It was really kind of obvious that Jack wanted somebody to love him and to comfort him. And yet on the other hand, he didn’t. He was holding you off with one arm and kind of reaching out with the other, so to speak. It’s difficult to really try to analyze someone’s feelings when you haven’t seen them in a long time, and you don’t know all the things that have been happening to them and you don’t know exactly where they’re coming from. You try to guess what they mean by certain little remarks. But like I said, with Neal I never had to do that. No matter how much he changed, we were always able to talk. But with Jack, it wasn’t that way. Maybe he just didn’t want the feelings dredged up—and the memories.
In a way, Jack’s long slide down, his loss of happiness, started with Neal’s rejection in San Francisco in 1949. And then the thing with us fell apart, and all his publishing hopes fell apart too. It was like a snowball. He had such fantastic expectations! And then it seemed like everything good that he was anticipating was just kind of being dumped by the way. He was probably starting to think back on things in his life, and it seemed like every time he turned around someone was handing him some kind of rejection slip. By the time On the Road became a success, he was already broken inside, and he couldn’t handle it. In my view, the fact that he was falling apart emotionally had a great deal to do with his mother. Jack became emotionally dependent on other people, just as he was emotionally dependent on her; and when all those disappointments came, they were chipping away at his self-confidence, and really taking such a toll that he didn’t realize it himself.
I think he must have felt that he handled all those disappointments all right at the time. But the dependency on his mother shows that he was relying on somebody else to give him strength. He needed her to take care of him. When publication, success, and fame all came, everything he’d anticipated and waited for, all the emotional letdown that he’d already gone through had worn him down and he couldn’t accept it. That was it. He didn’t have that much left, I don’t think, to really go on with his career. Because it is an emotional thing, the fame and people adoring you and hanging on you and complimenting you—this takes an emotional drain on a person also. And I don’t think Jack really had that much left to give. It takes strength to survive that kind of success. He had virtually no emotional strength left.
It’s strange, I see such a line between Neal and Jack—a line tying them together. I really believe there was something of an umbilical cord between the two of them, because their lives were so entwined, and they really both ran the same gamut, and wound up at the same place. Maybe they were not on exactly the same track, but Neal ran through a lot of the same experiences that Jack did—the emotional drain of being the center of attention, the person everyone looked at. Just like Jack, Neal gave to other people all the time—especially after he was given this thing, the identity of “Dean Moriarty,” that he felt he had to keep up. Jack gave through his writing, and Neal gave through being the person Jack wrote about. To me, it was like they were both on the same damn train, and they both gave up at about the same time. I don’t think Jack ever felt like the performer, although in the end he became a performer. I think it started in the late 1950s, when they put him on all those TV shows after On the Road came out. But it’s strange how closely their lives ran.
Jack Kerouac sharing bottle of Tokay and reading poetry from breast pocket notebook with painter William Morris, San Francisco railyards, 1960. (Photo by James Oliver Mitchell.)
I felt Jack wanted to be like Neal in a lot of ways, but let me make this clear: I never, never found Jack trying to imitate Neal in any way. I used to get a little irritated with Jack because he would always follow Neal—he would do whatever Neal told him to.