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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 44
Write a Madder Letter if You Can honeymooning in Wyoming and California, we moved into the Waring summer house south of Denver, where our first son Ted was born two years later, on September 28, 1957. Jack was invited to come and stay in the studio on the “farm’ property, but he was distraught and ill at that time, and unfortunately didn’t recognize that this offered an opportunity for a quiet, restful country retreat in which he could have gathered together his deteriorating life.” This would have been the time when the media spotlight was fully trained on Kerouac in the curious event that partially stemmed from old friendships when Neal Cassady and girlfriend turned up at the White household in the spring of 1968. White got home from an architect’s meeting to find an unknown car parked outside his house. But let him take up the story, this, in part, a commentary on one of Jack’s late in the day missives, “In the spring of 1968 I returned home from a meeting with the Garland School Board on the design of the new Foundation building to find an incredibly dilapidated Pontiac Sedan parked in front of the garage door. It was completely “But since (childhood) I have learned that the really great man is someone like Wm. Blake, in whose time there was nothing heard from him, but silence. All the Carlyle heroes (…) were ‘men of silence and darkness.’ But in this age of noontime and noise (revolving doors, advertising agencies, blurbs, traffic, small talk) such men are not even wanted. and are laughed at. I like to think of Mark Twain as the one truly great mediator between silence and darkness (…) I derive my life from the existence of a Twain and not from the existence of the psychological fact that he who wants to be a great man suffers from delusions of inferiority within. What difference does it make after a Huck Finn, a Journey to the End of the Night, a Song of Innocence is written? Those works are foremost; the ‘great man’ is but a victim of universal mortal limits, after all.” Jack Kerouac – excerpt from a letter to Ed White on March 5, 1950. wake of On the Road being published. Those close to the events, such as Joyce Johnson, have commented that Jack was finding solace in drinking ever more heavily and that this essentially shy, quiet man was having big trouble coping with all the attention. Joyce Johnson speaks of Jack not turning up for promotional events, lying on her floor in a kind of stage fright. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but a quiet refuge in Denver might have been just the ticket for him at that stage. This and the many other commentaries from White make this paperback an unlikely valuable source of insight into Kerouac’s life. Ed White was a relatively conventional friend for Kerouac. He went on to be a prominent figure in Denver, responsible for some crucial work in designing how the city looked. Others like Burroughs, Cassady, Ginsberg enjoy the close focus and scrutiny; yet it is refreshing to read of other friends and allegiances. Not enough work is done in this area. I’m certain it would provide fresh perspective on Kerouac. Put simply, it is another slant on Kerouac; it prods us into rethinking who he was. The notes back and forth diminish and become briefer with the passage of time. There is one filled with what appeared to be bags of laundry. I hurried into the house, and Anne told me Neal Cassady was upstairs taking a shower in the boys’ bathroom, and his girl companion was in the master bathroom. I think our boys, then 10 and 8, were in their bedrooms. With the experience I had from Neal’s past visits to other friends, it was apparent he hoped to move in for a while.” White goes on to describe how Neal had two different boots on. Neal explains it by telling the story of another vengeful girlfriend and of his hopes for the immediate future. It involved much travelling. It is plainly obvious that while White and Cassady went back a long way, the prospect of Neal Cassady, wired as he was at that late point in his life, and a girlfriend staying in his house was not an option. And who could blame him? White concludes his remembrance by commenting, “Luckily, to, we were able to get Cassady and his friend back on their way before they could unpack all their belongings.” There are many warm letters between Ed White and Jack Kerouac. Naturally the emphasis here is on Jack’s letters; however White’s contribution is an invaluable aspect of it all. He pushes and prods 45
Page 1 and 2: Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
Page 3 and 4: Number 73 Summer 2014 Editor ditor.
Page 5 and 6: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 7 and 8: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Du
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
Page 17 and 18: A Half-American Writer Another impo
Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
Page 21 and 22: company alongside Charles Olson, Ro
Page 23 and 24: abstract expressionist painters wer
Page 25 and 26: Jeffers is my God interest in it. H
Page 27 and 28: Cajoled Not notified of ancient Cur
Page 29 and 30: Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too,
Page 31 and 32: Ginsberg on Kerouac after being in
Page 33 and 34: Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie v
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
Page 49 and 50: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction Despi
Page 51 and 52: THE BEAT SCENE REVIEW SECTION Dexte
Page 53 and 54: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 55 and 56: Jack Kerouac The Haunted Life and O
Page 57 and 58: The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
Page 59 and 60: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
Page 61 and 62: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
Page 63: Diane di Prima having her long hair

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