The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose

Chapter 4: “Blow as Deep as You Want”

97 Chapter 4 “Blow as Deep as You Want” Since its publication in January 1973, Visions of Cody has confronted readers with a basic question: is it a cohesive, albeit experimental, work or essentially separate pieces—­ the literary equivalent to a sampler box of holiday chocolates. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Aaron Latham argued for the latter. “Visions of Cody” is a bizarre book with a bizarre history. When Kerouac wrote “On the Road” in 20 days on a continuous roll of paper in 1951, friends like Allen Ginsberg read it and did not much like it. Kerouac had not yet invented the legend that he never rewrote anything, so he set to work composing inserts, which he hoped would make his friends like his book better. These inserts, however, grew uncontrollably. . . . By the spring of 1952, the new sections were almost as long as the original. At some point in early 1952, Kerouac decided not to use the inserts to patch up his earlier work but to consider them a new book in and of themselves. He called this new work “Visions of Cody.” Kerouac was like a mechanic who had started out to repair a car with spare parts and had ended up building an entirely new vehicle instead. The form of the new book was no more what Jack Kerouac had set out to create than the form of “The Waste Land” was something T. S. Eliot had set out to create. It just happened, practically by accident, at least by indirection “The Waste Land” achieved its disconnected quality when Ezra Pound cut out all of Eliot’s connections; Kerouac’s new book achieved its discontinuous structure when he decided to leave out the book for which his inserts had been written. He kept the repair parts but junked the car.1 98    the textuality of soulwork Visions of Cody, he concludes, should be read “in bits and pieces as if it were a book of poetry rather than a continuous narrative because it simply is not a continuous narrative.” Latham was then researching Kerouac to write a biography and had at least some access to Kerouac’s papers (then still not generally available), so his view carries some weight. He is right that Visions of Cody, other than the retelling of the events of Parts Two through Five of On the Road in the final section, mostly lacks plot in the conventional sense. And Kerouac did generate at least one section of Cody as a possible “insertion,” as he termed it, for On the Road as he explored ways to improve what he characterized (in a July 14, 1951, letter to John Clellon Holmes) as “spontaneous unartificed too-­ pure too-­ raw criticizable ‘Road.’” But Kerouac’s fall 1951 work journal shows that most of Visions of Cody was written as he searched for an approach to writing and fiction that would take him beyond the “too-­ raw” April 1951 scroll—­ not as repair parts for On the Road. Also, the initial drafts for some of the pieces in Visions of Cody show that Kerouac reworked them, in minor but telling ways, as he integrated them into the book, and the Visions of Cody typescript shows that he reordered some of the sections as he finalized the book, which suggests he was purposefully structuring it. While a few Visions of Cody “bits” did begin as “repair” work for On the Road, Kerouac, the evidence shows, combined these “bits” with units originally written for neither Road or Cody and others written specifically for Visions of Cody after he began thinking of it as a distinct project (the evidence also shows that Visions of Cody’s initial title was On the Road and that it was to replace, not supplement, the April 1951 scroll).2 Visions of Cody is a vehicle in its own right, not a box of repair parts, and it needs to considered as such to understand its implications for Kerouac’s approach to writing. Visions of Cody, though it derives from On the Road, is not subordinate to it. In June 1948, as Kerouac was completing the primary draft of The Town and the City, he expressed his desire to write “Fiction” that would be “A ‘soulwork’ instead of a ‘novel’” yet would “have all the virtues of Melville, Dostoevsky, Céline, Wolfe, Dickens and all the poets in it (and Twain).” To do this would require finding a way to write...