Fifties (49 page)

Their roots were generally middle-class. Ginsberg’s father, Louis, who was a moderately successful poet, kept exhorting him to get rid of his ne’er-do-well friends and do something with his life. “Where is your former, fine zeal for a liberal, progressive, democratic society?” Louis Ginsberg wrote Allen while the latter was still in college. Ginsberg replaced Carr as the social glue of the group after Carr went to the reformatory. He was intelligent, generous, interested in everybody and everything; and he was awed, after the loneliness and self-doubt of his adolescent years, to find himself a part of such an extraordinary group of talented friends.

Yet if anyone was the center of the group, it was Kerouac. He hungered to be a writer, not so much for fame, but for people to listen to him, to take his words and his ideas seriously. He would go around the city all day long with his notebooks, writing down observations on life around him. Sketching, he called it. When the others would read what he had written, they were moved by his natural instinct for words and phrases.

He was the son of French Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts. English was his second language; as a boy he had spoken joual, the dialect of the French Canadians. In his next-to-last year in
high school, his football coach noted that one reason he did not use Kerouac very much as a player was that Kerouac had trouble understanding the language and therefore could not learn the plays. His was a harsh childhood, the Depression was difficult, and the Jansenist Catholicism of his home was particularly oppressive. He had experienced not merely the prejudice of a New England town but also his father’s endless rage about being a second-class citizen in America. This paranoia became deeply embedded in Jack Kerouac as well, and when things went badly for him as an adult, the same fears and angers that had driven his father surfaced in him. In effect he became a divided man—on one hand, the heroic prototype of the modern hipster nonconformist who lives on the road, unburdened by family and responsibility; on the other hand, he was unable to shed the deeply rooted fears and prejudices of his parents.

In his novel
Go,
John Clellon Holmes describes his hero on an all-night outing in the Village, followed by a groggy subway ride back to his apartment in the morning. Sharing the subway car with him is a happy, bouncy troop of Girl Scouts, on their way to a picnic. The antihero looks at these upbeat, optimistic emissaries of traditional wholesome American values and wonders: “To be like them or like us, is there another position?”

The Beats, as they came to be known, revered those who were different, those who lived outside the system, and particularly those who lived outside the law. They were fascinated by the criminal life and believed that men who had been to prison had experienced the essence of freedom from the system. In
Go,
Holmes described their world as “one of dingy backstairs ‘pads,’ Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, nightlong wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of ‘hip’ bars all over the city, and the streets themselves. It was inhabited by people ‘hung up’ with drugs and other habits, searching out a new degree of craziness; and connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes of long ago, or the strange recognition of affinity. They were going all the time, living by night, rushing around to ‘make contact,’ suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road, only to turn up again and search one another out. They had a view that life was underground, mysterious, and they seemed unaware of anything outside the realities of deals, a pad to stay in, ‘digging the frantic jazz,’ and keeping everything going.”

They were fascinated also by urban black culture, and they appropriated phrases from it:
dig
and
cool
and
man
and
split.
They saw themselves as white bopsters. They believed that blacks were somehow freer, less burdened by the restraints of straight America,
and they sought to emulate this aspect of the black condition. An interest in African-American music of the time—the new sounds of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and others now seen as legends among jazz musicians—was almost a passport into Beat society.

The first words that Neal Cassady, who was to become a mythic figure of the group, spoke to a young woman named Carolyn Robinson when they met in Denver were, “Bill [Tomson] tells me you have an unusually large collection of Lester Young records.” Ms. Robinson understood in some instinctive way that this was a test. Unfortunately, she did not have a single Lester Young record, and worse, she had never even heard of him. She apologized, noting that she had some swing albums left over from her college days at Bennington.

Drugs were also important. They were viewed as the key to the spiritual world. The cheapest and easiest (although often trickiest) high was benzedrine, imperfect but available from the local drugstore. Marijuana, then known as tea, was preferable to a benny. In
Go,
Hart Kennedy (a figure based quite deliberately on Neal Cassady) ruminates on the difference between a benny high and a tea high: “Yes, yes, man! That’s right! You got it! But
everything’s
great on tea! Everything’s the greatest. That’s the point, you see? You’re just digging everything all the time. Hell, when I was on benny, two years ago or so, I got all mean and ... compulsive, you know? Always worried and hung up. Sure. I was a real big serious intellectual then, toting books around all the time, thinking in all those big psycho-logical terms and everything ...”

Their name, the Beats, was borrowed from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square thief and male prostitute, who had used the word
beat
in regular conversation. As Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee note in
Jack’s Book,
an oral biography of Kerouac, the word came from the drug culture and has special meaning: “cheated, robbed or emotionally or physically exhausted.” Later, the definition was reinvented by Kerouac to mean “beatific,” to describe those who went against the prevailing tide of materialism and personal ambition.

Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished editor and critic, more sympathetic to them than critics at the time, wrote that they were “looking for something to believe, an essentially religious faith that would permit them to live at peace with their world.” It was no small irony that the magic ingredient that allowed them to forgo regular jobs and still manage reasonably comfortable lives was the sheer affluence of the mainstream culture that they so disdained; the country was so rich that even those who chose not to play by its rules were protected. No one pointed up the contradictions in their lives more vividly than
Kerouac. Throughout his adult life he continued to live with his mother, Mémêre, as she was known to his friends, who loathed her and whom by and large she loathed in return. Kerouac was extremely sensitive on this subject; in
On the Road,
a book which he wanted to be brutally honest, it is his
aunt,
not his mother, that the narrator lives with. Mémêre disliked Ginsberg particularly, because he was both Jewish and homosexual. He was not really allowed in the house, and when he wrote Kerouac letters, he had to use false names and return addresses—otherwise she would read and destroy them. Kerouac himself could only write his fiction once Mémêre went to sleep. Then he would smoke a marijuana cigarette with the window wide open and pour his words into the typewriter. One reason that the sentences in
On the Road
were so long, John Clellon Holmes believed, was the rush of sensation Kerouac got from the dope.

Hedonism stopped inside the doors of the house. Visiting friends were allowed to use the bed in his home for sex only if they were married. That, Gregory Corso liked to say, was Jack’s puritanism, not Mémêre’s. Holmes noted that deep down, Kerouac was more than anything else “a very, very proper middle-class boy from a mill town in New England. He believed that life could break open somehow. He wanted it to break open, but he didn’t have the guts to do it himself. He didn’t have the way to do it himself.” Certainly, Kerouac himself understood how little he had really experienced. In the early days, he desperately sought a real adventurer to use as a role model. He found it in Neal Cassady.

Cassady was to Kerouac what Kerouac was to others: someone who had escaped the shackles of middle-class America. Kerouac described him in
On the Road
as a “young Gene Autry—trim, thin hipped, blue-eyed with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” On occasion when Kerouac and Cassady posed together, they looked like brothers. Cassady came honestly to the kind of life that Kerouac so admired and wanted. His parents’ marriage had broken up when he was six, and he had stayed on with his skid-row alcoholic father: He got himself ready for school in the morning while his father slept off the whiskey from the previous night’s drinking. He learned to survive by his wits at an astonishingly early age, cadging food and money, and stealing cars before he was legally old enough to drive. By the time he showed up in New York he was twenty, four years younger than Kerouac, and had already, by his own account, stolen some five hundred cars.

He made his connection to Kerouac’s group through Hal Chase, a Beat from Denver. Everyone in New York had heard of
Cassady long before he arrived, of this golden young man who could throw a football seventy yards, run the 100 in under ten seconds, and have his way with any woman he wanted. To those immune to his macho charm, he was merely a small-time con artist; but to the group, he was a romantic Zen hipster of the road. The more conventional the setting, the more vulnerable Cassady felt with his sad background, so he always experienced an almost manic need to keep moving. What he exemplified, Ted Morgan wrote, was “pure, abstract, meaningless motion. Compulsive and dedicated, he was ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of careening from place to place. Wife and child might starve, friends existed only to be exploited for gas money, but Neal must move.” He was in awe of the New York group’s sophistication, for he was obviously bright and had spent long hours at the Denver public library trying to educate himself. He longed to be a writer, and he spoke of going to Columbia. Hal Chase even arranged with several professors for him to take special oral entrance exams. He never showed.

He was powerfully attractive to both sexes and he used that power indiscriminately. All sorts of men and women were in love with him. He changed wives often; by his late twenties, he had been married three times and had three children, none of whom he knew very well. He sensed that Ginsberg, with his wonderful mind and great generosity of spirit, was someone who could teach him a great deal, so he slept readily with him. Ginsberg, in turn, fell desperately in love. “When Neal came to town, that was total, man,” John Clellon Holmes noted. “The wives of people and the girlfriends of people looked upon Neal as an enemy, perhaps because their men were so attracted to him. I don’t mean homosexually, but attracted to the pole of this vigor and this energy and the simplicity that he seemed to offer. I mean, ‘Let’s roll up to Harlem and see what’s going on!’ Neal had a capacity to make—he didn’t intend this, I don’t think—some kinds of people feel inauthentic. I was always afraid I wouldn’t respond in the right way ... Neal never said, ‘Oh, come on, man, you’re a square.’”

Kerouac was mesmerized by him from their first meeting. Kerouac wanted to travel with him and to write someday what he called his “Neal” book. An odd relationship developed, Holmes thought. Kerouac seemed a man without a center, for whom Cassady offered, “not a center, but a trajectory.” Cassady wanted to write a book, and Kerouac wanted to be Cassady and in the end did Cassady’s book, which did not entirely please Cassady. In 1949 they embarked on the
first of their several journeys together. In 1950 the first of Kerouac’s books,
The Town and the City,
for which he received an advance of a thousand dollars, was published to modest reviews and negligible sales. It was a derivative book, strongly influenced by Thomas Wolfe, rambling and poorly focused, but not without merit. Kerouac was embittered by its failure and still wrestling with the question of how he was going to translate his experience with Cassady into a book.

In early 1951 John Clellon Holmes finished
Go,
which Scribner’s planned to release in the fall of 1952. Holmes wrangled with his editors and the publishing house’s lawyers over language. The editors and lawyers demanded that Holmes cut three of the six times that a character named Agatson says, “Fuck you.” On this point Holmes held his ground: “What’s the difference between three and six?” he asked. Although
Go
was a far more traditional novel than
The Town and the City,
it still had a tough time of it in the bookstores, with a printing of only 2,500 copies. The climate was obviously not yet right for books with eccentric language and characters challenging mainstream culture by talking about drug use and the sexual netherworld of that time.

But spurred by Holmes’s work (and his own belief, frequently stated, that he was a better writer), Kerouac started what would eventually become
On the Road.
He was twenty-eight at the time, not gainfully employed, already twice married. He wrote it in a fury—it was one long paragraph, and it was fiction as nonfiction; he changed nothing, not even the names of his friends. He wrote it, his friend John Clellon Holmes said, “simply following the movie in his head.” Within a week of finishing it, he had handed it to Holmes, not even having reread it himself. It was, in Holmes’s words, “a roll like a big piece of salami.” Kerouac’s great talent was an ability to catch precisely the moods and feelings of characters far outside the reach of traditional novelists. Holmes thought the book was brilliant; he also thought it was going to be almost impossible to convince the traditional, conservative publishing world of its value.

Not everyone thought it was that good. Ginsberg, who was usually generous about his colleagues’ work, wrote to Cassady that it was “a holy mess—it’s great all right but he did everything he could to fuck it up with a lot of meaningless bullshit.” The problem, he added, was that it had “page after page of surrealist free association that doesn’t make sense except to someone that has blown Jack. I don’t think it can be published in its present state ...” That seemed almost a prophecy. Kerouac seemed unable to interest publishers,
even though Malcolm Cowley, the venerable recorder of the Lost Generation, sensed that Kerouac’s was a new and interesting voice. It would take some five years to publish
On the Road.