Poetry Flash

[stilltrucking]

http://www.poetryflash.org/archive.288.Foley.html

Number 288
August/September 2001

A Life in Letters:
Ann Charters on Jack Kerouac
JACK FOLEY
Copyright © 2001 Poetry Flash

"AIMER, TRAVAILLER ET SOUFFRIR"
("LOVE, WORK AND SUFFER")
---Kerouac Family Motto




"JF: Philip Roth. And of course the Partisan Review crowd hated Kerouac.

AC: Yeah, yeah. This is on his mind. These are the competition. But the other thing that the reviewer in Boston couldn't understand was that, not only was he an anti-Semite, he also was hitting on me. I'm a married woman; I'm twenty-nine years old; I've been married to Sam at this point for seven years; we've been together ten years, and I love him very much. We're thinking of having a family soon. And when Kerouac turned out to be physically so wasted, there was no sexual attraction between us---not even an instinctive animal thing, nothing. But he kept propositioning me. Why don't I fuck him, why don't I fuck him. He asked me endlessly to go to bed with him, 'cause we're working in his bedroom, his study. Meanwhile his mother is right outside in the kitchen in a little Cape Cod house making sandwiches and bringing trays of food in to me, which is wonderfully hospitable. But, even if I'd wanted to, why would I do that? Anyway, the point is that the reviewer didn't know why I came back the second day. (It took two days to work with Kerouac to compile the bibliography.) It made me so confused! I came back the second day to finish the job. I was not a housewife with a Ph.D. I was really a committed professional, even though this was not anything that a major publisher had commissioned. If Kerouac had put a strong arm on me, if he'd raped me, if he had been physically brutal, I would have absolutely never have come back, I would have left the house. But he was a very gentle man. It was all verbal abuse. If you're propositioning someone and you don't get a yes the first time, you are not allowed to say it again! And Jack kept repeating it like a mantra. And I kept saying, "No, I love my husband; I don't want to do that," recognizing that he wouldn't have any respect for me. He had this virgin/whore kind of mentality---very working class in his sexual orientation. And it just didn't turn me on at all. When the reviewer asked why did I go back, I thought, "What an interesting comment!" The reviewer had no idea that women who are fifties women, like myself, took verbal abuse all the time. It was the society we lived in. Guys hit on us all the time. If they were physical about it, that's it---there's no continuing. But verbal abuse---hey, it rolls off the back. And I had a job to do. I believed in Kerouac as a writer. And the wasted man who was kindly showing me things and answering my questions, courteously treating me in every other respect like a human being and a scholar and a gentlewoman, except in his muddled, drunken---he was really going through a fifth and a half of Johnnie Walker Red Label when I was working with him and six packs of beer---he was out of his mind; he was an alcoholic. So the verbal abuse didn't get in the way of the job we did. He was functioning on a professional level; I was functioning on a professional level. And that stayed with me, that memory of Jack was the final memory. And that's what I was trying to do in the letters: emphasize that he was always a writer. [This incident is written about in chapter thirty-four of Charters' book, Kerouac: A Biography. Charters writes: "I realized after meeting Kerouac that the reality of the man was tragic, but the mark of his genius had been to create novels out of the tragedy of his own life. As a literary artist he transformed his own existence full of suffering and enlarged it in his fiction to be greater than life. This constituted the force of his genius, of his originality." ---JF]"

JF: In your biography you quote William Burroughs's remark about Kerouac that he was so much a writer that he really didn't feel anything he did to be real. And that's of course one of the themes of Kerouac's work: the unreality of this world.

AC: He turned it all into literature.

Poet and critic Jack Foley's most recent books are