“Angrier each time”: When Jack Kerouac waged war against the publishing industry
They say that to work in any kind of creative field, the one thing you really need is a thick skin. Talent is a tender thing, skill is fickle, rejection comes hard and fast, so the need is to be strong to ride it all out. Luckily, Jack Kerouac had that strength.
It’s fortunate that all of the Beat generation did because lord did the industry try and tear through it. The curse of the pioneer is to be misunderstood at best, which they were as they purposefully rallied against literary traditions of form and style, taking everything they learnt at Columbia and deliberately tossing it out of the window. But at worse, the curse of the pioneer is to be completely and utterly squashed.
In 1957, Allen Ginsberg was hit hard when his poem ‘Howl’ was accused of being obscene and hundreds of copies of it were seized. About as quickly as it was published, it was banned and even his publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights was arrested too. They tried to get rid of it, partly due to its explicit content but also partly due to the fact that it was undeniably a door opening to a new era of literature.
That became a pattern for the whole scene. They were all consistently hit with charges, censorship, publishers refusing them or questioning their content, or even putting their art on trial. Kerouac faced that as his famed novel On The Road which made him one of America’s most celebrated authors was heavily censored by the publishers still.
But what they all had was fight and determination, proved in Kerouac before he’d even had a single word published.
“Got form-rejection card from MacMillan’s,” Kerouac wrote in his diary in September 1948. So, at 26 and with his first novel complete, he was getting rejection after rejection for The Town and the City. It’s the stuff that breaks people or makes them give in before they’ve even started, but not him.
“I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know The Town and the City is a great book in its own awkward way,” he wrote, adding like an affirmation, “And I’m going to sell it.”
Clear and determined in his voice and vision, his diary entry from that day reads like a motivational speech. “They won’t fool me with their editors who want to skimp everything down to the shallow formulas of this age,” he added, steeling himself against the industry and reminding himself to stay on his course of rebellion. He had no intention of being one of the countless books that are released and swiftly forgotten. Instead, he knew he’d be something special.
“I’m ready for any battle there is, against anybody, in defence of this excellent book I have written, which comes from the heart and from the brain,” he said. That’s a statement that any author should look in the mirror and tell themselves.
He keeps reminding who the book is for, and that it’s about the readers and not the industry voices, writing, “Even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: because I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down.”
The single-mindedness is incredible and a signature of the Beats. It’s inspiring, and surely is why the author did in fact prove successful because he kept going, kept sending it out, kept talking to more people about it until eventually, Harcourt Brace wanted it. Then it all clicked. Perhaps it wasn’t quite what he expected as The Town and The City wasn’t the book that made him, but it was the one that opened the floodgates, and without that first, there would have been no breakout moment to follow with On The Road.
