"A Life In Letters": Ann Charters on Jack Kerouac
An Interview. (Part II)

Jack Foley

CHARTERS:Ferlinghetti doesn't care for Kerouac's poetry, but he 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.

FOLEY: Come visit me in California!

CHARTERS: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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: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.

FOLEY: It's the last great novel.

CHARTERS: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 seen 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.

FOLEY: I'm old enough to have heard a lot of that myself. One heard it all the time, one saw it on TV.

CHARTERS: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 60s.

FOLEY: They were cheap!

CHARTERS: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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: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, consdescending, 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 copywriters 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

FOLEY: 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' work:] "Who killed John Keats? ‘I,' says the Quarterly." "I weep for Adonais--he is dead." It's very much in that tradition.

CHARTERS:Exactly.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS:And because his books were autobiographical, the reviewers all attacked him personally, as Ferlinghetti noted. It was very difficult not to.

FOLEY: 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"!

CHARTERS: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.

FOLEY: 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 Celine 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.

CHARTERS:There was also a generational thing. Cowley had really been open to the stylistic experiments of William Faulkner, for example.

FOLEY: He wrote a book, Exiles' Return, about the Lost Generation.

CHARTERS: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 non-commercial 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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS:And it doesn't get published. It gets published in excerpts by New Directions, who you'd expect to take it, but that never went any further with his contract with them.

FOLEY: Or Grove Press. They didn't either.

CHARTERS:Grove was a little problematical too, with Donald Allen's editing of The Subterraneans.

(to be continued)

Jack Foley