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Write a Madder Letter if You Can
prospective purchasers of this sizeable collection of
letters from Kerouac to White. There are extracts
from every single one of them, they are carefully
annotated, dated, documented and then they all have
a commentary note from White. With White
explaining what he wrote to Jack that might have
prompted a certain response from him. Ed White
kept Jack up to date on his network of friends and
associates in Colorado, especially Denver. Of course
Denver was Neal Cassady’s hometown and a place
Jack gravitated to as a young
man in his twenties. It was a
landscape in drastic contrast to
the one he was familiar with on
America’s East Coast. The
region inspired his imagination
and quickly made it into his
writing.
Architecture had
become White’s career
eventually, after considering
painting and teaching. It seems,
from John Leland’s introduction,
that both Kerouac and White
suffered bouts of depression,
they refer to it in their letters.
But they had originally
connected while both students at
Columbia University in 1946.
Kerouac never finished his
degree but White followed it through to the end. It
was where the Denver connection began for Kerouac,
with White connecting with Hal Chase, Bob Burford
and others. It was a fortuitous meeting for the
budding writer from Lowell.
John Leland, in his introduction, gets close
to nailing Kerouac’s character, listen to this, “He was
a celebrated traveler who needed to live at home with his
mother; a rule breaker with a reverence for tradition; a
slacker with a mad work ethic; an experimental writer
with a dim view of modernism.” Leland is in tune with
the capricious mind of Jack Kerouac, alive to the
pulls and tugs going on inside him, the inner turmoil
and debate. These letters to Ed White were a therapy,
a working out, tilling over of ideas and argument.
White and Kerouac were up for it. There is a raw
honesty being played out over the decades. And
White was no passive recipient of manna from
Kerouac’s mountain. He was no backslapper content
to tell Kerouac how wonderful he was, listen to this
advice from White in a letter in 1948, “….you are
concerned with personalities, which is exactly the right
way to be, provided you set aside some small part of your
mind for objective appraisal – a small portion whose task
it is to look for weaknesses and limitations as well as
strength and greatness. It is there that you will
distinguish between the trivial and the essential…”
Ed White became ‘Tim Gray’ in On the
Road, a personality in that lively Denver crowd that
also included Neal Cassady. It has become evident
over the years that White, Hal
Chase and others, while they
knew and sometimes mixed with
Cassady, were something
different. White and his crowd
were law abiding, career minded
young people who steered clear
of Cassady’s car stealing
hedonist direction. Kerouac was
torn between the faction around
Cassady and Ed White’s group,
it all returns to John Leland’s
observations about Kerouac’s
personality doesn’t it?
White, as early as 1948
is exhorting Kerouac to come
over to France to be with him in
his adventures there. Kerouac,
the man who penned On the
Road, the vagabond, hobo,
sainted traveler, is reluctant to leave America. There
are all kinds of reasons why he can’t join White in
Europe. Kerouac admitted the situation and felt he
was ‘a little bird that you have to put salt on…’
Kerouac saw White having adventures in Europe
while he was at home writing ‘…sad letters…’ Of
course this was 1948. Kerouac was all of 26. We now
know the next few years would see him step into the
big wide world.
As Kerouac moved towards 1957 and the
onset of a published writing life that was to make his
name and probably kill him, White was still stretching
out his hand to provide a safe haven for a beleaguered
Kerouac. In late 1957 just as On the Road was about
to fill the bookstores, White invited Jack out to stay
in a property close to the White family home, “I
remained in New York until July, 1955 when I returned
to Denver because of my father’s terminal illness. In early
August Anne Waring and I were married, in Moose,
Wyoming, where the Warings were on vacation. After
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