Kerouac Corner

Question - What book is Jack Kerouac reading from when he was on the Steve Allen Television show? Is it only On The Road (which he seemed to be reading from)?

Dave Responds:  In the Steve Allen TV Show of November 1959, Kerouac begins reading two sections from Visions of Cody.

"At the junction of the state line of Colorado ..."  (p.295)

 

"I'm writing this book because we're all going to die ..." (p.368)

 

and finishes with the final paragraphs of On the Road:

 

"Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat ..."

He does appear to be reading from the front of his copy of On the Road. I guess he'd typed out those three sections especially for that reading, and had them taped into the front of his book.

Question -  I've been looking all over for Kerouac's "Wake-Up".   Where would I be able to get a copy of the book?  Also, did "The Buddhist Bible" influence Jack Kerouac's inclinations towards Zen? 

Dave Responds: "Wake Up" was finally published in 2008. Selections from it previously appeared in the magazine "Tricycle: The Buddhist Review", in eight parts, between 1993 and 1995.

Kerouac wrote a letter to Allen Ginsberg in May 1954 citing the books that he had found useful in his study of Buddhism. The letter is published in "Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956," page 415. He writes that "The Buddhist Bible" by Dwight Goddard was "by far the best book" on the subject. The book is still easily available from any good bookshop, or used copies for between $6 and $10 from dealers listed on-line.

Question -  What writers and books most influenced Jack Kerouac? I am aware of Saroyan, Wolfe, Whitman, but that’s about it.

Dave Responds:  I don’t know of any books that go into detail about Kerouac’s literary influences, although most of the biographies mention some.

As always, I think it best to go back to primary sources like Jack’s own writings, for answers. In his biographical notes for The New American Poetry (reprinted in Good Blonde) he tells us that he began “serious writing” after he “read about Jack London at the age of 17.”  Kerouac went on to read many of London’s books including his travel diaries The Road, which inspired Kerouac’s own On the Road. He then mentions that he read Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan at 18, and “began writing little terse short stories in that general style.” This was followed, while a Columbia freshman, by reading Thomas Wolfe which inspired him to write “in the rolling style.” Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City was very much influenced by Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. While at Columbia, Kerouac studied Shakespeare with Professor Mark Van Doren.

According to Jack, he then began reading James Joyce, and “wrote a whole juvenile novel like Ulysses called Vanity of Duluoz” (the 1942 version, unpublished apart from excerpts in Atop an Underwood). Then came Dostoevsky, a romantic phase with Rimbaud and William Blake, and, at 24, Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.

Other writers known to have had a major effect on Kerouac were Oswald Spengler, for his work Decline of the West, introduced to him by William Burroughs, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, primarily for Journey to the End of the Night. In Vanity of Duluoz (the later, 1968 version), Jack states that Allen Ginsberg was responsible for introducing him to Yeats, Huxley, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, and others. At the same time Jack was reading Thomas Mann, Herman Melville, Sigmund Freud, and H.G. Wells.

Kerouac also cites as influence “the marvellous free narrative letters of Neal Cassady,” especially the ones that he received in 1950, which led him to discover “a style of my own based on spontaneous get-with-it” that he used in his 1951 scroll version of On the Road. He wrote that he also “learned a lot about unrepressed wordslinging from young Allen Ginsberg and William Seward Burroughs.”

Kerouac stated that the “confessional madness” style of his novel The Subterraneans was based on that of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and that Visions of Gerard was directly influenced by Shakespeare’s Henry V, “the language is so windblown and Shakespearean.”  He also claimed that his later experimental prose piece Old Angel Midnight was inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “scribbled out in a strictly intuitional discipline at breakneck speed.”

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Question -  Was Bob Dylan influenced by Jack Kerouac?

Dave responds:  Dylan has recently been more forthcoming about his early influences. In both his autobiography, Chronicles, and the documentary film No Direction Home, he talks about the effect that reading Kerouac had on him.

 

He says that On the Road “had been like a bible for me. I loved the breathless, dynamic bop poetry phrases that flowed from Jack’s pen . . . I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying about the world being completely mad, and the only people for him that were interesting were the mad people, the mad ones, the ones who were mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn, all of those mad ones, and I felt like I fit right into that bunch.”

 

But Dylan adds: “One guy gave me a book that Woody Guthrie wrote called Bound For Glory, and I read it. I identified with that book more than I even did with On the Road.”

 

When Allen Ginsberg was travelling with Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Review tour of 1975 they visited Lowell, Massachusetts and stopped by Kerouac’s gravestone at Edson Cemetery, where, in a scene which appeared in the movie Renaldo and Clara, they read choruses from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Ginsberg asked Dylan how he knew Kerouac’s poetry and Dylan replied: “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.” Dylan mentions Mexico City Blues in his song Something’s Burning, Baby from the 1985 album Empire Burlesque.

Kerouac’s influence can also be heard on Dylan’s earlier album, Highway 61 Revisited. Two of the songs, Desolation Row and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues include direct quotes from Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels, including the phrases "the perfect image of a priest," "her sin is her lifelessness," and "Housing Project Hill." It is also informative to compare the song title Desolation Row and the phrase "junkyard angel" (used in another of the songs on the album -- From A Buick 6) with the title of Kerouac's book.

 

Desolation Angels was published in May 1965, and Highway 61 Revisited recorded in August 1965. The book was the first major Kerouac work to appear after Dylan began writing songs in the early 1960s. Clearly, Dylan was sufficiently affected by Kerouac's book that he chose to write those phrases into his new songs.

 

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Question: Is there a map of Kerouac's trips cross country?

Dave responds: Concerning a map of Jack's OTR travels, there is one of the 1947-48 journey in the Kerouac ROMnibus. I'm attaching a copy of it here. I hope that helps. (click on picture to enlarge)

Question:  I'm trying to figure out if Jack Kerouac used Highway 190 or Highway 90 when he passed through Southwest/SouthCentral Louisiana on his famous On the Road trip with Neal.  

I'm from a small town called Basile. It amazes me that one night in 1949 Jack Kerouac's infamous roadtrip might have passed through my podunk village. My dad was a high school junior then, so I have this idea of a story somehow linking his life to that historic journey in a fictional account. Wish me luck. Any info would be appreciated.

Dave Responds:  In On the Road, Part Two, Chapter 8, Kerouac describes his journey through Louisiana with Neal and LuAnne in January 1949, after leaving William Burroughs' house in Algiers, New Orleans.

They travelled to Baton Rouge, and then on to Port Allen, and through Opelousas, Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, De Quincy, Starks, and Deweyville, entering Texas at Beaumont. These places are all on Highway 190, the northern of the two routes. Basile is between Eunice and Elton, and Jack and friends would undoubtedly have passed through there some time around the last week of January 1949. Good luck with your story!

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Question:  I know that the events described in Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans actually took place in New York (rather that San Francisco as portrayed in the book). However, I’d be interested to know whether the bar names used -- the Red Drum, the Black Mask, and Dante’s -- were actual places or just names that Jack made up.

Dave Responds:  They are all names invented by Kerouac. In his reading of a passage from The Subterraneans on his Verve album he actually mentions the real name of one place -- the Open Door -- in parentheses after the Red Drum.

We know that the events described in The Subterraneans took place in the summer of 1953.  Charlie Parker had been playing the Open Door, in New York's Greenwich Village, close to Washington Square, on occasional Sunday nights since its opening that April.  It seems that Jack saw him there sometime in August, as described in the book.  Of the other bars mentioned -- the Black Mask was really the San Remo, and Dante's was Fugazzi's -- both in the Village. You can read more about all of these places in Bill Morgan’s useful book, The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City.

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Question:  I am interested in Mardou Fox (really Alene Lee) of Kerouac's novel The Subterraneans. Can you tell me more about her, and possibly indicate where I might find a photo of her?

Dave Responds: Despite the fact that she was undoubtedly one of Kerouac’s main inspirations, there's little to be found about Alene Lee anywhere, and surprisingly, perhaps, nothing at all in those books devoted to the female muses and writers: Women of the Beat Generation, A Different Beat, and Girls Who Wore Black.

Alene Lee was an attractive, intelligent black woman, half-Cherokee. Kerouac met her in the late summer of 1953 when she was typing up the manuscripts of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who at that time were sharing an apartment in New York’s Lower East Side.

Bill Morgan's The Beat Generation in New York has a small section on Alene, and a photo of her with William Burroughs in 1953, the time of her romance with Kerouac (p.125).

There's a different photo of Alene with Burroughs from the same time in the anthology The Beat Journey (p.172), and this is reprinted in The Beat Vision (p.208).

The Kerouac ROMnibus contains an excellent photograph of Alene, and Steven Turner's Angelheaded Hipster (p.142) shows Kerouac holding that photo.

On the same page of Turner's book there’s a photograph of Alene with Kerouac from 1953, and this can also be found in David Sandison's biography of Jack Kerouac (p.106).

According to Aram Saroyan's autobiographical work, The Street, in the 1960s Alene was living with Kerouac's old friend Lucien Carr in New York.

Alene also appears as Irene [May] in Kerouac’s other works, Book of Dreams, and Big Sur.

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Question:  I’ve read that, at the famous Six Gallery poetry event in San Francisco, on Friday, October 7, 1955, where Allen Ginsberg first performed Howl, Philip Lamantia was present but did not read his own poetry. Instead he apparently read the poems of his friend, John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico. What about Hoffman and his poetry – do you know anything about him?

Dave Responds:  John Hoffman was the poet friend of Philip Lamantia and Gerd Stern. He had died, aged 21, in Mexico from either peyote poisoning or polio. The symptoms, according to William Burroughs, were identical. Hoffman, although unpublished, had become an underground legend by the mid-1950s, and his surviving twenty-nine short poems, collected under the title Journey to the End, were similar to Lamantia's in their surrealism. Lamantia read a selection of Hoffman's poems, rather than his own, at the Six Gallery event. Little has been written about Hoffman, although Gerd Stern describes their times together in his book, An Oral History. He writes about meeting John Hoffman at the San Remo bar in New York and taking a sea voyage on a Norwegian ship to Rio de Janeiro around 1950 during which they were both "writing poetry like mad." He says that "[John] was found on the beach at Zihuatanejo in Mexico dead. What probably happened is he had an overdose and lay down to sleep in the sun, and the drug and the sun killed him."

Carl Solomon (dedicatee of Howl) also knew Hoffman, and writes about him in his book Emergency Messages (p.70): “John was a spaced-out type who called everyone ‘Man’ as did Gerd. When the captain of the ship asked John to bring him soup , John misunderstood and brought the captain a bar of soap.”

Hoffman appears in a couple of Kerouac’s books. He's "John Parkman" in Visions of Cody and "Altman" in The Dharma Bums -- but both appearances are very brief.

From Visions of Cody (1952): "That's what John Parkman did, committed suicide on Peyotl, the new sleeping pill." (p.333) and in The Dharma Bums, "Delicate Francis DePavia [Lamantia] read, from delicate onionskin yellow pages, or pink, ... the poems of his dead chum Altman who'd eaten too much peyote in Chihuahua (or died of polio, one) but read none of his own poems." (p.15)

Hoffman also appears in William Burroughs's Junkie as "one of those junkies" in Mexico City (towards the end of the book). In Poets on the Peaks, John Suiter says that "Almost nothing is known now, or was even then [1955], about John Hoffman" (p.150) and claims that "he was also a minor character in Kerouac's The Subterraneans."  I’ve not been able to substantiate that claim. Does anyone have any suggestions? (Hoffman would have been dead for a couple of years before the events Kerouac writes about in The Subterraneans, 1953.)

A limited edition of 24 copies of Hoffman's Journey to the End collection was published by Kolourmein Press of "Oaktown," California in November 2000. (Suiter, p.304)

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Question:  I have been wondering for some time whether the film script that Kerouac mentions in chapter 11 of book one of On the Road has survived; the "gloomy tale about New York" that Sal [Jack] writes in Mill City, which Remi Boncoeur [Henri Cru] has asked him to do and which Remi takes along to Hollywood to show to a film director. Do you know more about it?

Dave responds:  I once asked Henri Cru about this. He told me that the "famous director and an intimate of W.C. Fields" was Gregory La Cava (1892-1952), father of Henri's friend William Morse La Cava. According to the IMDB: "La Cava is also supposed to have directed some scenes in several of the films of his close friend W.C. Fields when Fields couldn't get along with the directors assigned to him, although there is no official record of this ever happening." Henri didn't know what had happened to the film script that Kerouac wrote.

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Question:  I’ve always liked Kerouac’s description, under the title of  “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog” in Visions of Cody, of watching Joan Crawford making a movie in San Francisco. Can you tell me more about the movie being made, and when it happened?

Dave responds:  The occasion was early 1952, when Jack was staying with Neal and Carolyn Cassady at their home in Russell Street, on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Jack witnessed the filming while he was out walking one evening, and he went back home and wrote about it. As you correctly say, his account eventually appeared as the "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog" section of Visions of Cody. In it Kerouac writes that the location was on Hyde Street, and Carolyn Cassady, in her autobiography Off the Road claims that it was "only a block away" (from Russell Street). The book San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present by Nathaniel Rich, examines forty or more noir movies and reveals the locations in San Francisco where they were shot. The film in question here was Sudden Fear, from a book by Edna Sherry, an exciting noir drama (now available on DVD) starring Jack Palance and Gloria Graham, as well as Crawford. The "white San Francisco apartment house" where Kerouac describes the action taking place was the eleven-story Tamalpais Apartments at 1201 Greenwich Street at Hyde. The same building had been featured in another noir movie -- Dark Passage (1947) starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and based on the novel by David Goodis. In that movie one of the female characters falls to her death from a window in the building.

Coincidentally, the home of the Joan Crawford character in Sudden Fear was the mansion at 2800 Scott Street, which was also the address of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who, some five years after the making of the movie was to coin the infamous word "beatnik."

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Question: In the story "The Great Western Bus Ride" (in the March 1970 issue of Esquire), Kerouac describes a solo bus trip from San Francisco to New York. It's winter, and he writes as if he were visiting Montana for the first time. The M&M bar in Butte, Montana, he says, "is the end of my quest for an ideal bar."

Do you know when he wrote this article, and if it is part of some other  work? I checked Lonesome Traveler (not there) and have been searching my dim memory for other mentions of Montana but can only come up with Montana Slim from On the Road.

Dave Responds-   I’m not certain when Kerouac wrote "The Great Western Bus Ride." The piece describes events that happened in February 1949 when Jack was returning from San Francisco to New York. It is known that Kerouac included this journey at the end of Part 2 of his original scroll version of On the Road in April 1951, but was persuaded to remove it before publication of the novel by his editor, Malcolm Cowley, in order to tighten up the action. It is possible that “The Great Western Bus Ride” was either the original piece of writing or else a reworking of it. 

 Kerouac evidently based his description of the trip on a journal account he kept while traveling. This latter has recently been published in Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac (pages 296-313) where you can compare it with "The Great Western Bus Ride." 
 
Kerouac mentions Montana in many of his novels (Visions of Cody, Desolation Angels, Vanity of Duluoz), and also in his poetry (Mexico City Blues, Book of Blues). His bus ride through the state in 1949 must have made a big impression on him.