On the Road-Post 3

In 1952 (when people still wrote letters to each other), Allen Ginsberg penned these words to Kerouac about the manuscript of On the Road: "I don't see how it will ever be published, it's so personal, it's so full of sex language, so full of our local mythological references, I don't know if it would make sense to any publisher." What is your reaction to this?

Ginsberg was technically proven right, for a time. The draft he is quoted critiquing here was edited into almost-acceptability, to be published first a few years later, only to have the first draft tweaked and also published much later. Both were worked and reworked and edited, although one much more extensively so. In the version in 1957, Kerouac relented to the “personal” aspect of Ginsberg’s comment and changed up a few names, so that they might become characters and the “sex language” and “mythological references” might become distinguishing character traits. As a side note, I think I remember that the new spontaneity and rhythm and word choice that so sets apart On the Road from Kerouac’s earlier work was at the advice of Ginsberg, who knew that Kerouac would find something in it, and that it would have to go somewhere, influence something, and, of course, help this story that they both knew had to be told. Ginsberg’s own work (to be published a bit before On the Road) was, to a degree, more inaccessible than even the first draft of On the Road, and centered itself around the same sex language and references that he warned Kerouac against (Was it really just a genre gap?). This was exactly the sort of writing that the 1950s warranted, and marketing more of the same couldn’t be the fate of something that couldn’t really carve interest for itself that wasn’t against the grain. Though the 1957 editing probably did make On the Road much more accessible and marketable than trying to sell the manuscript Ginsberg had seen, it wasn’t because Kerouac weeded out all explicit content. There are differences between selling a story in the 1950s, telling the story you feel you need to tell, and selling a story that is counterculture to the bone. I also feel as if the loose threads of the “local mythological references,” which weren’t completely woven in by 1957, were the results of a real experience that had its roots in roads that couldn’t be found again, lost in the “mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark...” with “a smell of oil and dead water” (p.257) or in snowstorms on the Kansas plains with the famous Cassady. And so these local references became references for the Beat generation to build their own mythologies around. I think that, all in all, neither Ginsberg nor any publisher could have predicted what On the Road was to become.