We knew that just the mention of the name Jack Kerouac was enough to aggravate some people. We also knew that his novels had inspired thousands and thousands of readers—especially youthful readers—to get the hell out of whatever boring or dead-end situation they were in and take a chance with their lives. I’ll always respect the writer Thomas McGuane for going on record about JK, saying in an essay that he, McGuane, never wanted to hear a word against Kerouac because Jack had indeed worked a kind of salutary magic on more than a few. “He trained us in the epic idea that . . . you didn’t necessarily have to take it in Dipstick, Ohio, forever,” McGuane wrote. “Kerouac set me out there with my own key to the highway.” Kerouac’s literary standing aside, the man had the power to move others.
Jack Kerouac was no avatar and Jack’s Book was not meant as hagiography. This book—biography, reportage, collage, holy mosaic, unholy mess, however it’s been and will be characterized—contains some extremely emotional, confessional material; it’s not dull. Dr. Freud notwithstanding, there is at least a sort of truth to be found here. The book belongs to those persons who bared their souls in conversations with us about their dead friend or adversary. Therefore, it belongs to Kerouac, which is why I titled it Jack’s Book. These are letters to a dead man from people who for one reason or another didn’t tell him what they really thought of and about him while he was alive. It was Larry’s and my pleasure to provide them the belated opportunity.
I’ll never forget sitting with Jimmy Holmes, the hunchbacked pool-shark of Denver, in the stuffy parlor of his elderly aunt’s apartment, where he lived, and him saying to me, after I’d read aloud a lyrical passage from Visions of Cody that Kerouac had based on his life, and which Holmes had never read, “I didn’t know Jack cared about me that way. He really cared, didn’t he?” Or stumbling drunkenly along the Bowery in the wee hours one frozen February morning with Lucien Carr, who kept repeating, “I loved that man. I loved Jack, goddam it, and I never told him!”
This new edition is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Lawrence Lee, who died on April 5, 1990.
—BG, 2012
PROLOGUE
America makes odd demands of its fiction writers. Their art alone won’t do. We expect them to provide us with social stencils, an expectation so firm that we often judge their lives instead of their works. If they declare themselves a formal movement or stand up together as a generation, we are pleased, because this simplifies the use we plan to make of them. If they oblige us with a manifesto, it is enforced with the weight of contract.
So it happens that, from Henry James on, Europe is regarded by Americans as a large lending-library of inspiration, and expatriation becomes something of a duty, whether fulfilled or not. Ernest Hemingway makes a market for wineskins. Mr. and Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald certify a dip in the Plaza Fountain as apt behavior for young Americans of a certain class and time.
Having derived an etiquette from their works, we hold these writers in our minds as creatures of the moment in which we noticed them. If they abandon our expectations, the literary critics and chroniclers put them in their place, like stamps that have been stuck onto the wrong page of the album. In this way we sometimes deny artists the ordinary chances at growth and change that are among art’s bare necessities.
This book is about a man who was a victim of this spirit of literary utilitarianism. Jack Kerouac is remembered as the exemplar of “the Beat Generation.” But the Beat Generation was no generation at all. The label was invented as an essay in self-explanation when journalists asked questions, but it was accepted at face value. Kerouac used the phrase above one of the first samples of On the Road to reach print (“Jazz of the Beat Generation,” 1955) and his friend John Clellon Holmes, who had described the same world in his novel Go, obliged the New York Times Magazine and Esquire with think-pieces about this new generation written in the style that the readers of those journals expected.
Kerouac was a writer whose belated success depended upon a new prose method, which he applied to a sturdy old form, a young man’s varied adventures. It was Kerouac’s misfortune that his fame—as distinct from his literary standing, a matter yet to be determined—owed more to the people and events he portrayed than to the way in which he portrayed them, as he later insisted he would have preferred.
Cutting away the amateurs, the opportunists, and the figures whose generational identification was fleeting or less than wholehearted on their own part, the Beat Generation—as a literary school—pretty much amounts to Kerouac and his friends William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In life and in art the three relied upon one another in strong and complex ways, and, more than four decades after his death, Kerouac’s prose style lives on in the forms Ginsberg adopted to become the world-poetry voice he is today. Ginsberg shed his role as the earnest, necktie-wearing “Ginsy” of the 1940s and managed to utilize the dangerous energy of publicity in projecting an image useful to his motives as a poet. Burroughs, whose frosty distance and Coolidge-like silences evidently have been in his repertoire since boyhood, saw to it that he was left alone. A fourth figure, Gregory Corso, entered the circle late, and continues to play the poètemaudit, lately in France, where that role is a matter of accepted tradition. Kerouac’s failure to adopt any of his former cohorts’ survival tactics or to find a successful one of his own is the sad heart of the last part of this book.
When On the Road appeared in 1957, after languishing in Kerouac’s rucksack for years, Jack won the literary and commercial success he had wanted desperately, but had failed to achieve with his first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950. Ginsberg asked him to write a brief explanation of his technique, and it was printed in The Black Mountain Review, the journal of that resolutely advanced Southern college, as “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Kerouac’s method was a war on craft, but his notes were adopted as the excuse for a torrent of bad stream-of-consciousness prose and poetry. Kerouac, unwillingly, was set up as the avatar of a movement that he had no desire and little ability to advance. Suddenly, he found himself placed by the media at the center of a stage dressed with props from French existentialism (black sweaters, berets), late romanticism (footloose hedonism) and the whole race-hoard of ideas about drugs, from De Quincey to Anslinger.
Kerouac realized the threat of this role at once, but he reacted with an odd mixture of shyness and belligerence. He accepted the attention, at first, as a compliment. Its focus was an insult. Why didn’t the journalists examine the books as well as the man? As he told The Paris Review in 1967:
I am so busy interviewing myself in my novels, and I have been so busy writing down these self-interviews, that I don’t see why I should draw breath in pain every year of the last ten years to repeat and repeat to everybody who interviews me what I’ve already explained in the books themselves. . . . It beggars sense.
He began to say forthright things about his essential conservatism and religiousness, and they were duly quoted with the feature-writer’s skill at synthetic irony. Esquire portrayed him as a pathetic class-traitor, a hipster-as-Bircher. Although that particular insult was delivered only after his death, Kerouac did live long enough to recognize the imminent fulfillment of this prophecy he had delivered in 1951 across a midnight kitchen table to Neal Cassady:
A Ritz Yale Club party where I went with a kid in a leather jacket, I was wearing one too, and there were hundreds of kids in leather jackets instead of big tuxedo Clancy millionaires . . . cool, and everybody was smoking marijuana, wailing a new decade in one wild crowd.