Geoffrey V. Carter is an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses in composition. His areas of interest in include writer's block, video culture, and the history of pinball. His work has appeared in journals like PRE/TEXT, Kairos, Computers and Composition, and Enculturation. He has also published chapters in Bad Ideas About Writing (2017) and Rhetorical Speculations (2019).

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Neal Cassady, the celebrated muse of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, was, by his own account, a frustrated writer who suffered from severe writer’s block. Indeed, part of what is so captivating about Kerouac’s fictional portrayal of Cassady as Dean Moriarty is the earnestness in which Dean wants to learn to write from Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s alter ego. But neither Cassady the person nor Moriarty the character became realized as writers. Instead, their enthusiasm for life off the page becomes the stuff of the excited exclamations of Kerouac’s art. Part of Kerouac’s genius is his ability to simulate burning creative intentions with bebop improvisational rhythm which lifted Beat Generation writers, and those who would follow in their wake to realize their own artistic potential. Poets, writers, and musicians like John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Garcia all often credit Kerouac’s work. That Kerouac’s artistry is predicated on a muse who was ebullient in life, but paradoxically felt severely blocked as a writer, is less understood.

Cassady’s deep recognition of the depth of his writer’s block deserves attention, especially as his own frustration may well have motivated other aspects of himself to soar. Although his attempts to become an author resulted in one stilted memoir (The First Third), much of his published works were written as correspondence and collected and published after his death in 1968. When he was alive, and when he drove the fabled, LSD-infused psychedelic school bus for Ken Kesey, Cassady famously had a sign pinned to the front windshield: “Neal Gets Things Done.” What Neal got done during this period when he was roaring off to the 1964 World’s Fair with Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, however, was not the difficult task of sitting before a typewriter. Indeed, whatever work Cassady had done beyond his memoir up to that point was purported lost after his car was stolen from Kesey’s La Honda Acid Test Compound. Regardless of whether these lost writings were ever found, it’s clear from Cassady’s letters that he did not feel that he had reached his potential as a writer, and perhaps prolonged drug use had made it difficult for him to focus.

It’s in his correspondence with Kerouac and Ginsberg where we find some of the most achingly articulate passages about writer’s block and amazingly forward-thinking ways of overcoming this blockage. These passages are fleeting, but in the early years of their friendship Kerouac would zero in on some of their artistic potential in ways Cassady could not realize for himself. For example, Kerouac’s second take on Cassady was as a semi-fictional character of Cody Pomeray in Visions of Cody. Much of the genius and experimental nature of that novel seems to spring directly out of the most uninhibited moments of Cassady’s letters, particularly when he was fighting for ways to overcome his doubts about writing. Cassady had the idea that he might use an Ekotape Recorder to overcome his blockage by simply transcribing the rhythm of his ideas aloud. Cassady himself was a prodigious reader of Proust, Celine, and Dostoevsky and loved jazz as much as Kerouac. But it would be Kerouac who would finally use Cassady’s tape recorder to capture his conversations with Cassady when Kerouac lived with him in an attic space on Russell Street in San Francisco. As Kerouac’s title suggests, Cassady had the vision, but it took Kerouac’s considerable variation for us to see it clearly.

Another way of putting all this is that Kerouac was able to find the artistic potential in Cassady’s frustration over his own impotentiality. This is a paradox because Cassady is often depicted as a fount of possibility. Indeed, the video mashup that accompanies the essay you’re currently reading, in part, celebrates the mythos of Cassady’s combustible virility. In addition to playing Cassady’s recorded ramblings at low volume throughout the video, I’ve cut together numerous first-person accounts of the man that are currently available on YouTube. The portrait that I’m offering is part of the frenetic legend of his later years, especially as he became the storied bus driver—nicknamed “Speed Limit”—for Kesey’s psychedelic school bus, Furthur. Cassady and Furthur became the central figures in books like Thomas Wolfe’s historical recreation The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and in songs by the Grateful Dead, a band who welcomed Cassady as a part-time roommate to their 710 Ashbury Street home in San Francisco: “The bus came by and I got on, that’s when it all began / There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never ever land.”

And yet, the counter-point to all this celebration is the loss of Cassady’s own voice as a blocked writer. As much as we enjoy his seemingly boundless kinetic energy as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries, what seems to have driven him are the moments of dread and insecurity that many writers experience. It may be that the paucity of Cassady’s own prose was exacerbated by his choice to surround himself with artists like Kerouac and Ginsberg. Again, it is remarkable that Cassady’s confrontation with his inability to write seemed to have shaped a writer like Kerouac into passages and pathways of his own writing. Also, it’s worth noting that one of the few pieces of writing that Cassady was not inhibited, and in which stories spilled out effortlessly, was presumed lost for sixty years. The so-called “Joan Anderson Letter” (written to Kerouac in 1950 and rediscovered in 2012), is considered by some to be “the Beat’s Holy Grail,” even though it remains in 2020 only published in tantalizing fragments (Ulin). When received, Cassady’s letter led to this shocking declaration by Kerouac in one of his final interviews for The Paris Review in 1968 : “It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.”

While we don’t have full insight into that letter, there are some letters written by Cassady around that time that offer important insights into his remarkable mind and, perhaps, to the very nature of writer’s block itself—that is, if there is anything generalizable about such a malady. I offer the following excerpts not so much to further pathologize writer’s block, but to show that even in the depths of despair over writing there’s a certain playfulness of spirit that might be exciting for writers today as they were inspirational for writers back then. As we’ve only really come to know Cassady in Kerouac’s wake—and in the oral accounts of people who I showcase in my video—it’s good to return to some of the source material. Indeed, one of the reasons that I’ve featured W.C. Fields in my video mashup so prominently is that Cassady’s and Kerouac’s correspondence reveals a shared affinity with Fields’s talking style and jokes. In lieu of the few actual recordings of Cassady speaking, perhaps in hearing Fields’s patter from the movie, we can hear some of the rhythms and in-jokes that Cassady and Kerouac seemed to have shared.

But the letters themselves are important, and this is why I have excerpted three letters and underscored a few passages that I think offer insight to writer’s block. Again, these letters are intended to stand as a sort of contrast to the video, or if not an exact dichotomy, a way of complicating our understanding of what Cassady left behind. I have re-formatted Cassady’s 1951 letter to Ginsberg into short paragraphs to make it more readily digestible, because, as with Kerouac’s fabled scroll draft of On the Road, Cassady, too, wrote without stopping. In fact, while it’s hard to directly credit Cassady’s lack of paragraphing to Kerouac’s own approach, not paragraphing was part of their shared language landscape.

In addition to Cassady’s lengthy letter to Ginsberg—what I am calling his “Writer’s Block Manifesto”—I am also sharing fragments from two letters addressed to Kerouac in 1948, just two years into their friendship. Given that On the Road would basically take another decade to find its way to publication, these excerpts offer tantalizing insight into how Cassady viewed himself as a writer. In particular, it shows Cassady’s thinking of moving beyond traditional forms of writing to engage audio recording and moving pictures. Both of these themes would occupy Kerouac’s attention between 1951-1952 as he drafted his most avant-garde novel, Visions of Cody. Again, perhaps we can read in Neal’s nascent experiments some of the risks of writing that are more often ascribed to James Joyce’s infamous Finnegans Wake. To be sure, I’m not saying that Jack borrowed everything from these fragments, but I want to suggest we do more than dismiss Cassady’s letters as mere circumlocutions. And yet, in arguing for giving Cassady a little more credit, it’s clear that he doubted his own experimental notions: “I don’t mean to waste your time with this trash.” While Cassady’s work could never reach the heights of Kerouac’s prodigious output, I doubt that I’m the only one who would like to rummage a bit more in what Cassady considered his trash writing. Despite his belief that it was all evidence of a severe case of writer’s block, scraps of frustrated language like these arguably had a profound influence on Kerouac and therefore American Letters today.        

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