The fact that Neal had become a performer at the end—it was so unlike him, so completely, totally unlike him. It was even unlike the Neal that all these writers had written about in their books. Even though Neal was a mover, a doer, he was always doing things for himself—doing things he had chosen to do. I mean, his thought was the thing about him that got us all so excited. What was remarkable was the fact that he was interested in so many things. Like Al and I were talking about recently, when we were kids, Neal could be reading a book and shooting pool and necking with me at the same time—and giving his attention to all three. But those were things that he wanted to do. He wasn’t putting on a show; he wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He could’ve cared less if anyone even noticed. That wasn’t the case in later years.
It was that change that bothered him. When we would be together, we would talk about the things that might have been, the things that had happened and changed everything. He felt, I think, cheated. I mean, he didn’t blame anyone. He blamed himself more than anyone else. Neal was his own worst critic in that respect. He was angry at himself that he hadn’t gone ahead and pursued his dreams. Because even when we were first married, Neal would type and write on into the night—whether he would have turned into a great writer, who knows? In those days, of course, he wasn’t into whether anyone was ever going to read his work or not. But he wanted to write, and he wanted to go to school. He wanted the education so that he would be able to do it and do it right. Whether or not he had the talent is something we’ll probably never know. A few years ago, City Lights published The First Third. He wrote that, my God, a hundred years ago—but he never finished it. It was unfinished, like his whole life.
Nowadays so many people want to write about us. They want to know every detail of our lives. What makes me sad is that they don’t want to know why we did the things we did. We were poor, but we made do the best we could. We tried to keep clean, to be neat. We had purposes and plans, just like everyone does.
Neal Cassady, San Francisco, 1963. (Photo by Larry Keenan, Jr.)
Lu Anne’s Role in Beat History / Cultural History
With a few exceptions, like Tom Christopher’s well-researched but still unfinished tabloid-format biography of Neal Cassady,30 portraits of Lu Anne in Beat histories tend to be extremely reductive, not to say demeaning. William Plummer, in the first biography of Cassady, The Holy Goof, refers to her as “a scarcely domesticated barbarian.”31 The most flattering portraits of her are as a teenage sex bomb with blonde ringlets down to her waist—and her chief value and raison d’être seems to be as proof of Neal Cassady’s power over women. It’s as if she’s dragged out on the Beat stage so people can say, “Look at this man’s sexual prowess! He could get a woman this desirable and make her do his every bidding, put up with his every infidelity. He must’ve been quite a man!” Few of these chroniclers have evinced any interest in what ideas the lady might have had in her own head; and fewer still have asked whether she might have been on some quests of her own. No one, that I know of, has ever pointed out, She must have been quite a woman to get this interesting and fabled guy to keep coming back to her, all his life—right up to the moment when he left for Mexico and the death he seems to have foreseen coming.
When Neal Cassady told her, “You are my one and only wife,” he was recognizing something in her that droves of subsequent biographers and annotators have failed to notice: that Lu Anne Henderson Cassady played a unique and irreplaceable role in that great man’s life, and hence, by extension, in all the lives he touched, which were some significant lives indeed. She was not a fungible commodity, not just one more instance of the teenage pussy—“young stuff in filmy sheer no underclothes dresses,” as he described his dream girls in a letter to Jack—of which he seemed able to gather an inexhaustible store. She was the impetus and sine qua non of a change in Neal Cassady that allowed him to become the Neal Cassady we know today, the prototype of so many rebel and outlaw clichés, and the begetter of the Beat Generation itself.
It is pretty well accepted that there would have been no Beat Generation had Jack Kerouac not met Neal Cassady. But along with that justifiable assumption there usually comes another tacit one, not really justified at all: that once Neal met Jack, it was like the sperm meeting the egg—that after the conception, it was only a matter of time before the embryo matured and the Beat Generation was born. The fact is, Neal meeting Jack was not enough to have created one of the most important literary, social, and cultural movements of the twentieth century. When they met—as Lu Anne tells eloquently in her interview—they didn’t even like each other, and they certainly didn’t understand each other.