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.
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