1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, Third Edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948). Their translation: Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children,/to whom no longer what's been, and not yet what's coming, belongs; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 1932, rpt., trans Ralph Manheim, London: John Calder, 1988, p. 192.
2. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. xxviii, 192.
3. Bakhtin, pp. 185, 193.
4. Establishing a chronological sequence to Kerouac's writing is difficult. He sometimes worked for many years on one text whilst in the same period composing other works, not infrequently completing these first. Additionally, many works suffered long publication delays. Kerouac's relationship with the publishing industry was never easy. Although he managed to get The Town and the City placed fairly straightforwardly, subsequent publication was often more difficult. Kerouac also became resistant to the idea of revising his work after The Town and the City received poor reviews, taking the view that it was the revisions his publishers had demanded that had weakened it. When publishers requested revisions, protracted negotiations could result. See Nicosia, Memory Babe, passim, for an account of these travails. All this complicates any attempt to arrive at a chronological arrangement.
The cause célèbre in this respect is On the Road, which in its first full draft was typed out onto a continuous roll of taped paper and presented to a publisher in this form. It was rejected (unsurprisingly, given that, in 1951, nothing resembling it could have been anticipated by any mainstream publisher). The immediate query raised by successive editors concerned how this continuous roll of paper could be edited. Eventually Kerouac gave way. The novel consequently went through a long series of minor and major revisions, some instigated by Kerouac, others at the behest of publishers, until it was finally published in 1957 after being accepted by Viking in 1953 and yet more revisions. See Tim Hunt, Kerouac's Crooked Road, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976, passim; see also Nicosia, p. 349 and passim. During this period, however, Kerouac worked on and sometimes completed other works. It is therefore not simple to decide where to position On the Road chronologically in his writings. In this study, I have sited it immediately after The Town and the City, since I believe that the change in approach to novel writing between Town and his subsequent writing is best demonstrated by this juxtaposition. But the ultimate justification for placing On the Road after The Town and the City is that, towards the end of the long process of revising Road, Kerouac turned back to his original 1951 typescript and worked from that. Even then, substantial revisions ensued, many insisted on by his publishers, which caused Kerouac to label the published work an 'emasculation'. See Tom Clark, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, New York; Paragon House, 1990, p. 152. But, to an important extent, the novel that resulted shows continuities with 1951's 'continuous roll'.
Other, more minor compromises have occasionally become necessary. These show up in the tabulation of the order I have settled upon, with dates of composition besides the novel's titles, to be found at the head of this study. I do not regard the decision to analyze Vanity of Duluoz and Pic at the end as contentious. Though Kerouac began to write about the periods of his life fictionalized in Vanity of Duluoz in the forties and early fifties, and actually used the title Vanity of Duluoz at this time, these early drafts played little part in the final work. Pic was assembled from early writings near the end of his life, and undoubtedly draws substantially on these early fragments, since Kerouac was in severe decline as he worked upon this final novella. However, though consisting of recycled material, Pic reworks it all, with much needing to be recast into the argot of its young Southern African-American narrator. Pic thus becomes a work of the sixties at least as much as the forties and early fifties (see the discussion in Chapter 17). It is more difficult to decide in which order to examine 'The Railroad Earth' and Maggie Cassidy, both composed contemporaneously. That the writing of the latter part of 'The Railroad Earth' (and some of the experiences that contributed to its writing) occurred after Maggie Cassidy had been completed proved decisive. Similarly, the composition of Visions of Gerard and Tristessa became inter-twined. In this instance, Visions of Gerard was completed first, and the seeds of the idea of writing Visions had been in Kerouac's mind for a long time. For a similar reason the positioning of Old Angel Midnight was problematic, since The Dharma Bums was written during a hiatus in the former's composition. The decisive factor here was that two thirds of Old Angel Midnight was written in 1956, and the compositional principle was decided at that time (see Chapter 11).