Scandalous for being Scandalous: ‘monstrous huge fuck[s]’ and ‘slambanging big sodomies’ in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Abstract

On the Road is by reputation a scandalous fiction: ‘Jack Kerouac’s On the Road… proved explosive. Under its influence, kids hit the drugs and booze, and ditched home and college for the drifter’s life… it was written in three weeks … Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty… zig-zag the continent in search of sex, drugs, and thrills [as] barely disguised versions of Kerouac and [Neal] Cassady.’ It’s difficult to know quite where to start scraping away at the accretions of myth and miscomprehension contained in this sketch by Christina Patterson of what she defined in 2005 as a ‘Cult Classic’.1 The novel that was published by Viking in 1957 was not written in three weeks. Though, famously, an early version of it, the so-called ‘scroll’ version, was indeed rapidly composed on several long sheets of paper in (more or less) a three-week period in April 1951, the novel that was published in 1957 was the product of a long series of retypings, revisions and adjustments to that text.2 These revisions were then complicated by Kerouac’s return to the scroll version just before he typed out the novel yet again, probably in late 1956. This retype did bring On the Road’s final version back to a form that was quite close to the scroll version. But important differences remained — including the incorporation of material from letters to Kerouac (mostly from Neal Cassady) and Kerouac’s own journal entries.3 Road’s final retyping was then subjected to a sustained editorial process, as Kerouac negotiated with his editors (primarily Malcolm Cowley).4