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Canongate Books - Barry Gifford

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210 pages

English

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'Jack Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven . . . Most of his friends survived him. Our idea was to seek them out and talk with them about Jack's life and their own lives. The final result, we hoped, would be a big, transcontinental conversation, complete with interruptions, contradictions, old grudges and bright memories, all of them providing a reading of the man himself through the people he chose to populate his work.' In this kaleidoscopic portrait of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gore Vidal and many others talk, argue and reminisce about their times with him. But alongside these luminaries of the Beat generation are the voices of those who knew a different side of Kerouac: the working men, the childhood friends, the bar companions, the lovers. Fascinating, honest and richer than any orthodox biography could be, Jack's Book documents Kerouac's genius in its full, tragic, contradictory glory.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	05 juillet 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780857867650
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0520€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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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
www.canongate.tv
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 was what we were after, the talk.
The novelist and journalist Dan Wakefield, later to himself chronicle the period in his memoir, New York in the 50s , magnanimously described our effort as "a fascinating literary and historical document, the most insightful look at the beat generation." The key word there, for us, is document. Jack’s Book is constructed like a documentary, what Kerouac, in his novel Doctor Sax , called a "bookmovie." Others of Mr. Wakefield’s generation decried the new attention being paid to Kerouac; they had disliked him and/or his work then, and they disliked him and it and, by association, Larry Lee and me now. That was all right with us; we, who cared enough about his writing to devote two years of our lives in an effort to get the Kerouac ball rolling again, expected as much.
We knew that just the mention of the name Jack Kerouac was enough to aggravate some people. We also knew that his novels had inspired thousands and thousands of readers especially youthful readers to get the hell out of whatever boring or dead-end situation they were in and take a chance with their lives. I’ll always respect the writer Thomas McGuane for going on record about JK, saying in an essay that he, McGuane, never wanted to hear a word against Kerouac because Jack had indeed worked a kind of salutary magic on more than a few. "He trained us in the epic idea that . . . you didn’t necessarily have to take it in Dipstick, Ohio, forever," McGuane wrote. "Kerouac set me out there with my own key to the highway." Kerouac’s literary standing aside, the man had the power to move others.
Jack Kerouac was no avatar and Jack’s Book was not meant as hagiography. This book biography, reportage, collage, holy mosaic, unholy mess, however it’s been and will be characterized contains some extremely emotional, confessional material; it’s not dull. Dr. Freud notwithstanding, there is at least a sort of truth to be found here. The book belongs to those persons who bared their souls in conversations with us about their dead friend or adversary. Therefore, it belongs to Kerouac, which is why I titled it Jack’s Book. These are letters to a dead man from people who for one reason or another didn’t tell him what they really thought of and about him while he was alive. It was Larry’s and my pleasure to provide them the belated opportunity.
I’ll never forget sitting with Jimmy Holmes, the hunchbacked pool-shark of Denver, in the stuffy parlor of his elderly aunt’s apartment, where he lived, and him saying to me, after I’d read aloud a lyrical passage from Visions of Cody that Kerouac had based on his life, and which Holmes had never read, "I didn’t know Jack cared about me that way. He really cared , didn’t he?" Or stumbling drunkenly along the Bowery in the wee hours one frozen February morning with Lucien Carr, who kept repeating, "I loved that man. I loved Jack, goddam it, and I never told him!"
This new edition is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Lawrence Lee, who died on April 5, 1990.

BG, 2012
PROLOGUE
America makes odd demands of its fiction writers. Their art alone won’t do. We expect them to provide us with social stencils, an expectation so firm that we often judge their lives instead of their works. If they declare themselves a formal movement or stand up together as a generation, we are pleased, because this simplifies the use we plan to make of them. If they oblige us with a manifesto, it is enforced with the weight of contract.
So it happens that, from Henry James on, Europe is regarded by Ameri