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The Kerouacs have no telephone. Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some
months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt
the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed
up at the Kerouacs' house. Two friends, poets Aram
Saroyan and Duncan
McNaughton, accompanied him. Kerouac answered his ring; Berrigan
quickly told him his name and the visit's purpose. Kerouac welcomed
the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined
woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.
“Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying 'Paris Review!'
'Interview!' etc.,” Berrigan recalls, “while Duncan and
Aram began to slink back toward the car. All seemed lost, but I kept
talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly
tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for 20 minutes,
on the condition that there be no drinking.
Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit
of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were
able to commence the interview. It seems that people still show up constantly
at the Kerouacs's looking for the author of On the Road, and stay for
days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.
As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and
Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess. The most
amazing thing about Jack Kerouac is his magic voice, which sounds exactly
like his works. It is capable of the most astounding and disconcerting
changes in no time flat. It dictates everything, including this interview.
INTERVIEWER
“What encouraged you to use the “spontaneous” style
of On the Road?”
KEROUAC
“I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road
from seeing how good old Neal
Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional,
completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however
(being letters). I remembered also Goethe's
admonition, well Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of the
West would be confessional in nature; also Dostoyevsky
prophesied as much and might have started in on that if he'd lived long
enough to do his projected masterwork, The
Life of a Great Sinner. Cassady also began his early youthful
writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft
business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn't getting out
his guts and heart the way it felt coming out. But I got the flash from
his style. It's a cruel lie for those West Coast punks to say that I
got the idea of On the Road from him. All his letters to me
were about his younger days before I met him, a child with his father,
et cetera, and about his later teenage experiences. The letter he sent
me is erroneously reported to be a 13,000-word letter . . . no, the
13,000-word piece was his novel The
First Third, which he kept in his possession. The letter, the
main letter I mean, was 40,000 words long, mind you, a whole short novel.
It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in
America, or at least enough to make Melville,
Twain, Dreiser,
Wolfe,
I dunno who, spin in their graves. Allen
Ginsberg asked me to lend him this vast letter so he could read
it. He read it, then loaned it to a guy called Gerd
Stern who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, in 1955,
and this fellow lost the letter: overboard I presume. Neal and I called
it, for convenience, the Joan Anderson Letter . . . all about a Christmas
weekend in the pool halls, hotel rooms and jails of Denver, with hilarious
events throughout and tragic too, even a drawing of a window, with measurements
to make the reader understand, all that. Now listen: this letter would
have been printed under Neal's copyright, if we could find it, but as
you know, it was my property as a letter to me, so Allen shouldn't have
been so careless with it, nor the guy on the houseboat. If we can unearth
this entire forty-thousand-word letter Neal shall be justified. We also
did so much fast talking between the two of us, on tape recorders, way
back in 1952, and listened to them so much, we both got the secret of
LINGO in telling a tale and figured that was the only way to express
the speed and tension and ecstatic tomfoolery of the age . . . Is that
enough?
INTERVIEWER
How do you think this style has changed since On the Road?
KEROUAC
What style? Oh, the style of On the Road. Well as I say, (editor
Malcolm) Cowley
riddled the original style of the manuscript there, without my power
to complain, and since then my books are all published as written, as
I say, and the style has varied from the highly experimental speed-writing
of Railroad
Earth to the ingrown toenail packed mystical style of Tristessa,
the Notes
from Underground (by Dostoyevsky) confessional madness of The
Subterraneans, the perfection of the three as one in Big
Sur, I'd say, which tells a plain tale in a smooth buttery
literate run, to Satori
in Paris, which is really the first book I wrote with drink
at my side (cognac and malt liquor) . . . and not to overlook
Book of Dreams, the style of a person half-awake from
sleep and ripping it out in pencil by the bed . . . yes, pencil . .
. what a job! Bleary eyes, insaned mind bemused and mystified by sleep,
details that pop out even as you write them you don't know what they
mean, till you wake up, have coffee, look at it, and see the logic of
dreams in dream language itself, see? . . . And finally I decided in
my tired middle age to slow down and did Vanity
of Duluoz in a more moderate style so that, having been so
esoteric all these years, some earlier readers would come back and see
what ten years had done to my life and thinking . . . which is after
all the only thing I've got to offer, the true story of what I saw and
how I saw it.
The full interview was first published in The Paris Review
- Issue No. 43-Summer 1968. [Find
Collectible Issues]
 Read
extended interviews with Beat writers including Kerouac in Beat
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. [Find
the Book]
Read the other Paris Review interview excerpts. [Ernest
Hemingway] [P.G. Wodehouse]
[William S. Burroughs]
What's it like to be the editor-in-chief of The Paris Review? [Read the Interview with Philip Gourevitch] |
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