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

Jack Foley

FOLEY: 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 etre ivre...De vin, de poesie ou de vertu, a 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--?

CHARTERS: 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--

FOLEY: Not so upbeat!

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: 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!"

CHARTERS: (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.

FOLEY: Some of his most famous books.

CHARTERS: Right, basically. Cowley wanted Jack to write a new book for Viking after On the Roadmade 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 undoubted 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"--Ed.]

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: No question. They brought out some of the Olympia Press titles as well.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: That could very well have been, sadly enough.

FOLEY: We forget that this was happening at a time when marijuana was really really illegal.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: Especially if he'd been written about as a user in an extremely popular novel.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: Kerouac's word, in addition to Beat, was "furtive." The generation was "furtive." "Subterranean" of course means "underground." Not quite declaring itself. Secret.

CHARTERS: 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.

FOLEY: The commentaries are fascinating. They bring you through the book in a very interesting way.

CHARTERS: 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 domicle.

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 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% from him, about 97% from him. I had to do some spade work, too.

FOLEY: It's interesting because James Joyce also felt that if he were 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.

CHARTERS: He was right!

FOLEY: 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.

CHARTERS: 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.

(To be continued)

Jack Foley