Jack Kerouac on Editors
INTERVIEWER
Why don’t we begin with editors. How do you . . .
KEROUAC
OK. All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse. When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions and inserted thousands of needless commas like, say, “Cheyenne, Wyoming” (why not just say “Cheyenne Wyoming” and let it go at that, for instance), why, I spent five hundred dollars making the complete restitution of the Bums manuscript and got a bill from Viking Press called “Revisions.” Ha ho ho. And so you asked about how do I work with an editor . . . well nowadays I am just grateful to him for his assistance in proofreading the manuscript and in discovering logical errors, such as dates, names of places. For instance, in my last book I wrote Firth of Forth then looked it up, on the suggestion of my editor, and found that I’d really sailed off the Firth of Clyde. Things like that. Or I spelled Aleister Crowley “Alisteir,” or he discovered little mistakes about the yardage in football games . . . and so forth. By not revising what you’ve already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way . . . Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact. . . . If he pauses to blow his nose, isn’t he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn’t he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he’s passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time? Incidentally, as for my bug against periods, that was for the prose in October in the Railroad Earth, very experimental, intended to clack along all the way like a steam engine pulling a one-hundred-car freight with a talky caboose at the end, that was my way at the time and it still can be done if the thinking during the swift writing is confessional and pure and all excited with the life of it. And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.
What Jack sent to Malcolm was a book on one long roll of paper. Not separate pages. Apparently one day in the office, Malcolm took the manuscript and unrolled it across the floor much to the hilarity of everyone. On The Road still crackles with energy.
Read it all Paris Review
guest post by Barbara Morgenroth
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
“The nearest printed paper on the bus was my own wrecked copy of the book I had written about him, the page-proof last-chance that publishers give writers to remember that diesel is spelled with the ‘i’ in front of the ‘e’, and was I sure I wanted this to be the only book in the history of English ever to end with a comma.” – Richard Bach, “The Bridge Across Forever”
And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it?
This is a person who has blanked from his mind all the poor storytellers, who go, “Wait, he was with a camel and they were coming from the bank, not going to it — or was it to a bar? Anyway, they cross the street — or was it a highway?”
If there was a’like’ button here I would like this a hundred times. Most of my friends tell stories that way. They think I’m an interesting raconteur without realizing I’ve practiced the story a dozen times in my head and revised it and honed it until it comes out sounding interesing and off the cuff.
My mother-in-law tells everything like this, sort of. “I need to get the furnace fixed” becomes, “The oil company called and they came out in the snowstorm, but they can’t make it start, and the fellow who came, oh, what was his name? well, anyway, he was a cousin to one of my students, brightest girl in the class, smart as a whip — did you know that she got a job at the bank the next town over? Anyways, he said that the furnace is totally garbage, and he’d seen a million of them when he was working for this other company, what was its name? Well, anyway, they weren’t very good, because they’d push people to buy this brand of furnace so they could get lots of work repairing them, and he finally got so tired of it that he quit and went to work for our oil company. ANYways, he says…”
That’s a shortened, fictional form. A real version would include something about the people she knows in Florida.
“None of these people have anything interesting to say and none of them can write, not even Mr. Kerouac… It isn’t writing at all—it’s typing.” ~Truman Capote, to David Susskind
I’ve never been a fan of either Capote or Kerouac, but I can see why people like the latter and why the former would say such a thing. This post confirms that Capote was on point.
I think On The Road is captivating, not for its elegant poetry, but for the freedom it offers. You ditch everything and, unencumbered, head out for a new life. This is very American. I just did a post on Laura Ingalls Wilder and I’m reminded how Pa didn’t want to stay in South Dakota, that he still itched to keep going to Oregon. The road has promise, the road has no rules, or commas, or your past.
Here’s Bob Seger’s Roll Me Away and I cry every time I hear it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfbBw-YMBeQ
For me, the road has a lot of dull driving and places that are uncomfortable. I’ve only once ditched everything for a new life, and it was hard enough. (Plus, we were transporting 3 cats in the back of the rented minivan.) Ain’t doing any more of that!
Not unless someone offers me a fairly comfortable starship, anyway.
The road has no rules? Sure it does. Lots of them. And it’s got a logic and structure, sign posts that inform your understanding of what’s ahead, and a way to go back from where you came.
You can go as fast as you like (sure you may get pulled over but chances are in the middle of the desert, you won’t) you can go slow. You can stop, change direction at any time. There’s the silence of open spaces, there is the absence of humanity, there’s a huge sky above and you can see to the horizon.
How many movies have been made where the main character drives out into the great southwest with the intention of getting lost?
If the symbolic road is equivalent to the rules of life, then that’s what it is for you. I don’t think people get that from reading On The Road but heck, I can be very wrong, and I’ve broken too many rules along the way to say otherwise.
Editors are a great tool. However, writers need to remember it’s his or her work and be willing to push back when an edit makes no sense. Might not happen often, but it DOES happen.