With the 50th anniversary of On the Road, some books with helpful hints about what that might have been are landing in bookstores.
In addition to the Library of America volume of Kerouac’s early novels and a book by John Leland called Why Kerouac Matters, Viking Press has reissued a facsimile of the legendary teletype roll on which Kerouac supposedly banged out a first draft, high on Benzedrine. It has also repackaged Joyce Johnson’s memoir of her time with Kerouac, Minor Characters.
The scroll is more than a curiosity. It is a pagan artifact of the creative process. Here is the writer writing, says this 120-foot monster of a manuscript. In an enlightening introduction, Howard Cunnell dispels many myths of its creation. It was coffee that fueled Kerouac, not Benzedrine; it wasn’t entirely teletype paper. “He cut the paper into eight pieces of varying lengths and shaped it to fit the typewriter.”
Kerouac finished the scroll in April 1951 and immediately began revising. What’s shocking is not how much it’s changed, but how little. So much of Kerouac’s new prose rhythm, his westward tilt, the shape and polish of his sentences is already there.
A lot of what he had to do to make it a novel involved taking things out—omitting much of the sexual content (including numerous homosexual scenes), changing names of characters, tightening the structure. He had to make it a novel, not a memoir.
Johnson was just 20 years old and working at a literary agency when she met Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg.
“At thirty-four, Jack’s worn down,” she writes of her first impression, “the energy that had moved him to so many different places gone. He’s suddenly waited too long. The check for The Subterraneans will never arrive; On the Road will never be published.” This is not the joyous Kerouac we have come so easily to love. Yet hers is a beautiful, loving portrait that feels at once forgiving and truthful.