Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors by Sarah Stodola

Author:Sarah Stodola [Stodola, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2015-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

With its frank tone and measured upfront reporting of personal troubles, the passage is a clear echo of Burroughs’s opening for Junky:

My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton who was working in a shipyard at the time. Norton, whose real name was Morelli or something like that, had been discharged from the peacetime Army for forging a pay check, and was classified 4-F for reasons of bad character.

A female friend of Burroughs’s taught Kerouac one night how to extract Benzedrine from inhalers.415 “Bennies” would serve as a writing aid for the rest of Kerouac’s life. He most often worked at night, powered by the Benzedrine, after whomever he was living with had drifted off to bed. It was the Benzedrine that kept Kerouac going for three nonstop weeks when he wrote On the Road on the single scroll of paper in April 1951, although years later he claimed to have written it fueled by coffee alone.416 In 1960, he wrote in a letter to his agent, Sterling Lord, that he was ready to begin his new novel, but was “waiting for my supply of benzedrine to start on it. Once I have the benzedrine it’ll be done in 10 days or less.” Later in the same letter, he wrote, “I haven’t had any benzedrine for 2 years and I realized that’s why I haven’t written any new novels.”417 The Bennie habit, plus his aversion to steady employment, meant that Kerouac was never an early riser, preferring instead to sleep in and ease into the day.

Kerouac’s reliance on substances in his writing did not end with Benzedrine. He wrote Doctor Sax with the aid of marijuana and morphine.418 Mescaline, Seconal, and mushrooms played a role both in the experience chronicled in Big Sur and in the writing of it. Drugs, for Kerouac, were a means for tweaking one’s perceptions, a key element in his creative philosophy.

By the time he finished The Town and the City in 1948, Kerouac was no longer impressed with his own approach to it—the conventional structuring, the third-person narrative. Still, he sent the manuscript off to publishers, and after a few rejections, Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace agreed to publish it, and the book was released in 1950. By that time, Kerouac’s new friends had displaced Wolfe as his literary touchstone. Still, two enduring features of Kerouac’s novels can be credited to Wolfe: his autobiographical plots and American mythmaking. After Kerouac’s own life, America became his most important subject. As he was planning his first trip across the country and thinking of On the Road, he wrote to a friend, “My subject as a writer is of course America, and simply, I must know everything about it.”419 Going out on the road became his way of conducting research.

In the beginning, On the Road seemed to be taking the shape of a more conventional novel, in the vein of The Town and the City.

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