Barry Gifford’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in twenty-eight languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including the New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, and the New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels and Sad Stories of the Death of Kings. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit BarryGifford.com.
Lawrence Lee, a Peabody Award–winning journalist, worked for United Press International, Associated Press, and a number of television stations in San Francisco. He coauthored Saroyan: A Biography. Mr. Lee died in 1990.
Photo of Jack Kerouac © 1950 by Arni. According to Kerouac’s widow, this was the way he wanted to be remembered.
This paperback edition published by Canongate Books in 2012
Copyright © Barry Gifford and Laurence Lee, 1978
Introduction copyright © Barry Gifford, 1994, 2012
Remarks attributed to Gary Snyder are copyright © Gary Snyder
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First published in the USA by St Martin’s Press in 1978.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 764 3
eISBN 978 0 85786 765 0
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro
Designed by Catherine Leonardo
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books.
To Marshall Clements, the book we always wanted
And to Mary Lou, as always
—B.G.
To John and to the memory of Robert Goodman
—L.L.
THE AUTHORS WISH to thank all of those persons who participated in this project—“An Adventurous Education” as surely as was Jack’s Vanity of Duluoz—and thank especially those who personally assisted us: Carolyn Cassady, James Grauerholz, Les Pockell, Marshall Clements, Pat and Liz Delaney, Ken and Tony Anderson, Lorna Goodman, Don Ellis, Deirdre Tabler, Dennis McNally, Duane BigEagle, Ray Neinstein, Sarah Satterlee, Bill Alexander, Paul DeAngelis, Mary Lou Nelson, the officers of KSAN-FM radio and Julie Lyon, for her indefatigable transcription of the nigh-untranscribable.
—B.G. and L.L.
“All your America . . . is like a dense Balzacian hive in a jewel point.”
—Jack Kerouac
in Doctor Sax
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
THE TOWN
THE CITY
THE ROAD
THE CITY REVISITED
BIG SUR
A GLOOMY BOOKMOVIE
EPILOGUE
CHARACTER KEY TO THE DULUOZ LEGEND
THE DULUOZ LEGEND BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
by Barry Gifford
On May 30, 1936, in a letter to Arnold Zweig, Sigmund Freud wrote: “To be a biographer, you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies, false colorings, and even in hiding a lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and if it were to be had, we could not use it. . . . Truth is not feasible, mankind doesn’t deserve it. . . .”
Heeding Freud’s admonition, Larry Lee and I chose the rather unorthodox (for that time, 1975) method of “oral history” to capture on record the brief life of Jack Kerouac. Larry called it “a rather more immediate form of biography”; the idea being that since most of Kerouac’s cronies and family members were still alive (he having died of alcoholism at the early age of forty-seven), if we could find and then persuade them to talk candidly about the subject, it would be left to us—and the reader—to sort through the revisionism and decide whose versions most closely approximated the ineluctable “truth.” It was Jack’s longtime cohort, the poet Allen Ginsberg, who pronounced, upon completion of his reading of the uncorrected galleys of the book: “My god, it’s just like Rashomon—everybody lies and the truth comes out!” Allen’s words are branded in my memory; I am not paraphrasing.
It was Allen’s well-meaning desire to see Kerouac presented in the “best” light, owing, no doubt, to the disrespect and disservice that Jack—and Allen, among other contemporaries—had received from critics and the news media during the heyday of the “Beat Generation.” Though Jack’s Book surely presents Kerouac warts and all, it was Larry Lee’s and my intention to get people busy reading JK’s eleven mostly ignored novels and other works. When we began our research for this biography, only three of Kerouac’s books were in print: On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Book of Dreams. By 1980, two years after the publication of Jack’s Book, at least eight titles were available. In 2012, virtually all of Kerouac’s work can be found in new editions, films of his novels On the Road and Big Sur have been made, and he has become something of an industry.
Larry and I did not intend that Jack’s Book be a “definitive” study. We assumed that more scholarly approaches would follow ours—“Après moi,” wrote JK, “le deluge”—and, true enough, that avalanche fell in short order. In fact, it’s still falling. We wanted to create a conversational, novelistic (in terms of dialogue) reckoning of this man’s life. We wanted the people he knew and loved and hated, and who knew and loved and hated him, to say whatever they had to say without being given too much time, too many years, to think about it. In most cases, these people had not yet spoken on the record about Jack Kerouac. Their thoughts were fresh—they didn’t know what they thought until they’d told us, until they’d said it out loud. One reviewer declared, “If you’re interested in listening to what the talk of the fifties sounded like, and if you believe that literature may just have something to do with life, then read this book.” That