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58 Chapter 3 “That’s Not Writing, That’s Typewriting” A month after drafting On the Road in three weeks, Jack Kerouac summarized the process in a letter to Neal Cassady. From Apr. 2 to Apr. 22 I wrote 125,000 [word] full-­ length novel averaging 6 thous. a day, 12 thous. first day, 15,000. last day [. . . .] If it goes over (Giroux waiting to see it) then you’ll know yourself what to do with your own work . . . blow and tell all. I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because road is fast . . . wrote whole thing on a strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.)—­ just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on the floor and it looks like a road. (SL, 315–­ 16) These comments support, it seems, the usual view that Kerouac wrote fast; wrote without reflection; wrote, that is, “spontaneously,” and Gerald Nicosia’s description of Kerouac’s sense of things as he was starting the scroll (derived from an interview with John Clellon Holmes) also supports this view. He [Kerouac] and John [Clellon Holmes] also had a long discussion about Jack’s problems with On the Road. Jack told how he had been struggling to create plausible backgrounds and family situations for his characters, and how he finally had to admit that he couldn’t catch the thing about it that he wanted that way. “I’m going to forget all that horseshit,” he concluded. “I’m just going to write it as it happened.”1 Nicosia then concludes that Kerouac—­ by committing himself to just writing what happened and writing just what happened—­“had finally found his own literary road.” “That’s Not Writing, That’s Typewriting”    59 Kerouac’s decision to write naturally rather than literarily and thereby create an unmediated account of his experiences rather than convert them into fiction is, then, seemingly the essence of the scroll On the Road. And we are to celebrate him as an artist because he refused artistry and to celebrate his book as literature because it rejects the category of literature. Embedded in this view is the belief that the scroll draft of On the Road can be the only authentic iteration of the work with any later revisions—­ whether Kerouac’s own or the meddling of the editors at Viking—­ to be scorned. In this account, the writing of On the Road is like a pair of before and after photographs: the attempts prior to the scroll are the before shot of a frustrated writer-­ to-­ be wandering the Atlas of writing styles searching for his writing road. The after shot is the courageous writer cutting the chain-­ link fence to the impound lot of convention and driving off into the sunrise of artistic individuality. Just as Saul arose as Paul, John arises as Jack, finding the true road of Road by traveling the road of no road. Truman Capote’s “That’s not writing; that’s typewriting” is simply a failure to recognize that the typewriting transcended mere writing. However, this binary of Kerouac prior to the scroll searching for spontaneity and after the scroll redeemed by spontaneity miscasts the nature of the scroll experiment, distorts what Kerouac actually achieved in On the Road, and provides no basis for understanding why he proceeded, within months of the scroll, to the revisions that spiraled into Visions of Cody. To understand the scroll experiment, to understand why he chose to revise On the Road, and why, for a time, he set it aside to work on Visions of Cody, we need to consider not only how the scroll was a turning away from trying to write On the Road as a conventional novel but also how it was an attempt to resolve the dilemma of the mysterious reader so apparent in the letters to Cassady in December 1950 and January 1951. That is, we need to treat the scroll as a development from the more conventional attempts at On the Road that preceded it, not simply a break from these attempts. Doing so shows that its narrative momentum (whether in the April scroll as published as On the Road: The Original Scroll or the version Viking published in August 1957 with its authorial and nonauthorial revisions) is not yet the momentum of rushing tremendousness, not yet Fiction with a capital F as Kerouac was imagining it in 1948. Reading the April 1951...

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