Another reason I was hesitant to excise too much, even of her repetitions, was that she tended to think aloud as she was talking, to think things through even as she was recalling them to me; and it was clear she was learning new things about her life even as she purported simply to tell me what had happened to her over the years. I wanted the reader of this interview to get that sense of her thinking aloud and following her own thoughts down new and unknown trails. To some extent, I did follow the normal procedure in redacting an interview, bringing together passages on the same subject that might appear at different points in the conversation. Interviewees often start to talk about a subject, then go off to something else, then return to the first subject when some new thought or memory strikes them about what they had been saying previously. It can be too disruptive to the reader to print accounts of various events broken up the way that people actually remember and speak them. So, for example, when Lu Anne tells of her trip from Denver to North Carolina with Neal and Al Hinkle in December 1948, I meld the several incomplete versions of the trip she gave at different points in the taped interview. But there were several places where I chose to go with a much more faithful rendition of the actual flow of her speech.
One of the charms of listening to Lu Anne was the pleasure of watching the associative trains, and occasional leaps, of her thoughts—the way one memory triggered another somewhat deeper, and then another deeper still, or the way she would sometimes keep getting pulled back to retell a story by the insistent demands of feelings that had not yet gotten fully expressed. An example of the former process is how, early in the taped interview, when she is talking about meeting Jack Kerouac and being puzzled by how shy he was in approaching girls, her mind suddenly jumps ahead a couple of years to the infamous New Year’s Eve party chronicled in both On the Road and John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go. She uses an event at that party to drive home her point about Jack’s inability to be subtle with women, and his bitterness about his own ineptitude. Since she talked at length later on about that party, the traditional approach would have been to cut the party scene from the chronicle of late 1946, where it didn’t belong, and move it up to the passages about late 1948 / early 1949. But you learn a lot about Jack quickly by getting to that party scene early, and you also learn a lot about the way Lu Anne’s mind works in her remembering of it—so I left the flow there just as it came from her lips.
The latter reason for keeping the flow intact, the fact that she could not resist trying and trying again to get a story told right, until her own feelings were satisfied, is shown most strongly in the section of the interview where she relates how Neal, after a wonderfully companionable trip across the country together in Neal’s brand-new Hudson in early 1949, coldly and callously abandons Lu Anne and Jack on a street corner in San Francisco. I retained the order of her thoughts in that long section exactly as they were recorded on the tape. In some ways, that section is the climax of the interview, just as Jack used that scene for the climactic moment in On the Road. Lu Anne tells how hurt Jack was by Neal’s deserting them, and how the incident merely reinforced her own knowledge and acceptance of Neal’s ability to inflict hurt; but then Lu Anne circles back to it, retells it with more detail, begins to focus more on the fact that she and Jack talked of getting married, revisits it again and reveals something she says she has told no one else, that Jack cried in her arms that first night at the Blackstone Hotel, and then, finally, comes back to it again and begins to muse on the prospect that, had the facts of the situation been only a little different, she and Jack might have ended up happily married and gone on to lead entirely different lives than the tragic and unfulfilled ones they did live.
I thought it was essential that the reader see—that is, listen to—Lu Anne going back again and again to that episode, as its impact and ramifications began to strike her with greater and greater force, as she let it sink into her own conscious mind, and allowed herself to understand what had really happened between her and Jack at that time. There is no question—after hearing Lu Anne’s account—that she and Jack had both reached a critical point in their lives during the two weeks they spent at the Blackstone Hotel. There can also be no doubt that, had she married Jack, her subsequent life would have been vastly different—perhaps not easier, but certainly less disjointed, less disconnected, and filled with a far greater satisfaction of her emotional needs, and perhaps a far greater flowering of her own gifts.