![]() Of all his books, On the Road had been the most difficult one to write, although the original idea had come to him twelve years earlier, not long after the war: a young man trying to lift himself out of a pessimistic mood after a debilitating illness takes a road trip across America that he hopes will reinvigorate him, encountering a series of symbolic characters. If Howl had been impounded, what would happen to On the Road? Jack’s greatest fear was that, given the heightened appetite for book-banning, Viking Press would decide against publishing his second novel, which it was supposed to bring out that September. “Imagine,” Jack wrote me from Berkeley, in June, soon after the raid on City Lights, “one woman writing in the paper if Jesus Christ was alive he would have led the police to the bookstore to impound HOWL! and all that kind of negative old woman attitude all over the place with all those new dreary neat cottages and clean streets with white lines and signs that say WALK, STOP, DON’T WALK…I can’t stand it….” He said he was sorry he’d ever suggested my coming to California, since he could “foresee being driven out of America altogether.” It had come out at a time when there was little open dissent in America memories of the lives that were ruined earlier in the decade during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee had not lost their potency. While “Howl” was just a poem by a relatively unknown poet published by the small, brave City Lights press, it was dangerous with its fierce indictment of America as a Moloch that devoured its young and those who did not live according to its norms. Howl had been impounded on the grounds that its title poem was obscene, though perhaps that had only been an excuse to suppress it. There were five of them by now-all “published in Heaven,” as Allen Ginsberg had put it in his introduction to the pocket-size paperback of Howl, which had just been seized by the San Francisco police. Now it was halfway through 1957, and none of his other work had been published, although he’d kept stubbornly writing his unacceptable novels. In 1950, that had been the fate of Jack Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, when, despite a promising initial flurry of attention, the twenty-eight-year-old writer soon realized he need not have worried that losing his obscurity might be bad for him. Most books come out and vanish pretty quickly, leaving a trail of silence behind them.
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