Go Your Own Way
THE BEATS
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight
the weight we carry
is love.
—Allen Ginsberg, “Song”
White picket fences were not everyone’s idea of the American dream in the postwar 1940s and ’50s—least of all Jack Kerouac and the other beat writers who boldly rejected social norms in favor of individuality and a free-love lifestyle. Although their alternative way of life came at a price, the result was groundbreaking books like Kerouac’s counterculture masterpiece On the Road. Two other works—William Burroughs’s sex-and-drug-fueled Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg’s homoerotic Howl and Other Poems—instigated notorious obscenity trials that helped end literary censorship in America.
Edie Parker’s wedding gift to Jack Kerouac was bail money. The couple exchanged vows at New York City Hall in August 1944, with the groom handcuffed to a detective during the ceremony. After the nuptials took place, the officer treated the newlyweds to cocktails and accompanied them to a restaurant for a steak dinner before escorting Kerouac back to the slammer until his release could be arranged with funds from Edie’s inheritance. The writer had helped a friend conceal a murder weapon, although charges against him were eventually dropped.
While their marriage lasted just six months, Kerouac and Edie had been together in an open relationship for several years. Both were Columbia University dropouts—she was a former art student, and he had abandoned a football scholarship. They met through Edie’s boyfriend, who eventually lost her to the handsome, athletic Kerouac after innocently asking him to look after his girl while he shipped out with the merchant marine.
Kerouac also joined up with the merchant marine, both to aid the effort during World War II and to garner fodder for his fiction by sailing the seas like his idol Herman Melville. When he wasn’t aboard ship, he shared a Manhattan apartment with Edie and her friend Joan Vollmer, both before and after his wedding. Kerouac had his wife to thank for more than just springing him from jail. It was through Edie that he first came to know the other major personalities of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.
Joan’s abode was a popular gathering place for aspiring writers, amateur philosophers, petty criminals, college dropouts, and others living beyond the bounds of traditional 1940s society. Drugs and drink flowed, and free love was practiced in earnest. Nineteen-year-old Ginsberg, the youngest of the bunch, was smitten with Kerouac, who was no stranger to sex with men but preferred to bed women.
Burroughs, the elder statesman of the group at thirty, favored men but began sleeping with their hostess, Joan, a divorcée and Benzedrine addict. Witty and well-versed in philosophy and literature, she often participated in discussions with her housemates while holding court from the bathtub. Burroughs, too, was a divorcé. While traveling in Europe in 1936, he magnanimously married a Jewish woman so she could escape Nazi persecution and had the union dissolved once the bride made it safely to the United States.
Life changed dramatically for Kerouac and Ginsberg after the ruggedly handsome, swaggering Neal Cassady turned up in the Big Apple. Burroughs never got on well with the Denver pool shark and car thief, introduced to the group by an acquaintance from Columbia. Cassady and his sixteen-year-old wife, LuAnne, rumbled into town on a Greyhound bus after their classier mode of transport—a stolen car—had broken down en route. A mass of contradictions, Cassady had been arrested ten times and yet made a serious dent in the offerings at the Denver Public Library.
The madcap adventure-seeker became a muse for both Ginsberg and Kerouac, most famously serving as the model for lively wheelman Dean Moriarty in the latter’s tale of wanderlust and youthful rebellion On the Road. The semiautobiographical novel incorporated many real-life events, including Kerouac’s memorable early encounter with Cassady, during which he arrived at the apartment where the out-of-towner was staying and interrupted a lovemaking session with LuAnne. Rumor has it that Cassady answered the door in the buff, although in On the Road Dean is clad in shorts. The randy muse also served as the inspiration for the titular character in Kerouac’s Visions of Cody while in Ginsberg’s notorious Howl he is immortalized as the “secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver.”
Several months after their initial meeting, Kerouac ventured west to look up Cassady but felt like a third wheel when he arrived. Ginsberg had beaten him to Denver and immediately hopped into bed with their mutual friend. In addition to dallying with Ginsberg, Cassady was still seeing LuAnne despite their impending divorce and was also involved with graduate art student Carolyn Robinson. None too pleased at having to compete so heavily for Cassady’s affections, Ginsberg wrote bitterly in his journal that he needed to “remind Neal to ditch a few women.” No doubt the frustrated Romeo would have been further incensed to know that Cassady had won over Carolyn with love poems Ginsberg had written him, passed off as his own.
While in town, Kerouac became friendly with Carolyn, but when chemistry developed between them he reluctantly told her, “It’s too bad, but that’s how it is. Neal saw you first.” Carolyn wasn’t as charmed by Ginsberg, whom she discovered having a ménage à trois with Cassady and LuAnne. She hadn’t known about either of her boyfriend’s lovers and was aghast at his having sex with a man. And yet she wasn’t completely without sympathy for Ginsberg, commenting that “an accident of gender was all that put me where he wanted to be.”
Although Cassady was an aspiring writer himself, his only published work, an unfinished autobiography, appeared posthumously. It was his frenetic, rambling personal correspondence that had a lasting literary legacy. Kerouac sought to emulate his friend’s spontaneous, discursive letter-writing style and break away from the more conventional prose he’d used in his first novel, The Town and the City. Cassady’s dispatches, in which he wrote about sexual escapades and his degenerate past, were “all first person, fast, mad, confessional,” enthused Kerouac.
Back in New York and unable to interest a publisher in his fiction, Kerouac was consoling himself with casual affairs when Cassady called to report he was the proud owner of a legally obtained, brand-new 1949 Hudson sedan. Leaving Carolyn and their infant daughter behind, he and LuAnne, who was riding shotgun, fetched Kerouac at a relative’s house in North Carolina.
Their monthlong, coast-to-coast joy ride, which helped inspire On the Road, ended abruptly in San Francisco when Cassady dropped Kerouac and LuAnne at the curb and announced he was heading home to his wife and child. “You see what a bastard he is?” Marylou asks Sal in On the Road. “Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it’s in his interest.” Fiction follows real life when Sal and Marylou, stand-ins for Kerouac and LuAnne, find a hotel room and end up in bed together.
Six years after his hasty city hall nuptials, Kerouac tied the knot once more. This time the bride was Joan Haverty, whose boyfriend had wanted to arrange an assignation between her and his friend Kerouac. Before the tryst took place, the drunken matchmaker was killed trying to climb out the window of a moving subway car. Several weeks later, Kerouac happened to pass by the apartment Joan had shared with her late beau and called up to her window. He proposed to the attractive seamstress within days, and they wed two weeks later. Their whirlwind courtship featured in On the Road,, in which he recalled the night he met “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for. . . . We agreed to love each other madly.”
Despite the ardent vow, this marriage, like his first, lasted a mere six months. Although a dismal time for Kerouac personally, it proved to be a productive stint in his career. After struggling with his “road book,” he powered through a three-week marathon typing session fueled by caffeine and drugs. On a continuous piece of scroll-like paper, he turned out 125,000 words, the first draft of On the Road.
Kerouac and Joan said good-bye for good when she announced she was pregnant. Forced to choose between her husband, who demanded she have an abortion, and their baby, she opted for motherhood. In a low move, the writer denied paternity, claiming Joan was insane and that she had been unfaithful. He was briefly jailed for failing to pay spousal support and didn’t meet his daughter until a decade later. Joan got revenge by airing her grievances publicly in an article, “My Ex-Husband, Jack Kerouac, Is an Ingrate,” in Confidential magazine, the National Enquirer of the day.
After his bitter break with Joan, Kerouac moved into the Cassady’s attic in San Francisco for a time. With Neal’s approval, his simmering attraction to Carolyn escalated into an affair she instigated. As he did with both of his wives, Kerouac moved in on a woman who had a romantic connection to a friend. The love triangle—reimagined in his novel Big Sur—lasted for several months until tensions flared between the two men. The writer then headed to Mexico to visit Burroughs, who was embroiled in a scandal so outlandish it could have been fodder for a film noir crime drama.
Burroughs had moved south of the border with his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, after fleeing Texas and Louisiana in the wake of drug busts. During a drunken revelry, the pair sought to entertain fellow partiers with a familiar routine. Joan placed a glass on top of her head while Burroughs, a crack shot, took aim with a gun. He fired from six feet away, tragically missing the glass and shooting her instead.
Burroughs insisted Joan’s death was an accident but didn’t rule out the possibility of darker, subconscious forces at work. Although he was haunted by the terrible incident, in the introduction to his novel Queer he confessed that it lit fire to his creativity. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” he admitted. Knowing him to be a skilled marksman, an acquaintance suggested that Joan, who suffered debilitating physical symptoms from years of drug use, may have committed suicide by moving at the last minute.
Burroughs escaped jail time with the aid of a local lawyer, some well-placed bribes, and two witnesses prepared to testify that the gun went off inadvertently. The perpetrator fled the country, later learning that he was given a two-year suspended sentence. He set out for Central and South America and then visited New York, bunking with Ginsberg, to whom he declared his love. Although he was once infatuated with Burroughs, Ginsberg was no longer interested and harshly told his houseguest, “I don’t want your ugly old cock.”
At the time Ginsberg rejected Burroughs’s invitation to hit the sack, he was in a straight phase. After intense psychoanalysis, the sexually conflicted poet declared himself heterosexual and began sleeping with women. One of his girlfriends was Alene Lee, an African American woman who later became involved with Kerouac and appears as the main character’s love interest in his novel The Subterraneans. Ginsberg’s vow of heterosexuality lasted until he gazed at a naked portrait of Peter Orlovsky at a San Francisco artist’s studio. When he asked about the blond-haired man gracing the canvas, his host obligingly called into the next room and the real thing sauntered into view.
Living a nonconformist life worked out better for some of the beat generation writers than for others. Kerouac achieved overnight celebrity when On the Road was finally published, but he then spiraled into alcoholism, eventually unable to write and sometimes walking the streets in a drunken stupor. The writer was married to his third wife and de facto caretaker (she hid his shoes so he couldn’t go bar hopping) when he died of internal bleeding, caused by cirrhosis, at age forty-seven. Cassady, too, passed away in his forties, found lifeless in a Mexican ditch after a night of partying. The long-suffering Carolyn had kicked him out for good after he squandered their life savings at the track and bigamously married a model with whom he had a child.
Burroughs lived a hermetic existence, twenty-five years of it abroad, assuaging his loneliness in homosexual affairs and mind-altering drugs while pouring out his experiences on the page (he was one of the first American novelists to write explicitly about gay sex). Guilt and regret over Joan’s death perpetually tormented him.
Ginsberg was luckier in love—and life—than his beat counterparts. He took up with Orlovsky, publicly referring to him as his spouse. Neither was monogamous: both slept with other men—including Burroughs, who Ginsberg finally shagged, ugly old cock and all—as well as women. The two maintained a relationship for more than four decades, until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. Their daring openness about their liaison, which the poet’s celebrity brought into the spotlight, aided in advancing the gay liberation movement.
In a letter to Kerouac, Ginsberg once passed along some wisdom he heard from Burroughs: “I say we are here in human form to learn by the human hieroglyphs of love and suffering. It is a duty to take the risk of love.”
IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK