May 22 1951
[Richmond Hill]
—
Dear Neal,
Want you to know I didn’t ask Allen to write you a letter about “your doom” and that in fact my book about you is not about your doom but about your life and I know your life in many respects better than Allen does… not sluffing Allen but I was worried you might get wrong impression of what I was writing. From Apr. 2 to Apr. 22 I wrote 125,000 [word] full-length novel averaging 6 thous. devoted to Victoria, Gregor, girls, weed, etc. Story deals with you and me and the road… how we met 1947, early days; Denver 47 etc.; 1949 trip in Hudson; that summer in queer Plymouth and 110-mi-an-hour Caddy and Chi and Detroit; and final trip to Mexcity with Jeffries–last part dealing with your last trip to N.Y. and how I saw you cuttin around corner of 7th Ave. last time. (Night of Henri Cru and concert.) Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W.C. Fields saintliness… step by step in all I saw. Book marks complete departure from Town & City and in fact from previous American Lit. I don’t know how it will be received. 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 the road is fast… wrote whole thing on 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 floor and it looks like a road.
I really like this letter. First time reading it and it really speaks to his sensitivity, kindness. What a shame you were taken from us so young. RIP Jack.
Its always hard for me to realize how early On the Road was written. Although it became a real hit in the 60s, it was obviously mostly written in very early 50s (about times in the late 40s!).
I read it when I was a freshman in college and the wild spirit appealed to me, but like lots of that kind of writing (ie. Bukowski), I'm not sure how appealing I would find it now.
Its certainly easy to see though why it was so influential. There is an interesting sort of undercurrent that connects Kerouac - Burroughs - Dylan together.
In some sense, although all 3 came to be very much associated with 60s culture, all 3 pretty much were more or less apolitical and even fairly traditional in their core outlook (Kerouac mainly considered On the Road a story about two catholic friends searching for God...)
Funny that all 3 of these were heavily tied into Ginsburg, the famous hard-leftist poet, but they each in different ways all rejected leftism to various degrees.
I find Dylan to be somehow the funniest example of that. During the entire 60s they all tried to make Dylan "the voice of our generation" a title he always refused. By 1967-68 Dylan moved to upstate New York with his wife Sara and kids....the town he lived in was very close to a little place called Woodstock.
The organizers of "Woodstock" entire goal was to setup a hippy music festival with Dylan serving as kind of the spiritual center of it all....they all converged on the that town because thats where Dylan lived and they thought they would be able to convince him to headline the festival. Sad for them, Dylan flatly refused, and was often calling the cops on the hippies who were trying to drop by his house to discuss things like politics and organic farming with him....
Great writer...