But soon studies began to matter little to him, anyway, because he was plunging rapidly into a heady subculture of New York artistic intelligentsia, which included his future wife Edie Parker, an art student; piano-playing pre-law student Tom Livornese; would-be writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr; creative and unconventional college students such as Hal Chase (anthropology) and Ed White (architecture); and bookish petty criminals such as William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. This offbeat group (pardon the pun) enjoyed the fleshly kicks of booze, drugs, and sex as much as they enjoyed high-level, soul-searching rap sessions, since they were for the most part a troubled bunch of young people—some of them actual outcasts from society and their disapproving families, and some of them just feeling outcast in a world that now worshipped power in the form of atom bombs and commercial success in the form of look-alike tract houses and gray flannel suits.
In 1942, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia completely. He got kicked out of the Navy because he laid down his rifle on the drill field, announcing that he didn’t want to kill anyone. He still wanted to serve his country, however, and did so in the Merchant Marine, sailing on the famed S.S. Dorchester the run before it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, resulting in the loss of nearly 700 lives. Kerouac remained patriotic all his life, but when he returned permanently to New York after yet another dangerous merchant voyage, he was embittered and feeling let down by society in general. When Carr stabbed a man to death one night in Morningside Heights, Kerouac helped him dispose of the knife and other evidence, ready to become a criminal himself. He had decided that society’s rules were at best meaningless, if not downright destructive, and that friendship was really the only thing that mattered.
After the war and America’s so-called victory, which had come at the price of millions of deaths, Kerouac and his friends were all the more convinced that society’s values were bankrupt, and that some kind of new personal code had to be forged. They knew it was the role of the artist to create those new values; but they could no longer figure out what, if any, role the artist and writer might have in modern society, which seemed bent on stamping out individuality in all forms, and seemed to view different behavior of any kind as a red flag of warning.
Kerouac and Ginsberg, especially, discussed, argued, and pondered what they should do with their lives, what and how they should write, what their proper subjects should be, and so forth—endlessly, in late-night discussions in 24-hour diners and unkempt hipster flats, and in literally hundreds of letters back and forth. Many of these letters have recently been published,3 and they are often stunningly brilliant, but they also show two young proto-geniuses who have reached an absolute dead end. They comment ad infinitum on books they have read, each other’s writings, and every little incident in their rather tame if sordid lives—but they get nowhere. They reach no resolution. They are looking for a way out and cannot find it.
And then the answer came to them, in the form of a wild man from Denver blazing across the plains in a stolen car—and later, when the car broke down from being pushed too hard, a Greyhound bus—with his drop-dead-beautiful 16-year-old wife and volumes of Proust and Shakespeare in his small, battered suitcase. The man was 20-year-old Neal Cassady, and his wife was Lu Anne Henderson, whose greatest adventure until recently had been drinking a few beers and smoking a little pot with Neal and his guy friends and a bunch of other giggling high school girls at a vacant house in the Rocky Mountains just above Denver.
Neal Cassady, San Francisco, circa 1948. (Courtesy of Carolyn Cassady.)