JACK FOLEY: This is 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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: 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, ed.]. 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 coop 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 LaVigne's drawings of him and Allen Ginsberg, in bed, naked, making love. 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.

FOLEY: Perhaps because they were men. Women in bed together in a painting is not so strange.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: You took the negative on that.

CHARTERS: Definitely. I knew what I knew!

FOLEY: What do you think now?

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: 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."

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: You say in the introduction that there will be other books of letters, that you don't regard this as a definitive book.

CHARTERS: 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 surely 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.

FOLEY: Viking of course published On the Road. What was the attitude of the Viking editors at that time to Kerouac?

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: 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, have this middle-class aura to them, whereas Kerouac is working class, and so is Corso. That's one of the things that connects them.

CHARTERS: 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 5th, 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.

FOLEY: Actually, City Lights wasn't worth beans until after it published "Howl," at which point it became extremely famous and very successful.

CHARTERS: 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 1st, 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"!

FOLEY: He got some letters from nuns because of that!

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: Yes, James Jones too.

CHARTERS: ...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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: He gives them The Book of Dreams, which he's just quoted from for Allen.

FOLEY: And a lot of his poetry, which Ferlinghetti doesn't care for very much.

CHARTERS: Not a bit.

Jack Foley