A recent exhibition at the Grolier Club featured ashes that fell from a cigarette the novelist was probably smoking on the day he died. Joyce Johnson reflects on her time with Kerouac, and what she’s kept from him.
A glass ashtray—the kind you used to find often in American households—was recently on exhibit in the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Club . It was in a display case, ashes and all.
If you had seen it on a coffee table, you might have thought that the smoker had just left the room, and could still be somewhere close by. But the ashes were fifty-six years old; they must have dropped from a cigarette Jack Kerouac was smoking the day he died, unexpectedly, in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of forty-seven. Born poor, he died broke, with his books out of fashion, although he was still a household name.
When I saw the ashes, I wondered who had found them. Was it Jack’s third wife, Stella, who couldn’t bear to throw them out? Or was it his mother who insisted on keeping them? He called her Mémère; she and Jack’s father had been born in Quebec and had raised him in a French-speaking enclave of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Mémère was a woman who saved things—a bit of string, a quarter of an onion, the accumulating boxes of papers that her son left in her keeping while he set out to know the country where he felt only half American. The ashes, carefully sealed up somehow, were evidently added to everything else that got packed in 1969, from a pair of Jack’s pajama bottoms—also destined to become a collector’s item—to the iconic scroll of “, for twelve million dollars, one of the highest sums ever paid for a literary manuscript.
All of it got shipped north and stored for years in a barn in Lowell, where Jack’s brother-in-law, John Sampas, kept the used furniture that he sold in flea markets. When Stella died, in 1990, her family made Sampas Jack’s literary executor. During the next four decades, he sold Jack’s personal belongings and portions of his archive to dealers and collectors.
The ashes were acquired by the archivist and bookseller Jacob Loewentheil, who, about fifteen years ago, bought Jack’s copy of Dostoyevsky’s “. ” As he looked at the passages Jack had underlined, he felt a profound connection to him and a desire to collect other things that would give him “a tangible link to Kerouac,” as he put it.
No doubt some of the visitors to the Grolier felt the thrill of propinquity as they looked at the remains of one of Jack’s last cigarettes, but, for me, they were reminders of his absence, and the lasting strangeness of his fame, and how his kisses always tasted of Lucky Strikes. I have my own Kerouac collection.
It starts with the red-and-black-checked shirt that he told me to look for when I met him on a blind date one January night in 1957. Even without it I would have noticed him right away as he sat at the front counter of the Howard Johnson’s in Greenwich Village. He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment.
No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, “. ” I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home.
I studied the author photo on the back cover: John Kerouac, age twenty-seven, with a necktie and a neatly pressed jacket and a serious, slightly melancholy expression. The photo had been taken seven years earlier. He had written eight unpublished books since then, and lived much closer to the edge. My arrival at the Howard Johnson’s seemed to have interrupted his train of thought.
After I sat down, he let me know that solitude was what he was craving most at that moment. He’d spent the past summer as a fire lookout on a mountain out West called Desolation Peak.
“I wish I was there now,” he said, his eyes on my face. I wondered if he always told people exactly what he was thinking. He ordered me a cup of coffee, but when it came he said, with some embarrassment, that I’d have to pay for it—he had bought a pack of Luckies with his last twenty dollars and had been badly shortchanged.
I guessed he hadn’t eaten, so I offered to buy him a meal; I’d never bought anyone a meal in my life. He ordered the cheapest dish on the menu, frankfurters and beans.
Then we sat at the counter talking, mostly about books. I got up the nerve to tell him that I’d started working on a novel. To my surprise, that interested him—most men wouldn’t have wanted to hear about it. He laughed when I told him I loved Henry James, and said I needed new influences.
By the time he suggested we go uptown to my place, I found myself saying, “If you wish. ” As we walked out into the street, he put on a shabby brown leather jacket that looked as if it had been through a lot, in many different places. Once, I asked him how old the jacket was, and he said he’d got it during the war, when he first shipped out as a merchant seaman.
In “The Town and the City,” he described that voyage on “a great proud bark back from homeless seas,” but I only learned decades later, from Jack’s journals, that he’d signed on as a scullion, and sailed on the S.S. Dorchester.
The ship carried hundreds of construction workers who were heading to Greenland to build an airfield, and Jack, who was then on a break from Columbia University, scrubbed pots and peeled potatoes in a galley run by three Black cooks. He wrote about each of them: the one who kept finding fault with his work and called him Stupid; the one named Glory, whom he considered a born leader; and the gay pastry chef, who conducted religious services on deck.
It was the pastry chef who had offered Jack the warm leather jacket, insisting that he keep it. Six months later, in February, 1943, most of the men Jack sailed with that summer—including Glory and the pastry chef—were killed when the Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat. More than six hundred people died. Jack was so shattered by the news that his hands shook for weeks afterward.
I remember him wearing the leather jacket even after he became famous and could have afforded a new one. I wonder if it reminded him of what Buddhists call the void. We were all heading there, he told me more than once, though he knew I didn’t like to hear about that.
The week before our blind date, Jack’s previous girlfriend had thrown him out of her apartment, on the advice of her psychiatrist, so he was in serious need of a place to stay, as he had often been during his travels. Since I happened to be a young woman with an apartment of her own—something of a rarity in those days—Allen Ginsberg, whom I’d recently got to know, had arranged for us to meet.
My two haphazardly furnished rooms were in a brownstone a couple of blocks from Columbia. The windows looked out on a back yard where generations of bedsprings rusted and a tree of heaven grew. Just before we stepped inside, he pulled me close and kissed me.
“I don’t like blondes,” he murmured, which I thought was too ridiculous to take seriously. By the time we’d left the subway and his arm dropped around me as we walked along Broadway, it was clear that we were going to be friends, whatever else we might be to each other. I had just survived a bad breakup and a really awful year, which should have made me cautious. Instead, I had a nothing-to-lose feeling.
The next day, Jack moved into my apartment with a zippered sports bag that he picked up from the cheap hotel on Eighth Street where he’d been staying. It contained a notebook and a couple of changes of clothes, mostly from the Salvation Army. I knew he’d be leaving as soon as he got his first five-hundred-dollar check for “On the Road,” which Viking Press was finally going to publish after three years of maddening indecision.
Still, by the time Jack boarded a freighter, six weeks later, it was hard to say goodbye. I remember trying not to show it, because I knew he didn’t want to carry any weight as he moved through the world. When I began writing him letters full of news about my life in New York, I hesitated before typing “Love” above my name. We spent our last night together in Jack’s cabin aboard the S.S.
Slovenia. It was an experience he wanted me to have—he knew I was afraid my life would never give me enough to write about, and he’d been urging me to do some travelling of my own. The ship was still docked in Brooklyn, but I could feel the cabin gently rocking as the East River moved under us.
Early the next morning, as I walked to the subway through the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Jack was on his way to Tangier, to visit William Burroughs. From there he would go to Paris, where he was thinking about living for the rest of his life. He’d forgotten to pack his red-and-black shirt. I hung it in the closet, wondering if I’d see him again.
Three weeks later, I opened my mailbox and found a letter.
“We had a tremendous storm 500 miles out & almost foundered,” Jack wrote. He was currently eight miles off the coast of Africa, looking forward to landing in Tangier, “the Blue Pearl of the Hesperides—the city of” He told me that he’d spent the voyage studying history and reading Kierkegaard in his cabin and that, since he hadn’t been drinking, he was now the healthy Jack I’d never known.
“We’ll meet again,” he promised. In his next letter, he wrote about walking through the casbah, the “whanging music” he heard, the cafés where marijuana was smoked openly. It sounded like the kind of adventure he’d imagined. But two weeks later he was wishing he hadn’t come—too many “dull expatriate characters” and “not too many good vibrations.
” “Lonely here,” he wrote.
“Don’t like whores anyway and no girls speak English. ” Had he forgotten to whom he was writing? Or was it that he felt there was nothing he couldn’t tell me? Before March was over, he’d left for Paris.
I wrote him twice, care of American Express. A month went by with no response. I kept telling myself not to wait for him, but I waited. One day near the end of April, I received a cable: Jack was on an ocean liner back to America and asked if he could stay with me.
“Door wide open,” I cabled back. A few days later, I gave him back his red-and-black shirt and learned that he was going to be with me for just a week: his new destination was California. He would pick up his mother in Florida, move her to the West Coast by Greyhound, and settle down for good with her in Berkeley.
“Paris didn’t want me,” he said. The Parisians had made fun of his way of speaking French. I didn’t understand why Jack’s French was so important to him until I sat in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library forty years later, reading his notebooks. Having grown up when there was widespread prejudice against Franco-Americans, he had anguished feelings about his identity, a mixture of shame and pride that he kept to himself.
Mémère, I realized, had been the only one he could speak his kind of French with. If I felt like coming to San Francisco and getting a place in North Beach, he said, he’d sneak in to see me all the time—and Mémère would cook me a nice dinner if I visited him in Berkeley. I almost went. In May, the editor-in-chief at Random House read the first fifty pages of my novel and unexpectedly offered me a contract.
Suddenly I was due five hundred dollars, which I could live on for a while, I thought, until I found a job. Meanwhile, though, Jack’s moods and plans kept changing.
“I’m slowly being driven out of California,” he wrote in mid-June, after he was stopped and questioned by the Berkeley police for taking a peaceful walk at midnight. In his next letter, he told me that he’d been apprehensive since the police raided City Lights Bookstore and impounded all the copies of Ginsberg’s “. ” Jack was worried now about what might happen when “On the Road” came out, in September.
He apologized for encouraging me to come to a state that “has now fallen into the hands of Total Police Authority” but said that maybe I’d like it there anyway.
“Always do what you want,” he added, in a postscript, leaving me with much more freedom than I appreciated. “A week later, he had a new thought: maybe I could go to Mexico with him. And by late July he’d moved Mémère back to Orlando and was on his way to Mexico City. On the twenty-eighth of that month, he wrote me from his “earthquake-proof” hotel, on Orizaba Street, after a devastating quake had levelled the buildings around him.
He’d thought he was experiencing the end of the world; having survived, he realized that he no longer wanted to be alone.
“So come on down, I’m waiting for you,” he wrote. We’d make love in his mirrored “Sultan’s room,” and dance the rumba and eat hot soup at market stalls and “float on rafts of flowers,” and when we grew tired of Mexico City we’d spend a year in a quiet mountain village while “On the Road” came out in America without him. It would be just the kind of novelist’s education I’d been looking for.
“I’m lonesome for yr. friendship & love,” he finally admitted. How could I not go to him? I quit my job, gave up my apartment, and bought a plane ticket I never used—a few days later, Jack caught the Asiatic flu and went back to Florida so that Mémère could take care of him. On Labor Day weekend, a Greyhound bus brought him back to New York in time for the publication of “On the Road.
” I had just moved into a fourth-floor walkup in a brownstone on West Sixty-eighth Street. Late Sunday afternoon, I went to my window and there was Jack on the sidewalk, wearing a bright-blue Hawaiian shirt that he’d bought in some Florida thrift shop, hoping it might bring him luck.
“What do you think? ” he asked. He was in a buoyant mood. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the orange palm trees on his shiny shirt were going to look a little weird on the streets of Manhattan.
He was wearing that shirt at midnight when the two of us went to a newsstand on Broadway and stood under a street lamp reading the extraordinary review of “On the Road” that had just come out in the. It seemed as though the reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, was trying to preserve a measured tone but couldn’t contain his excitement.
Rereading it now, I can pick out the phrases that thrilled me seventy years ago: “historic occasion,” “authentic work of art,” “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important expression yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named as ‘beat’ and whose principal avatar he is. ” “It’s good, isn’t it? ” Jack asked me. But he sounded subdued.
His book was about to set off a culture war, and he was going to become the leading casualty of the Beat Generation. Maybe this was the fate he’d been trying to avoid when he invited me to Mexico. Millstein threw a party for Jack that Friday, but, after five overwhelming days of instant fame, Jack couldn’t bring himself to go.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” I heard him tell his friend John Clellon Holmes, who had dropped by to see him. He’d always dreamed of losing his anonymity; now that it had been swept away, along with the freedom of movement it had given him, he felt naked, and wanted to hide.
He also wanted to live up to the moment, experience the interviews, the parties, the requests for readings, the swarms of women vying for his attention—all of it. But since there had always been a deep shyness in him, the only way he could be the “avatar” of the Beat Generation was to drink. The day after Millstein’s review, Viking Press had presented Jack with a case of champagne. He finished it and kept going.
After his bouts of drinking, I always managed to get him safely up the four flights of stairs to the apartment, even when my heart was in my mouth, but I couldn’t persuade him to turn off the world, though sometimes we tried. For a few days we’d hole up together, pull down the blinds, try to ignore the ringing phone.
Just as he started to recover a little, he’d be drawn into the uproar again.magazine followed Jack and me around Greenwich Village, from one old hangout of his to the next. There’s a shot of us standing in Sheridan Square in front of a red neon bar sign. Jack’s in the foreground forcing a grin; I’m the girl with long blond hair dissolving into the darkness as she waits for the endless night to be over.
Thirty-five years later, in 1993, I would be airbrushed out of the picture when the photo was used in an ad campaign by the Gap, with the slogan “Kerouac Wore Khakis. ” Jack wore his black-and-red shirt that fall, but it didn’t help him feel more like himself.
Since people were so used to seeing authors in tweed jackets, his lack of one, even on TV, may have contributed to the public’s fascination with him—and to the otherness they perceived, even in the sound of his unplaceable last name. But Jack’s otherness also worked against him. One critic called him “a slob running a temperature.
” And, in the brutal way that some members of the literary establishment attacked his writing, Jack may have heard echoes of the insulting stereotype that Franco-Americans were “primitive. ” One bright October weekend, we escaped upstate to Cherry Valley, where a friend of Jack’s had a farmhouse. We took a long walk together under falling yellow leaves and found a meadow, where we stretched out on the warm dry grass.
I had just drowsily closed my eyes when I heard Jack say, “I know we should just stay up here and get married. ” In the silence that immediately dropped over us, I thought to myself that marrying him would be a disaster, but that I’d marry him anyway if he asked me. In the spring, he kept an old promise to Mémère and bought her a house in Northport, Long Island. Soon, he retreated there himself.
He had been attacked and beaten outside a bar on MacDougal Street, and no longer felt like coming into the city. I had taken him to an emergency room that night, and he’d been told that he had no concussion, despite the blows to his head. But the beating seemed to have broken something in him. The lifeless sentences in the penny postcards he sent me now and then could have been written by a stranger.
In August, he offered me a book title that he said he no longer had any use for, since he’d stopped writing the novel about his childhood that went with it. He’d always had a phenomenal memory that he drew upon when he wrote, but the details he needed for this new book seemed to elude him. Once, he invited me to Northport to see him.
“What train are you going back on? ” Mémère asked me, the moment she opened the front door.
“Jewish bread,” she said darkly, when I gave her a loaf of pumpernickel that Jack had told me to bring her. Ginsberg had told me that Mémère had such a superstitious hatred of Jews that she called him the devil. Jack sent me a letter afterward telling me not to come to his home anymore—he didn’t want to “disturb the tender routines of what is after all an elderly lady. ” But he said he’d see me in the fall.
And he did visit then, three times, so drunk that he was as out of reach as he’d been in Northport. I had aged over that long summer and was now twenty-three, old enough to know that I had to walk away. I have no idea what became of Jack’s red-and-black shirt. Was it among the stuff that got stored in his brother-in-law’s barn, or had he discarded it?
We all shed things as time moves us along; we shed people, even mountains.
“I still love her tonight,” Jack would write, looking back on our affair in his 1965 novel “There were certain things I could have saved but didn’t. My Royal portable that Jack typed on whenever he stayed with me, the Lee Wiley record we used to play over and over again, the copy of “” that he was reading before he sailed to Tangier.
I could have kept the pot in which I made him Lipton’s pea soup, something he reminded me about during a late-night phone call in 1966, not long before I married someone else. I recently learned that there’s a sheet of paper in Jacob Loewentheil’s collection which I tossed away in April, 1957, right after Jack’s return from Paris. On one side of it is a fragment of my first novel.
I must have felt it had to be rewritten, even though Jack had been urging me never to stop to revise. He had apparently fished it out of my embarrassingly full wastepaper basket and typed a letter to his friend Ed White on the other side. He hated seeing paper wasted. The letters he sent me, typed or written right out to the edges of the page—those I held on to.
I intended to quote from them in theI began writing forty years ago, before learning that all the words in them belonged to Jack’s widow and could not be used without permission that she refused to give me. Only the pieces of paper Jack had written them on were mine. I xeroxed Jack’s letters when I was fifty, then sold them to a dealer.
I’d just bought a small house on the edge of some woods in Vermont, and its well went dry every summer. I needed money for a new well, which would have to be drilled very deep, and for a room that I was adding. I felt Jack would have forgiven me—he’d often said that all he wanted for himself was a little mountain cabin.
But words have mysterious properties; you can lose them in their tangible form and still keep them. I didn’t know Jack had saved all my letters until his brother-in-law informed me that a Hollywood producer had given them to a famous director as a birthday present, along with the ones Jack had written to me. So we’re together in Hollywood, as far as I know, along with Jack’s raincoat, which was purchased by Johnny Depp.
The Berg Collection has some crutches that Jack used at Columbia, in October, 1940. They’re preserved in the library’s temperature-controlled precincts, together with a lock of Walt Whitman’s hair, the surprisingly small wooden chair that Dickens sat on when he wrote, and other proof that legendary writers had actual lives.
It may be that, like the crutches and the cigarette ashes, I, too, am part of Kerouac’s realia: girl, blond, circa 1957-58. Though I couldn’t be saved or collected, he left his imprint on me. ♦
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