On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road.
I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.
I read it at 14 and it hit home with me right away. But then I recommended it to my then friend and she didn't get it. She said "nothing happened in it". And I can see her point now there was no plot, just wandering.
To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?
Not a "guy novel" at all. I read it around 20 and just thought it was a waste of time, nothing happened, just wandering around aimlessly like 90% of my buddies on their teenage years. The whole beat movement was just style over substance, pages and pages of nothing.
I guess I liked it because I was living in a small town and eager to see more of the world and people, get away from "small-town mentality". And hang out with "the cool guys" of course. I still think they were cool.
With the way girls were treated by the guys in the novel? Yeah, totally. A certain kind of guys’ novel, anyway. Not my kind, as I was disappointed to discover.
The discussion is about a novel whose main appeal is described as "scenes one can imagine themselves in" with "more style than substance". That's a valid thing to enjoy, but not for everyone.
The idea that it appeals to boys and not girls was conflicted with further nuance: while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.
While one can make the argument that the beats' values and writings are at least complimentary to misogyny, that wasn't the discussion happening here previously.
> while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.
That's the same thing, in this context. Saying "only some boys could see themselves in books where men mistreat women" is basically the same thing I'm criticising.
Exactly the same. I loved Dharma Bums much more as a book, but On the Road certainly changed the course of my life. I'd always been made to wander, but never fully understood it.
It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words
My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south
got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly
preserved in the rafters of my shop
I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian.
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.
I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.
That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.
That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:
He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.
Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:
That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.
He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.
He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:
He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:
His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".
Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:
The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:
I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.
Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:
"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."
Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
That's great story and a wonderful counterexample to what I wrote above. Thank you!
Edit: you got me thinking about one other counterexample, which is the part of the "Children of the Beats" interview with the daughter of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). She doesn't go into much detail but it definitely doesn't sound tragic.
You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit."
I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.
Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.
The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.
It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D
I found that book before ever reading any Kerouac, and it indeed put me off.
Of possible interest to the "ramen profitable" set, there's a part in the book where she had no money and had heard you could live on just cabbage and peanut butter, so she does that for a month.
About fifty years ago, The Denver Post ran a series of articles about people who had known Cassady, Kerouac, and other beats in their Denver days. I remember about two things about the articles, one being that those still around to be interviewed had given up drinking.
Yes, I think we can sum it up as "Never meet your heroes". We tend to build an inaccurate image of those we look up to personally and the culture also builds a kind of communal shared false image for (probably all) popular figures like writers.
As a youngster I was really into Burroughs. He was presented to me by older people as great writer, a cool artistic sort of person like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollok, but in the literary sphere. When you’re young you don’t have life experience yet, so if someone gets enough critical praise, you think they must be great. Boy is it hard growing up and realizing that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the people you idolize are morally, intellectually and artistically bankrupt. I still really adore some of Ginsburg’s poems, there are some real gems in the dross. But Ginsburg was a legit pedo. Kerouac was an overrated drunkard. Burroughs killed his wife and seemed to have little to no remorse, arguably he was a sociopath. As you note, as a group they were horrible people, abusive parents, drunkards, pedophiles, junkies, but for me the most difficult realization was that they were artistic frauds and really not very talented, and even worse, that everything presented to me by authority figures about aesthetics and culture was complete bullshit. But that is the best sort of liberation, and the beats would approve of liberation from the baggage of the past so it sort of goes full circle.
I don't know that they were artistic frauds - perhaps one test for this is how their work lives on in other artists. From that point of view, Burroughs probably lives on in his paranoid way; Kerouac less so; Ginsberg I have no idea. But yes I hear you that if older people in your life handed you this stuff as anything to admire or live by, then the only self-enlivening response is to reject it completely.
It's very odd reading this because, to me, the Beats were never regarded well by authority figures, teachers, or other established credentialiers of literature that you interact with as a kid. They were seen as comic books, video games, etc. Junk for people who like junk.
I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?
They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
Agreed with everything you've said, but I'd note that Tom Wolfe is definitely one of the talented ones to come out of that circle.
Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.
On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
There are others. Ferlingetti as just one example had some great stuff. That was the critical lesson for me: you have to evaluate works by big names with self blinding to the person’s reputation. Real life reviews aren’t that different from yelp. I ask myself, is a work good on its own, not because of who did it or what other people tell you to think or how often you hear the artist’s name referenced. Doing so opens a whole world of beauty and saves you from so much dreck and wasted time. So much is overrated and so much is underrated. There’s a lot to gain by understanding that and then seeking to refine one’s own sensitivity to what is good.
Ferlinghetti was remarkable. He started before the Beats and outlived them all. He said he wasn't a Beat poet but the City Lights Bookstore he co-founded gave them an outlet and a publisher. He published his last novel, Little Boy, when we was 100 years old.
I read On the Road, and I think the most annoying thing about that book was how they had an enormous focus around funding their road trip and all the things they had to do to get money. Maybe that was all the plot they had, but it just felt weird.
Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.
The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? "What the hell are you talking about" is too aggressive for the curious conversation we're trying for.
Sure. Stating the authors of the Beat novels, despite many of them being married to women, were "mostly gay" isn't curious conversation though. It's an obviously false conjecture not based in evidence.
That may well be so, but we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone here) to follow the rules even when another comment is wrong or bad. Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral. There's actually an interesting reason for that: we all underestimate the provocations in our own posts and overestimate the provocations in other people's posts. If the skew is 10x each way then that's a 100x perception gap. Since more or less all comments suffer from this baseline bias, we need to compensate for it by doing extra work to stay within the guidelines.
Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic.
Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter.
The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate.
Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.
On the road was terrible writing, Kerouac a misogynistic drunk - I believe the reason it became that popular was that it captured Americana at a time when some freethinkers realized their parents' ways were too stifling
Many great authors are deeply flawed people. Tolstoy was not a good person, and Steinbeck was a complete a-hole. The list is long. But the classics they create are no less classic.
Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning, that he is not monogamous and she should make up her mind, whether she can accept that?
That is not a flaw in my book.
And that he left household chores to her?
Well, depends how things were agreed between them, but since his dayjob was writing .. I think that article overall presents a very weak case.
"all this was also on Sophia’s shoulders, including the village’s clinic, which she paid to organize. Last but not the least, Sophia was her husband’s scribe, secretary and literary agent. She even consulted Anna Dostoevsky, another great writer’s wife who was responsible for her husband’s literary business. Sophia understood the perplexing handwriting of her husband and rewrote and edited many of his works. She copied the entire text of War and Peace seven times."
Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores.
> Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning
She was 18, he was 34 and he gave her his diaries with all the details to read. And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village).
Overall he does come across as a low key asshole even if we ignore cheating as a fair play.
"Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores."
Like I said, it depends on the agreements they had. I have no problem giving her credit, my question was whether it makes Tolstoy bad.
"And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village)."
That would be bad, but is that a solid fact?
edit:
"not to have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent"
That is the quote from the article. Does not imply he broke it to me.
Whats your problem grasping straws? The guy cheated his wife, plain and simple, even written in your own words. No defensible moral ground I can see.
Maybe you are fine with occasional cheat, maybe your subconsciousness desperately irons out wrinkles of reality to make looking in the mirror still a pleasant activity (like all other people doing bad things who are not complete sociopaths), who cares.
Its failure in one of most important aspect of life, undefendable, and generally looked down upon. Thats it.
Cheating implies lying and breaking agreements and I did not write that about Tolstoy. I see no cheating, if the agreements were made upfront in a different way. And no promises broken from Tolstoy as far as I know. With even sharing his diary, he seemed to be have been crystal clear and open about everything from the start, or do you have different information?
A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating.
After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
On The Road was an inspiration to me in high school. I ended up doing a solo road trip around the west coast when I was 17. Met some interesting people. Mostly it was quiet. Not nearly the excitement I had hoped from the open road.
I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.
I read it at 14 and it hit home with me right away. But then I recommended it to my then friend and she didn't get it. She said "nothing happened in it". And I can see her point now there was no plot, just wandering.
To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?
Not a "guy novel" at all. I read it around 20 and just thought it was a waste of time, nothing happened, just wandering around aimlessly like 90% of my buddies on their teenage years. The whole beat movement was just style over substance, pages and pages of nothing.
I guess I liked it because I was living in a small town and eager to see more of the world and people, get away from "small-town mentality". And hang out with "the cool guys" of course. I still think they were cool.
With the way girls were treated by the guys in the novel? Yeah, totally. A certain kind of guys’ novel, anyway. Not my kind, as I was disappointed to discover.
"Only misogynists could like this novel" is pretty reductive.
It is, but it's your reduction.
The discussion is about a novel whose main appeal is described as "scenes one can imagine themselves in" with "more style than substance". That's a valid thing to enjoy, but not for everyone.
The idea that it appeals to boys and not girls was conflicted with further nuance: while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.
While one can make the argument that the beats' values and writings are at least complimentary to misogyny, that wasn't the discussion happening here previously.
> while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.
That's the same thing, in this context. Saying "only some boys could see themselves in books where men mistreat women" is basically the same thing I'm criticising.
Exactly the same. I loved Dharma Bums much more as a book, but On the Road certainly changed the course of my life. I'd always been made to wander, but never fully understood it.
Blue Highways was much better, IMO.
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It is a good thing that on the road exists, it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words My grandmother left NYC in 1929 with 3 other recently graduated nurses and drove a model A ford to california when there were still patches of prairy that had to be driven over, and in the 90's I drove there useing mostly back roads, bought a school bus in Vancouver for $50, and drove it back to Nova Scotia, though ended up chatting with Keasy at the country fair....got invited to the farm, but was in a hurry going south got a copy of on the road in a cleminites box, with a stack of state maps from the time it was written that I found all perfectly preserved in the rafters of my shop
I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian.
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.
> it tells a vivid truth about america that many millions have experienced but very few put down in words
The similarly-titled "The Road" by Jack London does the same for an earlier America. It's one of my favorite books.
I have long adored Kerouac and devoured everything he wrote as well as all the biographies about him. Thanks for posting this article, it was a pure delight to get some insight into the seldom covered battle to publish the book.
Good book. I never laughed louder or smiled wider than the part where he becomes a Mexican cotton picker.
I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—a rabbit labyrinth really—learning about what happened to the children of the Beats. It started here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...
That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.
That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...
He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.
Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr
That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.
https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/
He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.
He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA
He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173
His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".
Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:
https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...
The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr.
I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.
Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:
"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."
Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.
That's great story and a wonderful counterexample to what I wrote above. Thank you!
Edit: you got me thinking about one other counterexample, which is the part of the "Children of the Beats" interview with the daughter of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). She doesn't go into much detail but it definitely doesn't sound tragic.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for those great recommendations!
You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit." I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.
Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_Road
Edit:
The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.
It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D
I found that book before ever reading any Kerouac, and it indeed put me off.
Of possible interest to the "ramen profitable" set, there's a part in the book where she had no money and had heard you could live on just cabbage and peanut butter, so she does that for a month.
About fifty years ago, The Denver Post ran a series of articles about people who had known Cassady, Kerouac, and other beats in their Denver days. I remember about two things about the articles, one being that those still around to be interviewed had given up drinking.
It goes to show that for how much we mythologize the lifestyles of 20th century writers, their lives weren’t necessarily healthy ones.
Yes, I think we can sum it up as "Never meet your heroes". We tend to build an inaccurate image of those we look up to personally and the culture also builds a kind of communal shared false image for (probably all) popular figures like writers.
Sitting in front of a computer all day long isn't healthy either.
Definitely not. That said, sitting in front of a typewriter was probably the healthiest thing some of these people did.
Writing is an isolating profession, and its demons compound when you introduce other vices.
As a youngster I was really into Burroughs. He was presented to me by older people as great writer, a cool artistic sort of person like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollok, but in the literary sphere. When you’re young you don’t have life experience yet, so if someone gets enough critical praise, you think they must be great. Boy is it hard growing up and realizing that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the people you idolize are morally, intellectually and artistically bankrupt. I still really adore some of Ginsburg’s poems, there are some real gems in the dross. But Ginsburg was a legit pedo. Kerouac was an overrated drunkard. Burroughs killed his wife and seemed to have little to no remorse, arguably he was a sociopath. As you note, as a group they were horrible people, abusive parents, drunkards, pedophiles, junkies, but for me the most difficult realization was that they were artistic frauds and really not very talented, and even worse, that everything presented to me by authority figures about aesthetics and culture was complete bullshit. But that is the best sort of liberation, and the beats would approve of liberation from the baggage of the past so it sort of goes full circle.
I don't know that they were artistic frauds - perhaps one test for this is how their work lives on in other artists. From that point of view, Burroughs probably lives on in his paranoid way; Kerouac less so; Ginsberg I have no idea. But yes I hear you that if older people in your life handed you this stuff as anything to admire or live by, then the only self-enlivening response is to reject it completely.
It's very odd reading this because, to me, the Beats were never regarded well by authority figures, teachers, or other established credentialiers of literature that you interact with as a kid. They were seen as comic books, video games, etc. Junk for people who like junk.
I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?
They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
Burroughs was a legit pedo too.
Agreed with everything you've said, but I'd note that Tom Wolfe is definitely one of the talented ones to come out of that circle.
Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.
On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
There are others. Ferlingetti as just one example had some great stuff. That was the critical lesson for me: you have to evaluate works by big names with self blinding to the person’s reputation. Real life reviews aren’t that different from yelp. I ask myself, is a work good on its own, not because of who did it or what other people tell you to think or how often you hear the artist’s name referenced. Doing so opens a whole world of beauty and saves you from so much dreck and wasted time. So much is overrated and so much is underrated. There’s a lot to gain by understanding that and then seeking to refine one’s own sensitivity to what is good.
Ferlinghetti was remarkable. He started before the Beats and outlived them all. He said he wasn't a Beat poet but the City Lights Bookstore he co-founded gave them an outlet and a publisher. He published his last novel, Little Boy, when we was 100 years old.
I read On the Road, and I think the most annoying thing about that book was how they had an enormous focus around funding their road trip and all the things they had to do to get money. Maybe that was all the plot they had, but it just felt weird.
Once I found out the beats were mostly gay it changed how I viewed them much as I didn’t want it to change how I viewed them. I even read all of William Burroughs and thought he was the only in the group but he wasn’t.
Just a couple of bros, traveling the countryside in each other's company. History is full of such roommates.
Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620
The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
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Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? "What the hell are you talking about" is too aggressive for the curious conversation we're trying for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure. Stating the authors of the Beat novels, despite many of them being married to women, were "mostly gay" isn't curious conversation though. It's an obviously false conjecture not based in evidence.
That may well be so, but we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone here) to follow the rules even when another comment is wrong or bad. Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral. There's actually an interesting reason for that: we all underestimate the provocations in our own posts and overestimate the provocations in other people's posts. If the skew is 10x each way then that's a 100x perception gap. Since more or less all comments suffer from this baseline bias, we need to compensate for it by doing extra work to stay within the guidelines.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Fair enough I will. I agree with what you said about underestimating provocations
Slate Star Codex's review is always worth a re-read
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...
Harsh, but not, in my recollection, wrong.
Tsk, tsk: the author of this piece fails to mention the long-lost--but recently found--Joan Anderson letter, written by Neal Casady. Kerouac himself attributed Casady's style in the letter to helping him find a style appropriate to Road. Kerouac considered the letter to be a literary masterpiece in its own right and arranged to have Ginsberg, then affiliated with Ace paperbacks, to submit it for publication. Ginsberg sent the only copy to a friend in San Francisco to be submitted to a little press in San Francisco and then invented a story about the letter--at this point legally a manuscript?--being lost overboard off a houseboat. The little press went out of business. Ginsberg’s lie probably discouraged any effort to find the letter. When the little press went out of business, the landlord dumped its office’s contents left behind in the building’s lobby. An accountant working in the building went through this garbage and carried some of it home, where it found a place in his attic.
Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter.
The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate.
Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.
On the road was terrible writing, Kerouac a misogynistic drunk - I believe the reason it became that popular was that it captured Americana at a time when some freethinkers realized their parents' ways were too stifling
Jack Kerouac was quite misogynistic in real life and this unfortunately comes through in his work. Makes it hard to read.
Many great authors are deeply flawed people. Tolstoy was not a good person, and Steinbeck was a complete a-hole. The list is long. But the classics they create are no less classic.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/fea...
https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terr...
"Tolstoy was not a good person"
Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning, that he is not monogamous and she should make up her mind, whether she can accept that?
That is not a flaw in my book.
And that he left household chores to her?
Well, depends how things were agreed between them, but since his dayjob was writing .. I think that article overall presents a very weak case.
> And that he left household chores to her?
"all this was also on Sophia’s shoulders, including the village’s clinic, which she paid to organize. Last but not the least, Sophia was her husband’s scribe, secretary and literary agent. She even consulted Anna Dostoevsky, another great writer’s wife who was responsible for her husband’s literary business. Sophia understood the perplexing handwriting of her husband and rewrote and edited many of his works. She copied the entire text of War and Peace seven times."
Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores.
> Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning
She was 18, he was 34 and he gave her his diaries with all the details to read. And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village).
Overall he does come across as a low key asshole even if we ignore cheating as a fair play.
"Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores."
Like I said, it depends on the agreements they had. I have no problem giving her credit, my question was whether it makes Tolstoy bad.
"And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village)."
That would be bad, but is that a solid fact?
edit:
"not to have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent"
That is the quote from the article. Does not imply he broke it to me.
Whats your problem grasping straws? The guy cheated his wife, plain and simple, even written in your own words. No defensible moral ground I can see.
Maybe you are fine with occasional cheat, maybe your subconsciousness desperately irons out wrinkles of reality to make looking in the mirror still a pleasant activity (like all other people doing bad things who are not complete sociopaths), who cares.
Its failure in one of most important aspect of life, undefendable, and generally looked down upon. Thats it.
Cheating implies lying and breaking agreements and I did not write that about Tolstoy. I see no cheating, if the agreements were made upfront in a different way. And no promises broken from Tolstoy as far as I know. With even sharing his diary, he seemed to be have been crystal clear and open about everything from the start, or do you have different information?
What promises and agreements he did break?
But it is ok to say where their general opinions and attitudes visibly reflect in their books. We do not have to pretend those aspects done exist.
And it is also ok how sometimes, or even not frequently, misogynistic content makes you look cool to quite a lot of people.
Misogyny in the past and in the recent current haven’t been moral failings.
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Destroying high trust society is a lot of fun.
OK, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating.
After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
We’re done with that, the GOP is now having fun destroying the medium trust society.