Revisions of On the Road:

Censorship of Homosexuality?

Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, started as a stream-of-consciousness prose about his life, his friends, and his travels: a long scroll full of real life stories. Many subsequent drafts and rewrites attempted to cover up, or edit out, the homosexuality present in the original. Because of pressure from editors and lawyers, this editing could be viewed as blatant censorship of homosexuality, but in actuality it was far more complicated and complex than that.

On the Road is a story of two friends, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, discovering themselves, their friendship, and the meaning of life itself through many cross-country road trips and wild adventures exploring jazz music, drugs, sex, and literature. This novel “epitomized to the world what became know as the beat generation”(Penguin 1976, n. pag.). Written in 1951, in three weeks, high on Benzedrine, on a 120-foot long scroll, single-spaced, with no paragraphs, no punctuation, no margins, was the true tale of Kerouac’s many years on the road with Neal Cassady (Cunnell 2007, 1). Since On the Road was initially published in 1957, there has been much interest in the original scroll. “The story of how Jack Kerouac came to write On the Road became a legend.” (Cunnell 2007, 1) It is often on display in museums and in 2007, Viking published the original scroll transcribed by Dr. Howard Cunnell along with essays by Cunnell and other academics. Cunnell contributed a lot to the conversation and understanding of what happened between 1951 and 1957.

As Cunnell details in his essay “Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road,” the original scroll was edited and revised many times. Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise, Neal Cassidy became Dean Moriarty, Alan Ginsberg became Carlo Marx, and William S. Burroughs became Old Bull Lee (Cunnell 2007, 29). Changing their names was just the start of the many edits yet to come. “Kerouac usually erased male homosexuality out of his books” (Stimpson 1983, 385) and in On the Road that is most apparent in the relationships between Sal and Dean, and Dean and Carlo.

The relationship between Sal and Dean is at the center of the book. “Much of Beat writing — On the Road, for example,… is about brotherhood” (Stimpson 1983, 375). Aram Saroyan argues, “They [the beats] had to love each other first, before and more importantly than women” (Saroyan 1979, 19). Because of the failures of their fathers, they had to be brothers “because they could not be sons” (Stimpson 1983, 375). As men, they sought a relationship with each other driven by the want for a father and defined by the likeness to a brother (Ibid). But even On the Road, such an ode to brotherhood, “has some scant doubts about its adequacy… Sal and Dean achieve utter union of the soul,… one of brotherhood’s finest hours”(Ibid, 386) and yet this moment takes place in a whorehouse surrounded by female prostitutes. The heterosexual female is presented as a cloud to conceal the innate homosexual nature of such a male friendship. “Unable to present homosexuality clearly,… Kerouac idealized and de-eroticized a picture of Whitmanesque brotherhood [in Sal’s friendship] for Dean” (Ibid). The Beat ideal of brotherhood, and before that Whitman’s, was inherently erotic, but Kerouac attempts to disguise that and move as far away from it as possible. But, as Eve Sedgwick brings up in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, homosocial desire is often applied to “such activities a ‘male bonding’” (Sedgwick 1985, 1) as is very present in On the Road. Sedgwick draws “the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit… of the potentially erotic… to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (Ibid.) reinforcing the homosexuality present in Sal and Dean’s homosocial relationship.

The relationship between Dean and Carlo, although secondary in plot, is more predominantly and purely homosexual in the original draft (Cunnell 2007, 30). But, as the edits continue, the homosexuality begins to disappear. Dean and Carlo have playful eccentric moments together as opposed to the sexual relationship Cassady and Ginsberg had in real life and in the original scroll (Ibid.). “Kerouac edited all references to the homosexuality of Carlo Marx and the relationship between [Dean] Moriarty and [Carlo] Marx out of the final version of On the Road”(McDowell 1996, 415). In the original draft Kerouac wrote in 1947, a passage reads, “Allen [Ginsberg] was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt,” (Cunnell 2007, 29). The passage goes on to describe how attracted Cassady was to Ginsberg at first, and how they disappeared together for two weeks. “This passage was rewritten and in the final version the explicit references to homosexuality were cut, although its sexual ambivalence and indeed homoeroticism remains” (McDowell 1996, 415). Many of the homosexual undertones prevail, but Kerouac tries to lead the passage in the other direction by adding in the final draft that they spent those two weeks talking all day and all night about Ginsberg’s writing and other philosophies, instead of the sexual activity that was previously assumed. “In this instance the excising of the sexual relationship between Neal [Cassady] and Allen [Ginsberg] serves to obscure the erotic aspect”(Cunnell 2007, 31) of the novel. The erasure of Carlo’s homosexuality as a whole leaves the character “portrayed as sexless himself” (McDowell 1996, 415). Carlo is left out of Sal and Dean’s excursions as they go gallivanting after women. “His apparent exclusion from the (hetero)sexual chase of his buddies” (Ibid) leaves him as a very minor character.

These specific edits and more were often a result of pressure from publishers, editors and lawyers. Kerouac had originally sent On the Road to many publishers, including Harcourt, Brace, who had published his first book, but they turned it down. “Harcourt, Brace had rejected it as ‘so new and unusual and controversial and censorable (with hipsters, weeds, fags, etc.) they won’t accept’” (Cunnell 2007, 33). The format, the language, and the homosexual content deterred many publishers. Kerouac had to work on making it “more conventional and thus more appealing to publishers” (Maher 2007, 240).

Malcolm Cowley, who worked at Viking Press, took an interest in Kerouac and started working closely with him to get On The Road purchased by Viking. Cowley saw promise in Kerouac’s early versions, but knew there was much work to be done before the book was “publishable by [Viking’s] standards” (Cunnell 2007, 31). In a letter to Viking, commenting on an early draft of the novel, Cowley writes:

Some of his best episodes would get the book suppressed for obscenity. But I think there is a book here that should and must be published. The question is whether we can publish it and what we can or must do to make it publishable by our standards. I have some ideas, all for cutting. (Ibid, 40)

Cowley and Kerouac wrote many letters back and forth working on the novel, especially the legal issues it might bring about. “Worried about how the forthcoming Howl obscenity trial… would affect On the Road” (Ibid, 47) they were precautious and discussed many edits that would have to be made. On September 16, 1955, Cowley wrote Kerouac that “publication depended on if we can be sure that the book won’t be suppressed for immortality; and if it won’t get us into libel suits” (Ibid, 42). Kerouac made many changes and even had people sign “libel-clearing statement forms” (Ibid, 45) at the request of Viking’s lawyers.

One thing that became problematic was Kerouac’s depiction of “Justin W. Brierly, the Denver luminary who groomed promising young local boys for Columbia University” (Ibid., 43). Brierly, being a prominent member of society, was dangerous territory and the lawyers at Viking wanted to steer clear of associating “‘respectable’ characters” (Ibid.) with homosexuality for fear that he would bring about a libel suit (Ibid, 43). “What mattered to Viking’s legal department was Kerouac’s depiction of some of the characters’ actions and the repercussions it could create for the company if Kerouac’s portrayal sparked ‘shame or ridicule’” (Maher 2007, 316). Kerouac attempted to just change some personal details about Brierly, e.g. changing the name to Denver D. Doll, but in the end, Kerouac excised Brierly completely after pressure from Cowley about not taking the libel suits seriously enough (Cunnell 2007, 43–44).

The book went through many drafts and edits at Viking. Kerouac’s editors, Cowley and Helen Taylor, worked exhaustively with him on the book. “As the years passed, Kerouac’s [desperation increased], in the wake of the success of Holmes’s Go and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, to see the novel published. By September 1955 he was telling Malcolm Cowley that any ‘changes you want to make [are] OK with me’” (Ibid, 28). Near the end, there was much more silence between Cowley and Kerouac and in fact Kerouac never saw the final galleys before printing. After the novel was published, Kerouac “would blame Malcolm Cowley for making ‘endless revisions’ and inserting ‘thousands of needless commas’… Kerouac would say that he ‘had no power to stand by my style for better or worse’” (Ibid, 31) Though this may seem to construct a narrative of blatant censorship — a publishing company demanding the erasure of homosexuality — this is only half of the story.

Stories surrounding the scroll and the beginnings of writing On the Road may have been sensationalized over the years. Now a legend, some components of these tales might not all be true. It is told that Kerouac took the scroll to the publisher of his previous book, Harcourt, Brace. They advised some revisions, but Kerouac refused to revise it (Ibid, 2). Robert Giroux, his editor at Harcourt, Brace, told a dramatic story in an interview for the documentary, On the Road to Desolation, in which he advises edits and Kerouac insists, “This manuscript has been dictated by the Holy Ghost” (Ibid, 32) “but the story may well be part of the mythmaking surrounding On the Road” (Ibid). In reality, no publisher actually ever read the original scroll. “Kerouac immediately began to revise the novel” (Ibid, 26) creating a new manuscript he would eventually send to Viking Press, the publishing company who accepted the novel in the end. Cowley was possibly one of the first to see a manuscript, and he made several suggestions on edits, but “[Kerouac’s] cuts to On the Road precede Malcolm Cowley’s suggestions…contrary to previous biographers’ assertions” (Ibid, my emphasis). Kerouac wrote that “he had been ‘typing and revising’ since he finished the scroll. Although Kerouac would complain after the book had been published about some of the changes Cowley had made, “it is Kerouac who begins tempering the sexual content of his novel” (Ibid, 31). “Kerouac’s deletion of much of the sexual material and language, in particular the homosexual content” (Ibid, 28) was part of the initial redrafting process, before others had seen it, not the editors work as many had previously thought. In fact, much of the scroll had been changed between the time it was written and the time Cowley saw it. Penny Vlagopoulos argues that “Kerouac is consciously writing against a fearful cold war culture that encouraged Americans in self-censorship and the transmission of politically acceptable levels of reality” (Ibid, 5) but Kerouac does present an acceptable version of the homosexual reality. He did a lot of self-censorship before the pressures of publishers. Many have hypothesized why Kerouac exercised the self-censorship that he did. Richard Watts in his article “Doing the Beats: Kerouac, Sexuality and On the Road” blames it on “Catholic-guilt” and “personal shame” and Calhoun Kersten writes in his blog post “The Sexual Politics of Kerouac’s On the Road” that Kerouac is just working through “his own struggle with his sexuality.” In the end, not just one thing caused Kerouac to censor the homosexuality.

The edits, revisions, and redraftings of On the Road were convoluted and complicated. It was not blatant censorship; it was not straightforward. It was a “complex process of revision and redrafting” (Cunnell 2007, 31). As Michel Foucault explains power, “there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled” (Foucault 1978, 94) — it was not a grand battle between Kerouac and the publishing company with the editors and lawyers as their soldiers — “no such duality extending from the top down” (Ibid). It’s not the big publishing company reaching down to powerless Jack Kerouac with their metaphorical black marker to cross out anything and everything they don’t agree with. Jeffery Falla argues “in Jack Kerouac’s novels one might find an implicit self-censorship motivated not from fear of authoritarian reprisal but from the desire to be published” (Falla 2002, 57). It’s a multitude of reasons, a collection of people and a complex system of visible and invisible powers that all come into play to change the original scroll to what would be published. But after all, “Ginsberg [said] that someday when ‘everybody’s dead’ the ‘original mad’ book will be published as it is” (Cunnell 2007, 2).

Works Cited

Cunnell, Howard. 2007. “Fast this Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road.” in On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac edited by Howard Cunnell. New York: Penguin. 1–52.

Falla, Jeffrey B. 2002. “Disembodying the Body: Allen Ginsberg’s Passional Subversion of Identity.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2. 49–65.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1.: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.

Maher, Paul. 2007. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishers, Inc.

McDowell, Linda. 1996. “Off the Road: Alternative Views of Rebellion, Resistance and ‘The Beats’.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 2. 412–419.

Penguin Books. 1976. Introduction bio to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin.

Saroyan, Aram. 1979. Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and The Beat Generation. New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stimpson, Catharine R. Fall 1982-winter 1983. “The Beat Generation And The Trials Of Homosexual Liberation” Salmagundi, No. 58/59. 373–392.