Syntax of the street

In one of the most famous, free-flowing and deceptively careless paragraphs in his second novel, On The Road (1957), Jack Kerouac (1922–69) writes with disarming honesty about his relationship with ‘Dean Moriarty’ (Neal Cassady) and ‘Carlo Marx’ (Allen Ginsberg), each of whom would later become, like Kerouac himself, central figures in the mythology of the ‘Beat Generation’: But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting dearly to know how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. ‘Now, Carlo, let me speak – here’s what I’m saying …’ I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight talk proportions. In Penguin’s new edition of On The Road, which reproduces Kerouac’s unedited first draft of the novel, written during three frantic weeks in 1951, we can read this paragraph for the first time as the author intended it, sexually frank and uncensored: … but then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing … but burn, burn, burn, like roman candles across the night. Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. I was in the same room, I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to myself ‘Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.’ So I didn’t see them for two weeks during which time they cemented their relationship to mad proportions. On The Road: The Original Scroll (2007) – named after the carefully prepared 120-foot roll of paper upon which Kerouac wrote the first draft, and which he made by taping together thin sheets of drawing paper – is significant for a number of reasons; not least that its publication celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s original release on 5 September 1957, an event that New York Times reviewer Gilbert Millstein heralded as an ‘historic occasion’. The publication of this new edition of the book is equally historic, in that it allows the reader to experience On The Road as it was written, without changes imposed on Kerouac’s manuscript by its original publishers. Under the supervision of Viking editor, Malcolm Cowley (who noted in an early, in-house report that, were it to be published unamended, ‘some of [Kerouac’s] best episodes would get the book suppressed for obscenity’), the structure and style of Kerouac’s original, breathless draft was significantly altered, not always for the best. Explicit references to drugs and sexual activities, particularly homosexuality, were toned down or excised. Pseudonyms were introduced to obscure the identities of the friends and strangers Kerouac wrote about, although the likes of Ginsberg and Cassady were nonetheless also asked to sign libel release forms in case they took umbrage at Jack’s portrayal of them. Most frustratingly for Kerouac, much of the improvised notation and punctuation, the dashes and ellipses he had employed in order to capture the stream-of-consciousness conversational and writing style of his friend and muse, Neal Cassady – the book’s hero and inspiration – were rewritten in a more traditional form. So too were many of Kerouac’s long, lively sentences, which he had written as a conscious attempt to create a literary form that possessed the lyrical cadences of jazz, ‘in the sense of a, say, tenor man drawing a breath, and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, til he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made … that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind’. All such deletions and alterations are restored in British scholar Howard Cunnell’s scrupulous edition. Such changes are significant, but arguably the most important aspect of the new edition is the effect it might have in restoring Kerouac’s reputation as a major twentieth-century American writer. Cunnell’s exhaustive introduction – and the accompanying essays by co-editors Penny Vlagapoulos, George Mouratidis and Joshua Kupetz – mount a convincing argument for Kerouac’s consideration as an innovative modernist prose stylist, worthy of a place in the Western literary canon alongside the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Immediately following the publication of On The Road, and for many years thereafter, Kerouac’s contribution to literature was derided and belittled. The conservative American writer Norman Podhoretz dismissed Kerouac’s radical reappropriation of syntax and grammar as an ‘inability to express anything in words’. Truman Capote famously described Kerouac’s outpouring of words, whose flow is unimpeded by traditional sentence and paragraph structure and punctuation, with the pithy phrase, ‘That’s not writing, it’s typing’. In her introductory essay, co-editor Penny Vlagopoulos rebuts such criticism, noting that: Kerouac’s unique approach to language was partly the result of his upbringing. As he wrote to a reviewer, ‘The reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my own language. I refashion it to fit French images.’ … He seemed to approach words from outside of their expected meanings, as if they were objects to be appropriated and made anew. Jean-Loius Lebris de Kerouac was born in the working-class mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, on 12 March 1922, the third child of French–Canadian parents, Leo-Alcide and Gabrielle-Ange Kerouac. Until the age of six, Jack spoke only his parents’ lively and musical Québécois dialect, joual; for several years thereafter he had difficulty speaking and understanding English, which was to him a foreign tongue. At eleven, when he began writing narratives, inspired by the popular detective stories of The Shadow, Kerouac ‘had so much trouble with this second language that some of his teachers thought him slow-witted’, notes biographer Gerald Nicosia in Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983). How and why he eventually mastered English, and bent it to his needs, is made evident in Kerouac’s descriptions of his Lowell childhood, which he detailed in later life in such novels as Dr Sax (1959) and in the penultimate book completed before his death, Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Even at an early age, Kerouac wanted to master English and the written word, just as later he would set out to break the rules of traditional English usage, when it suited him. The Town and the City (1950), Kerouac’s first published novel, begun as early as 1945, is clearly the work of an author still seeking his own voice. It reveals the extent to which Kerouac was influenced by the opulent, autobiographical prose of Thomas Wolfe. The impressionistic and poetic style that Wolfe employed in such semi-autobiographical novels as Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), was one of the seminal factors in Kerouac’s literary evolution, perhaps overshadowed solely by the irrepressible Neal Cassady, whom Kerouac would not meet for several more years. Kerouac tried to emulate many other writers in his formative years. He admired Edgar Allen Poe’s ability to ignore distinctions between poetry and prose. Ernest Hemingway and the Depression-era short stories of William Saroyan were other significant influences. But it was Wolfe – ‘the Giant!’ Kerouac called him, in a letter written in 1941 – who would have the most significant impact on Kerouac’s literary voice. Wolfe, he wrote in The Vanity of Duluoz, ‘woke me up to America as a poem instead of America as the place to struggle around and sweat in,’ and ‘made me want to prowl, and roam, and see the real America’. This poetic aspect of Wolfe’s writing dominates The Town and the City, often to its detriment, and is apparent in On The Road; though by the time Kerouac began writing his most famous novel, other influences were beginning to dominate Kerouac’s life and literature, tempering his more florid, Wolfean moments. By the time On The Road was published, Kerouac had been a writer for twenty years. In Jack’s Book: An Oral History of Jack Kerouac (1978), William S. Burroughs, one of the key figures in the early Beat circle, is quoted as saying that Kerouac had already written ‘about a million words’ by the age of twenty-two. This claim is backed up by Kerouac’s detailed journals and letters, which, together with his voluminous juvenilia and journalism, allow us to trace his slow evolution as a writer. When he was sixteen, Kerouac commenced a laboured novella about ‘Bill Clancy’, an idealised version of himself as football hero turned hobo (Kerouac’s scholarship to Columbia University in 1940 was secured on the basis of his skills as a gridiron player). In 1943, aged twenty-one, he hand-wrote the 158-page novel The Sea Is My Brother, based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine during World War II; and in 1944, he commenced on another autobiographical novel, Orpheus Emerged, chronicling the dreams and desires of a group of university students in New York City. Inspired by his time at Columbia University and by his first, tentative friendships with kindred spirits Ginsberg and Burroughs, Kerouac would finish Orpheus Emerged in 1945, whereupon he started writing The Town and the City. These early, laboured works have a common, Wolfean thread, which Kerouac would ultimately weave into the tapestry he came to call ‘the Duluoz legend’: a largely factual account of his own life and experiences, infused with the versatility of fiction and the beauty of poetry. Kerouac first clearly articulated the concept in 1943: Long concentration on all the fundamental influences of your life will net a chronological series of events that will be open to use as a novel – for a novel should have a sort of developing continuity, if nothing else … Your life and every other life is stuff for great novels, provided the treatment is good. Unfortunately, Kerouac’s early treatment of these themes enjoyed little success. The Town and the City received a cool response on publication. But Kerouac had already started grappling with his next major work, similarly inspired by life, but also by ‘the real America’. It would be shaped by ‘the syntax … of the street’ that Jack heard when he went looking for America’s soul. It is often erroneously assumed, thanks to the mythology that has grown up around Kerouac, that On The Road was conceived and written during the inspired threeweek burst of typing in April 1951 when the first draft of the book, all 86,000 words of it, was written. Its gestation took significantly longer. Just as it would be several years before the novel was published, so it took several years, and numerous false starts, before Kerouac commenced what would be the final iteration of the book now published as On The Road: The Original Scroll. While simultaneously completing and revising The Town and the City, Kerouac was feverishly crossing and re-crossing America in a deliberate search for inspiration, assembling material for a novel that he variously referred to, in letters and journals, as Gone on the Road, Souls on the Road, The Beat Generation and the Official Log of the Hip Generation. It would be, Kerouac wrote in his journal on 23 August 1948, 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’. In the different treatments of On The Road that Kerouac started and quickly abandoned during this period, the ‘two guys’ rapidly developed into idealised versions of Jack himself, and the fast-talking, hell-raising young car thief and Lothario, Neal Cassady, for whom ‘sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life’, and whom Kerouac had first met in December 1946. Soon the two main characters were not just inspired by Jack and Neal; they were Jack and Neal. After numerous failed attempts, Kerouac’s breakthrough came in the form of a letter from Cassady in December 1950, a ‘long, fast, sexually frank and detailed first-person story’. Having already embraced autobiographical fiction, but not yet made the leap to a first-person narrative, Cassady’s letter not only gave Kerouac the impetuous he needed to start On The Road afresh yet again; it showed him that he could write in a new narrative style which embraced the poetics of Wolfe, but tempered with contemporary vernacular, ensuring that the resulting prose was fresh and vibrant rather than repetitive and forced. Co-editor Joshua Kupetz notes in his essay ‘The Straight Line Will Take You Only to Death’: ‘Kerouac abandoned the conventional techniques he had used when writing The Town and the City so that he might be “free as Joyce” when composing On The Road’, and suggests that by abandoning the standard structural conventions of the novel in favour of his own, original style, Kerouac created ‘a new American prose form’. As millions of readers have recognised, it was an inspired act of literary invention. Kerouac drew on years of notes and recollections and his earlier, laboured drafts; his experiences in the American heartlands and its great coastal cities; and the lives and experiences of his friends. Fuelled by endless coffee (not Benzedrine, as is commonly supposed), he hammered out the ‘spontaneous bop prosedy’ of his five crossings of America between 1947 and 1950. It is the story of a search for kicks but also a spiritual quest; of looking within for what the world had failed to deliver, despite promises of postwar affluence – all of it tempered by and flowing to the erratic rhythms of conversation and the syncopations of jazz.

Richard Watts

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