The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  1956

  Completes Visions of Gerard on January 16. Hitchhikes to California in March. Lives with Gary Snyder in a cabin in Mill Valley, where he writes Old Angel Midnight (posthumously published in 1993) and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. Hitchhikes in June to Mount Baker National Forest in northern Washington. Works for two months as a firewatcher in the Cascade Mountains, staying in a lookout cabin on Desolation Peak. Returns to San Francisco in September before going to Mexico City, where he begins Desolation Angels. Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is published by City Lights Books. Kerouac returns to New York in November. Viking Press accepts On the Road for publication.

  1957

  Makes his final revisions to On the Road in January. (Viking had insisted that names and locations in the book be changed to avoid possible libel suits.) Begins affair with writer Joyce Glassman (b. 1935, later Joyce Johnson). Sails in February for Tangier, where he visits Burroughs and helps type his novel Naked Lunch (a title originally suggested by Kerouac for a different manuscript). Visits Paris and London in April before returning to New York. Moves with his mother to Berkeley, California, in May, but in July they move to Orlando, Florida, where his sister is now living. Visits Mexico City, then goes back to New York. On the Road is published on September 5, becomes a bestseller, and makes Kerouac a national celebrity. (In The New York Times, critic Gilbert Millstein calls it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.”) Despite the success of On the Road, Viking rejects all of Kerouac’s unpublished manuscripts, including Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels. Writes play Beat Generation (published in 2005), childhood memoir Memory Babe, and novel The Dharma Bums in Orlando during the fall. Returns to New York in late December to give a series of readings with live jazz backing.

  1958

  Gives series of interviews, including one with Mike Wallace for the New York Post. The Subterraneans is published by Grove Press in February and receives almost entirely bad reviews. Buys house at 34 Gilbert Avenue in Northport, Long Island. Suffers broken arm, broken nose, and possible concussion when he is beaten outside a bar in Greenwich Village. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen uses the term “beatnik” in print for the first time on April 2. Kerouac drives from New York to Florida and back with photographer Robert Frank. Moves into Northport home with his mother in April. Begins sketches later published as Lonesome Traveler. Neal Cassady begins serving sentence for marijuana trafficking in July (he is released from San Quentin in the summer of 1960). The Dharma Bums is published by Viking on October 2. Affair with Joyce Glassman ends. Kerouac’s health worsens as the result of years of heavy drinking and Benzedrine use.

  1959

  Records narration for partially improvised Beat film Pull My Daisy, directed by Robert Frank and painter Alfred Leslie. Writes introduction for the U.S. edition of Frank’s photographic collection The Americans. Grove Press publishes Doctor Sax as a trade paperback in April, and Maggie Cassidy is published as a mass-market paperback by Avon in July. Kerouac begins writing column for Escapade magazine. Moves to 49 Earl Avenue in Northport with his mother. Travels to Los Angeles in November and reads from Visions of Cody on the Steve Allen television show. Mexico City Blues is published by Grove Press. On November 30 Life magazine publishes “Beats: Sad But Noisy Rebels,” article by staff writer Paul O’Neil attacking Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

  1960

  Works on Lonesome Traveler and Book of Dreams. Totem Press publishes The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. Avon publishes Tristessa as a mass-market paperback in June. Film version of The Subterraneans, directed by Ranald MacDougall, is a critical and commercial failure (Kerouac received $15,000 for the film rights). Spends summer at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur, where he suffers mental breakdown while trying to deal with his worsening alcoholism. Sees Carolyn Cassady for the last time before returning to Long Island in September. Lonesome Traveler, a collection of travel pieces, is published by McGraw-Hill on September 27.

  1961

  Meets Timothy Leary in January with Ginsberg and takes LSD. Book of Dreams is published by City Lights Books. Leaves Northport and moves with his mother in April to 1309 Alfred Drive in Orlando. Spends a month in Mexico City during the summer and completes the second part of Desolation Angels. In August Confidential magazine publishes “My Ex-Husband Jack Kerouac Is an Ingrate,” article detailing Joan Haverty Aly’s ongoing attempts to collect child support from Kerouac. Writes Big Sur in Orlando, September 30–October 9. Goes on an extended drinking spree in New York in the fall.

  1962

  Meets his daughter Jan, now 10, for the first time when they undergo blood tests in February, and is ordered to pay $12 a week in child support. Grove Press publishes the first American edition of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in March. Big Sur is published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy on September 11. Buys house at 7 Judy Ann Court in Northport and moves there with his mother in December.

  1963

  Works on novel Vanity of Duluoz (a different work from unpublished manuscript of 1942). Visions of Gerard is published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in September and receives poor reviews.

  1964

  Gives drunken reading at Harvard University in March. Sees Neal Cassady for the last time when he comes to New York City with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during the summer. Sells Northport house and moves with his mother to 5155 Tenth Avenue North in St. Petersburg, Florida. Caroline Kerouac Blake dies of a heart attack in Orlando on September 19; she is buried in an unmarked grave because Kerouac is unable to pay for a headstone.

  1965

  Suffers two broken ribs when he is attacked in a St. Petersburg bar in March. Desolation Angels is published by Coward-McCann on May 3. Visits Paris and Brittany in June in an attempt to research his ancestry. Writes Satori in Paris soon after his return to Florida.

  1966

  Moves with his mother in the spring to 20 Bristol Avenue in the Cape Cod town of Hyannis, Massachusetts. Satori in Paris is published by Grove Press. Visited in August by Ann Charters, who is compiling his bibliography. (Charters will publish the first biography of Kerouac in 1973.) Mother suffers massive stroke on September 9 that leaves her paralyzed. Kerouac briefly visits Milan and Rome to promote the Italian publication of Big Sur. Marries Stella Sampas (b. 1918), the sister of his Lowell friend Sebastian Sampas, in Hyannis on November 18.

  1967

  Moves in January with Stella and his mother to house at 271 Sanders Avenue in Lowell. Completes Vanity of Duluoz. Gives lengthy interview to the poets Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan, and Duncan McNaughton for publication in The Paris Review. Sees his daughter Jan for the second and last time in November.

  1968

  Neal Cassady collapses and dies on February 4 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Vanity of Duluoz is published by Coward-McCann on February 6. Visits Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany in March. Sees Burroughs and Ginsberg for the last time in early September when he goes to New York for the taping of William F. Buckley’s television program Firing Line. Returns to St. Petersburg, moving to 5169 Tenth Avenue North with Stella and his mother.

  1969

  Completes Pic (published in 1971). Suffers cracked ribs when he is beaten outside a bar in early September. “After Me, the Deluge,” article in which Kerouac disassociates himself from the New Left, appears in the Chicago Tribune on September 28. Collapses at home on the morning of October 20 and dies at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg on October 21 from massive internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis of the liver. A Requiem Mass is held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell on October 24, after which Kerouac is buried in Edson Catholic Cemetery.

  Note on the Texts

  This volume contains a selection of previously unpublished writings by Jack Kerouac. They appear here under the following titles: On Frank Sinatra; America in World History;
A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence; On Contemporary Jazz—“Bebop”; Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log; The Night Is My Woman; Journal 1951; Old Bull in the Bowery; Tics; Memory Babe; Doing Literary Work: An Interview with Jack Kerouac; and Beat Spotlight. I Wish I Were You, which was written in collaboration with William S. Burroughs, is included in an appendix. (Portions of Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log appeared previously in Douglas Brinkley, ed., Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954, Viking: 2004.) The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery were originally written in French, and are presented here in translations by Jean-Christophe Cloutier that incorporate translations that Kerouac made of some portions of both works. Unless otherwise indicated, all other translations from the French present in this volume were also made by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. The source for all the writings included is the Jack Kerouac archive of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

  On Frank Sinatra appears in a handwritten journal dated May 6, 1946–July 21, 1946.

  America in World History and A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence are both taken from a handwritten journal dated September 3–October 9, 1946. The first was begun on September 23; the second was written in May following the death of Kerouac’s father.

  On Contemporary Jazz—“Bebop” is from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947. The manuscript contains the following explanatory note: “A Paper for Tom Livornese.” Livornese was a jazz enthusiast and pianist who studied at Columbia University in the mid-1940s, during which time Kerouac helped him write two essays for one of his music courses. (Those collaborative efforts, “Jazz and the Modern Symphony” and “The New Music,” were published in the Spring 1985 edition of the Kerouac fanzine, Moody Street Irregulars.)

  When he moved to Westwood, Colorado, in May 1949, Kerouac began the notebook to which he gave the title Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log. The residence in Colorado proved to be brief and the notebook was completed in Richmond Hills, Queens, in March of 1950. As the title indicates, it is very much a catchall containing a number of distinct sections, including (in addition to the three segments indicated by the title) an unfinished play, a draft of a poem written with Allen Ginsberg and ultimately published in a number of different versions as “Pull My Daisy” (see Jack Kerouac, Collected Poems, The Library of America: 2012), and other assorted notes and fragments.

  The Night Is My Woman is a translation by Jean-Christophe Cloutier of the fifty-seven-page manuscript La nuit est ma femme, which was composed by Kerouac in February and March 1951 in the French patois that Kerouac had grown up speaking in the French Canadian neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts. The archive contains two typescript pages of excerpts translated by Kerouac; these passages have been inserted into the present translation to complete the text, and are indicated in the notes. Further information on The Night Is My Woman may be found in the Translator’s Note included in this volume.

  Journal 1951 is a sixty-two-page journal, written August–November, that Kerouac began while a patient in the Kingsbridge VA Hospital in the Bronx; his original heading for the journal was simply More Notes.

  Old Bull in the Bowery is a translation of the French manuscript Sur le chemin, which Kerouac composed in December 1952. In 1954 he began an English translation, titled Old Bull in the Bowery, which was not completed. The translator, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, describes his preparation of the text in the Translator’s Note included in this volume.

  Tics comes from a typescript containing a series of short prose pieces apparently written from 1953 to 1956, similar in genre to the work published in Book of Sketches (Penguin, 2006).

  Kerouac began Memory Babe in November 1957, not long after the publication of On the Road, making preliminary outlines and sketches for it in a series of notebooks and diaries. He continued to work on it in 1958, in tandem with the composition of The Dharma Bums, and in June of that year completed a twenty-foot scroll of the work, which remained unfinished. In a May 5, 1961 letter to his agent Sterling Lord, Kerouac included a list of all the titles intended as part of his literary cycle the Duluoz Legend. Among these was Memory Babe (immediately following Visions of Gerard and preceding Doctor Sax), which he described as “to be written,” also noting its chronological scope as 1926–1932. Around the same time Kerouac sent Lord a twenty-two-page typescript constituting a revision (notably providing English translation for some of the Québécois dialogue of the scroll) of roughly the first third of Memory Babe, describing it on the first page as “a nostalgic review of the good old days meant to be read simply for the pleasure of reading.” The first part of the present text of Memory Babe is taken from the 1961 revision, and the remainder from the point where that version breaks off in mid-sentence (see page 266), from the 1958 scroll.

  Doing Literary Work, as explained in its opening paragraphs, is an interview conducted by mail in June 1963 by Kerouac’s friend the novelist John Clellon Holmes, undertaken as part of Holmes’s research for his book Nothing More to Declare (1967). The text included here is taken from Holmes’s typescript.

  Beat Spotlight, probably written in 1968, the year before his death, was the last of Kerouac’s scroll compositions. The title is mentioned in a list of future projects in a letter to Sterling Lord (April 20, 1968), with no further description of Kerouac’s intentions.

  In 1945, following the August 1944 murder of David Kammerer by their mutual friend Lucien Carr, Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a fictional version of the event. Written in alternating chapters, it did not find a publisher at the time, eventually appearing in 2008 as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove Press). I Wish I Were You represents Kerouac’s unfinished attempt to revise the unpublished novel in a radically different style, while retaining much of the original dialogue. (Although Burroughs is listed on the front page of the 53-page typescript as coauthor, he does not seem to have been actively involved in the revision.)

  The texts in the present volume, taken from Kerouac’s manuscripts and typescripts as specified above, are newly prepared clear texts. Slips of the pen, missed keystrokes, omitted punctuation (where the omission does not appear to be deliberate), and misspelled proper names have been silently corrected. Letter cases have been regularized to capitals at the beginning of sentences and for proper names. Titles of works and passages in French have been printed in italic type. In Journal 1951, several footnotes were added by Kerouac at later dates. These are indicated by brackets in the present volume. With regard to Memory Babe, it should be noted that Kerouac, who had used real names in the original draft, in his unfinished revised version substituted fictional names for a number of characters. The text presented here maintains the names used in the first draft throughout.

  Persons Mentioned

  Many of the works collected in this volume are autobiographical in nature and as such feature many of Jack Kerouac’s family members, friends, and acquaintances. This reference list provides brief biographical information on those figures.

  Joan Vollmer Adams (1924–1951), common-law wife of William Burroughs, who shot her to death under obscure circumstances in Mexico City in September 1951.

  Alan Ansen (1922–2006), Brooklyn-born poet.

  George “G.J.” Apostolos (1922–2010), childhood friend of Kerouac who appears in a number of his Lowell-based works.

  Vickie Russell Armiger (b. 1924), close friend of Herbert Huncke and other New York Beat writers.

  Virginia “Ginny” or “Jinny” Bailey (1928–2006), Greenwich Village folksinger who briefly dated Kerouac.

  Joseph Henry “Henri” “Scotty” Beaulieu (1922–1975), childhood friend of Kerouac who appears in a number of his Lowell-based works.

  Freddy Bertrand (1922–1990), Lowell-born childhood friend of Kerouac.

  Paul Blake (1922–1972), Kerouac’s brother-in-law, husband of Caroline “Nin” Kerouac.

  Paul Blake, Jr. (b
. 1948), son of Caroline Kerouac with Paul Blake.

  Rhoda Block (1923–2002), Bronx-born friend of Kerouac who appears as Mona in On the Road.

  Justin Brierly (1905–1985), Denver attorney and benefactor of the teenage Neal Cassady.

  Beverly Burford (1924–1994), friend of Kerouac’s from Denver. Beverly was the sister of Bob Burford, and appears in On the Road as Babe Rawlins.

  Bob “Burf” Burford (1924–2004), Denver-born writer.

  Dan Burmeister, Denver acquaintance of Neal Cassady, who introduced him to Kerouac. In 1950, Burmeister and Kerouac maintained a brief correspondence.

  William “Bill” Burroughs (1914–1997), American novelist and leading figure of the Beat Generation.

  Mardean Butler (1928–2000), Indiana-born writer and poet who moved to Greenwich Village in 1950 to pursue her artistic aspirations.

  William Cannastra (1921–1950), aspiring writer in the New York Beat orbit who died in a subway accident.

  Mary Carney (1921–1993), high school girlfriend of Kerouac who served as the muse for Maggie Cassidy.

  Lucien Carr (1925–2005), friend of Kerouac whose “New Vision” aesthetic philosophy was influential over the New York Beats during the 1940s. Carr worked for many years as an editor at United Press International.

  Carolyn Cassady (1923–2013), painter and theatrical designer who became Neal Cassady’s second wife in 1948.

  Neal Cassady (1926–1968), Kerouac’s close friend and muse.

  Billy Chandler (1920–1942), childhood friend of Kerouac who died at Bataan during World War II. Like Kerouac and Sebastian Sampas, Chandler aspired to be an artist.

  Haldon “Hal” Chase (1923–2006), Denver-born anthropologist who befriended Kerouac at Columbia University.