Review of The Voice Is All, a biography of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson

This review previously appeared in the Spring 2013 Edition of Rain Taxi.

Normally, when you break up with someone, you cut your losses and move on. If that someone is a writer, you might occasionally read a little bit of their work, usually hoping it’s not very good, reaffirming that you broke up with them because they lack depth, maturity, and talent. Only a few, exceptional, dedicated ex-lovers keep up with everything the other person goes on to do. Novelist and Kerouac biographer Joyce Johnson falls into the last category. Her love affair with Jack was over fifty years ago and he died in 1969, but apparently she is still haunted, or at least intrigued, by his ghostly presence in her life and as well as in American culture, as this is her third book about Kerouac.

Johnson has chosen to write about the beginning of Kerouac’s life, from his very early childhood to his writing of On the Road, roughly until the period when she dated Kerouac. What is immediately striking about the book is that while most biographies of artists are rather dull in the beginning—treating the artist’s early life as something you have to get through in order to get to the heart of the artist that can only be understood by dredging up the past—Johnson’s biography is immediately interesting, probably because so much of Kerouac’s work is autobiographical and begins with his own early childhood experiences. In its best moments, this is a true “literary biography.” It addresses many personal details about Kerouac’s life and relationships, ultimately tying almost everything back to Kerouac’s writing, from the death of his brother in his early childhood to the way people in his life became the characters of his novels and short stories, depicted both sympathetically and acrimoniously.

At worst, like all biographies, it is a collection of names and date that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the overall narrative, telling a tale of Jack that bounces from home to home to adventures—at sea, in New York, and ultimately, on the road—as well as relaying information about the people in his early life and the roles they ultimately ended up playing in his books: the boyhood friends, burgeoning writers, criminals and drug addicts, all powerful influences and characters. It is when Johnson gets into the story underneath the details, trying to get into his psyche, that the book really shines. Using his journals, novels, biographies of Kerouac, and her own personal experience, she attempts to explain some of Jack’s mental states and what motivated him in his life and in his writing. For example, talking about his marriage to Edie Parker, Johnson writes:

Here was another sobering ending in Jack’s life—one of the failures and mistakes he hoped his book would redeem . . . He was in a troubled mood one afternoon in late August after he had spent the previous night looking through a family album . . . in the city, he reflected gloomily, the people he knew felt threated by what a family album represented. (222)

In moments like this, it is easy to see the influence of Joyce Johnson the novelist on her nonfiction: I occasionally found myself stopping to ask, “how does she know what Jack was thinking?” For the most part, though, you don’t question that—you just enjoy the ride, the way you would read a novel without questioning the omniscient narrator. For the more skeptical reader, there is an acknowledgement of the role of Johnson’s assistant in helping her to wade through Jack’s extensive journals and papers, and at the end of the book, of course, there are extensive notes. She has, it would seem, a fairly firm footing into Kerouac’s psyche, both from memory and from research.

Johnson appears to have very genuine affection for Kerouac. She addresses Kerouac’s failings head-on, but does so in a generous and loving manner. Writing about Kerouac’s much-discussed relationship with his mother, Johnson says “his inability to make a commitment to any woman other than his mother took me a while to understand . . .” In this same section, she talks about one factor in the break-up of their relationship being Kerouac’s womanizing, which “went on very openly after he became famous, though he did try not to hurt me (186).” You can see the genuine affection that the two of them maintained for each other throughout their lives, “judging from what he wrote about our time together in Desolation Angels.”

Kerouac is famed for writing the quintessential road novel; On the Road played a large part in establishing the automobile and the road as part of the mythology of America. Yet Johnson talks about his affinity to his French roots throughout his life. He struggled with mastery of writing in English, as opposed to the joual, a primarily spoken form of French, that he grew up with in his early days and that he frequently returned to. Describing it as lacking “layers of subtlety and politeness,” this may in fact, explain some of Jack’s straightforward style of writing, as opposed to the more baroque style of the French writers that he had initially revered. Chapters like “Franco-American Ghosts,” “A Half-American Boyhood” and “White Ambitions” in particular discuss this continuing issue as something Jack struggled with throughout his life, rather than something that was “settled” for him early on.

Working between two languages can result in a split psyche for a writer, and ultimately, you get a sense of Jack’s ambivalence towards most things in his life: his family and personal relationships, as well as his need to be involved with groups, from his boyhood to the Beat Generation writers. Johnson also talks about the way that Jack wrestled with libertinism versus Catholic morality. This is something that Kerouac would struggle with his whole life, particularly towards the end when he had become fairly conservative and seemed to have turned his back on Allen Ginsberg, for example, in his infamous drunken rant on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Reading Johnson’s biography, it is easier to see that this was actually a reflection of a lifetime of contradiction between two sides of himself, but also the reflection of a lifetime of feeling pulled in multiple directions.

Avoiding, for the most part, the incessant mythologizing about Kerouac that still pervades Beat studies today, The Voice Is All adds a great deal to our understanding of Kerouac, showing how the writer can be understood by knowing the man.

Chapter 1 of my accursed novel

That is what I have come to call the project that I have worked on intermittently and/or has sat in a drawer, on my computer, etc. for the past 25 years. I think that should I ever finish it, which I probably won't, maybe that will be the title. My Accursed Novel. For now, to have something to post, and maybe even get some comments, I think I will serialize it here. I would especially like comments such as "it's not so bad . . . ." But criticism, particularly the constructive kind, but whatever, is also welcomed, nay, highly encouraged!

CHAPTER: THE STARLIGHT MOTEL


I am a woman escaping.


Maureen looked around at the room that had become her "halfway house". A sterile, quiet, beautiful motel room with a white wood desk. She felt like the battered women she had spent two semesters working with as a volunteer at the shelter. She was grateful for a moment of peace, the breather. Unlike those women, what was chasing Maureen was not going to come bursting through the door with clenched knuckles and a red angry face. It would come out of her own mouth, and so she tried to remain silent. It would conjure in her sleep, and so she hadn't slept in days. This space belongs only to me, she thought, only to me. The way the ducks and the ice own the river in the winter.


I am a shaman, she scribbled quickly into the notebook she had picked up at Walgreen's on the way over. I have come back from walking death. I heave been empty among my own bones and felt nothing. Not numbness. That has its own feeling. I am empty, fleshless, and now I dance because I have come back and because I have bones that creek and bend that have reconnected themselves in the right sequence and because I am not a bee pollinating dandelions, attaching myself to other people. I've come a long way to get here and tonight I can finally sleep in a strange bed.
Freedom is its own squandering. It's why we probably need marriages and church and school and government. Left with absolute freedom, we sit in a stupor, our minds racing over the things we could be doing, while we sit inanimate in indecision. Or we flit from one thing to the next. From tv to dancing to praying to singing to writing to whatever comes next. Our free self becomes an adolescent sleepover at the house of the family with neatest stuff. We know our freedom can't last forever, and so we try to do everything at once and pretend our freedom has no limits. And so we never get around to what matters most.


Jack Kerouac would have called it her Sansara self--this false world. But eventually, Maureen tired herself out and began to feel lonely. She got up from the bed, where she had been lying down and scribbling in the dark, and turned on the lights and the television. She put her sweatshirt back on, but not her pants and stepped quietly out of her room and went down the hall for a soft drink from the machine, careful not to let the door close completely behind her, as she had left the key somewhere under a pile of clothes and notebooks and whatever else was in her backpack. She went back to her room undetected and closed the door. She could hear someone else's television through the wall.


Motels like this were where you came for illicit affairs and she thought about meeting someone in the hallway. She focused on one of the men she had seen earlier at the ice machine. She slipped her hand inside her panties and began to imagine what might happen if . . .


She removed her t-shirt and leaned against the side wall. She felt sexy and melodramatic and unreal, like a character in a play. Maybe Blanche DuBois. She looked own at the round white parts of her breasts cupped by the lace, lighted by the moon. She wanted all of the men she had ever been in love with, who had not loved her in return, to be there now, to see her sitting in the half-light, half-dressed. She picked up the remote and turned off the television and laid back, running her hands along her body. She was torn between her sensual self-exploration and the desire to get up and write some more of her thoughts down.


Masturbation, it occurred to her, as she rubbed her hands over her belly, is like a form of meditation. You have to empty your mind of day to day things and focus on your breathing, your clitoris, your hands. It's no good if you conjure a conversation you had last week, or a Jerry Lewis movie, or start making a grocery list or worrying about your unpaid phone bill. With a partner, there is always someone to focus on, someone to pull you back. But alone, you need a Buddhist's self-control to stay focused.


She picked up the remote and turned the television back on. She turned sideways on the bed and propped her feet against the wall for balance, so she could still look at the television while she touched herself. All cheap motels have a dirty movie channel, she told herself, and when she came upon channel 43, she put the remote down and focused on the movie on the screen, thinking again about the man at the ice machine.


Maureen got up and looked outside the window. This was the kind of motel room women disappeared from. A busy, urban road that had narrowed into a slightly rundown section of town, it was nestled a long driveway's length from the road. It was not too far from the lake and still had a sign advertising color televisions in the room.
Once inside though, the room was suprisingly clean. There were a few cigarette burns on the bedspread and some permanent ink stains on the formic and faux wood desk. It was not the kind of hotel with its own stationary and a pristine bible in the bedstand.


The mysterious second door led not to an indoor lobby with a whirlpool, the way it might at a Ramada Inn, but to a cement balcony that, were it not lacking a ladder, might just as easily have been a fire escape. Maureen stepped out the back door and eased herself onto the cement. She sat with her back to wall, her knees arched, and feet flat on the cement. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Without realizing it, she began talking outloud, answering people she would see later in the week, or replaying conversations that had already happened. She sighed and "shushed" herself, leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes once more.


Maureen could hear fighting out in the hallway and someone pounding on the door of the room next to her. She started to lift herself from the balcony, to go back into her room and lock the door. Instead she relaxed her legs and sat back down. After a few minutes the manager came stomping down the hall and the noise subsided.


Eventually, Maureen became bored with her self and wanted to talk to someone. She ran down the list of people she knew, pacing slowly around the room. It occurred to her that of all the people she knew, she didn't feel close enough to any of them to call and talk to them about what had happened.


She started to take inventory of her "friends". Who could she call now? She tried to think of someone she would want to talk to right now, or someone she could crash with while she decided what to do next.

Life, Only Better

This was something I found in a journal that I had written a few years ago and found recently. This will be my last post for a while. I would love to know what you think.



Life, Only Better
(Tentative title for now)

Sometimes I need to just look out the window and think.

Sometimes I need to write something down and not develop it with examples, anecdotes, lists in 3s, with a thesis and a conclusion.

The thing about writers is that they can’t just have a thought. Everything has to become something. Thought is pressure to write. Not writing is guilt. Blasphemy. Squandered. What if the words (The Word) never comes back? What if in the course of remembering and recording you lose the beautiful phrase? Does the composer lose the melody sitting at the piano thye way I drop words at the keyboard? Is it not enough to have one thought? one beautiful moment? Must every note lead to a symphony, an opus? Each word the voice of a single angel raised to a cacophony?

“The problem with being a genius is that you spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing.” --Gertrude Stein

A year ago I was looking for you.

I don’t want to write a whole book about you. My life is not a book. Too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.

My mind is not a book.

No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better”. Only anal retentives think that.

I want to write and live movie trailers, with all the good stuff pulled into split-second cutaways, glimpses of the beautiful, explosions, and a great soundtrack.

And here you are.

I was wandering the streets in the snow wondering your name.

Every day I wait for you to leave.

I wanted you to make me feel better. To love you . . . was going to make me better.

Curving back on itself . . . what is the term? Concave? Elliptical? In the story it always curves back on itself, ties everything together even when it looked like nothing fit.

Novels imply there’s a grand design to life, a plan, a plot, a logic, an author.

A reason.

I am more random than that.

Switching from story to living (life) changes the words the cadence the way you live them the experience of your palate. Do you write to live on your mind or do you write to say things outloud?

Do you want to be read or to be heard? Do you write to say everything at once, or do you write to focus?

I thought of you as a reader.

The cafe is an oasis from life. Here is the desert island you are stranded on with only 3 possessions, only the items in your purse . . . a desert island with music and tv and sofas and lattes. But only a bit of yourself.

People resent artists for wanting what they themselves are not allowed to have either.

I envy the mad addicts, so lost in themselves that they have no room for the details of daily life, have faith that their muse will provide and someone will look out for them. I with no siblings, no dowry, no spouse, must fend for myself, straddling, required to feed myself, keep a roof over my own head in a world that is increasingly harsh, that gives no quarter to those who are different, those who desire anything more than the creature comforts craved by those who resent me. My wants are not so different--a roof over my head, money for going out, a doctor when I am sick, the occasional trip to see friends or family, to be be inspired by a new city. But the audacity of expecting such things in return for my mere art, my innermost, without sanction for my labor, a CEO to sign my check, an incorporation to keep the books . . .

Nothing in my home is fixed until it affects someone else.

When the war comes I will be free of responsibility, when the creditor/landlord/collector finally has other concerns.

Is there an understanding that never fades? Even Dresden was rebuilt. The shadows of Nagasaki are monuments now. Art. Memory. Museum. All knowledge becomes memory eventually.

How will I become a stranger for 40 days?

On Tuesdays the Somalian women go to English class. They get on the bus bringing with them the smell of Sandalwood.

On Tuesday I get on the bus with my hair wild, disoriented after a night of poetry and war reports.

You make me want to write
you make me want to write
you down.

I could never write on the bus. Not because of motion sickness, but because I cannot stop looking out the window, watching moments pass and time pass in marvels. Once I was [there] and now I am [here], minutes across a city, hours across a state/country/continent.

It’s sad when you can’t [don’t][don’t want to] love someone anymore. When you feel sorry to remember. Now that the daydream is over, this is not your story anymore. It’s just something I’ve written
remembered
lived

and I watch for you at the window mechanically, without desire
Miss you with annoyance

One year later, like always, I sit in the cafe watching for you outside the window. I have your phone number committed to memory [permission to speak] have seen your house walked your dog hugged your lover. I try to remember your mysteries. What it was to want you.

Anticipation.

Familiar.
Like always I watch for you.
I forget what it was to be strange
etranger
(e)strange(d)

What is the shelf-life of grief?
Anniversaries give us permission.

You are a conversation with myself.

I wrote you a letter by committee.

Is God a narcissist? to require us to love him?

Maybe god’s infinity comes from us. If god is love, and that love is unrequited, does god become finite, diminish? in existentialism, maybe god is not really dead, just burning himself up like the sun. Love is finite only when nothing comes back to you in return. It makes you stingy.

Unrequited love’s a bore--Jack Kerouac

At one I time I wanted to give you things. Take you places. Show you.

At one time.

Which is to say, not anymore.