Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac's Lost Highway and My Search for America

PREFACE

The Big, Rushing Tremendousness

In the spring of 1947, a young unknown writer rode the 7th Avenue subway to the end of the line at 242nd Street and then took a trolley to Yonkers, New York, stuck out his thumb, and began hitchhiking. His trip, and the novel that grew out of it, would change the course of American literature. For that athletic, dark-haired young man rushing off the platform at Yonkers was Jack Kerouac, and his wanderings over the next three years, from New York to Chicago to Denver and back again, in freight trains, travel bureau cars, and buses; San Francisco to Fresno; North Carolina to New Orleans; through Colorado, across the arid plains of Texas, and down to Mexico City, would be immortalized in his 1957 masterpiece, On the Road.

By traditional standards, the Kerouac of those early years was a failure. A Columbia University dropout and washed-up football star, discharged from World War II military service for having an indifferent character, the Lowell, Massachusetts, native was, at age twenty-five, living with his widowed mother, Gabrielle, in a tiny apartment in Ozone Park, New York. But Kerouac, nicknamed Memory Babe by his old school chums for his prodigious recall, was determined to become a published writer, sleeping all day, waking after dark to take long walks through Brooklyn and Queens, and churning out what he hoped would be the Great American Novel. His first book, which grew into more than a thousand pages of raw manuscript and owed a great debt to Thomas Wolfe, would be published in 1950 as The Town and the City. It could be said, however, that Kerouac’s tale of a war-torn New England family was in black and white, and soon he would be writing in color.

Later on, he would name his new method spontaneous prose, an intoxicating mix of sharp, clear observations and descriptions, made-up words, popular and obscure references, poetic insights, and spiritual longing, all strung together with long dashes, ampersands, and ellipses. Of his stylistic breakthrough, Kerouac wrote in his journal, Here, I think, is one of the secrets that will lead to the miraculous novel of the future, and when I’m finished with T & C in all its aspects, I’m going to discover a way of preserving the big rushing tremendousness in me and in all poets. At age thirty-five, ten years after he set out from Yonkers with his old sea bag, Jack Kerouac would become famous (he called it fame mouse)—a condition he was particularly unsuited for—and his miraculous novel,On the Road, would be recognized as the hallmark of his contribution to American letters.

Of course, Kerouac didn’t know any of this back then. Fascinated by letters written by a young, Denver-based car thief named Neal Cassady—called Dean Moriarty in On the Road—Kerouac longed to see the West. The fog of war had lifted, and like many other young Americans, at least those who had rejected the suburbs, a steady job, and a two-car garage, Kerouac was seeking girls, visions, everything. Many of the future Beats appear in On the Road—Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs—but none so dramatically and explosively as Cassady, the Adonis of Denver, Kerouac’s chauffeur, comic foil, and amorous rival, popping up at irregular intervals to shock the young writer—here called Sal Paradise—from his solitary pursuits.

It ’s believed that Kerouac first used the written word beat as an adjective in his 1948 journal, referring to Huncke. But he never embraced the definition of beat or the Beat Generation, such as it was, as defeated or ‘beaten, preferring the Catholic notion of beatific vision, or the immediate knowledge of God that the angels enjoy in heaven. It’s also important to note that the Beat writers and wannabes were no more a literary or social movement than a group of anarchists could be called a political party. In fact, as early as 1958 the literary critic John Sisk called the Beats an ephemeral oddity," claiming that they and their unruly works would soon fade from the public memory. Obviously, that has not been the case. In recent years, Kerouac’s image has been used to sell name-brand khakis and running shoes, and his book sales have risen steadily. Still, in the minds of many hoary-handed academics, Kerouac and his iconoclastic friends, particularly Cassady, remain the louts of American Lit.

A legendary con artist and ladies’ man, Cassady, so they say, had literally been born on the road, in a moving car outside of Salt Lake City, and grew up in the sporadic company of his father, Neal Sr., a onetime tinsmith turned wino and bum. They spent most of their time in Denver, with young Neal hustling pool on Larimer Street and appearing in court on behalf of his ne’er-do-well dad when Neal Sr. was picked up for vagrancy and other two-bit crimes. Left mostly to his own devices, Neal was sent to reform school at age sixteen for stealing a car, then drifted in and out of various institutions over the next few years. By the age of twenty-one, when he made the acquaintance of Kerouac, Cassady was an impressive figure: lean, bony-faced, and muscular, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes. Possessed of native-born intelligence and a keen sense of other peoples’ vulnerability, Cassady expended most of his energy in pursuit of kicks, most notably girls, jazz music, and lengthy, Benzedrine-fueled conversations aimed at teasing out the meaning of life.

In Cassady, the so-called Holy Goof, Kerouac found a charismatic replacement for his brother, Gerard, who died when he was only nine years old and Jack was four. Shy by nature and uncomfortable speaking English—the Kerouacs spoke mostly French at home—Jack was emboldened by the power and presence of Neal Cassady, somehow licensed to engage in wild flights of his own. Certainly, there would be no On the Road without this gasoline-fueled muse, driving them across country like the Angel of Terror himself and exhorting Sal/Jack to eschew geometry and geometrical systems of thinking, whatever that meant.

Kerouac made most of his cross-country jaunts on a shoestring. His mother gave him some money, and occasionally he’d buy a train or bus ticket with his GI education bill checks. He picked cotton for a spell in Selma, California, and he and his old friend from prep school Henry Cru, called Remi Boncoeur in the novel, had a short but hilarious stint as armed security guards in Marin City, California. Believing that apple pie and ice cream were highly nutritious, Kerouac often subsisted on this confection when he was traveling and took occasional respites in small town parks, doing headstands to relieve his phlebitis, a painful and debilitating circulatory disease. He met a legion of interesting folks on the road, farmers and hill-billies and salesmen, ordinary Americans possessed of quirks and tics that never escaped Kerouac’s eye or his ear. Montana Slim and Mississippi Gene and Denver D. Doll and Big Ed Dunkel have therefore taken their rightful place in the pantheon of unforgettable literary characters. Sal Paradise himself is one of the most unlikely heroes in all of literature, and his eccentric and existential journey forms an American Odyssey of the twentieth century.

Critics have mentioned that On the Road has no beginning, middle, and end. Certainly, there is a plotless and improvisational aspect to Kerouac’s narrative, just as there was an unscripted and plotless aspect to his road-going experience. For that reason alone, the enduring popularity of On the Road, which continues to sell a hundred thousand copies a year in English, reveals the boldness and originality of Kerouac’s artistic vision. He believed in a simple me-to-you and you-to-me brand of storytelling and not the grammatically inhibited and unenlightened debris favored by the literati. However, during Kerouac’s short life, the stuffy New York suits were never able to grasp the ineffable, indescribable IT of his testimony. Attempts by celebrated editors like Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press and Grove Press’s Don Allen to neuter his prose style were a typically American business idea, Kerouac once wrote, like removing the vitamins out of rice to make it white (popular). Due to the tastes and standards of the day, Kerouac would look on with frustration as his original drafts were cut down and sanitized, and the kinetic progression of encapsulated nows he was trying to recreate on the page were broken up into more digestible pieces.

It has never been easy to separate the riot of Jack Kerouac’s life from the tumult of his art. For instance, the king of road books usually lacked a driver’s license and often hated to travel. Nicknamed Ti Jean as a child, Kerouac revered family life, yet avoided paying child support for his daughter, Jan (by Joan Haverty, the second of his three wives). Like the comedian Groucho Marx, who insisted he would never join a club that would have him as a member, Kerouac swore off the Beat movement, declaring in a 1958 letter to the poet Gary Snyder, No wonder Hemingway went to Cuba and [ James] Joyce to France. He also noted throughout his voluminous correspondence with a number of old friends that he was going to build a log cabin in the woods and pursue the solitary existence of a Zen lunatic saint, yet he lived mostly with his mother. And the grand-daddy of free-swinging prose stylists admitted in a letter to his editor Don Allen that even Hemingway has nothing over me when it comes to persnickitiness about craft.

First among the Kerouac myths is that he never revised his stories. But the writer in his prime—a long, prolific stretch of twenty years, from 1941 to 1961—was an indefatigable worker and reworker of great chunks of material. It’s a misunderstanding of Kerouac’s writing process and his status as a literary craftsman to believe that everything he did was spontaneous—that he simply blew like an inspired jazz musician. After his first novel, The Town and the City, was published, Kerouac may have abandoned traditional line editing, but his letters and journals illustrate that he never resorted to single draft composition.

Even the most famous version of the On the Road manuscript, a 120-foot scroll that Kerouac typed in just three weeks in the spring of 1951, contains numerous written corrections, crossed-out lines, and inserted passages. Assembled by Scotch-taping eight irregular-size pieces of tracing paper together, this particular draft came out of Kerouac in a caffeine-induced fury. He created what amounts to a dense, single-spaced paragraph forty yards long, complete with the real names and detailed exploits of his friends and acquaintances. Now frayed, yellowed, and nearly translucent, it looks like something dug out of a cave by a team of drunken archaeologists. The conclusion of the scroll is ripped and ragged; it is believed that a friend of Kerouac’s named Lucien Carr owned a cocker spaniel that bit off the end of the manuscript. Purchased for $2.4 million by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay Jr., the raggedy manuscript was published in 2007 as On the Road: The Original Scroll and has been rightly celebrated as Kerouac’s unexpurgated and righteous vision for the book.

Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, his dark good looks and athlete’s physique ravaged by alcohol. He was forty-seven years old. What happened to the young, eager, productive scribbler, who, fueled by old radio serials, pulp fiction, and his own early adventures, claimed to have written a million words before age twenty-one? Dig it, man, whither has he gone, in that shiny car in the night?

I believe the answer is out there. On the road.

My grandfather, the critic Brooks Atkinson, once wrote, Ever since I was a boy, I have been indebted to librarians. I’m just kidding; the estimable Mr. Atkinson was no relation. My paternal grandfather, Wray, a baker from Methuen, Massachusetts, was too busy making pies to study literature. Therefore, what I know about books I gained merely by reading them and from feeling a certain way when I read certain passages. No less an authority than the Roman poet Horace said in 14 BC that narrative art should blend in one the delightful and the useful; in other words, it must entertain before it can educate. And there are particular stories that kept me riveted to the page, firing my determination to become a writer. If you believe, as I do, that writing is a kind of geology, and that stories are acquired through the pipeline of your subconscious like oil—created by the accumulated detritus of your reading and pressed under the weight of years—then you believe that the quality and depth of that reading will determine the grade of your work. Throughout my experience, I’ve searched for high-octane stories—tales of vigor, with a steep and vivid narrative line. In the sort of yarn that appeals to me, you can feel the ground shake from momentous events, hear the call of bugles, and smell fires burning. This kind of writing prompts a physical response—knuckles get white, hearts palpitate—that doesn’t typically occur as a result of most serious literature these days. For my money, if a story doesn’t take place in a real landscape populated by flesh-and-blood characters, it isn’t worth reading.

Despite growing up less than ten miles from Jack Kerouac, I never heard of him until I went away to Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. One day on Main Street a classmate named Keith Bowden, whom we called Bongo, gave me a dog-eared copy of On the Road, and as I looked it over, he let out an abrupt giggle and walked away. I called after him, asking what sort of novel it was, and Bongo laughed again and said I’d find out soon enough. Since it was published, Kerouac’s masterpiece has been a watershed for restless young Americans, and that’s exactly what we were.

On the Road was one of those rare books that I didn’t want to end, yet I zoomed through like it was a comic book. Sometime after dark I heard the wail of a freight train charging along the Bay of Fundy and had the most acute sensation of homesickness I’d ever felt. Later that night, when I finished reading, I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road and Kerouac’s blue-collar voice was reinforced: hip, iconoclastic, with a brashness that contained notes of joy underscored by a lament. Because for all its exuberance, On the Road was a sad story and Kerouac a guy like me, a watcher, born in Lowell, two towns over from mine: And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon.

This book went beyond something I wished I’d written—a common enough occurrence—but was a story that I knew, for each page came spooling out like a precious red thread unwound from the interstices of my heart. Just as Kerouac had done, I’d traded my small town in Massachusetts for someplace else, held great philosophical debates in moving automobiles, and stood on lonely roadways with my thumb out and four dollars in my pocket. Kerouac’s subject, of course, is more than just bop parties and boxcars, or drinking wine and chasing women. Like a Brueghel painting, On the Road teems with life, celebrating our moments on earth even as it mourns them. As Sal Paradise says, The only people for me are the mad ones.

A few weeks later, I hitchhiked home for Christmas, and one night Bongo turned up with another friend named Geoff Pitcher, and the three of us drove over to Lowell. At Edson Cemetery, I parked my dad’s station wagon beside an oak tree, and we scrambled onto the roof, grabbed the lowest branches, and swung ourselves over the fence. After a short hike, we arrived at Kerouac’s grave, a small granite tablet sunk into the ground and dusted with snow.

Ti Jean

John L. Kerouac

Mar. 12, 1922—Oct. 21, 1969

—He Honored Life—

Bongo and Pitch and I stood around in our old varsity jackets sipping cans of beer, not saying very much. The ground over Kerouac’s tomb was littered with whiskey bottles, poems, dead flowers, and unjacketed copies of his books. (Bongo said that caretakers would gather up this tribute every few days and then return to the grave and find all new stuff.) In the darkness of the cemetery I realized that Kerouac’s triumph was the intimacy he shared with millions of readers. Once asked by Steve Allen on the Tonight Show to define his work, Ti Jean merely shrugged and replied, Sympathetic. Kerouac never felt superior to his audience and therefore never tried to put anything over on them—he believed in simply telling his story and letting it stand on the merits.

After I read Kerouac’s novel and became enamored of its innumerable riotous angelic particulars, I said to hell with law school and tax shelters and prudent real estate investments. I had no time for any of that, and a preoccupation with time and how to best make use of it runs straight through On the Road. Oddly enough, Kerouac has been accused of squandering his life on drugs and booze and loose women. In many ways he was the prototypical slacker, dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt, his arm dangling from the window of a Hudson. But Jack Kerouac cared little for the conventions of society, and dared to write in his own voice. All told, I see his signature work as a precious American deposit that deepens the well of my experience, fuels my own writing, and reminds me what it means to be alive.

It’s been thirty years since I walked out of that darkened cemetery with Bongo and Pitch. Since then, I’ve reread On the Road several times, pontificated on it in front of audiences, and written about it for magazines; I’ve also absorbed many other literary influences besides Kerouac and published four books of my own. But On the Road has persisted in my imagination across that span of years, and lately I’ve come to realize that I’ve thought about Kerouac’s saintly vision of America long enough. It’s time to go experience it for myself.

PROLOGUE

Ghosts of the Pawtucketville Night

Night descends on the crumbling storefronts and tenements of downtown Lowell, falling in the spaces between buildings and shedding gloom over the rooftops. Beside the whirring traffic, my volunteer tour guide Roger Brunelle stands on the corner, holding a laminated file card with a passage from one of Jack Kerouac’s books typed on it. In a loud voice, Brunelle reads, The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself ‘ Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk.’. . .

With his wispy gray hair and neatly trimmed beard, Roger Brunelle looks like a courtier in a Rembrandt painting. Coming toward us are a pair of glowering young men in large, puffy black coats, black do-rags, and black baseball caps pulled down low, but the seventy-two-year-old Brunelle is undaunted, holding his ground as the youths approach. Some authors write about the River Seine, says Brunelle, gesturing operatically at the surrounding neighborhood, a grim collection of dingy businesses and triple-deckers. "But Jack, Jack wrote about Lowell, in glowing terms."

One of the youths smiles with his gold tooth at Brunelle, and they dismount the sidewalk and cross over to the other side of the street. I used to dig and dig at this stuff, sweating over the books with a pencil, underlining everything, says Brunelle, holding the tiny rectangle up to the streetlight. But now, you know, I got it all on cards.

Brunelle has given this nocturnal walking tour, which he calls Ghosts of the Pawtucketville Night after the opening section of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, intermittently for more than twenty years, most nights, including this one, leading pilgrims around Kerouac’s old haunts for the sheer fun of it. Although celebrated for On the Road, Kerouac published five books set here in his native Lowell, a small, postindustrial city twenty-five miles north of Boston on the Merrimack River. Taken together with his entire body of work, these true-story novels form a single epic known as the Duluoz Legend, chronicling Kerouac’s physical, emotional, and spiritual journey across the American landscape.

Brunelle is a high school Latin teacher, not a trained literary scholar, but he knows what he’s talking about. He grew up in this once French Canadian section of Lowell and still resides on Campaw Street, where he lived as a boy. Brunelle attended the St. Louis de France grammar school a few blocks away, same as Kerouac, and spoke the same patois at home, fielding questions in French from his parents and replying to them in English. Kerouac never moved out, really, says Brunelle. He was hooked on the umbilical cord. Kerouac’s heart was always here, in Lowell.

It’s growing cold as the sun disappears for good behind the wall of tenements. Brunelle is dressed in a shiny black leather coat, a gray-green herringbone scarf, and khaki pants; he limps slightly on an arthritic knee but hops about and shakes his fist with enthusiasm as we move along. The atmosphere is thin, and every sound—cornering automobiles, the knock of our boots against the pavement—is sharpened and amplified, full of portent. "Kerouac delineated everything for Lowell, just like James Joyce did for Dublin, says Brunelle, waving his arms. The guy’s on fire, and he’s putting it down on paper."

A couple of blocks east, we ascend a narrow paved road, and Brunelle mentions that two of Kerouac’s childhood friends are still around and living in Lowell. Not long ago, he ran into one of the old gents, who gave Brunelle a ride in his battered Chevrolet and instructed him to open the glove compartment. Inside was a pocket first edition of On the Road in mint condition, inscribed to the author’s boyhood chum and autographed.

Did you read it? Brunelle asked, turning the book over in his hands.

No, the fellow said. I just bought it, and put it ’dere.

When I ask Brunelle why so many old Lowell types have never read Kerouac’s books, his laughter rings out against the house fronts. They aren’t readers, most of them, he says. They just bought Jack’s book because they loved him.

At the apex of Phoebe Avenue, we halt in front of No. 17, a small white cottage illuminated by a glass globe affixed to the porch. Kerouac lived here when he was ten years old. Above is the high, cold winter sky, dark blue now, punctured with holes we call stars and gleaming with the heavenly fire beyond. Referring to On the Road, Brunelle says, "I don’t read it before I go to bed anymore. It’s like—wooo. Dynamite. I like to read it in the morning so I can forget about it."

Earlier, we visited Kerouac and Brunelle’s old stomping ground, Ecole de St. Louis, a four-story brick building on Boisvert Street. Despite all the French street names, and the St. Jeanne D’ Arc church and Peter J. Dechene fire house, Kerouac’s schoolboy neighborhood is a polyglot mishmash of Lebanese, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, East Africans, and Haitians. Kids on bicycles were calling to one another in Creole, and from over the housetops a church bell tolled the noon hour.

After walking past the little house on Beaulieu Street where Jack’s brother Gerard had died, Brunelle and I went around the block, the low winter sun slanting between the buildings and throwing shafts of gold on the sidewalk. It’s Saturday, and the school is closed. Resting his back against the locked door of Ecole de St. Louis, Roger mopped his brow with a handkerchief and said, In the morning, everything here was in French. In the afternoon, it was English. Brunelle also noted that the diverse student body still receives an hour of instruction in French each day, taught by the school’s principal. St. Louis hasn’t changed—

Just then, someone inside the school opened the door, and Brunelle nearly tumbled into the lobby. St. Louis hasn’t changed in a hundred years, said a nun who was standing there. The school’s principal, Sister Irene Martineau, sixty-nine, is a short, bespectacled woman with gray hair, dressed in a neat gray skirt, gray jacket, and white blouse, with a crucifix dangling around her neck.

We were welcomed into the empty school for a tour. Sister Irene, who belongs to an order of French Canadian nuns with headquarters in Quebec, Canada, has been an educator for fifty years, the last twenty-eight as principal of Ecole de St. Louis. She was born in Salem, Mass. I tell the children I was one of the witches who escaped, and they believe me, she said with a small, prim smile. When Sister Irene was a young woman, the nun’s habit included a thick rubberized cowl that hid everything but the oval of her face. She told us that the order eventually got rid of the headpiece because it was so hot and uncomfortable and caused the nuns’ hair to fall out.

It was a cross we had to bear for Christ, she said, with a wistful expression. I miss it.

Outside a third-grade classroom is a framed passage from Kerouac that reads, in part, Parochial schools gave me a good early education. They made it possible for me to begin writing stories and even one novel at the age of eleven. These schools, in Lowell, Mass. were called St. Louis de France and St. Joseph. . . .

Brunelle recalled that when he was at St. Louis, the nuns employed a small wooden device called a claquet, which produced a sharp clicking sound when squeezed between thumb and forefinger. One click meant to stand, two meant ‘sit,’ and three ‘kneel,’ he said, as Sister Irene nodded her approval. We entered the classroom, which was redolent of chalk dust and oil soap. Its tiny wooden desks were lined up in rows, and a construction paper frieze ran around the upper edge of the room, explaining the vowels and their sounds.

Going slowly, Brunelle walked up one row and down the other and then stopped, gazing out the window at an azure sky. When we heard three clicks, we knew we had to turn around—he squeezed into one of the desks, grunting over his arthritic knees as he held out his arms in supplication—kneel like this, and pray.

Back on Phoebe Avenue, Brunelle and I scurry along the pavement, blowing on our hands and swinging our arms. It’s been a long day of walking and reflecting, and we agree that we must pause to lubricate our senses. Around the corner at 123 University Avenue is the Social Club de Pawtucketville, the oldest French club in the city, founded in 1897. It’s a low brick building sandwiched between an insurance agent and the Chung Hair & Nail Salon. Inside the tiny glass foyer is a security door that requires a pass card; the Pawtucketville Social Club is a private organization. A sign on the wall announces that dues are $30 a year, and Smokers are welcome.

Brunelle raps on the interior door. Through a small, wire grille portal we can see nearly a dozen patrons ranged along the bar, drinking long-neck bottles of beer and watching the evening news on a television in the corner. Kerouac’s father, Leo, once managed the club, and the young Jack worked as a pinsetter in the bowling alley in the cellar.

The drinkers are ignoring us. Brunelle knocks more insistently this time, and, without turning around, a very large man in a navy windbreaker yells out, Try turning the knob, and the other patrons laugh.

The door isn’t even locked. We enter the dense, smoky interior of the club, and Brunelle