For the sake of narrative economy, Cowley compressed Kerouac’s account of his second and third cross-country trips into one. He likewise toned down the sex scenes to the point where it sometimes becomes hard to know whether the characters are wrestling or copulating. All homosexual material was removed. The vetting process for libel, however, was more prolonged and painful. Any editor or author who has gone through a libel reading knows that it is a nerve-shredding exercise. On the Road was full of legal landmines, so the manuscript was sent to Viking’s outside counsel, Nathaniel Whitehorn, for forensic examination. His report came back on November 1, 1955, in the form of a nine-page memo with a page-and-a-half cover letter identifying hazards large and small and suggesting changes and excisions that could minimize the risk of libel suits. Kerouac had already secured signed libel releases from the major characters, but Whitehorn observed, sniffily, that “the fact that these people are portrayed as drunks, dope addicts, etc., could give any one of them a basis for avoidance of the release.”
Over the next year or so, Cowley worked with Kerouac to fumigate On the Road to conform to the lawyer’s suggestions. Increasingly though, editorial responsibility for the book went to Helen Taylor, the novel’s in-house editor. What few Kerouac biographers and scholars have grasped is that Cowley was a consulting editor for Viking, not a full-time staffer. He went into the office once a week and was often absent for months at a time while in residence at this or that university as a visiting instructor. Getting any book into the world, let alone one with as many imponderables as On the Road, is a complex process. Someone has to be reliably in the office every day, and that person was Taylor. Cowley became increasingly remote from his editorial control of Kerouac’s novel—as, alas, did Kerouac himself.
The impression one gets from Taylor’s letters and memos is of a high-functioning and extremely professional American editor. She had to accomplish three crucial tasks: to make sure that all the legal corrections were made to satisfy the lawyer, to do the line editing of the book to bring Kerouac’s idiosyncratic prose nearer to the standard usage of the day, and to keep the book’s production on schedule to meet its publication date. The latter two tasks led to friction. Kerouac wrote to please his ear. He didn’t like commas much and rarely resorted to semicolons. Taylor liked commas and semicolons a lot, and the regularized style she imposed on the book undermined much of its energy and immediacy. On March 21, 1957, she wrote in an interoffice memo that “Whitehorn called this morning to say that the book was clean now, in his opinion.” This was the point at which a publication date could finally be scheduled; it was also the moment that Viking broke faith with Kerouac in a fashion that is hard to forgive.
After a compositor typesets a book in what are called galleys, they are sent to the author, who has a chance to correct any mistakes the compositor may have made and ensure that the book reads as intended. Authors are routinely advised not to make too many edits in galleys, as changes cost money and delay the book’s production. Nevertheless it is a near-sacred principle that authors must be given a chance to read their galleys.
Kerouac never received them. There is no paper trail to trace the thinking behind this decision, so we are left to speculate as to why. There was a distinct air of condescension at Viking toward Kerouac and his Beat companions. Kerouac had no fixed address, and his editors may not have known where he was at any given time. He would have grumbled about the many changes to his book that had been forced on him. Seeing one’s words in type for the first time is a phenomenological experience. In any case, in mid-May, Kerouac had settled into an apartment in Berkeley, where he anxiously awaited galley proofs that never came.
A decision must have been made to keep Kerouac out of the loop. Viking probably feared that he would decide to restore so many edits and add so much new material that the bound-book date would be delayed. Given Kerouac’s peripatetic life style, the galleys might not have reached him at all, or maybe too late for his changes to be made. Whatever the reason for this lapse, he never got to read his words in type until he received the printed book, and he was justifiably aggrieved.
For more than a year leading up to the publication of On the Road, Kerouac and Cowley remained in sporadic contact. Missed connections drew out the editing process unpleasantly. Finally, though, Cowley could write a genuine “Manuscript Acceptance Report” and share the fruits of his and Kerouac’s and everyone else’s labors with the company. Few interoffice memos rise to the level of important literary documents, but this is one:
The characters are always on wheels. They buy cars and wreck them, steal cars and leave them standing in fields, undertake to drive cars from one city to another, sharing the gas; then for variety they go hitch-hiking or sometimes ride a bus. In cities they go on wild parties or sit in joints listening to hot trumpets. They seem a little like machines themselves, machines gone haywire, always wound to the last pitch, always nervously moving, drinking, making love with hardly any emotions except a determination to say Yes to any new experience. The writing is at best deeply felt, poetic, and extremely moving. Again at its best this book is a celebration of the American scene in the manner of a latter-day Wolfe or Sandburg.
His final paragraph made a startlingly accurate prediction: “The book, I prophesy, will get mixed but interested reviews. [It] will have a good sale (perhaps a very good one), and I don’t think there is any doubt that it will be reprinted as a paperback. Moreover it will stand for a long time as an honest record of another way of life.”
After the many trials On the Road suffered on its way to publication, there was something miraculous about how it was launched. The book was scheduled for review by the all-important New York Times in the first week of September 1957. As luck would have it, the paper’s main daily reviewer, Orville Prescott, a notorious curmudgeon guaranteed to have excoriated the novel, happened to be on vacation that week. Instead the assignment went to Gilbert Millstein, who two years earlier had commissioned Holmes’s famous “This Is the Beat Generation” essay. Millstein’s exceptionally smart review called the publication of On the Road “a historic occasion”; praised the novel as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’ ”; and compared it to The Sun Also Rises. “On the Road is a major novel,” he emphatically concluded. His 1,000-word rave was the literary equivalent of Elvis Presley’s appearance the previous year on The Ed Sullivan Show. Presley delivered an electrifying jolt of sexual energy to the somnolent culture of the ’50s; Kerouac’s book, Millstein asserted, offered an irresistible new model of freedom and spiritual questing to a younger generation chafing under the decade’s cultural constraints.
The first newspaper reporter showed up that afternoon, and excited and champagne fueled, Kerouac had to explain for the first of hundreds of times the beatific derivation of “Beat” to an ill-informed interviewer
The evening before the review came out, Kerouac was staying in the Upper West Side apartment of his girlfriend, the editor and novelist Joyce Johnson. Tipped off to the review by Viking, she and Kerouac walked down to a newsstand on Broadway at midnight to get a copy of the next day’s paper, fresh off the truck. They both eagerly scanned the review, and Kerouac asked her, hardly believing his luck , “It’s good, isn’t it?” “Yes,” she replied. “It’s very very good.” She’d worked in publishing, and she knew what it meant. She was thrilled, but also a bit frightened by what his anointing as a generational avatar might mean for him.
The next day, the phone in Johnson’s apartment never stopped ringing with demands for interviews and appearances. A Viking employee arrived that morning with half a case of celebratory champagne, three bottles of which were quickly dispatched. The first newspaper reporter showed up that afternoon, and excited and champagne fueled, Kerouac had to explain for the first of hundreds of times the beatific derivation of “Beat” to an ill-informed interviewer angling for a quick personality feature.
The publication of On the Road was both the making of Kerouac and his eventual undoing. He was completely unprepared and temperamentally unfit to handle the kind of fame that descended on him. He was shy, and he drank to manage his shyness, which led to a familiar downward spiral as he found himself for the first time before audiences and radio microphones and television cameras.
On the Road hit the bestseller lists for five weeks and became the focus of a heated debate in literary circles and in the culture at large. Opinions were mixed and sometimes sharply divided. There were some good, appreciative reviews in magazines and newspapers across the country, but many other reviewers and columnists manifested the American tendency to resort to mockery and moral panic when something new comes along. As Robert Ruark, a powerful syndicated columnist, wrote, “What I am by the beat generation is just that—beat. If ‘beat’ means defeated, I don’t know what they are defeated by, or for what reason. … All I gather is that they are mad at something.” Ruark sneered that On the Road was “not much more than a candid admission that [Kerouac] had been on the bum for six years.” He concluded that “the whole sniveling lot” of Kerouac and his fellow Beats “needs a kick … right in the pants.” No wonder young people hate adults.
Of greater interest were the attacks that came from literary intellectuals, who understood what was really at stake in the rise of the outlaw sensibility of this new crowd that did not worship at the shrine of T. S. Eliot or read any Karl Marx. Their designated attack dog was Norman Podhoretz, already a made man among the New York intellectuals. His piece in the spring 1958 issue of Partisan Review, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” remains a durable attack on Beat writing. In Podhoretz’s view, the older bohemianism of the teens and ’20s was a repudiation of the provincialism and hypocrisy of American life and “a movement created in the name of civilization: its ideals were intelligence, cultivation, spiritual refinement.” The Beats, in contrast, he saw as primitives in thrall to pure instinct, spontaneity, irrationalism, woolly mysticism, crank philosophies, and unearned sentimentality.
Podhoretz’s piece scores points while missing the biggest point of all: the sadness and sweetness at the heart of the book, and the openness and masculine vulnerability of Kerouac’s writing. In his 2021 book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand calls attacks of this sort “a crude misreading.” “The Beats weren’t rebels,” he wrote. “They were misfits.” On the Road, he continued, is “exuberant, hopeful, sad, nostalgic; it is never naturalistic. Most of all, it is emotionally uninhibited. … The Beats were men who wrote about their feelings.” Kerouac had courageously committed his emotions to paper for all the world to see. This is what brings tens of thousands of new readers to On the Road every year.
Cowley largely lost touch with Kerouac after publication of the novel, and he had very little to contribute editorially to Kerouac’s future dealings with Viking. There was probably considerable fatigue on the part of both men. Cowley had spent years conducting a kind of editorial shuttle diplomacy between a writer and a company with scant sympathy for each other’s needs. Kerouac had jumped through every hoop Cowley required of him while receiving rejections from him for new novel after new novel. It had been a painful and protracted slog.
Viking naturally wanted another book from Kerouac as soon as possible. Novels that Sterling Lord had been frustratingly unable to place were now being sold with ease to other houses. So Viking signed up the superior Dharma Bums, another exercise in male bonding, with dispatch, with Helen Taylor once again editing the text and, along the way, sticking Kerouac with a bill for $519.45 for author’s alterations. The Dharma Bums received, on balance, more favorable reviews than On the Road, but the shock of the new had worn off. It sold only modestly in hardcover and was the last Kerouac book that Viking would publish for decades.
In Beat circles, Cowley came to be seen as less the hero of the saga of On the Road’s long march to publication than as its author’s nemesis and underminer. The source of a lot of this animus can be found in a rollicking interview that Kerouac gave to The Paris Review in 1968, the year before his death. “In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums,” he said, “I had no power to stand by my style for better or worse. When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions and inserted thousands of needless commas … why, I spent $500 making a complete restitution of the Bums manuscript and got a bill from Viking Press called ‘Revisions.’ Ha ho ho.” Later in the interview, he alleged that Cowley had also fiddled with the text of On the Road. Not a word of this is true. It was Taylor who put the clamps on Kerouac’s prose for Viking in both books. “Jack and his memory are very, very unfair to me,” Cowley told an interviewer in 1978. “Blaming me for putting in or taking out commas and caps and what-not in On the Road. I didn’t really give much of a damn about that.”
The truth is, Cowley was the perfect editor for On the Road but the wrong editor for Kerouac. His curt rejections of Kerouac’s other novels proved that he could not be for him what Max Perkins had been for Thomas Wolfe: an all-in-to-the-end editor. He never took the larger enterprise of Kerouac’s Proustian “Legend of Duluoz” cycle of novels seriously. Cowley was a man whose own credo as a writer was that he hated to write and loved to revise. He’d also written his master’s thesis on the 17th-century Neoclassical poet and dramatist Jean Racine. Kerouac’s temperament was Romantic, privileging perception and feeling over form. As partners, the two men were not built for the long or even the medium haul.
Still, on one extended occasion, they battled together against the naysaying forces of conventional wisdom and won a great victory. Once On the Road came out in Signet paperback, it would be read by millions of people and lodged in their hearts and minds as a summons to another way of life, one of physical and emotional amplitude and spiritual discovery. Kerouac was and remains a conductor of that core American value, freedom.