Whither Goest Thou, America?

Exploring the origins of Kerouac’s famous line from On the Road.

I was doing some research on Allen Ginsberg recently and came upon a poem that was originally published in Empty Mirror and was later included in Collected Poems. It is called “After Dead Souls” and it begins:

Where O America are you

going in your glorious

automobile, careening

down the highway […][i]

I must have read this poem before because it is in both of those books, yet for some reason I had never paid it much attention. It is a short work at just 12 lines and easy to overlook. I suspect Ginsberg did not rank it highly, for I could only find one instance of him reading it aloud.[1]

This time, however, the words jumped out at me as being remarkably similar to one of the most famous lines in Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road:

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

It has become one of those quotes that is rather annoying for how frequently it is shared online, but at least it is usually correct when it is shared. It is not imagined or misattributed like so many others. (“Here’s to the crazy ones… Climb that goddamn mountain!”)

Or maybe it is misattributed. After all, people tend to quote this line and then attribute it to Jack Kerouac, when in fact the line in the novel is spoken by Carlo Marx, a character based on Allen Ginsberg:

What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?[ii]

This takes place at Ginsberg’s home in Long Island.[2] Kerouac and Ginsberg are there along with Neal Cassady, Al Hinkle, and Lu Anne Henderson. Ginsberg asks the question and Cassady repeats it “with his mouth open,” but the question is not answered. “We sat and didn’t know what to say,” the narrator tells us, because “there was nothing to talk about any more.” In the space of a few lines, they eat, drop Ginsberg in New York, and set off for Virginia, arriving there 10 hours later.

The question posed by Ginsberg starts as a direct inquiry but then morphs into a broader, more philosophical one and the ensuing silence speaks volumes. It is not just about Kerouac and Cassady but about the fate of the nation at that time. The fact that the next few sentences feature so much action and condensed time and distance covered is typical of the restlessness that epitomises the book.

Many people far more knowledgeable than me have written about Kerouac’s novel and I have no interest in exploring the greater issues within the question posed above or in the paragraph that followed it. Compared to the scholars who have already written volumes on these ideas, I am entirely unqualified. However, I would like to explore its origins. In other words, I want to discover why this question appeared in these two Beat texts, which were both written in the spring of 1951, suggesting that one of the men had borrowed from the other. This raises several possibilities:

1. Kerouac was quoting something Ginsberg had said in 1948/9 (the time covered in the novel).

2. Kerouac made up the dialogue and then later showed it to Ginsberg, who rewrote it for his poem.

3. The two writers came up with this together in early 1951 and both made use of this idea.

4. The line was known to both men for some reason—perhaps a literary/cultural reference the early Beat group often used with each other.

First of all, we should address the fact that the quote as it appeared in the published version of On the Road—a novel already marked by fairly creative language use—stands out as rather unusual. As we can see here, the words “whither, “goest,” “thou,” and “thy” were by the 1950s extremely antiquated.

This is further highlighted by the colloquial language with which Ginsberg punctuates his initial question: “I mean, man, whither goest thou?” The use of “man” here was quite modern and the following three words were all very archaic.

Of course, those who know Ginsberg’s work well might not be terribly surprised by Kerouac’s account of his question. In the late 1940s, he frequently made use of such language. A quick look at his poems from that era shows he often used “thou” and “thy,” yet these terms were often juxtaposed against contemporary street language. Although he largely dropped the classically poetic language in the 1950s, he continued to employ it occasionally, even using “whither” in the 1960s. It is possible that Ginsberg really used those words and that Kerouac remembered them all those years later but it is equally possible that Ginsberg asked something like, “Where are you going?” and Kerouac rewrote it in a more poetic way.[3] After all, this was a novel. It was not an entirely faithful account of events and persons and of course the dialogue was not transcribed from a recording.[4]

It would not matter whether Kerouac accurately recorded Ginsberg’s speech or merely wrote something that sounded like the sort of thing Ginsberg might have said, except that both men ended up writing the same line in different words at approximately the same time. I could not help but wonder who originally came up with it.

The first and most obvious step for me was to check the original scroll. Since I do not have access to the actual physical scroll, I made do with the 2007 book, On the Road: The Original Scroll, which is a transcription of the famous scroll Kerouac wrote in April 1951. I was surprised when I came to the part in which Ginsberg (here just Ginsberg rather than Carlo Marx) asks the famous question… or rather, he does not ask it:

What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou?[iii]

The notable absence of course is the subsequent “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” In other words, we have Ginsberg directly addressing his peers but not asking the broader, more philosophical question aimed at America as a whole.

I have typed out the two pages, highlighting the omitted line in red and leaving a gap. Note: This does not in any way reflect Kerouac’s formatting. The scroll was one continuous block of punctuated text. The published book had paragraphs. I’ve simply arranged it this way to highlight the fact that the section is the same except the one notable change.

This is quite interesting. If Ginsberg had really asked the question, then why was it not in the scroll version? Its absence suggests that Kerouac had later expanded upon Ginsberg’s short, direct question, perhaps taking his flowery, archaic language and posing a question aimed more at the reader (or post-war, materialist America) than the characters in the room at the time. It suggests that the full quote was not originally Ginsberg’s but something Kerouac added to his novel as a later revision.

On the Road: The Original Scroll comes with an introductory essay by Howard Cunnell, who explains that only did Kerouac take Ginsberg’s original question and expand it, but he entirely deleted it first. When the scroll was retyped and then edited, this whole scene (of 26 lines) was removed. It was probably much later, when the book began to more closely resemble the published version, that Kerouac added the more philosophical version of the original question. In pencil, he wrote:

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?[iv]

I am not sure when this was added to the manuscript and the textual history is famously complicated, but it was certainly after Ginsberg wrote his poem. (This is explained later.) So did Ginsberg ask the original question, then Kerouac wrote it in his manuscript, then Ginsberg wrote a poem that inspired the fateful addition? It is a plausible theory, yet when I looked back further that whole line of inquiry seemed to fall apart.

The book Windblown World includes excerpts from a notebook titled “Rain and Rivers,” which Kerouac began writing in on January 31, 1949. These notebooks would later be used in the creation of On the Road as he mined them for language, observations, and events. One passage described a trip that year from New Jersey to San Francisco. In it, Kerouac writes:

Neal and I and Louanne talking of the value of life as we speed along, in such thoughts as “Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night?” and in the mere fact that we're together under such rainy circumstances talking heart to heart. Seldom had I been so glad of life.[v]

This appears to be a reworking of something he had written in another journal on January 3 of that same year:

Haunted by something I have yet to remember. Neal and I and Luanne talking of the value of life as we speed along: “Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night?” Seldom had I been so glad.[vi]

We can see, then, that the famous line existed as far back as early 1949, albeit with the less effective “at night” rather than “in the night,” which appeared later, presumably for alliterative reasons.

But what of Ginsberg, who was the source of this question in the 1957 version of the novel? There is no mention of him here, but in the “Rain and Rivers” passage, Kerouac notes that the three people in the car had said goodbye to Ginsberg before starting their journey and so it is quite possible that he had asked them before they departed, leaving them to discuss it on their trip. The January 3 entry, however, and particularly the use of a colon, suggests that the question arose in the car independent of any input from Ginsberg.

Kerouac quoted the “Rain and Rivers” version in a letter to Ed White written in May 1949[vii] and then abbreviated it in a letter to John Clellon Holmes in 1950. In the latter, he is outlining his vision for the novel and talks about “the Great Walking Saint of On the Road,” who

walks around America till the day of his death, no Nature Boy, but a man digging all women, men and children, dogs, cats, squirrels, birds, trees, rivers, and flowers that fall in his path as he trudges. He stops and speaks with the children. He sits on a rock in front of a Coca Cola sign and listens to the hum of time. He stands on the side of Highway 66 looking at all the cars that pass, saying “Whither Goest Thou?” and when a car stops he repeats the question to the driver, and stares at him.[viii]

In this instance, it is not Ginsberg who asks nor Cassady and Henderson who discuss it. It is not asked in a Long Island house nor a car headed for California. Of course, this is merely a summary written in a letter, but the fact that Kerouac mentions the question and in a totally different context shows that it was a phrase he liked and almost certainly a concept he wanted to explore.

It seems that in 1950 and 1951 Kerouac had for some reason dropped the fuller, grander question in favour of a shortened version: “Whither goest thou?” However, there is another letter that complicates matters. On January 11, 1951, Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg. He announced that he was heading off on yet another trip with Cassady and ended his message:

Whither goest thou, O America, in thy frantic truck at night? Whee![ix]

For those keeping up with the timeline, it was now two years since Kerouac had first invoked the line “Whither goest thou, America, in thy…” Here, he has added the salutation “O,” which is interesting because Ginsberg used “O America” in his poem, and he has changed “shiny car” to a different adjective + noun combination: “frantic truck.” He has added “Whee!” which appears in both the scroll and published versions of On the Road, albeit spoken by Cassady prior to Ginsberg asking his question.

The way he throws this question into his letter suggests to me that he felt Ginsberg would recognise it. He seems to be reminding his old friend of a whimsical but poignant question by distorting it playfully. This lends credence to the idea that Ginsberg had indeed spoken these words at some point several years earlier, but perhaps there is another reason… What if it was not something Ginsberg had asked but rather a literary reference that both men knew? That would account for his distortion of it in the 1951 letter.

What could that reference be? I racked my brain for writers and texts that Kerouac and Ginsberg both admired and lines that could be borrowed and altered to create the famous quote, but I could not think of anything. Who would write “Whither” and “thou” and “thy”? It surely had to be an old English poet.

I felt I had exhausted my ability to explore Kerouac’s work and had proved nothing, so I did what I perhaps should have done first, given that my knowledge of Ginsberg is far more extensive. I turned to his poem. I read it many times, parsing it for clues, and eventually the answer came in the most obvious of places: the title.

Ginsberg’s poem is called “After Dead Souls.” This was the sort of over-the-top, romantic, fatalistic phrases he wrote in the 1940s, when his poems were often about death, but by 1951 he was moving a little away from that and towards the more original Beat poetry he would become famous for. He titled his poems so melodramatically and hyperbolically that I did not initially see it. He was not talking about the death of souls but rather alluding to Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Dead Souls.

I seldom think of Gogol in connection with the Beat Generation, and yet the connections are numerous. In fact, he is mentioned in the very first letter Ginsberg ever wrote to Kerouac! That was all the way back in the middle of 1944, just after the death of David Kammerer:

I saw [Edie Parker] carry Dead Souls to you yesterday—I didn’t know you were reading it (she said you'd started it). We (Celine [Young] et moi) took it out of the college library for Lucien [Carr], too. Anyway, and to get to the point: Good! That book is my family Bible (aside from the Arabian Nights)—it has all the melancholy grandeur of modder Rovshia, all the borscht and caviar that bubbles in the veins of the Slav, all the ethereal emptiness of that priceless possession, the Russian soul. I have a good critical book on it home—I'll send it to you (or, I hope, give it to you) when you're finished with the book. The devil in Gogol is the Daemon Mediocrity, I’m sure you'll therefore appreciate it. Anyway, I'll finish some other time.[x]

Dead Souls was one of Ginsberg’s favourite books and something Kerouac read at a pivotal moment in his life. It was also read by Carr, was apparently on Burroughs’ bookshelf when Ginsberg first visited him,[xi] and I found a letter from Neal Cassady in 1947 that showed it was important to him as well.[xii] There is even a 1950 letter from Kerouac to Cassady, highlighting pages of particular interest.[xiii] But I’m getting ahead of myself… What does this have to do with the quote we were investigating? How does Gogol relate to the line from On the Road, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night”

I am quite ignorant about Gogol and also I cannot read a word of Russian, but I dug up some translations and managed to locate what seems to be the passage that is the origin of the famous line from On the Road and the poem Ginsberg wrote around the same time Kerouac was typing his scroll. I cannot say what version Kerouac had in jail with him,[5] or what versions the other Beat writers possessed, but in a 1936 edition it is not hard to see how the language could be rearranged:

And, Russia, art not thou too flying onwards like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake? The road is smoking under thee, the bridges rumble, everything falls back and is left behind! The spectator stands still struck dumb by the divine miracle: is it not a flash of lightning from heaven? What is the meaning of this terrifying onrush? What mysterious force is hidden in this troika, never seen before? Ah, horses, horses—what horses! Is the whirlwind hidden under your manes? Is there some delicate sense tingling in every vein? They hear the familiar song over their heads—at once in unison they strain their iron chests and scarcely touching the earth with their hoofs are transformed almost into straight lines flying through the air—and the troika rushes on, full of divine inspiration. . . . Russia, whither flyest thou? Answer! She gives no answer.[xiv]

Other versions contain the same idea (of course) but in somewhat different language. However, for all they differ in quite fascinating ways, they typically come close to Kerouac’s line. For example, another version says:

Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes[xv]

This appeared far too much of a coincidence to overlook. In fact, I felt certain that Kerouac borrowed this passage from Gogol and updated it for contemporary America. In the first passage, we can see “Russia, whither flyest thou,” which is the most obvious connection. Kerouac seems to have rewritten it as “Whither goest thou, America.” I think he also took “spirited troika” (a mode of transport in 19^th-century Russia; see the image below) and changed it to “shiny car” and “frantic truck.” For Ginsberg, it became a “glorious automobile.” We can see “O Russia” became “O America” in Ginsberg’s account and one version by Kerouac, though Kerouac mostly used it without “O.” Remember too that in Kerouac’s passage—in both the scroll and published version—the question is met with no answer, as with Gogol above.

A troika. Source.

Now that I had found and compared these texts, I began to search for supporting evidence. I could see more references to Gogol in both writers’ work, with Kerouac comparing his father to “a Gogol hero of old Russia,” for example, in Maggie Cassidy.[xvi] But perhaps a more telling sign came from the abovementioned letter Kerouac wrote to Holmes in 1950, where he outlined his plans for On the Road and spoke of “the Great Walking Saint of On the Road” asking “Whither goest thou?” Kerouac continued:

He walks on. He will do so till he’s a hundred years old. I decided to do this from seventy on...or sixty on...or anytime. Meanwhile it goes in my book. Someday like old Gogol and old Tolstoy, why not, I will do that...if it comes to pass that the light is not of this world. I have seen the light. That’s what is at the end of the night.[xvii]

Although he does not attribute the phrase to Gogol here, it is the only instance I can find of Kerouac using “Whither goes thou” and then mentioning the author he was paraphrasing. Now he compares himself to Gogol and suggests the phrase is his own creation.

Whilst Kerouac never explicitly stated the origins of the reference, Ginsberg did. I was able to find a quite interesting statement from a 1981 lecture he gave with Ann Charters on Russian Futurists at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, in which he said:

It’s not far from the old, uh, the heroic nationalists, holy Russia projections of the nineteenth-century Russians, including Gogol, who had a great On the Road passage in Dead Souls, in which he said, “Where are you going, O Russia, in your troika? Horses galloping up the dirt road leaving all the chickens squawking behind... Where you headed for? What kind of apocalypse? What kind of revolution? What kind of nationalist divine denouement of all the strivings and hopings of the Petrashevsky Circle, and all the bomb-throwing Anarchists, and all the police vibes, where you gonna wind up?” So there was this famous passage in Gogol’s Dead Souls that I was just paraphrasing, which was a call to Mother Russia or to Russia, personification of Russia, asking where she was going, what her future was.[xviii]

In his mind, all those years later, it was “a great On the Road passage in Dead Souls” rather than the other way around. I wonder if he assumed his listeners would immediately know the reference. But he said nothing else here. He did not mention his own poem nor did he explain why the line was attributed to him in the novel. However, it is interesting that whilst he mentions On the Road, the paraphrased version he gives in this lecture is far closer to his own poem than to Kerouac’s versions.

Why did he not mention “After Dead Souls” if he thought to reference Gogol’s novel in this lecture? Well, as I mentioned above, I don’t think the poem was terribly significant to him. In fact, I only found one instance of him reading it on tape, and even that was extremely hard to locate. In this 1970 performance of many poems from Empty Mirror, he even seems uncertain of the name, calling it “After Dead Souls by Gogol.” He wrote this on a list of poems performed, too, and then later deleted “by Gogol.” He prefaces the poem by calling it “a paraphrase of a line a great Russian novel, Dead Souls, by Gogol… Prophetic of the Haight-Ashbury.”[xix] I wish he had elaborated on that remark, but he did not.

Now we know the origin of the line in Kerouac’s novel and the poem Ginsberg wrote at that same time… but for me it was still not quite enough. Perhaps it is a little obsessive, but I found myself wanting to know exactly how it came to be in On the Road. I felt that Kerouac’s 1951 letter to Ginsberg probably prompted the poet to re-read Gogol or at least brought that passage to mind, but did Kerouac remember and paraphrase that specific passage or did Ginsberg really quote it back in 1949? Or, given that Cassady was also a fan of the book by 1947, did perhaps Kerouac and Cassady discuss it in the car on the way to San Francisco?

Even in March 1952, just a year after he and Kerouac had written Gogol-inspired lines, Ginsberg himself was uncertain. He wrote to Kerouac:

Now, what I want to know from you: my fantasies and phrases have gotten so lovingly mixed up in yours, Jack, I hardly know whose is which and who’s used what […] I am enclosing copies of poems that seem to stem from you […] I’m not haggling I just want to know if it’s OK to use anything I want that creeps in? […] I enclose, “After Gogol” Do or did you use the idea? If I use it will it screw up you? Fuck, lets both use it.[xx]

Kerouac responded:

The only phrase which I have used in On the Road is “strange angel”— disregard ANY worries about “stealing from each other”—I steal from you all the time, it’s okay—anything that creeps in is the only truth... we’re creeping in the shroud.[xxi]

Kerouac’s reply was sent around March 8, and in it he says he had not yet begun rewriting the scroll into a more standardised manuscript. Thus, On the Road at this point would have contained only “Whither goest thou?” and not “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

Considering the brotherly love shown in these two letters, it is perhaps appropriate that I found the answer in a book called Brother-Souls. Although it is about Kerouac and Holmes, it nonetheless contained the information I needed about Ginsberg:

Before feeding the first ten-foot sheet of paper between the rollers of his typewriter, Kerouac cut off a small piece to prepare what he called a “Self-Instructions List” for composing his book that he kept on his desk as a “chapter guide.” It began with the phrase “shining mind—dark mind.” The list wasn’t a conventional plot outline, but rather a reminder of the topics he wanted to cover in his narrative, including “Talk about Neal with Hal,” “Describe Allen monkey dance,” “Allen’s whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night,” and “Joan paper—wants to know what’s happening.”[xxii]

I have highlighted the key phrase here. I had originally been struck by how similar Ginsberg’s poem was to a line from Kerouac’s book, and after all this searching it is obvious why: Ginsberg had given the expression to Kerouac, who had played with it over several years, before giving it back to Ginsberg, who re-used it in different words, and eventually it ended up back in Kerouac’s book. No wonder Ginsberg had written, “I hardly know whose is which and who's used what.”

Perhaps those of you better versed in Russian literature than me would have immediately gotten the reference from Kerouac’s novel and Ginsberg’s poem, but for me it was a long and enlightening investigation. I had not thought much about Gogol before writing this, yet evidently he was of great importance to Ginsberg, and admired by Kerouac, Cassady, and Burroughs, with Carr also reading him at an important moment in his life. The first four seem to have come upon his novel independently, so it was a point of mutual interest during that formative period (1944-1947) and likely still something to discuss as of 1949. When you look closely, there are indeed references to Gogol in their various writings. In the 1990s, Ginsberg even went as far as saying that Kerouac got his “Soul from Dostoyevsky and Gogol.”[xxiii] I also like to think that he was referencing Gogol when in 1972 he referred to Kerouac and Cassady—both quite recently deceased—as “two dead souls.”[xxiv]

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Footnotes

[1] He read it at Rosary Hill College in 1970. You can hear him at about the 16-minute mark here: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/cp793kc0220

[2] Although this is a novel, and it is Marx rather than Ginsberg who lives on Long Island and says these words, for the sake of clarity I am going to give the names of the real people on whom the characters are based.

[3] This is suggested by the fact that Kerouac used “whither” once more in the scroll version of On the Road, where it is attributed to the narrator, Sal Paradise.

[4] Ginsberg went on record quite a few times as saying Kerouac fictionalised him but that these depictions were generally fair and accurate. Kerouac invented things but they were—in the Hemingwayan sense—true because of the depth of knowledge behind them. He captured a person and their speech well even when he was making something up years later to represent a multitude of earlier conversations.

[5] A clue may be in a 1950 letter, where he says he particularly likes “pages 134-135” but in the various versions of Dead Souls I checked the paraphrased section is not on or even close to either of those page numbers.

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Endnotes

[i] Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (Harper & Row: New York, 1984) p.65; Empty Mirror (Corinth Books: New York, 1961) p.43

[ii] Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (Signet: New York) p.99

[iii] Kerouac, Jack, On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking: New York, 2007) p.221

[iv] On the Road: The Original Scroll, p.28-29

[v] Brinkley, Douglas (ed.) Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 (Viking: New York, 2004) p.285

[vi] Maher Jr, Paul, Kerouac: The Definitive Biography (Taylor Trade Publishing: New York, 2004), p.180

[vii] The Missouri Review, Volume XVII, Number 3, 1994, p.129

[viii] Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, p. 214

[ix] Charters, Ann (ed.), Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (Penguin: New York, 1995) p.311

[x] Morgan, Bill, and Stanford, David (eds), Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking: New York, 2010) p.3

[xi] Charters, Ann, Kerouac: A Biography (Straight Arrow Books: San Francisco, 1973) p.59

[xii] Cassady, Neal, First Third: A Partial Autobiography & Other Writings (City Lights: San Francisco, 1972) p.126

[xiii] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956, p.233

[xiv] Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls (Random House: New York, 1936) p.78

[xv] Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls (Dent & Sons: London, 1948) p.206

[xvi] Kerouac, Jack, Maggie Cassidy, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1978) p.142

[xvii] Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, p. 214

[xviii] The lecture can be heard here. It is transcribed (slightly differently) here at the Allen Ginsberg Project.

[xix] https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/cp793kc0220 16:00

[xx] Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, p.145

[xxi] Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, p.146

[xxii] Charters, Ann, and Charters, Samuel, Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2010) p.191

[xxiii] Kerouac, Jack, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights: San Francisco, 1992), p.i

[xxiv] Ginsberg, Allen, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995 (HarperCollins: New York, 2000) p.352