Jack's Book

An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac

Barry Gifford, Lawrence Lee

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857867650
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

'Jack Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven... Most of his friends survived him. Our idea was to seek them out and 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.' In this kaleidoscopic portrait of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gore Vidal and many others talk, argue and reminisce about their times with him. But alongside these luminaries of the Beat generation are the voices of those who knew a different side of Kerouac: the working men, the childhood friends, the bar companions, the lovers. Fascinating, honest and richer than any orthodox biography could be, Jack's Book documents Kerouac's genius in its full, tragic, contradictory glory.

3

THE ROAD

“What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”

—DEAN MORIARTY IN ON THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac, Denver, 1950. Photo courtesy of Justin Brierly.

JACK HAD BEEN at work on The Town and the City for eight months when Neal Cassady burst onto the New York scene in December 1946, his teen age bride, Luanne, in tow.

Hal Chase, Allen’s roommate from Denver, had described Neal to Ginsberg and the others as a self-aware representative of the American underclass, a reform-school punk with an eye for poetry. From Hal’s letters and from conversations during Chase’s summer vacations, Neal had decided that Manhattan was exactly the place for him, a city of poets. In much the same way, Jack yearned to head west to the frontier that he imagined remained there. This is the basic equation of the friendship between Jack and Neal that turned Kerouac in the direction of his best work.

There was an instantaneous understanding between the two men, who, in photographs taken in the early fifties, resembled each other so closely that it is difficult to tell which is Jack, which is Neal.

Neal was four years younger than Jack, born to a wandering family that the Depression would scatter. He had few warm memories of that family. His half-brothers by his mother’s first marriage were a good deal older, and they routinely beat Neal’s father bloody whenever he came home drunk. Neal recalled his brother Jimmy as a bully, and his younger sister only as a dim memory. When Neal was six his parents separated and his half-sisters were sent to orphanages. Each summer, Neal was left to the care of his father.

Neal Cassady, Sr., was “the barber” to his fellow denizens of Larimer Street, Denver’s skid row, but, aside from manning a third chair at a friend’s shop on busy Saturdays, he really followed neither that trade nor any other. Instead he drank.

After the separation Neal’s mother stayed on in Denver, and Neal returned to her occasionally until her death when he was ten, but his loyalty was with his father, who offered a world of saloons, flophouses, and mission meals purchased with a hymn. Neal grew up canny and street-wise, turning his remarkable mind to the immediate tasks of survival for himself and his father.

Neal reached out for whatever he wanted, whether it was a girl or a car. He was unburdened by doubts about motive or method. He bragged that he had his first girl when he was nine and stole his first car when he was fourteen. It was the cars that got him into trouble. In a typical incident Neal “borrowed” his boss’ car and, when it broke down, hailed a policeman for help. The car had been reported stolen and Neal’s boss pressed charges.

In Neal’s conversation and in Jack’s fiction Cassady spent five years of his youth and young manhood in jail, but this is an exaggeration. The five years beginning in 1940, when Neal was fourteen, were checkered with convictions and reformatory terms, including one successful escape, but the total time served was less than a year.

When he was sixteen Neal met the man who would supply the roundabout link to Jack Kerouac and his friends. Justin Brierly was inspecting one of his rent-houses in Denver when he encountered Neal in a hallway.

Cassady regarded him as an intruder. “How did you get in here?” he asked. “This is my house.”

“I’m sorry,” Brierly said, holding up the key. “This is my house.”

Brierly, then in his mid thirties, was a handsome attorney who sat on the school board and was active in Denver art and music circles. He was involved in formal efforts to aid truant boys and he served Columbia University, his alma mater, by screening local applicants for admission. This last role was his connection to Hal Chase, Ginsberg’s friend.

Neal was naked at the time of their surprise encounter, and Brierly cannot but have been struck by Cassady’s piercing blue eyes, his chiseled features and his hard, well-muscled body. After a few minutes of talk he also was impressed with Neal’s energy and intelligence.

By 1944, when he was sentenced to ten months in the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista, Neal had come to rely on Brierly for a variety of favors. He wrote, asking the lawyer to cover an unpaid bill at the bar where Neal’s brother Jack had worked before joining the Army, and he chided Brierly for failing to cadge permission from the warden for Neal to visit a medical specialist in Denver, a trip that would have amounted to a leave.

In the dense block of rules and questions printed at the top of the prison stationery, Neal explained his relationship with Justin by the word “friend.”

Neal’s friendships and sexual relationships held a quality of transaction: something Cassady wanted in exchange for something the others needed, hard-pressed though they might be to give it a name. For Kerouac and Ginsberg—although not for Burroughs, who remained unimpressed—Neal provided an example of instinct in action. In exchange, Neal wanted from them instruction in how to express his feelings. For Neal, in this instance, the transaction was incomplete. Aside from a few fragments of autobiography and his voluminous letters, he did not become the writer he said he wanted to be.

But Jack found in Neal the principal character for the novel that his closing scene of The Town and the City pointed toward, the road book, and Neal also gave Jack the method of telling that story. As Kerouac once put it, “The discovery of a style of my own based on spontaneous get-with-it came after reading the marvelous free-narrative letters of Neal Cassady, a great writer who happens also to be the Dean Moriarty of On the Road.”

When Kerouac and Cassady became friends late in 1946 and early in 1947, Jack was working on the idealized version of his boyhood which fills the early pages of The Town and the City, pages Neal read over Jack’s shoulder as he typed. When he began his own writing exercises with Jack as tutor Neal set down his boyhood in letters meant to please Kerouac, and in those written with the help of marijuana Neal abandoned the etiquette of the “friendly letter” as taught at Denver’s East High School, piling impression upon impression, all of them tumbling off the page with the clatter of life itself.

A few nights after Neal arrived in New York he seduced a trembling Allen Ginsberg after an evening wandering across New York with Kerouac and other company, and the two pledged undying love. However authentic that love was—and Neal’s letters to Allen indicate that it was genuine—Cassady’s pansexuality differed from Allen’s confirmed, if uncomfortable, homosexuality, a difference that led to a good deal of pain for Allen in the years ahead.

At one point when Ginsberg was imploring Neal to experiment with a monogamous, gay life together Neal patiently explained that his feelings for Allen transcended physical sex, and that the ideal situation would be one in which the two of them lived together with a woman whom they both could love.

Because Ginsberg, Burroughs, Huncke, and others in the circle are homosexuals, it has become fashionable to assume that Jack and Neal were gay men, too repressed to act out their love for each other openly, a theory ratified by the fact that both men did, on occasion, sleep with other men. There is no evidence, documentary or otherwise, to support the notion. However, it would be difficult to imagine two human beings, sex and sexuality quite aside, more intensely interested in the contents of each other’s minds than Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

Throughout the late forties, as The Town and the City accumulated page by page, startling Allen and the others with its bulk and the precision of its recollections, Neal gave Jack a focus for his impulse to stand up from the typewriter, kiss Mémêre good-bye, and go on the road.

From a distance of two thousand miles, Larimer Street, a dismal, redbrick dead end, glowed for Jack with the leftover magic of the West and the roads that led in that direction. In the summer of 1947, six months after he met Cassady, Jack went west for the first time, to Denver. Neal was involved in a bisexual quadrangle that summer and had little time for Kerouac, but the trip gave Jack a chance to see the scenes of Neal’s childhood and young manhood and, the following winter, to try on Cassady’s prose style for a possible fit, writing about the easy society of the poolhalls in a narrative which was a discarded beginning to On the Road.

On the Road, the book which finally brought Jack fame and a degree of material success, existed in his mind and under that title for four years before its composition and for ten years before its publication. It was not until 1951, as John Clellon Holmes has described, that Jack sat down and simply wrote the book, as Neal would have written one of his long letters. The book’s center, its energy, is Neal himself: Neal driving, Neal stealing cars, Neal talking his way out of a tight corner, Neal and his women. (Neal and his men were left out.)

Thus, the book is a prolonged meditation on the subject of Neal Cassady and, even at that, could not contain all that Jack wanted to write about this remarkable figure. For example, some of the material about Cassady which Jack wrote during his attempts to begin On the Road during the 1940s became the opening of Visions of Cody, written as Visions of Neal. The latter book was completed with rhapsodic variations on a documentary record of the two men’s time together in 1952 with Neal’s last wife, Carolyn, a time when the Cassadys were more or less settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. From that point on Jack traveled alone, alternating between compulsive wandering and a return to the home—Mémêre’s, Nin’s, the Cassadys’—where he wrote the bulk of his legend.

On the Road is the portrait of a man racing to make up for any and all lost time, a portrait of Neal. It gives the impression of a single journey that sweeps back and forth across America. In truth it was several journeys, consolidated at the behest of the book’s editors, who, noting the absence of solid motivation for the trips in the first place—Jack’s accurate recollection provided fiction stranger than fiction was expected to be—insisted upon compression.

On the Road opens with Neal’s first visit to New York in 1946, follows Jack to Denver in 1947, and on to solo adventures in California, but the book is at its best when Neal is onstage and the two are on the road together.

Their first trip took them from the East Coast to San Francisco by way of the Burroughs’ household in New Orleans in early 1949. Later that year, there was a trip from San Francisco to New York and, the final episode of On the Road, a journey from New York to Mexico in 1950, The motivation for the trips which On the Road’s editors had sought was, in fact, the complicated sex-life of the book’s principal character, Dean Moriarty—Neal. It is present, of course, between the lines of that novel, but Jack’s record of the time did little to convey directly the passions involved, perhaps because they were unfathomable to the principal actors in the story at the time.

Instead Jack centered on accurate description of Neal’s world, and Kerouac’s summer alone in Denver in 1948 offered him a chance to range Larimer Street and reconstruct the world of the flophouses and poolhalls where Cassady had grown up.

In Jack’s homemade mythography Neal’s poolhall cronies took on the quality of the hero’s companions in an ancient epic. One such companion was “Tommy Snark” of On the Road, “Tom Watson” of Visions of Cody, a slump-shouldered youth with a soft voice, large, hurt-looking eyes and a nearly unbeatable pool-hustling style. He has remained in Denver for the rest of his life, pursuing his skills with a cue, at cards, and at the track. His real name is Jim Holmes.

Jim Holmes:

I knew Neal very, very well, and for years before the other people involved knew him. I felt that there was a little feeling of, oh, perhaps jealousy or some sort of hostility between Jack and I when we first met in relation to the amount of time that Neal was going to spend between the two of us. Not that I really cared, but somehow I think he did, and so we never went out of our way to be around each other very often.

I’m not a very big person, and so I have to compete in things of skill. I played table tennis before I played pool. As soon as I got good at one thing I would start on something else, and so at the end of my table tennis playing, I started playing pool, and I was very good at playing pool. I thought I was the best pool player in Denver, but I imagine that was a matter of opinion.

Neal used to come in and watch me play. Finally he approached me and said, “Well, come on and let’s get something to eat,” and I went down and I thought he didn’t have any money, which I found out later was usually the case, and so I bought him something to eat. The man was very, very energetic and very personable and he would—I don’t think intentionally—but he would actually flatter you, your ego, in such a way that he would almost immediately be liked. Like when I bought him the meal, you would think it was the greatest thing that ever happened in the world. Of course, that makes you feel good, and so almost immediately we became friends.

Regardless of what you did or who you were, Neal approached everyone over the years the same way. For example, if you were a young girl and he was interested in you and you were going to college, immediately: why that’s the greatest thing that ever happened. You know, “You really are going to college?” and all that sort of thing. I don’t think it was a put-on. It was a technique, however. But it wasn’t a con. He really respected the individual.

And it would be such little trivial things. If you had a record player at home, well, “Would you take me over to your house to listen to your records? I don’t have a record player. I haven’t had one in years. I know I would just love to hear so-and-so.” And he really would want to hear so-and-so.

But at the same time, the people that he’s talking to, he really puts them on, too. It was just his way of doing things. I think that this was a natural gift, so to speak.

The man was very energetic, he was very handsome—had a strong body, before he dissipated it—and he could go for days without sleeping or resting or anything. And wanted to. And didn’t need drugs or anything to do it. What he wanted to do was just be active and move constantly, and the only time that he lived that I know of, except on rare occasions, was right now.

Tomorrow meant nothing. I mean tomorrow like tomorrow, Wednesday or Thursday, would mean something, but tomorrow like two weeks from now didn’t mean anything to him. He never planned his life in terms of goals, like a five-year goal or something, or even a two-week goal. He might in terms of next Sunday, but never any future dates like most people do. He lived right now, right at the moment. And he hardly ever lived in the past unless he was relating an incident that had happened to him that appl...