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A Half-American Writer up. When I can’t sleep because my mind is ringing with gongs of English thought and sentences, he says, Pense en Francais, knowing I will calm down and go to sleep in simplicity.” Jack saw this older brother as “my original self returning after all the years since I was a child trying to become un Anglais in Lowell from shame of being a ‘Canuck.” He wrote that it was actually the first time he understood that he had “undergone the same feelings any Jew, Negro or Italian feels in America, so cleverly had I concealed them, even from myself, and with such talented, sullen aplomb for a kid.” Jack spent that summer in Mexico City, a place that in many ways reminded him of Lowell with its poverty and its many Catholic churches. There he continued to struggle with the road novel that was giving him so much trouble. After his mother forwarded him Yvonne LeMaitre’s review of the The Town and the City, in which she praised his writing but called his novel a tree without roots, he immediately started on a new book called Gone on the Road about a 15-year-old Franco American kid from New Hampshire called Freddie Boncoeur, who hitchhikes across America with an older and wiser cousin in search of Freddie’s lost father. This novel too he put aside after returning to New York in the fall and resuming his frustrating attempts to write his road novel with American characters. It was a wonder the Jack didn’t completely wear out his material or his desire to write On the Road. In December, however, something very important happened that immediately opened up a new direction for his work. Jack received a 40-page confessional letter from Neal Cassady that immediately made him decide to renounce both “fiction and fear.” Energized by the power and fluency of working directly from memory, Jack responded to Neal with a series of memoirlike letters about his Lowell childhood and the death of his brother Gerard. It was the most stunning writing Jack had ever done, and he could feel it. “The Voice is all!” he wrote Neal triumphantly. He was finally starting to use the richly evocative first-person voice he had been suppressing in his fiction. In March of 1951, Jack went even further— experimenting for the first time in writing entirely in French. His first experiment was the opening section of a projected novel called “Sur la Route” in an awkward French literary style he apparently had difficulty sustaining. His second experiment, La Nuit Est ma Femme, which he also called Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne (Michel Bretagne’s Jobs) was far more successful—in fact, it’s a wonderful piece of writing that has never been transcribed from his notebook, and needs to be carefully translated and published so that everyone can read it. Written in a strong, direct, conversational first-person voice, with great immediacy and intimacy, it tells the story of an unsuccessful Franco American writer who has sacrificed everything to his creative work and feels the need to account for himself. In this manuscript, Jack wrote about his lifelong dilemma—the conflict between what a man had to do in order to survive and the dreams of immortality that kept him an artist child, preventing him from making the compromises others made out of necessity and causing him to walk away from one demeaning job after another. He wrote about the mill whistles he used to hear in Lowell and his fear that he could end up as one of the workers trudging toward the factories that made him get a scholarship and start writing, and how the die was cast once he’d discovered the classic American writers, Twain, Melville, Thoreau and Wolfe, who wrote what he called “unknown, unsoundable books.” Jack translated one important passage from this book into English: “I wanted to write in a large form which was free and magnificent like that, a form which would give me a chance to go out the window and not stay in the room all the time with old ladies like Henry James and his European sisters.” He wrote the sixty pages of La Nuit Est Ma Femme in mid-March. In mid-April, when he sat down to write On the Road he would keep the ingenuous-sounding forthrightness of the Michel Bretagne voice as well as the overtones of its cadences and the tinge of melancholy that washes through it even when its energies seem highest. The voice he gave his first-person narrator would seem to Jack’s future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been born in French. But very soon after finishing On the Road, Jack felt dissatisfied with it. He knew he had still not been really truthful in the way he portrayed the protagonist he’d based on himself, even though he’d called him Jack Kerouac, for he had only dealt with the question of his ethnicity between the lines—notably in a rueful passage about having “white ambitions,” which could only have been written by someone who did not feel “white,” with the privileged status that that word implied. In Kerouac’s third novel, Visions of Cody, Jack would finally openly inhabit his Franco American identity and never conceal it again, and he would boldly and deliberately include passages and expressions in the French Canadian language. The Jack Duluoz of Cody would be a further exploration of that melancholy, half-American outsider Michel Bretagne of La Nuit Est Ma Femme.“ The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson - was published in recent times by the Viking Press. 18
CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited by Scott F. . Par arker (University Press of Mississippi) Seventeen interviews from a man who apparently didn’t enjoy them much at all. They stretch from the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in 1959, with Kesey having taken LSD, to his last interview in 1999 with Mike Finioa. As editor Scott Parker points out, there is an air of regret that can be traced in Kesey, throughout these interviews, a regret that his extracurricular activities took him away from a fuller writing life. Put simply, he wished he had written more books. Kesey was more than a novelist of course. An iconic trailblazing figure, an integral personality at the head of this thing loosely called the ‘Sixties Revolution.’ Furthur was his bus and his aim. His Paris Review interview in 1993 highlights his ambitions after graduating from the famous Wallace Stegner writing program at Stanford University. A course that also included Robert Stone, Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry. Stegner and Kesey clashed over the direction Kesey took after the course. Kesey theorised that Stegner contented himself with Jack Daniels and Kesey opted for LSD. To some, Kesey remains a one hit wonder. That wonder being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The big advantage that epic novel had was being filmed and given widespread promotion with Jack Nicholson in the key role of Randell P. McMurphy. That film fixed the book in a wider consciousness and cemented Kesey’s reputation. Yet it was a big thing to live up to. There are many who cite Sometimes a Great Notion as a better book. Again that book was turned into a film, with Paul Newman involved. Somehow it never quite captured the imagination in the same fashion. The film royalties must have provided a cushion financially for Kesey, perhaps taking away the urgency to write. Certainly there were issues he had with the film of Cuckoo’s Nest. In an interview with Allan Balliett for Beat Scene (not included in this collection) some years go, Kesey talks of not being invited to the film premiere. Kesey has any number of gripes, but he gripes in a good natured way, he seems to be a man without a malicious bone in his body. Talking to Terry Gross in 1989 he discusses the Tom Wolfe depiction of him in The Electric Kool Aid Test book, a work which fixed Kesey’s image firmly in a much wider public view. Kesey is at pains to point out his admiration for Wolfe, who, he says, didn’t have a tape recorder with him, he simply possessed a keen, observant nature. However, he stresses that Wolfe only relayed part of who Kesey was in his book. The picture is incomplete. What is evident from these intriguing interviews is that like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey was a thorn in the side of right wing, repressive factions inside the American government. He was adept at exposing CIA funded initiatives - supposedly innocent organisations, that the covert government departments utilised to infiltrate everyday American life. It might have taken Ginsberg and Kesey, who was initially sceptical of Ginsberg’s CIA allegations, twenty years or more to expose the covert CIA operations, but they were both dogged individuals. Ken Kesey may have written but a few books but they all made their mark. These interviews reveal a man of high ideals. ISBN 978-1-61703-982-9 - Paperback $25 University Press of Mississippi, 3825 Ridgewood Road, Jackson, MS 39211-6492, USA www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1666 Colin Cooper 19
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: A Half-American Writer Another impo
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 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 45 and 46: Write a Madder Letter if You Can ho
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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