For Jack, it would have meant marriage to a woman who truly loved him, and he would have been saved from the debacle of that impromptu marriage to Joan Haverty a year and a half later, born far more of his desperation to put his life in order than from any kind of real love or even respect between them. Jan Kerouac would never have been born, to live out her life with two uncaring parents, or maybe she would have been born in a different body—if you believe in reincarnation—to Jack and Lu Anne. But now we’re in the realm of speculation. To return to facts, it’s pretty evident that Jack’s iron-fisted Catholic mother, Mémère, would never have allowed him to marry “that type of woman”—for Lu Anne would have seemed like the worst kind of tramp to her narrow-minded morality.
In any case, it’s interesting to see that Kerouac himself felt the critical importance of that juncture in his life, just as Lu Anne did. In a scene from On the Road that he told Allen Ginsberg was the most important in the book, just after Neal abandons Jack and Lu Anne (Sal and Marylou), Sal wanders the streets of San Francisco penniless, picking up cigarette butts from the pavement, and suddenly imagines that a woman in a fish-and-chips joint on Market Street gives him a “terrified look,” as if she sees their past lives together two hundred years earlier, when Sal is her thieving son just returned from jail. “I stopped, frozen in ecstasy on the sidewalk,” Kerouac writes, and then goes on for two more pages of the most dazzling, poetic and metaphysical prose he ever wrote, describing “the plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness,” and on and on and on, leaving the reader dizzy and exhausted at the end of a literary ride like no other I can think of.2
There is nothing in the novel about Jack considering getting married to Lu Anne, or about crying in her arms, but he could not have come up with any more powerful metaphor for the emotional trauma and transformations he was going through at that moment.
One more point needs mentioning briefly. Besides the fact that the second and longer interview I did with Lu Anne, which was taped, provides a far more accurate rendering of her words than the notes I took in longhand (though one can mishear words on a tape too), there is the additional problem that the tone of the two interviews differs a great deal. In the hospital, not sure how much of what she was saying was “on the record,” Lu Anne was a lot franker with me about many things, including her feelings about Carolyn Cassady; and she was also, because of her helpless situation—penniless in a hospital bed while others seemed to be making hay off the Beat life she’d led—a lot angrier than when she was safely ensconced back in her friend Joe’s house. Her language in the hospital was in general a lot rawer and more uncensored. On tape, she was milder in what she said about Carolyn, only once throwing a mild jab at her, where she says that after Neal broke his thumb he “ran back to his mother,” meaning Carolyn and implying the essentially nonsexual relationship between them that she had spelled out for me in the hospital. Although I chose to blend some accounts from the hospital with the same events narrated on the tape, I chose to keep others separate, to avoid creating a jarring shift in the tone. Thus I saved much of what she said about Carolyn for the introduction to this book. I also felt certain things, such as Lu Anne’s reactions to the filming of Heart Beat, needed to be kept discrete from the main text of the interview. Hence they are now also part of the introduction instead.
Gerald Nicosia
January 18, 2011
Lu Anne, World War II pinup, taken by her stepfather, Steve Henderson, 1944. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
Interview with Lu Anne
INTERVIEW WITH LU ANNE
PART ONE
By the end of 1946, Jack Kerouac had lived for nearly seven years in New York, seven years that were as intensely lived and filled with incident as 77 years in another man’s life—in short, he already had a whole private history there. He had come from Lowell, Massachusetts, a depressed mill town, “Stinktown on the Merrimac” his father had called it. At 17—his head filled with Thomas Wolfe and Jack London—he had been desperate to get out, to go live somewhere where he could become a writer. His family were poor Canucks, but his ticket out was his tremendous athletic ability. He was, by all accounts, one of the best running backs who had been seen in New England high school football—virtually unstoppable once he took off. He won a football scholarship to Columbia University; but since his Lowell high school education had been so spotty, they insisted he go to Horace Mann prep school for a year, to bring him up to speed for college work. He started at Horace Mann in the fall of 1939—just as the world was going to war, he would later note ruefully.
At first, though, he paid no attention to the war. He was too busy listening to jazz, both the big-band swing of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw that was then in vogue, and also the underground birth of bebop in the little after-hours Harlem clubs, where he was led by a hip Jewish kid from Horace Mann named Seymour Wyse. Once he got to Columbia, his interest in jazz continued to grow, and he’d spend much of his time in his room reading Dostoyevsky and other great books he loved. He played little football, because Coach Lou Little (Luigi Piccolo) had a different favorite running back, an Italian named Paul Governali, and Kerouac’s breaking a leg on the playing field didn’t help things.
Jack Kerouac running for a touchdown for Lowell High School, fall of 1938. (Photographer unknown.)