Subterranean Kerouac - Paperback: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac - Softcover

PART ONE

ONE

THE AGONIZED COCK OF THE MATTER

Jack Kerouac's childhood and adolescence were lived at a pitch of romantic intensity and fulfillment rarely equaled in his adulthood, when he became tormented, and often paralyzed, by conflicting sexual passions. After becoming a writer, he addressed the sublimity and lewdness of what he called "the littleboy loves of puberty" and "the kick of sex and adolescent lacerated love" with perhaps unprecedented depth and insight, both in the four "Lowell novels" about his youth--The Town and the City, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard--and in a newly published 1950 letter to his friend Neal Cassady.

The letter marked Kerouac's first attempt to write in a totally honest, spontaneous, confessional way, a style that became the foundational rock for On the Road and all the books that followed. Jack sensed that he and Cassady were to be the architects of a dawning American literary renaissance, but first he had to empty his heart to Cassady. The "agonized cock of the matter," he wrote Neal, led straight to his childhood, and his choice of words clearly shows that Kerouac saw his life as a sexual drama, as indeed it would prove to be, as he moved restlessly from homoerotic to bisexual and heterosexual liaisons.

Until high school, he expressed his sexuality, as do many boys, almost entirely in homoerotic terms. These early emotions were recounted with lyricism and obsessiveness in Kerouac's correspondence with Cassady and later in Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard. In Kerouac's world, children not only fall passionately in love, but "love each other like lovers," as he wrote in Maggie Cassidy. His account of his nine-year-old brother Gerard's passion for Lajoie, a grade-school friend, was confined, inVisions of Gerard, to voyeurism and genital fondling, but Kerouac went much further as a child, he confessed in a 1951 letter to Cassady. At five, he enjoyed masturbatory "pissadventures" with two other five-year-olds, Ovila "Banana" Marchand and Ovila's twin brother, Robert. Though the exciting episode with the twins stimulated Kerouac's curiosity about girls, it also led to his "dream-fear of homosexuality," he admitted to Cassady. In his teen years, though other biographies fail to mention it, there occurred an extraordinary, protracted French kiss between Jack and one of his adolescent buddies, in front of his parents and a number of friends, which is unflinchingly described in Maggie Cassidy, as is a full-fledged "juvenile homosexual ball" in Dr. Sax. The incredibly varied emotional reality of his childhood and youth provided the groundwork for the magnificently complex web of relationships that sparked Kerouac's novels, even while they turned his personal life into a battleground.

The publication of his Selected Letters in 1995 went a long way toward confirming the autobiographical nature of Kerouac's novels, but during his lifetime he told many people, including myself, that "every word I write is true." In the preface to Big Sur, he wrote, "My work comprises one vast book like Proust's ... seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz." The commonly held assumption of all Kerouac scholars and aficionados is that his works are thinly veiled accounts of real people and actual events. In this book as in other biographies, stories are recounted with real people's names as accurate accounts of real events. Throughout, I have relied on the well-researched character key put together by pioneering Kerouac scholar Ann Charters and expanded by Barry Gifford, Lawrence Lee, and Dave Moore, and by others such as Gore Vidal, who in their memoirs have acknowledged their part in Kerouac's life. Because of these character keys, I, like other Kerouac biographers, have been able to rely on fictional works as primary nonfiction sources. The presumption of every Kerouac scholar, for example, is that the character "Japhy Ryder" in The Dharma Bums is Gary Snyder, that "Cody Pomeray" in Visions of Cody is Neal Cassady, and that "Mary Lou" in On the Road is LuAnne Henderson. Such attribution has not been signaled in the text in every instance but has been indicated in the notes section. As Kerouac's biographer, I have attempted to cross-check everything in his novels, using not only his letters, but also interviews and numerous other primary and secondary sources. The greatest help, of course, was having been his editor at Coward-McCann, Inc. for some of his most important work. Even prior to contract negotiations for Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac assured me that his fiction was entirely factual, and that he hoped future biographers, if there were any, would regard his oeuvre as his truthful autobiography.1

During the time I knew him, Kerouac attempted to trace his "agonized cock" even further back than childhood, digging deeply into his family's roots. I vividly remember the day in the 1960s when he rang my office at 200 Madison Avenue. A former English major, just turning thirty and in myfirst publishing job, I still got cold chills every time my secretary, Ann Sheldon, came to my door or buzzed me on the intercom and said Jack Kerouac was calling. Though his books weren't selling well any more, everyone remembered him as the wild rebel who'd shaken up the world a few years previously with the groundbreaking, best-selling On the Road. On the phone, in a voice that was still bright and boyish, he told me he was going to France to discover his roots. Convinced he was the scion of Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac, a noble Breton, he was off to do genealogical research in the Paris libraries and then to locate his ancestor's hometown in Brittany. When he returned a few weeks later, he told me that he'd given up his search in Brest. I didn't take his pretensions to aristocratic birth seriously, believing, along with James Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann, that "the best dreams of noble ancestors occur on straw beds."

Kerouac, who began life as a poor mill-town boy in Lowell, Massachusetts, unfortunately never lived long enough to see his aristocratic claims borne out. In 1990, twenty-one years after Kerouac's death in 1969, a distant Canadian relative, Colette Bachand Wood, discovered the family's ancestral home not far from Brest. The elegant gray stone Chateau de Kerouartz (one of the many spellings of the clan's name) sits on a hill in Brittany, France, near the town of Lannilis. Throughout Kerouac's novels and in other biographies, the family's coat of arms is reported to bear the inscription, "Aimer, Travailler, et Souffrir" ("Love, Work, and Suffer"), but when Ms. Wood came upon the coat of arms at Chateau de Kerouartz, she discovered a silver sable, three iron crosses, and the motto, "Tout en l'honneur de Dieu" ("All in the name of God").2

Taken together, the two inscriptions sum up Kerouac's brief but fascinating life, which was passionate, productive, painful, and pious. But neither begins to suggest the transformative effect that Kerouac had on modern society. Only in the 1990s, nearly forty years after the publication of On the Road, would he come to be recognized as one of the major novelists of the twentieth century. The critical revaluation that greeted the long-anticipated release of his Selected Letters in 1995 reflected a popularity that had been growing for some time. Unfortunately, when I knew him in his last years, he was unread and forgotten.

 

 

At some point in their illustrious history, Kerouac's ancestors emigrated from France to Canada. Then, in 1890, tired of scratching potatoes from the frozen soil of Quebec, they drifted...