This confusion between some of the social forms of the late sixties and the content of Kerouac’s work continues to do his reputation damage. In Exile’s Return, his book about the social side of American letters between the world wars, Malcolm Cowley describes The Saturday Evening Post’s thirty-year grudge against Greenwich Village, a vendetta replicated by the New York Times, which still maintains a specialist in critical attacks on “the Beats.” Students of English literature waited twenty years for the first scholarly edition of On the Road, and only in recent years has Kerouac’s work begun to prevail over what poet Jack Spicer called “the great, gray English Department of the skull.”
But despite the gap on the assigned-reading list, students at any school of a certain size, whether in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Austin, or Cambridge, have always been able to step across the street and find a big selection of Kerouac novels, often in British paperback editions. The books live. On the Road has never gone out of print. Ginsberg and fellow poets have created a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Buddhist college in Colorado, Naropa Institute. Movie companies are exploiting Kerouac’s novels again, and a play based on his life was produced in New York in 1976 and in Los Angeles in 1977.
As with Scott Fitzgerald, another drinking Catholic who gave out at the midpoint, there is a threat that Jack Kerouac’s legend may supplant his work, rather than merely overshadow it. Had he lived unto silvery literary senior-statesmanship, it is possible that one publisher or another would have fulfilled his wish for corrected and uniform publication (with the names straight, once and for all) of his “one vast book . . . an enormous comedy, like Proust’s.” He would have called it The Duluoz Legend. As it is, the one-vast-book notion cannot accommodate his first novel, The Town and the City, a fact Jack acknowledged. He would have set it aside. There are other problems. Tidy-minded publishers forced him to give the same characters exasperating strings of pseudonyms masking pseudonyms and even, in The Subterraneans, to disguise New York as San Francisco in a hedge against libel suits. His work is scattered among foreign and American houses, individual volumes popping in and out of print.
The idea of this book is to provide the framework for a first or fresh reading of Kerouac as a man who succeeded in giving us his one vast book, but in the bits and pieces the marketplace demanded. The authors are men born during or shortly after World War II who at first knew their subject only through his work, where they found the energy for the undertaking of learning as much as they could of his life.
Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, young in the terms of our time. Most of his friends survived him. Our idea was to seek them out and to talk with them about Jack’s life and their own lives. The final result, we hoped, would be a big, transcontinental conversation, complete with interruptions, contradictions, old grudges, and bright memories, all of them providing a reading of the man himself through the people he chose to populate his work.
The job took us back and forth across the country twice, mostly by airplane. The very roads have been replaced since Jack’s travels by the homogenized culture of the Interstate Highway system, but the people of Kerouac’s novels have survived. We talked to seventy or so individuals, thirty-five of whom speak here. We had no “Rosebud” to ask them about, like the friends and victims of Citizen Kane, nor, although more than one interviewee proposed the metaphor, did we feel much like the field investigators in the Roman Catholic Church’s saint-making procedures. Much of what we learned from these conversations has been used in the text that binds the excerpts from them together. We have let Kerouac’s friends speak a good deal about themselves because it seemed to us both possible and proper to provide a group portrait as well as a close-up of the man who stands at its center. Because the cast reached Russian-novel proportions, we provided the character key as an aid to following their appearances in this book and those of their fictional shadows in Kerouac’s.
In what follows you will read again and again, in many voices, that Kerouac’s novels were fiction, not reportage. We agree. It is fascinating to see the way in which real people, places, and events are utilized in the books, which then fed back to alter reality, but the technical leaps and the heartbreaking beauty of Kerouac’s prose take his novels into a realm far beyond that of the reporter or diarist. His books are the product of a genius at recollection. When he was a boy in Massachusetts Jack’s friends nicknamed him “Memory Babe.” To the editor who brought On the Road to light he was the recording angel. To his friend and fellow novelist, John Clellon Holmes, he was “the great rememberer.” And to a great many of those with whom we spoke, memories of Jack were mixed up with notions of sainthood. If miracles are required as evidence of his life, his books themselves should suffice.
One hundred feet above sea level,
on a plateau where the powerful
Merrimack joins the sluggish
Concord River, stands Lowell,
one of the leading manufacturing
cities of New England. Canals and
grassy plots criss-cross the crowded
metropolitan business section.
On the hills beyond are a city’s
homes from mansion to tenement.
—MASSACHUSETTS
FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT, 1937
1
THE TOWN
“Jacky Duluoz’s home was in a tenement. . . . He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops . . .” (Maggie Cassidy, pp. 21–22). Moody Street, showing Textile Lunch. Vinny Bergerac’s apartment was third floor of building next to vacant lot. Photo by Marshall Clements.
THE TENEMENTS WERE, and are, Little Canada. There are others like it in Burlington and Nashua and Portsmouth, neighborhoods in which the shop signs are in English but the French language and ways prevail. You can still see the young French-Canadian men lounging by the front door of the Pawtucketville Social Club, the bowling alley and beerhall where Jack’s father, Leo, went on afternoons when business was light at his Spotlight Printshop in the “crowded metropolitan business section” across the river.
Like many New England towns, Lowell has swallowed up a collection of villages, each with its own history. Jack Kerouac was born in Centralville and grew up in a succession of rent-houses and flats in Dracut and Pawtucketville, all of them north of the Merrimack and the now-vanished mills that multiplied the Merrimack’s power by that of the leisurely Concord, a river which is a river only as Lowell is a city, on an old scale—New England’s.
During the early years of the industrial revolution Lowell was a wonder-town, literally a capital of industry. The mills spun Boston fortunes that survive to this day. Charles Dickens, a stern critic of factory slavery in his own country, visited Lowell and wrote home an approving report. He was impressed by the looks of the place and by the deportment of the farm girls who had come there to tend the looms, and he found no fault with their wage, two dollars a week. The mill owners gave the town a Textile Institute on the north bank of the Merrimack, but they were less generous with their workers. As the nineteenth century rolled on, the “operatives” became relatively less and less well-paid. The farm girls went to Boston, instead, to work as stenographers or telephonists. Their places at the looms were taken by immigrants from Ireland, France (via Canada), Poland, and Greece.
The mills hummed until the end of World War I, when imported cloth and southern factories provided competition that began to close them down. By the