Carolyn Cassady has now written and rewritten several memoirs, but to my mind they are more about her than they are about Neal and Jack. And Carolyn, not to put too fine a point on it, belonged for better or worse to the square world that Jack and Neal were always trying to run away from. She was more a friendly opponent than somebody who understood from the inside the world they inhabited.
But Lu Anne was unquestionably on the inside, and remained there even after spending decades exiled from the Beat world in the squaresville suburb of Daly City. Even amid the plethora of Beat interviews that now exist, Lu Anne’s interview with me is a unique document, I think. Unlike so many of the other women who have written about Kerouac—including Joyce Johnson, Edie Parker Kerouac, and Helen Weaver—she resists the temptation to shift the focus of the story from Jack (or in this case, Jack and Neal) to herself. Through an almost seven-hour interview, Lu Anne stays on point about those two men, the American countercultural icons of the twentieth century. And she sees them with an objective accuracy that is uncanny, but also with a compassion and nonjudgmental attitude that is worthy of a bodhisattva—which, forgive my presumption, I would make the claim that she was.
Beat fans, who want the same shopworn but comforting portraits of their two favorite happy outlaws, the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the 1950s, need be prepared to go down the Rabbit Hole and through the Looking-Glass. For what they will find in Lu Anne’s memoir are two men who may be almost unrecognizable to them—and certainly neither one of them are anything resembling an outlaw hero or even antihero. Kerouac may have written some of the greatest and most innovative books of the twentieth century, but Lu Anne portrays him as a man who couldn’t go out and find a job to pay the rent when it was crunch time—a man who, when the pressures of the ordinary world built up too high, froze in his tracks and had to let a teenage girl show him the way forward.
Neal she shows to be a man of enormous vulnerability around both men and women—a man who would rather pimp his wives and girlfriends to other men than risk having them choose another lover on their own; a man who, when he finds another man, a large strong young man, kissing his wife, does nothing but scream and scream and then demand everyone in his party turn tail and flee. Cassady’s male bravado, which became as much a symbol for the age as Brando’s sneer, is revealed to be a mask for his own monumental uncertainty. Lu Anne shows Neal to be a man for whom decisions of any kind were inordinately hard; hence we see his endless crisscrossing of the country, San Francisco to Denver to San Francisco to New York and back to San Francisco, ad infinitum, to be less the intrepid travelings (to borrow a phrase from Neal’s later master, Ken Kesey) of a New Age explorer, and more the futile and endless missteps of a man who could never truly figure any real direction for himself in life.