Beat Generation Jack Kerouac Thunder’s Mouth Press ISBN 1-56025-742-3 hardcover, 112 pages $18 (US)

Empty Phantoms Paul Maher Jr. (ed) Thunder’s Mouth Press ISBN 1-56025-658-3 paper, 506 pages $18 (US)

Conversations With Jack Kerouac Kevin J. Hayes (ed) University Press of Mississippi ISBN 1-57806-755-3 paper, 112 pages $20 (US)

Collected Letters, 1944-1967 Neal Cassady Penguin ISBN 9780142002179 paper, 512 pages $18 (US)

The Beat Generation has been out of the vanguard of the avant-garde for at least a generation; their heyday is long past — 2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road — but public interest in the Beats remains surprisingly strong, despite the passage of time. On the Road is reportedly still one of the most stolen books in America — surely one measure of public interest — and I would not be surprised to hear that the book still inspires thousands of readers — young male readers, predominantly — to want to be writers themselves. Inspired not so much by the literary merit of Kerouac’s work, but because he made the writing profession seem glamorous, an exciting option to those who would never otherwise have considered it as a career.

Writers, as exemplified by Kerouac, were not effete, pasty-faced pedants who spent their lives indoors thumbing through their rhyming dictionaries and thesaurii; they wore plaid flannel work shirts and carried small spiral-bound notebooks in their front shirt pockets in which they jotted down poetic fragments — American haiku — and observations for the first draft of their next novel, novels whose characters were based on their own friends. What could be easier! Writers spent summers in monastic solitude on mountain tops in the Pacific Northwest, contemplating the void and jotting down further observations on life and death; they bopped to jazz in small clubs in Harlem or San Francisco; they hitched across the country and back; they had women by the dozens, and they drank: heavily, and in some cases fatally (although that dark conclusion was not as widely known as the more easily romanticized activities that preceded it).

Publishers continue to tap into this steady interest in the Beats with new books, although the latest batch of Beat books owes more to the efforts of archivists and editors — literary archaeologists digging through files — than to the authors themselves. The authors’ names, though, still feature prominently on the front covers.

Beat Generation is a three-act play which Kerouac wrote in 1957, the year that On the Road appeared. It has been said that Kerouac “woke up famous” on the morning the New York Times published its glowing review of his book, and you cannot blame him for trying to capitalize on the enormous public curiosity about this new Bohemia with this play. Previously unpublished (and never produced) the manuscript sat undiscovered in his agent’s files until 2004; Thunder’s Mouth Press published it in hardcover the following year; a paperback edition will follow this fall.

As Beat scholar A. M. Homes puts it in her introduction to the play:

It is set in a disappeared New York City, with the smoky scent of cigarettes hanging over all, men playing chess, the racket of the elevated subways, the feel of life lived underground, everything a little bit beat, […] It is a kind of demolition derby pileup, a jazzy musical of words picking up speed and hurling themselves forward. […] Beat Generation is about talking and friendship and shooting the shit, it is about the biggest question of all — existence.

The third act of Beat Generation was the skeleton shooting script for Pull My Daisy, the obscure 1959 Robert Frank film in which Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg both appeared, and for which Kerouac ad-libbed the narration. Play and film are set (at least in part) in a Bowery apartment; both feature a Bishop and a railroad brakeman as characters (Kerouac and Neal Cassady had worked as brakemen in California). The play is described on the back cover as “a major literary find”; however I think it is fair to say that Beat Generation, while a fascinating bit of Kerouac marginalia, is a slight work, more of interest to Beat completists than to the general reader.

Near the end of a 1958 interview with Mike Wallace (then of the New York Post, later a fixture with TV’s 60 Minutes) Jack Kerouac admits that he is “tremendously sad.”

I’m in great despair.

Why?

It’s a great burden to be alive. A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.

The same sentiment can be found in the 211th chorus of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, likely written years before the Wallace interview, during Kerouac’s 1955 stay in Mexico: “I wish I was free // Of that slaving meat wheel // And safe in heaven dead”; he knew a good line when he wrote one.

The Mike Wallace interview can be found in its entirety in Empty Phantoms, an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Jack Kerouac. The same interview can be found in Conversations With Jack Kerouac, a much slimmer volume (100 pages vs 500 pages) from the University Press of Mississippi. I’m afraid that the latter volume can only be seen as a case of unfortunate timing, since (with one insignificant exception) Empty Phantoms contains everything that Conversations does and then some.

We have Kerouac interviewed in 1958 by Ben Hecht on his Chicago radio show; and in 1968 by William F. Buckley on Firing Line (I’ve seen a clip of Kerouac’s Firing Line appearance; it is painful to watch as Buckley baits and mocks a visibly inebriated Kerouac). It is sobering to realize that, just one year after this interview, Kerouac had achieved the freedom he’d despaired at finding a decade earlier: dead in Florida from an internal hemorrhage at the age of 47.

The only fault I can find with Empty Phantoms is its lack of an index; why Paul Maher Jr. would go to this much trouble (tracking down and transcribing obscure audio and video appearances by Kerouac; ransacking the microfilmed archives of ancient daily newspapers) to compile such a thorough collection, and then omit the index, is a mystery. It is a small but not insignificant flaw in an otherwise stellar effort.

Born “on the road” in 1926, Kerouac’s muse Neal Cassady stole cars in Denver as a boy, leading to a year in reform school at the age of 18. Following his release he made his way to New York City with his 16-year-old wife, and while there met Ginsberg and Kerouac, forming a lasting friendship with both. Cassady was Dean Moriarty in On the Road; years later he hooked up with novelist Ken Kesey’s crowd, the Merry Pranksters, and became the driver of Furthur, the Merry Prankster bus, as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It was one of Cassady’s letters from 1950 which inspired Kerouac to change his writing style from that used in his first novel, the Thomas Wolfian Town and the City. This pivotal epistle — the so-called “Joan Anderson Letter” — was a stream-of-consciousness outpouring that was passed around (Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg to poet Gerd Stern) before a large portion of it was (according to legend) lost off Stern’s Sausalito houseboat in 1955. As Kerouac later described it, the letter

was a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoyevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it! I really got it from Neal. So I started to tell the story just the way it happened, too.

That 1950 letter — or at least the 5,100 word portion which remains — is included in Collected Letters, 1944-1967, as are more than two hundred other letters written by Cassady to Kerouac, Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and others, including a large selection of letters to Cassady’s second wife, Carolyn.

These letters are fascinating, for they are the natural expression of someone with little formal education, who, for a variety of reasons, decided that writing would be his way out of a life of petty crime. He looked to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs as role models, as a younger brother looks up to his college-educated elders. He had enormous energy; those who knew Cassady said that it was as if he could not keep still, and that restlessness is evident in this collection.

There are always several simultaneous plans underway: schemes for selling stolen overcoats and finding drugs; suggestions for rendezvous in Texas and Mexico, Denver and San Luis Obispo. Through 1947 Cassady fends off Ginsberg’s sexual advances while still trying — Sheherazade-like — to hold his interest as a writing mentor; in 1948 Cassady responds enthusiastically to Kerouac’s suggestion that they and their friends all live together on a ranch, and as the list of friends grows — “So that’s another 9 counting Julie and Bill [Burroughs] junior. That makes a house that […] ought to hold eighteen people” — we see what Cassady could not: that it would only ever have been another doomed utopia. What is amazing is how tenacious Cassady was in pursuing his many ambitions; unfazed by the setbacks which were to dog him right to the (premature) end, he never seemed to give up hope.

Despite the deceptions (Cassady — still married to Carolyn, and the father of two small children — writes to his ex-wife in 1952 to propose a secret tryst), and despite the petty criminality, there is a sense that Cassady was, in his own unique way, a quintessentially American idealist, and these letters are an essential addition to the Beat canon.