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Number
288
August/September 2001
A Life in
Letters:
Ann
Charters on Jack
Kerouac
JACK FOLEY
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
"AIMER, TRAVAILLER ET SOUFFRIR"
("LOVE, WORK AND SUFFER")
---Kerouac Family Motto
Renowned scholar Ann Charters began her
thirty year career as a student, teacher, and
collector of Beat literature when she was still a
graduate student at Columbia University (where both
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg had preceded her as
undergraduates). After completing her doctorate she
worked with Jack Kerouac on a bibliography of his
writings. Then, when Kerouac died in 1969, she
wrote the first Kerouac biography and edited his
Scattered Poems. In 1986, a book of her
photographic portraits called Beats &
Company, with a foreword by John Clellon Holmes
was published. She became the general editor of a
two-volume encyclopedia The Beats: Literary
Bohemians in Postwar America, and edited The
Portable Beat Reader and The Portable Jack
Kerouac Reader.
The following interview concentrates on her
editing of a second volume of Kerouac's
Selected Letters. Jack Foley conducted the
interview on December 14, 1999, for his "Cover to
Cover" show on KPFA radio in Berkeley. The program
was aired, in a slightly edited form, in two
segments, last year. Since then, Ann Charters has
also edited Beat Down To Your Soul: What Was
the Beat Generation?---Poems, Essays, Memoirs,
Notes, Protests, Attacks, and Apologies---from the
Beat Explosion that Rocked the World, published by
Penguin in June, featuring commentaries by the
writers themselves---Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary
Snyder, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Diane di
Prima, and more---with historical asides and
commentary by Henry Miller, William Carlos
Williams, Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom
Wolfe, Grace Paley, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and
others. The new book is meant as a companion volume
to The Portable Beat Reader, and takes
another, more in-depth look at important women Beat
writers, including Joyce Johnson and Hettie
Jones.---Editor
JACK FOLEY: My guest today is Ann
Charters. We're going to be talking about her
Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957--1969,
which has just been published by Viking. It's the
second half of her editing of Jack Kerouac's
letters. The first half, Selected Letters,
1940--1956, was published in 1995, also by
Viking. So we're going to start with 1957, a very
important year for Kerouac, the year On the
Road gets published. Ann Charters wrote the
very first biography of Jack Kerouac, Kerouac: A
Biography, which came out in 1973. And she's
done many other things connected to Kerouac,
including editing Viking's Portable Kerouac
Reader. Ann, welcome to the show. Selected
Letters 1957--1969 is a wonderful book; it
reads like a new Kerouac novel. You say yourself
that you wanted Kerouac to tell his own
story.
ANN CHARTERS: Right. This is an
attempt to select his letters from all that were
available to me and to create, on the page, with my
commentaries to help you get the story straight, a
life in letters, letting Kerouac tell the story in
his own words to a whole cast of characters who are
in his novels but who are also his very close
friends and the people to whom he spoke most openly
and frequently about his aims as a writer.
JF: I want to ask you about
that pivotal year, 1957, but before I do that, I
want to ask you about 1956. What happened to you in
1956 in Berkeley? if that's not too puzzling a
question.
AC: No, it isn't puzzling at all.
I was a student at Berkeley. I was a junior in the
English Department, and I was falling in love with
a married man named Sam Charters [her future
husband. ---Editor]. I was a junior and
nineteen, and my roommate Carolyn told me that I
had to date other guys. She fixed me up with a
blind date from San Francisco. Carolyn was an art
major at Cal, and she knew a lot of people because
she'd grown up in Marin. Through her grapevine or
whatever she plucked out a wonderfully beautiful,
soft-spoken, shy young man who turned out to be
Peter Orlovsky. And when I say "turned out"---it
wasn't until he had walked me down to the cottage
at Milvia from way up in the Berkeley hills where
the Co-op was, too late to get any of the spaghetti
that Allen Ginsberg had cooked for his friends but
just in time to pile into a car [that I learned
about Peter Orlovsky]. This was March, 1956.
Jack Kerouac wasn't there. He was arriving too late
to attend this second reading of "Howl"---second
reading meaning that the gang of poets [Allen
Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Kenneth
Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen] had
performed as the Six Poets at the Six Gallery in
San Francisco the previous October, 1955. And it
had been such a success that Allen decided to do it
again. This time he had completed "Howl." When he
did it in October, it was incomplete. So this was
to be the first public reading of the completed
poem. I didn't know any of this. All I knew was
that this wild, tousled blond who had sort of
dragged me down the dark Berkeley street and into
this crowded car driven of course by Neal
Cassady---I didn't have any idea who he
was---took me to the theater. It was in the lobby
of the theater, while the six poets set the stage
up for the reading before the audience
came---because we were early---that Peter showed me
Robert La Vigne's drawings of him and Allen
Ginsberg, in bed, naked, making love.
[Robert La Vigne writes: "Regarding the Ann
Charters interview. The drawings by me on the wall
of the Berkeley Little Theatre at the First
Complete Reading of Allen Ginsberg's great poem,
"Howl," were not of Allen Ginsberg making love with
Peter Orlovsky, but with another person. Perhaps
Peter was "joshing" Mrs. Charters. I would,
however, much appreciate a correction of the fact
of the drawings' reality; Mrs. Charters is welcome
to relate the facts of her date with Mr. Orlovsky
however she wishes." ---Editor] This was
1956, and as a nineteen year old who had just sort
of begun to experiment with sex and stuff at
Berkeley, I was really appalled. (Laughter)
I recognized the quality of the art, but I realized
that there was no future in Peter Orlovsky as a
second date if he was doing stuff like this with
Allen Ginsberg. It terrified me. What was even more
terrifying was the public nature of it. You
understand it was doubly public. First of all,
these two guys were exhibitionist enough to perform
in front of a person who was drawing them. I could
maybe accept that if all three of them
really were close. But then to show them in public.
It was a degree of exhibitionism that instinctively
I recoiled from.
JF: Perhaps because they were men.
Women in bed together in a painting is not so
strange.
AC: I never had seen that
in 1956 either. It was just a certain public aura
about it. I was having a hard enough time with the
private! Peter was obviously crazy, that's all I
could say. But he was fun, and the poems---when we
sat in the audience and listened to the six
poets---were mind-bogglingly memorable. But being a
junior English major I was full of myself in terms
of my opinions about American poetry. And we were
not invited to take the drive back to the cottage
or do whatever after-reading parties there were.
Peter, I guess, sensing my withdrawal, decided to
walk me home, which was a gentlemanly thing: he
didn't just leave me there. We walked up Dwight
Way, the entire length of it; we didn't even have
money for a bus, or maybe they weren't running so
late. We had about an hour to argue whether
Ginsberg was as good a poet as Walt Whitman.
JF: You took the negative on
that.
AC: Definitely. I knew what I
knew!
JF: What do you think now?
AC: I think he was certainly, if
not 'as good as', in a sense the equal of in his
importance in our culture. And of course he is
certainly in the tradition of Whitman, which is
also very, very important.
JF: That's something that shows up
over and over again in the Kerouac letters. Kerouac
has to be the best. He has to be the one
who's the best poet around. Otherwise he's
nothing.
There is this whole sense of, on the one
hand, being high---and he wants ecstasy all the
time, he wants to be high all the time---but if
you're high, that also means you have to come down
from it, which means low. There's this
manic-depressive spin that's throughout and which
manifests in a literary career way as "I'm the
greatest, I'm the best."
AC: That's very true; you're
reading it, I think, very accurately. If anyone has
doubts about this, this is one reason why I took on
the job of doing a life in letters using Kerouac's
own words. There have been so many biographies,
including mine (which was numero uno in
1973). I think one of them is a substantial and
good job, and that's Gerald Nicosia's Memory
Babe. He did unearth things about Kerouac,
factual material, doing his interviews and doing
his homework, so that my book was, I thought, in
comparison, woefully inadequate. And so what was I
going to do about this? Was I going to rewrite mine
so I could incorporate the new information? Or was
I going to "make it new" in a more creative way?
That's why I took on the editing, because I saw
with the letters that it could be a way of giving a
biography through my selection, which
emphasizes Jack's life as a writer. To me, of all
the possible interpretations of his importance,
that's the central one. If I were to write a
biography---and I will not rewrite my first
biography---well, I've done that with this
two-volume set. I was told to make it one volume
when I took on the job. When I realized that I
could make it a life in letters, I also realized
that it would take two volumes to do justice to the
material. So they reluctantly said go ahead.
JF: You say in the introduction that
there will be other books of letters, that you
don't regard this as a definitive book.
AC: Of course not. There will be
one out in April or May this coming spring. Joyce
Johnson has prepared a book, similar to the format
of this selected letters, of her correspondence
with Jack Kerouac. They were together about
eighteen months, a very important time for Jack,
when On the Road was published. Of course
she's written a major memoir called Minor
Characters. And she has, I'm sure, many new
insights to add to the work of Jack Kerouac. I look
forward to that book in the spring of 2000. Viking
will publish that. The other book of letters that
Viking is interested in is the Cassady letters. I'm
not sure how much Kerouac will be in there. Joyce's
is the complete correspondence back and forth,
which is wonderful. With Cassady I'm not sure
whether it will be primarily Cassady's letters to
Kerouac. Carolyn Cassady will edit those, and she
will have the assistance of an editor in England.
That's the second one that we can look forward
to.
JF: Viking of course published On
the Road. What was the attitude of the Viking
editors at that time to Kerouac?
AC: Well, this was the major
disappointment of Kerouac's life, his relationship
with mainstream publishing. Unlike Ginsberg, he did
not want to be published by City Lights, by small
presses. He was, as you say, a major
manic-depressive, and in his mania he wanted to
have a reputation on Madison Avenue. That was
success in the only terms he recognized, frankly.
In a sense he had middle-class ambitions, which is
interesting. He really wanted to be famous in a
very big way. It had to be that way.
JF: Particularly because he starts out
as working class rather than middle class, which is
why you would have the ambitions. Almost everybody,
Ginsberg and the others, has this middle-class aura
to them, whereas Kerouac is working class, and so
is Corso. That's one of the things that connects
them.
AC: Yes. It meant that to have his
books reviewed in the New York Times, to
have everybody in his family know that he's a
writer---which is what happens if you get Madison
Avenue publishers---was a central aim. In fact, one
of the things that I think is so fascinating is his
lack of perception of what is going on. When, for
example, he writes Allen Ginsberg shortly after
Gilbert Millstein's remarkable New York Times
review of On the Road---on September 5,
1957---pushed that book onto the best-seller
list---he writes to Allen Ginsberg describing the
first three weeks after the publication of On
the Road, the madness, and he ends by talking
about the publication of Howl, which at the
time was at the center of an obscenity trial here
in San Francisco. That was in October, 1957. But
Jack's words to Allen at the end of this letter
show that he doesn't think that Ferlinghetti's
publishing company is worth beans. You gotta get a
New York publisher.
JF: Actually, City Lights wasn't worth
beans until after it published Howl, at
which point it became extremely famous and very
successful.
AC: This is a letter that Jack
wrote Allen Ginsberg, who was living in Paris
during the Howl trial. Ginsberg had left the
country with Peter Orlovsky. On October 1, 1957,
Jack writes about the success of On the
Road,
---Unbelievable number of events almost
impossible to remember, including earlier big
Viking Press hotel room with thousands of screaming
interviewers and Road roll original 100 miles ms.
rolled out on carpet, bottles of Old Granddad, big
articles in Sat. Review, in World Telly,
everyfuckingwhere, everybody mad, Brooklyn College
wanted me to lecture to eager students and big geek
questions to answer…Of course I was on
television big Interview bit, John Wingate show,
mad night, I answered angelic to evil
questions….
Kerouac is one of the first American writers to
be taken up by the mass media, and it was a curse,
an unmitigated curse. What he actually did in front
of two million viewers on The John Wingate Show was
this. In this early interview John Wingate asks
what the Beat Generation writers want and what
Kerouac was supposedly doing in On the Road.
Jack answers, "I was waiting for God to show his
face." That's his answering "angelic to evil
questions"!
JF: He got some letters from nuns
because of that!
AC: Yes, he did!
I had nervous breakdowns, 2, now I got piles and
I lay up and read [Dostoevsky's] The
Idiot and rest mind…I had final evil flips
of evil spirits and most insane dreams of all time
where I end up in leading big parades of screaming
laughing children (wearing my white headband) down
Victory Street Lowell and finally into
Asia…(parade is intended to cover me up from
cops, when they look kids surround me hide me
singing, finally cops join parade happy and it ends
big blur of robes in Asia)…I been preaching
Peterism, on TV too, about love, preaching Nealism,
everything, I have just made big final preachment
in American that wd. flip you if you knew
details…big roaring parties finally where I
see old enemies in a blur, shouting round
me---(Bill Fox, etc.)…news that Norman Mailer
pleased with me,…
Norman Mailer of course had done The Naked
and the Dead which put him really up at the
top, and this is the competition as far as Kerouac
is concerned.
JF: Yes, James Jones too.
AC:
…telegram from Nelson Algren [The
Man with the Golden Arm, the World War II novel
about a morphine addict] praising me, etc. etc.
in short we dont need press agents any more (I told
Sterling [Sterling Lord, Kerouac's agent]
to leave minor details of our poetry &
Burroughs to us, he is busy with contracts and $$$
and bewildered by yr. innocent demands, you being
poet do not realize the madness of NY)
Of course Allen knew much better than Jack "the
madness of New York." He's coming back in a year to
write Kaddish. "The madness of New York" is
going to enter that poem.
---You will when you get back---NOW LISTEN
VIKING WANTS TO PUBLISH HOWL AND YOUR OTHERS AND
ALSO GROVE. THEY RACING TO REACH YOU FIRST. TAKE
YOUR CHOICE. I THINK HOWL NEEDS DISTRIBUTION. IT
HAS NOT EVEN BEGUN TO BE READ.
So here's Jack trying to get Allen to move to a
Madison Avenue publisher, and it's not really quite
fair to Ferlinghetti, who has put his neck out,
with the American Civil Liberties Union behind him,
trying to defend Howl from the charge of
obscenity---and from the attempt to put
Ferlinghetti out of business in the process. I
think this is a wonderful instance of Kerouac
showing where his mind is, and it's definitely
mainstream.
JF: That's true, but he's not
completely wrong at this point about it, and that's
interesting too. City Lights becomes important
later, and later Kerouac does give manuscripts to
City Lights.
AC: He gives them Book of Dreams, which
he's just quoted from for Allen. [The
unabridged Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac
has just been published for the first time, as he
intended it, by City Lights Books. Excerpts from
Kerouac's "private dream diary" were published by
City Lights in 1961.---Editor]
JF: And a lot of his poetry, which
Ferlinghetti doesn't care for very much.
AC: Not a bit. But Ferlinghetti is
loyal to him, and as a friend he helps Kerouac out
of a jam when he invites him to get away from the
publicity that surrounds the film, The
Subterraneans, a few years later, in 1960.
JF: Come visit me in
California!
AC: Come visit me in California,
which was an experience resulting of course in the
novel Big Sur, that alcoholic breakdown on
the Pacific coast at Ferlinghetti's cabin.
JF: Ironically enough, one of the
words that haunts this collection---I think it
shows up more than any other word---is the word
"hut." Kerouac keeps talking about wanting to go to
a hut. "Shack" occasionally replaces it, but
mostly the word is "hut." Why don't you read the
letter Ferlinghetti wrote defending
Kerouac---specifically defending Big
Sur.
AC: Yes. I read this aloud at City
Lights last week in a wonderful program celebrating
the publication of the Viking Selected
Letters. Ferlinghetti was there. I found
the manuscript of this letter; it was never
published. This was Ferlinghetti's defense of
Kerouac, a letter to TIME magazine written
after the publication of Big Sur in 1962 and
also after the ragged, wrenching, bad review
of the novel by the TIME magazine book
critic. Before I read you Ferlinghetti's defense, I
can give you a little sense of what was happening
to Kerouac when he was being savaged by reviewers
by telling you what TIME magazine said about
Big Sur on September 14, 1962. This is among
many bad reviews of that novel, and I think it's
one of the best novels Kerouac ever wrote.
JF: It's the last great novel.
AC: Exactly. Here's what
TIME said:
What can a beat do when he is too old to go on
the road? He can go on the sauce…In the end he
settles for a howling emotional crisis---which on a
grown-up would look very much like the Dts.
A child's first touch of cold mortality---even
when it occurs in a man of 41---may seem
ridiculous, and is certainly pathetic. In Kerouac's
case, though, there may be compensations. Think of
the books, man, a whole new series: The Dharma
Bums Grow Up, The Dharma Bums on Wall
Street. Who knows, maybe even The Dharma
Bums in the White House?
That ridicule was a real stinger.
JF: I'm old enough to have heard a lot
of that myself. One heard it all the time; one saw
it on TV.
AC: It also sunk the books. They
never sold back enough copies so that Kerouac could
receive royalties. His books were remaindered,
including Big Sur, which was one of the ways
I got to afford to buy them, on the remainder
tables, when I started collecting Kerouac in the
mid-sixties.
JF: They were cheap!
AC: But for him it was a
devastating career, because he never had enough
money to pay taxes and to buy the houses that he
kept buying. If these reviews had been kinder, as
the one in the New York Times had been for
On the Road, his career would have been very
different.
JF: Had he not had that New York
Times review his career would have been very
different! On the Road would have probably
sunk too because, by and large, it didn't get very
well reviewed either, except for that enormously
influential Gilbert Millstein review.
AC: Which was the only one Gilbert
Millstein ever wrote, apparently. The regular
editor came back from his vacation and said, "Never
again! This upstart has really gone beyond himself
here!" But the Village Voice liked it. It
said that the novel On the Road was "a
rallying point for the rebellion of our time." Even
then, in 1957. People on his side were around, but
they were not in the majority. So here's what
Ferlinghetti did. He sat down at his typewriter,
and he wrote a letter to TIME, which, thank
goodness, he kept a carbon copy of. TIME
probably crumpled the letter up and threw it away.
They never published it. Ferlinghetti's incredible
archives at the Bancroft Library at UC
Berkeley---City Lights' archive---included this
letter, and it was catalogued, so I was able to
obtain it and copy it. Ferlinghetti very kindly
gave me the permission to include it amongst the
few letters to Kerouac or about Kerouac that I
included as the other side of the story to Jack's
letters. Here it is:
TO TIME MAGAZINE FROM
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI:
September 15, 1962
City Lights
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco 11, Calif.
Dear TIME,
Your snide, sneering, condescending,
semi-literate, semi-dishonest, spiteful attack on
Jack Kerouac and his latest book, BIG SUR, is
disgusting. The fact that you've concentrated on
Kerouac himself more than on his book makes your
review particularly despicable. Since TIME is the
Protestant bible to millions of Americans who
receive your so-called literary criticism as from a
godhead, don't you think you should at least try to
consider authors as human beings rather than as
fodder for your advertising men and copy writers?
(I believe the Kerouac review was written by your
advertising copy writers who got off at an
editorial floor one foggy morning by mistake, or
perhaps, by design, knowing that no one would be
able to tell them from editors anyway.) Typical of
the distortions and untruths in the article is the
statement that Kerouac is "an adoring pantheist"
and that at 41 he has just discovered Death. It
happens Kerouac is a Catholic, and Death has been
an insistent presence in all his books, from the
earliest ones such as DOCTOR SAX onward. Your
cruel, oh-so-clever annihilation of him only brings
Death that much closer to him, and to us, and to
America.
Perhaps this is just what you had in mind. For
you are all great experts in the killing of the
spirit, and here you have killed another great one.
Cart the carcass off gleefully to your slick
cemetery and pour yourself another dry martini. On
the rocks. And ask for a raise. You're a clever
fellow.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
JF: Yeah, "on the rocks," not "on the
road." (Quoting Byron's "John Keats" and
Shelley's "Adonais," both of which deal with bad
reviews of Keats's work:) "Who killed John
Keats? 'I,' says the Quarterly." "I weep for
Adonais---he is dead." It's very much in that
tradition.
AC: Exactly.
JF: Kerouac had actually written a
dozen novels between 1951 and 1957, and he was
having trouble with all the stuff that was coming
at him. He expected, as one does with a book, to
change the world, and of course the world doesn't
change at all. Not only that: the world was
hostile.
AC: And because his books were
autobiographical, the reviewers all attacked him
personally, as Ferlinghetti noted. It was very
difficult not to.
JF: This is in May, 1961, and he's
writing to John Montgomery:
In fact I think I've forgotten how to write by
now. 4 years without a book, a million visitors.
Only the good ones came once a year, I F, Ferling,
Phil etc. Allen etc. The fuckin strangers came
every week till familiarity bred contempt. I guess
that's what they came to my door for, to contemn. I
spent 4 years bitterly defending myself. Till I
lost my original gladness, like the silly gladness
of that day in Corte Madera with you.
But now I intend to get back on the ball.
He's always intending "to get back on the
ball"!
AC: And he never stops writing. He
never stops. Despite being in failing health most
of the last few years of his life. Sometimes he
gets the joy back writing letters. This is one of
the things---a very small thing, we're talking
about a grain of sand in a desert here---that
success does for him. When he does write a few of
the fans and tells them what he was trying to
do---and some of those fans, like John Montgomery,
are also friends. Once [May 9, 1961] he
wrote a letter to a fan named Carol Brown. She was
a theology student. If Jack hadn't been famous he
never would have had to describe what he had been
doing in On the Road. I'm not saying that
this made up for the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune---which was, sadly enough, his
tragic fate---but there are things in the
letters, as in the letter to Carol Brown: he might
have had most of the people taking his energies in
bad ways, but he does give something to us through
his commentaries in a few letters to his fans.
JF: One of the problems with Kerouac
was that the middlebrow critics and editors he was
dealing with---Malcolm Cowley and others---were by
and large not familiar with his sources. They knew
who James Joyce was, but it's doubtful that they
had read Finnegans Wake, which was one of
the books Kerouac was coming from. They didn't know
Céline necessarily. There were a lot of
people Kerouac was coming from---and he expected to
be judged by their accomplishments---but that was
not the way he was judged.
AC: There was also a generational
thing. Cowley had really been open to the stylistic
experiments of William Faulkner, for example.
JF: He wrote a book, Exiles'
Return, about the Lost Generation.
AC: Right. He was part of
that generation. And here we have an older editor
who is sympathetic to young people. Cowley's also
going to become Kesey's editor, and there are
interesting things Kerouac writes about Kesey's
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in these
letters. Malcolm Cowley was positive about On
the Road. He would have been the right
editor for Kerouac if he could have opened himself
up to noncommercial writing. He remained "an editor
for Viking Press." And when Kerouac lays all these
unpublished manuscripts on him after Cowley has
accepted On the Road, and Kerouac has been
so drunk and disorderly and difficult in their
personal meetings, Cowley does an unforgivably bad
thing to Kerouac: he doesn't allow him to see the
edited manuscript of On the Road. After
signing contracts they go directly from
that, several months later, into the final book!
And Jack is so much in awe of Malcolm Cowley that
he doesn't really protest. Today, someone would
say, How could you do this! You never showed me
galleys? You never showed me corrected manuscript?
Jack was just sent a carton of the finished
book. There was nothing there that showed that
Cowley had any sense of respect for Jack as a
writer. And when Jack tries to explain himself,
defend himself, in graciously accepting the carton
of books and then going on to say, I'm trying to
do something different, will you please listen to
me? Cowley writes him back a reprimanding
letter, as if Kerouac's in high school or something
and a wannabe writer.
JF: It's also true, as people
sometimes don't know, that On the Road is
not quite spontaneous prose. He hasn't discovered
it quite yet; he's not doing that. He rewrites
On the Road as the experimental Visions
of Cody, which is his favorite novel for a long
time.
AC: And it doesn't get published.
It gets published in excerpts by New Directions,
who you'd expect to take it, but [it] never
went any further [than] his contract with
them.
JF: Or Grove Press. They didn't
either.
AC: Grove was a little
problematical too, with Donald Allen's editing of
The Subterraneans.
JF: Ann, I want to begin with two
quotations from Jack Kerouac. He writes to Gary
Snyder on June 24, 1957, "I mean why on
earth…aren't people CONTINUALLY DRUNK?…I
want ecstasy of the mind all the time." He sounds
like Baudelaire: "Il faut être
ivre…De vin, de poésie ou de vertu,
à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous." ("You
have to be drunk, with wine, poetry or virtue,
whichever you wish. But get
drunk."---"Enivrez-vous"). On April 24,
1964, on the other hand, Kerouac writes to Stella
Sampas, "I am sick of life and that's why I
drink."
What he understands to be the joyousness of
drinking---drinking and poetry are the same
thing---shifts and becomes quite a different thing.
In the middle of all this, late in Kerouac's life,
Ann Charters suddenly shows up to do a
bibliography. Ann, tell us about this. Your
favorite letter is---?
AC: Well, in the hundreds of
letters that I selected for the two volumes, I made
my selection primarily on the basis of letters that
would emphasize Kerouac's development as a writer.
Volume one was what you might call an 'upbeat' book
and then, volume two---
JF: Not so upbeat!
AC: No, It's a downbeat book! He
writes a dozen books in the years of discovering
spontaneous prose, 1951--1956, which is volume one.
And then volume two starts with the acceptance of
On the Road by Viking Press. Kerouac signed
the contract on January 11, 1957. Finally he's
getting his work published, not only "published in
heaven," as Ginsberg writes in the dedication to
Howl.
JF: Dana Gioia remarked about
publishing, "You think you're in the City of God,
but you're not even in the City of Man: you're on
the Planet of the Apes!"
AC: (Laughter) Kerouac discovered
that, much to his despair, with Malcolm Cowley, who
was the most prestigious editor of his
time---having done, for example, an exemplary
Portable William Faulkner that helped to
rescue Faulkner's reputation. Cowley seemed to
understand experimental writing. He'd been in Paris
with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.
But he had a complete blank when it came to what
Kerouac was trying to do. So, although he accepted
On the Road, he turned down every other
manuscript that Kerouac showed him of the dozen
that he'd written, including Doctor Sax.
JF: Some of his most famous
books.
AC: Right, basically. Cowley
wanted Jack to write a new book for Viking after
On the Road made the bestseller list. That was
when Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums, which
was the second and last book Kerouac did for Viking
because they didn't want him after that. Jack was
absolutely inundated with bad reviews as his books
were taken up by different publishers. Grove, with
Donald Allen, started to publish his experimental
work. They came out with The Subterraneans
in 1958. But apparently either Don Allen couldn't
persuade Barney Rosset, who owned Grove Press, that
Jack's work as an experimental writer was
commercially viable---Grove was a new press---or
perhaps, as Kerouac suggests sometimes, Donald
Allen himself didn't scruple to rewrite things to
make them more conventional. I don't know.
[In a letter dated March 4, 1957 Kerouac
complains about the "horrible castration job (of
The Subterraneans) by Don Allen (who
undoubtedly was ordered by Rosset)": "Since all of
this is executed in one spontaneous word-flow every
bit of it belongs to every bit of it, and if it is
drastically fucked-with as Don Allen did it loses
its swing---and worse than that it becomes
unutterably more wordy as though there were too
many words after half of them were taken out---He
has broken down the organic strength of the
manuscript and it is no longer THE
SUBTERRANEANS by Jack K, but some feeble
something by Don Allen---He apparently thinks that
I dont know what I'm doing, like a critic who
doesn't believe that writers know how to write,
only critics know---My whole believing heart is
involved here---I can see it clearly, there will be
no American Literary Renaissance unless the
sanctity of personal speech is honored, that
indefinable personal quavering sound of each and
every writer." ---JF]
JF: Grove Press was a new press which
was discovering the San Francisco writers as a main
source of interest and making money. The famous
"San Francisco Scene" issue of Grove Press's
Evergreen Review---edited by Barney Rosset
and Donald Allen---came out in 1957.
AC: But then they broadened out
and did things with D.H. Lawrence and others. They
did Naked Lunch. They were really fighting
the good fight against obscenity laws in
literature.
JF: No question. They brought out some
of the Olympia Press titles as well.
AC: So they were wide-reaching,
but they also had little tolerance for Kerouac. In
fact, one of the letters I found so distressing was
one in which Don Allen had almost persuaded Barney
Rosset to take Desolation Angels. Then, in
1958, Neal Cassady got busted. And when they
realized that Neal Cassady was a character in
Desolation Angels, they backed out of buying
that book. It was published much later, in 1965, by
Coward-McCann. Grove was afraid of the fact that
Kerouac wrote true-story novels. They weren't
willing to risk libel.
JF: There was a flip side to that for
Cassady himself---a sense that he was set up to be
busted because the cops knew who he was from On
the Road.
AC: That could very well have
been, sadly enough.
JF: We forget that this was happening
at a time when marijuana was really really
illegal.
AC: And it didn't have the
wide-spread distribution that it has now, so it was
relatively easy to target somebody, to finger
somebody who was a user.
JF: Especially if he'd been written
about as a user in an extremely popular
novel.
AC: Exactly. At any rate, Jack
kept writing, and this is one of the things which I
was so respectful of. I decided to compile a
bibliography of Kerouac's works in 1966, after I
had finished my Ph.D. at Columbia, with a major
interest in and dissertation on the
nineteenth-century American writers in the
Berkshires. But I had become a collector of Jack
Kerouac and a fan of Jack Kerouac as early as 1958
after I read The Dharma Bums. He had, from
my way of thinking, described my life in
Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1955 and 56---life
in the cottages, the poetry. That was my time, so I
figured he was absolutely on my wave length or I
was on his.
JF: It's interesting because you were
told by William York Tyndall---an authority figure
at Columbia (not such a great authority
figure, he wrote a bad book on Yeats)---that
Kerouac's book was no good. Tyndall was like
Malcolm Cowley. Here were you, a young person
saying, "Wait a minute, this book speaks directly
to my experience"---and that's exactly the
effect both On the Road and The Dharma
Bums had on generations of young people. And
continue to have.
AC: This is what made me a Kerouac
collector. Sam and I were very busily engaging
ourselves in discovering what Allen Ginsberg was to
call "secret heroes." [ "N(eal) C(assady),
secret hero of these
poems"---"Howl."] These were
primarily in music, in the blues and in jazz, and
for me it was in black theater as well. By 1966 I
had written a book on the great African-American
comedian, Bert Williams. These were people whom we
felt had been treated badly by American society,
who were geniuses and who were part of our culture,
but not part of the mainstream. Kerouac was another
one.
JF: Kerouac's word, in addition to
Beat, was "furtive." The generation was "furtive."
"Subterranean" of course means "underground." Not
quite declaring itself. Secret.
AC: What I put into this book of
selected letters, which goes to Kerouac's death in
1969, was one of the letters he wrote to me after I
had written to his mother asking
her---saying that I had heard that she had a
very good collection of Jack Kerouac books and that
they lived in the same house. Of course I
knew that they did. It was a sort of
dishonest thing to do. I knew she probably wouldn't
answer me, but I had been told that he was a drunk
and a recluse and that he might not be cooperative.
So I thought if I could get his mother to
say, "Jackie, there's a good reason to see this
woman because she's going to help organize your
reputation or whatever"---Anyway, Jack Kerouac
replied. I was just flabbergasted. And this letter
that I put into the book, August 5, 1966,
absolutely changed my life. And so I'll read it.
First of all, I introduce it with a commentary in
order to tell you about the historical context of
the letters. He's writing so many different people,
and his voice changes depending on the person he's
writing to. I found that, without commentaries, it
was often hard to follow what he's saying. It's not
just Jack writing to Allen over and over again.
JF: The commentaries are fascinating.
They bring you through the book in a very
interesting way.
AC: I spent nine years on the
project. Largely, it was writing the commentaries.
I transcribed all the letters myself, and they were
checked for accuracy of transcription, but it was
putting it together as a life in letters that I was
trying to do, with the commentaries giving you the
context of the letters, historical and
biographical. So here's what I say:
Early in August 1966, one of the first uses Jack
made of a new Royal standard typewriter was to
reply to a letter that I had sent to Gabrielle
Kerouac [his mother], in care of the
Sterling Lord Agency, asking her to help me compile
a bibliography of the works of Jack Kerouac, which
I was preparing for the Phoenix Bookshop's series
of contemporary authors' bibliographies. [The
idea was really Robert Wilson's, who owned the
Phoenix.] I had been told by Robert A. Wilson,
owner of the bookshop in Greenwich Village, that
visitors to the Kerouac home had stolen most of
Jack's copies of his own books, so that he had
entrusted his library to his mother for
safekeeping. On August 5, 1966, Jack wrote me that
he was willing to cooperate with my project and
invited me to his home in Hyannis. We agreed that I
would visit him on August 16--17, 1966, and in a
second letter he sent me directions to his
brown-shingled Cape Cod house [on Bristol
Avenue], located close to the Joseph Kennedy
Memorial Skating Rink. He added, "This will be
fascinating: I myself am beginning to need a
bibliography. And I look forward to meeting a
scholar and a gentlewoman." As an afterthought, he
penciled a postscript to this second letter: "Throw
these instructions away, rather, that is, bring 'em
with you---'Beatniks' look like Spooks in my
mother's poor door at midnight---You
understand."
This is the letter he wrote me. He was really
trying to be "incognito," as he would say, because
the fans had really disturbed him.
Aug. 5, 1966
Box 809
Hyannis, Mass.
Dear Doctor Charters:
I had probably signed my letter "Doctor Ann
Charters" because I was a Ph.D. all of eight months
at that time.
I'm willing to go through my collection of
editions at my home providing only you don't give
my home address to anyone or any groups. I'm trying
to work in the privacy of my own thoughts and
domicile.
Also, I think my complete bibliography would
come to a hundred pages or so. I think I have here,
in my study, something like 99.5% information for
the entire bibliography: I think the rest I can
direct you to. I've kept the neatest records you
ever saw.
That was a wonderful thing, because it
turned out that he did keep the neatest
records. Jack took writing as his mission on earth;
that's what he did. And if he had a day when the
juices weren't flowing---and I mean that quite
literally!---he would spend the time in his study
organizing contracts or filing letters of his
friends together in chronological order or taking
his periodical publications and lining them up on
the shelf.
So, if that's not too long, and you keep my
address a secret, write and tell me the date you
want to come: I'm sure we can get the whole thing
done in one afternoon.
Actually, since I started talking to him about
how he had written the books, there had been
published a William Carlos Williams bibliography.
The woman who had done it had asked Dr. Williams
about his books, and I loved that, so I thought why
not do that with Kerouac too.
I'll just pull everything out one by one, hand
them to you at the desk, return the things back
where they were (innumerable poetry pamphlets,
broadsides, sheets from magazine publications,
etc.) (and also all the 16 foreign translations of
novels are either here or recorded in my pile of
contracts and in foreign publishers'
announcements)---Anyway, to make a long story
short, write, give date, and I'll immediately send
you my Hyannis street address and wait for you.
I'm going to Italy (invite of Mondadori
publishers) on Sept. 26, so come long before then,
please. So come on down.
Sincerely,
Jack Kerouac
It was this last phrase, "So come on down"---he
wanted me to come. It wasn't like "I'm too
busy to see anyone right now, go away, little
woman." He was absolutely inviting me, and he was
extremely helpful. I mean I really did get,
if not 99.5 percent from him, about 97 percent from
him. I had to do some spade work, too.
JF: It's interesting because James
Joyce also felt that if he was going to last as a
writer, the only way that he could do that would be
to make his book obscure enough so that he would
give employment to generations of
academics.
AC: He was right!
JF: He did this quite deliberately.
Joyce's letters were out by that point. And
Kerouac, who read Joyce, understood that. It wasn't
a question of being a best-selling author; he
wanted to be that too. But the way to last would be
to interest academics. I think you were receiving
some of his feeling about that.
AC: I was getting that. And he had
helped two people who had written him. There are
letters to these people in volume two. These were
Master's candidates, a man and a woman. The woman
was concerned with his Lowell background. She was
from a small college in Massachusetts, as I recall,
and she wanted to know about his French-Canadian
family and friends and how he grew up in Lowell,
who his teachers had been at the elementary school
and how they were portrayed in his books. That was
a wonderful project. And the other one was a man
who was getting a degree, a Master's, and I think
he was more concerned about On the Road.
JF: Kerouac is furious when Gary
Snyder gives him a paper that a young woman who's
been studying with Snyder writes about him. He's
absolutely livid about this one. The paper is
Freudian, and Kerouac doesn't want to hear any of
that stuff.
AC: No, he doesn't.
JF: He doesn't want to hear about his
mother!
AC: No, he doesn't want to hear
about his mother. Also, there was something strange
going on with that letter. I don't quite understand
it. We'd have to ask Snyder about that one. The
relationship [with Snyder] was just about
over at that point. I included letters, as I did
Ferlinghetti's letter or Carolyn Cassady's letter
late in Jack's life, to show that many of his
friends stayed loyal and tried to comfort him,
because he was really fading fast. I wanted to show
what the people he had written about in his novels
felt about that, so I included Gary Snyder's
first letter of thanks to Jack. Later on,
though, because of thinking about it or because of
Jack's take on Buddhism---which I think was
annoying to Snyder---Snyder wrote a very angry
letter.
JF: Snyder asks him, "Do you think you
understand Buddhism?"
AC: I quote passages from that in
the headnote, in the commentaries that I put in the
book, but I didn't want to put in two letters, and
I wanted, again, to put a positive spin on things.
Most of the time the people Kerouac described
liked what he was doing. Even today Snyder
doesn't disavow his portrayal in The Dharma
Bums. He just says it's fiction, that's
all.
JF: Rather than religion. Kerouac
understood it to be religion rather than fiction.
You point out Kerouac's own uneasiness that the
portrait of Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums
wouldn't please Snyder. He was not certain that
Snyder was going to be happy about it.
AC: Think about it. If you had a
very talented friend who stayed at your home or had
some times with you, and then you found that you
were being taken as the center of his novel, and he
remembers things his own way, not always the way
you remember them. Suddenly your most private
life---I'm not saying that there's anything you
have to hide---but your most intimate family life
is being portrayed for literally millions of
strangers without your consent.
JF: Snyder didn't see the novel
beforehand. Nor did Cassady.
AC: No! Because his publishers
insist, Kerouac sends libel releases to the people
he takes into his books, and most of them accept
this. In fact, when he goes to Alene Lee---who is
the woman he portrays as having an affair with him
in The Subterraneans---for whatever reason,
she signs this release, so he's permitted to go
ahead and publish the book. But she is so angry
when she reads his book that she refuses to speak
to him. One of the things she's angry about is that
he takes some writing she's done about her own life
and puts it into his book without making it clear
that she actually wrote this section---the
section in which she's describing what she calls
her "flips." This is really a very dangerous thing
to do.
JF: He says "Full Confession," and he
cites Thomas Wolfe. But Thomas Wolfe didn't write
about writers or use their letters to him. Wolfe
got into a lot of trouble by writing about people
he'd grown up with in a small town in the South,
but he did not use writers as his subject. In fact,
one of Kerouac's problems at the end of his life is
he's trying to figure out what he can write about
since he doesn't have a life anymore.
AC: Exactly. And he begins a
different experiment, which is Pic, a novel
published posthumously which is not an
autobiographical novel. He's trying to break into
something that enables him to have some room
because there isn't any adventure for him. When he
writes Satori in Paris he writes that as
honestly as he's ever written anything. And it's
quite clear that he's incapable of adventure in
that. When I went to see him in 1966, Satori in
Paris had just been brought out in installments
in Grove Press's magazine, Evergreen Review.
I had read it before I saw Kerouac. I collected the
issues and put them in folders in my study. (The
magazines are now at the Byrd collection in the New
York Public Library, which bought my archives. The
library wanted a complete Beat scholar, and so we
arranged for them to buy everything.) But the point
is that when I saw Jack, I was shocked by the way
he looked. I didn't really read carefully to
understand that in the muscular rush and joy of his
prose in Satori in Paris he's really
describing a man who's over the hill. And when I
went back to New York after having spent the two
days in Hyannis, the first place I went was Allen
Ginsberg's. He lived up the street in the East
Village. I said, "Allen, a terrible thing has
happened. I had a marvelous time with Jack; he was
so helpful; he answered all my questions; he showed
me everything. But he's a wreck. He's an alcoholic.
I was so surprised to see this." And Allen said,
"Then you didn't read his work very well!"
JF: Kerouac himself says in one of the
letters, "Got from a healthy tanned and 20 pound
lighter handsome jack to a big glooby blob of sad
blufush---In no time."
AC: (Laughing) That happened,
yes!
JF: You saw him in 1956, ten years
earlier, didn't you? So here you see him ten years
later. Quite a different man! What happened in your
relationship with him? You had a very good time in
the sense that you were able to get a lot of
information; he was very helpful, etc. But at the
same time there were problems about this
visit.
AC: Actually, I thought I
had seen him in the audience in 1956. That was my
poor memory. He was not present at the second
reading of "Howl." He was still "on the road,"
traveling up to Berkeley. But the image I had of
him was of the photo on The Dharma Bums and
from all the books---his picture is so
extraordinarily sexy.
JF: In fact, when you take a picture
of him, he doesn't like that picture.
AC: This is part of how I realized
that he doesn't tell the truth. When he describes
the circumstances, complaining about my pictures,
in a letter to Andreas Brown---he doesn't want
anything to do with me after I show him my
picture---he says I snapped them without his
permission and I was rummaging around in his desk.
Well, I was only allowed to take twelve pictures. I
had a tape recorder, but he wouldn't allow me to
use it. Suddenly, at the end of our second
day, in the late afternoon, he's sitting at the
window, drinking. He sort of, like, mellowed out,
and I said, "Jack, could I take a picture?" I had
my Rolloflex, twelve shots, and I had loaded it
with tri-x film. And he said, "Sure, take my
picture." So I took about eight photos, snaps of
him at the window, late afternoon. He tells Andreas
Brown that he'd just woken up in the late morning.
I got there at noon. He would then have been
in the doorframe, with the hall behind him. But no,
he's sitting down; he's posing for me. And then he
tells me, "Well, that's enough," and his mother was
in the hall, and I say, "Why don't we take a
picture of you with your mom, then?"
JF: A haunting photograph!
AC: Thank you, it's the best
picture I ever took. So he consents, goes and poses
himself, kneeling beside her armchair in the living
room. She sat herself, and a cat jumps into her
lap. She's still in her apron; she's not trying to
primp. And it's a magic moment, 'cause I don't have
much time. He's going to change his mind; he's a
very volatile guy! But I would never snap a picture
without anyone's consent cause you never get a good
picture---or I never have anyway. It's with
available light in the darkness of his home. But he
tells people a lie about something that I
knew had happened differently. And I have a
proofsheet of photographs that show that I remember
it correctly. So how correctly is he remembering in
his "true story novels"?
JF: "Memory Babe"!---as he was called
as a child. What is "Memory Babe" doing
here?
AC: He's filtering it through his
emotional consciousness.
JF: Of course this was also true of
Faulkner, who also had a drinking problem and an
intense imagination.
AC: What I couldn't understand,
though, was, later, when Selected Letters
1957--1969 came out about a month ago, there
was a review in the Boston Globe. The
reviewer had done his homework. He was a very
careful and intelligent reviewer. He had read every
word of the book. But he ended the review saying
that I had described Kerouac's anti-Semitism---and
indeed, he was a virulent anti-Semite; he thought
there was a Jewish conspiracy of writers like
Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer. That was so
absolutely paranoid!
JF: That's true, and, when you know
that, you see him writing a letter to Allen
Ginsberg in which he's carefully using
Yiddishisms---Kerouac's trying to sound Jewish!
Because it's Ginsberg reading it.
AC: Because it's Ginsberg reading
it. He changes his voice with everyone.
JF: On the other hand, the writers who
were successful---
AC: …were many of them
Jewish! Like Saul Bellow, who is a novelist too and
wins a Nobel Prize.
JF: Philip Roth. And of course the
Partisan Review crowd hated
Kerouac.
AC: Yeah, yeah. This is on his
mind. These are the competition. But the other
thing that the reviewer in Boston couldn't
understand was that, not only was he an
anti-Semite, he also was hitting on me. I'm a
married woman; I'm twenty-nine years old; I've been
married to Sam at this point for seven years; we've
been together ten years, and I love him very much.
We're thinking of having a family soon. And when
Kerouac turned out to be physically so wasted,
there was no sexual attraction between us---not
even an instinctive animal thing, nothing. But he
kept propositioning me. Why don't I fuck him, why
don't I fuck him. He asked me endlessly to go to
bed with him, 'cause we're working in his bedroom,
his study. Meanwhile his mother is right outside in
the kitchen in a little Cape Cod house making
sandwiches and bringing trays of food in to me,
which is wonderfully hospitable. But, even if I'd
wanted to, why would I do that? Anyway, the point
is that the reviewer didn't know why I came back
the second day. (It took two days to work with
Kerouac to compile the bibliography.) It made me so
confused! I came back the second day to finish
the job. I was not a housewife with a Ph.D. I
was really a committed professional, even though
this was not anything that a major publisher had
commissioned. If Kerouac had put a strong arm on
me, if he'd raped me, if he had been physically
brutal, I would have absolutely never have come
back, I would have left the house. But he was a
very gentle man. It was all verbal abuse. If you're
propositioning someone and you don't get a yes the
first time, you are not allowed to say it again!
And Jack kept repeating it like a mantra. And I
kept saying, "No, I love my husband; I don't want
to do that," recognizing that he wouldn't have any
respect for me. He had this virgin/whore kind of
mentality---very working class in his sexual
orientation. And it just didn't turn me on at all.
When the reviewer asked why did I go back, I
thought, "What an interesting comment!" The
reviewer had no idea that women who are fifties
women, like myself, took verbal abuse all the time.
It was the society we lived in. Guys hit on us all
the time. If they were physical about it, that's
it---there's no continuing. But verbal abuse---hey,
it rolls off the back. And I had a job to do. I
believed in Kerouac as a writer. And the wasted man
who was kindly showing me things and answering my
questions, courteously treating me in every other
respect like a human being and a scholar and a
gentlewoman, except in his muddled, drunken---he
was really going through a fifth and a half of
Johnnie Walker Red Label when I was working
with him and six packs of beer---he was out of his
mind; he was an alcoholic. So the verbal abuse
didn't get in the way of the job we did. He was
functioning on a professional level; I was
functioning on a professional level. And that
stayed with me, that memory of Jack was the final
memory. And that's what I was trying to do in the
letters: emphasize that he was always a writer.
[This incident is written about in chapter
thirty-four of Charters' book, Kerouac: A
Biography. Charters writes: "I realized after
meeting Kerouac that the reality of the man was
tragic, but the mark of his genius had been to
create novels out of the tragedy of his own life.
As a literary artist he transformed his own
existence full of suffering and enlarged it in his
fiction to be greater than life. This constituted
the force of his genius, of his originality."
---JF]
JF: In your biography you quote
William Burroughs's remark about Kerouac that he
was so much a writer that he really didn't feel
anything he did to be real. And that's of course
one of the themes of Kerouac's work: the unreality
of this world.
AC: He turned it all into
literature.
Poet and critic Jack Foley's most recent
books are O Powerful Western Star: Poetry &
Art in California and Foley's Books:
California Rebels, Beats & Radicals, both
from Pantograph Press. He hosts Berkeley's KPFA
"Cover to Cover" radio program each Wednesday at
3:00 p.m., and is a contributing editor to
Poetry Flash.
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