Luanne Henderson:
It was kind of a shock when I found out that On the Road had become a pattern for young people.
A friend of mine, a young boy about twenty-two years old, I guess, came up from Los Angeles with these two young girls, about eighteen—in their late teens—and this woman that was a friend of the boy, she had lived with me. She had told him about On the Road, and so forth. I’d never even talked to him about it at all, but he had related all this to these girls, and they had to come to meet me, so he brought them up to the house.
They were on their way to Denver to re-create the trip back to New York, and I couldn’t believe that. How could anybody? It was just totally insane to me. You know, here are these two well-heeled young women from upper-middle-class families, money in their pockets and beautiful clothing, and they were going to Denver and go through with this. I don’t care what they did, but I just couldn’t imagine young people trying to re-create something out of a book like that. It was really a shock to me to find out what impact Jack’s books were having on the younger generation.
Of course, I loved the book, but I guess in living it and being around Jack and Allen and all of them I didn’t think about it as material for a book. It was quite convinced that John [Holmes] would finish his book, because they were all dedicated and disciplined. They weren’t fly-by-night, you know, running around not getting anything accomplished. I just never thought of Jack as being famous, or Allen as being famous. We were all just doing a thing, and that was the extent of it.
Malcolm Cowley:
I think most of Jack’s place will be for On the Road, and there’ll be a little passage in the history of American literature on his revelation that there was a new underground generation with new standards. He was a precursor, of course, of the revolution of the 1960s. Strangely, that revolution of the sixties has receded, but On the Road keeps on being read.
John Clellon Holmes:
The tragedy—I shouldn’t even call it that—but the irony is that he worked so hard to project, to put on paper and project in the world a vision, his own particular vision. Somebody else is going to have to judge how widespread it was, how encompassing it was. He’d worked really very selflessly out of his genius to get it down, and then when it came back to him, when it was accepted, from his point of view, for the wrong reasons, he didn’t know how to handle it.
I’m not sure that if you handle fame, you deserve it. He deserved it because he was a great writer, in my opinion, but there was nothing in his personality that could handle it, that could be judicious about it, that could say, “Well, I understand they’re not talking to me, they’re talking to their idea of me.” That’s what made him good.
Jack had tremendous areas of—I’m loath to call it ignorance, but they were. But that’s what made him good.
If he’d known how the world worked he never would have broken his heart over it.
Lucien Carr:
He ain’t dead to me by a long jack shot. And I mean it, not only in terms of a man, but in terms of someone that scribbles, scribbles, scribbles, a scrivener, a writer. Jack is very important to me, and he’s just as alive today as he ever was. Unfortunately, he can’t come down here and crack his head on the floor with us.
Man, you don’t see a plant like that grow right in front of your face without loving it. What Jack was, Jack was—it was like you were glad to be a man, you were glad to be alive!
Could there have been some pure way that Jack could have lived? No, he had to have it just the way it came to him. How could he come out of that house of his mother and his father, of Leo and Mémêre, when their only real feeling was for money, fame, and glory, and for nothing, for nothing that meant anything.
Jack was so corrupted by the world. A man on the run, that’s what he was. The poor man! There was no way, no fucking way, no way to join Kerouac, no way to love Kerouac. He had to come down off a hill that was never built for him.
He went up a hill of books and fame, and then he had to come down that hill—down that hill …why. Why? Because the media had put him into a thing, which he didn’t want to be. He really wanted to be that old fart that was his father, that’s who he wanted to be. And he wanted to sit on the top of the hill and say that’s who he was, and “I know this millionaire,” and “That’s my good buddy.”
More than that, he wanted to be like Neal.
I told Kerouac, from the first time I met him to the last time I saw him, I told him this: “You have a barrel full of apples, and you got a few rotten ones in there, you motherfucker. You’re ruining your soul.” And that is what he did. God!
What can a man do for another? What can a man do for his brother? What can a man do for love? Nothing. Nothing.
It’s a bad thing when you got that mother and that father at home, trying to smut you into the football team or smut you into this or that—or dying of cancer. I say to you, gentlemen, that I should have done better by Jack than go to jail. I mean, I wasted my time going to jail. I should have done better. I should have saved his fucking ass.
I would love to have gone to Ozone Park and say to his mother and his father, “Ah, I am here, it’s so nice to be here—ah, Mémêre, oh, Leo, oh, yes, Leo—it’s very nice, I’ve brought you this present, it’s something to free Jack!”