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Kerouac Ascending

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of

By

Elbert Lenrow

Edited by Katherine H. Burkmann, with an Introduction by Howard Cunnell

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road , by Elbert Lenrow Edited by Katherine H. Burkmann, with an Introduction by Howard Cunnell

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Elbert Lenrow and Katherine H. Burkmann

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2416-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2416-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface...... vii Katherine H. Burkman (with remarks by Barbara Philips)

Acknowledgements ...... xvii

Introduction ...... 1 Howard Cunnell

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road Elbert Lenrow

Part I: 1948-1951 ...... 19

Part II: 1957-1969...... 51

Appendix A ...... 63

Appendix B...... 71

List of Contributors ...... 81

PREFACE

KATHERINE H. BURKMAN

The last time I saw my cousin Elbert Lenrow was in December of 1992, the year before he died in July at age 90. I always visited Elbert when I went to , and it was always difficult to end our visits–we both enjoyed them enormously. Before he reluctantly let me this last time, he went to his file cabinets and pulled out one file that contained our exchange of letters and notes over the years–he kept carbon copies of what he wrote so that I had the full exchange. Then he offered me a small, blue folder that contained Kerouac Ascending: a Memoir . The copyright on it was 1984. I was moved that he gave me our correspondence, wondering, as perhaps he did, if we would see each other again. The Memoir, he explained, was about his relationship with , whom he had taught at the New School for Social Research, as well as his relationship with , whom Kerouac brought along for some of his lectures. As I browsed through the typewritten pages, some corrected in ink, I didn’t realize that I had in my hands a valuable piece of writing that would reveal much about the two writers and perhaps even more about Elbert himself. He had, he said, given the memoir to a former student from the Fieldston School, where we both had taught, a student who promised to look into its publication, but nothing had transpired. He wondered if I might give it a try. I went to my colleague in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, Professor James Phelan, for advice. He found the piece engaging and said he would himself like to publish it in Narrative , a journal that he edits. Because of some difficulties with permissions, he was only able to publish the first part of the memoir, which focuses on Kerouac, so that the second half, more about Ginsberg, was left out. He did want Elbert to do a bit of editing. When I spoke to my cousin about the publication and the editing, he was thrilled about the former but flummoxed by the latter. “Tell Mr. Phelan,” he said to me on the telephone, “that I am 90 years old. He can do whatever he wants with it!” Which I did. Unfortunately, Elbert did not live long enough to have a copy viii Preface of the January, 1994 Narrative in his hands, but he had sent Dr. Phelan another message. “Tell him,” Elbert instructed me, “to make lots of copies. Many people will want to read it.” Because, unfortunately, everyone doesn’t read Narrative , I did not feel that I had fully succeeded in my task, which was to share both parts of the manuscript with a larger public. Sandy Croons, Senior Editor at the Ohio State University Press, encouraged me to turn the Memoir into a manuscript. The Kerouac and Ginsberg estates (my profound thanks to John Sampas and Peter Hale) also realized its value. I leave it to Howard Cunnell to comment in his Introduction on what the memoir reveals about the development of the two writers. As I write here about Elbert, however, I hope to give some context for the Memoir, and I will, of course, speculate at the very least about what attracted Kerouac and Ginsberg to his class as well as what attracted them to him as a friend. My own relationship with Elbert began as a young teenager when my mother took my sister and me to New York and we met her second cousin; Elbert’s mother was my grandmother’s sister. Perhaps we had felt the impact of Elbert as teacher since my mother did not attend college because of the Depression, and it was Elbert who became her mentor in the arts. He took her to concerts and museums, opening a world of culture to her that became a part of my inheritance. During our New York visit, Elbert took us to the Museum of Modern Art, where, despite my sister’s and my perplexity before what seemed to us very strange paintings, Elbert’s patient guidance opened up an important door, and he became, in a more direct way, my teacher. The highlight of that visit to the museum was a room that contained two statues by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, “Standing Youth,” and “Kneeling Woman,” both of which have remained favorites of mine throughout the years. Elbert had a small reproduction of “Kneeling Woman” on his piano, and after his death I asked to have it sent to me. I knew it had no monetary value as Elbert had told me laughingly that his cleaning lady had apologized for breaking his doll. He had been able, however, to paste her head back on. Perhaps in the tradition of such breakage, the reproduction arrived at my home in some 18 pieces, but my husband put it back together like a puzzle and I have it on my piano at this very moment. My education under Elbert’s tutelage continued when I moved to in the late 1950s. After observing me teach five classes at the Columbia High School in South Orange, New Jersey, Elbert hired me to teach English at the Fieldston School in Riverdale where he was chairman of the Department. I remember how the students in those days referred to

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road ix

Elbert as “Uncle Elbow” and how they all longed to be accepted into his senior seminar. I sat in on the seminar myself, where I learned not only a great deal about the “great books,” but also an enormous amount about teaching. One of my students, so Elbert told me he had overheard, noted that in my class he was getting “Lenrow re-taught.” My education continued as I risked my life on a daily basis, riding home with Elbert in his red Karmann Ghia, swerving about as we gossiped–Elbert was the quintessential gossip–and talked. Elbert was not happy when I left Fieldston to pursue a Ph.D. in Theatre, which led to an academic career at The Ohio State University. But he is probably the only one I know who read every page of my publications as I sent them to him over the years. He discussed each one with me on my yearly trips to New York and showed me the typos that the printers had missed but he had corrected. To finish the personal part of my relationship with Elbert, I must tell you about a suggestion I made that probably led to a kind of rebirth for him shortly before his death. The suggestion was to my nephew, Alan Blumberg, who was moving to New York. I remember I called him at 10:00 p.m. one evening and suggested that he might enjoy meeting the now elderly Elbert. In those last few months of Elbert’s life, Alan and he became fast friends. Here was a person, Alan has told me, who loaned him books, including an underlined edition of Faulkner’s Light in August , which Elbert told him to keep and Elbert’s signed copy of Look Homeward Angel, which Alan recently read with interest. Alan also has Elbert’s top hat that he wore with full regalia when he attended the opera at an earlier time in New York. Elbert was as curious about Alan’s life (without judging it) as Alan was about his. Alan cooked for Elbert (who claimed it was his first time to taste lobster), who in turn had his piano tuned so they could play for each other. Elbert played Debussy, Allan played Jerry Lee Lewis. Elbert had not left his apartment for some time, but Alan put him in a wheelchair and took him to restaurants. As with Elbert’s relationship with Kerouac and Ginsberg, each opened doors for the other. When Elbert called to thank me for sending Alan, he suggested the relationship was giving him a new lease on life, but Alan also talked about what he learned from Elbert. Indeed, Elbert never retired as a teacher. When he called me to thank me for sending Alan, he talked on the telephone to my then 20-year-old daughter before he talked to me, and both of them told me later that they had fallen in love. And so I will end this section on the personal side of my relationship with Elbert and our entire family’s no doubt somewhat incestuous love

x Preface affair with him. Elbert died a young man of 90, a nourisher of the young, who in turn kept him young and growing until the end. After Elbert’s death, I have had the opportunity to learn even more about the context of his Memoir and about Elbert as a teacher. At his funeral, I met many members of my family whom I had never known, among whom was my cousin Barbara Phillips, Elbert’s niece, who had a very special relationship with her uncle. He had confided much to Barbara about his time with the two young writers, and it was her contention that he got an enormous amount of vicarious pleasure from hearing of their exploits and following their careers. Barbara sent me taped copies of an interview with Elbert that took place some years after his retirement from The Fieldston School in 1970. The interview, which extends over time and is recorded on nine tapes, was undertaken in order to get a history of the Fieldston School, but the tapes reveal much about Elbert’s life and attitudes about teaching. Perhaps what is most striking is that his teaching involved encouragement: he was not in any way judgmental. He felt, he said, that the most important thing in presenting the literature to his young students was to get their reaction. He saw teaching as an art, comparing it to a performance at a concert, during which the music moves to a climax near the end. He talked about using the Socratic method, but he insisted that he never cornered his students, never stuck to a lesson plan. When students came to him for advice, he said, he helped them make their own decisions; he didn’t believe in pushing them. Elbert compared teaching to playing the piano, which he did very well, and suggested you could only get a good tone on the piano when you were relaxed. Surely such a teaching approach was what so appealed to Kerouac and Ginsberg. In his book, Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On The Road (They’re Not What You Think) ,1 John Leland suggests that in the scroll version of On The Road Kerouac begins with the death of his father, ends with a “salute to Old Dean Moriarty ‘the father we never found’” and in between writes of “a search for lost fathers and for the past that is gone with them.” 2 The father the young writers found in Elbert was one who did not judge them (Kerouac’s father disapproved of his writing and of him), who encouraged their work, and who was flexible in his demands: Elbert could relate to them both as a father and as an artist himself–the teacher as artist. 3

1 New York: Viking, 2007. 2 Leland, 75. 3Penny Vlagopoulos reports that Kerouac told an interviewer who asked him what he was looking for, that he was “waiting for God to show his face.” “Rewriting

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road xi

And Elbert knew his students! Barbara Phillips shared a tape with me which recorded a birthday party that former students, now middle-aged, gave to Elbert when he turned 90. The camera focused on each of the guests as they told stories they remembered of Elbert as a teacher, and Elbert did not seem to be listening. But when it was his turn to speak, he turned to his former students and said, “Thank you for your memories. And now I’m going to tell a story about each one of you,” which he proceeded to do. This book is Elbert Lenrow’s story about Kerouac and Ginsberg.

Elbert Lenrow in Paris at Bois de Boulogne, June 1953

America,” On The Road: The Original Scroll . New York, Penguin Books, 2007 (63). Shades of Beckett’s tramps on their road?

xii Preface

REMEMBERING ELBERT AND “T HE BEATS ”

Barbara Philips

Elbert Lenrow was my mother’s brother and spent a great deal of time in our home–his long school holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas and a couple of weeks at the end of each summer following his annual motor trips in and Central Asia. During those visits we regularly heard much about the progress and antics of his Fieldston students and their parents. In the late 1940s we started hearing about some of his adult for- credit students at the New School for Social Research. They were taking advantage of the G.I. Bill for veterans. The two students he mentioned most often were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. After our family read Kerouac’s On the Road , published in 1957, I took a more active interest in Elbert’s connections with his young writer friends. Elbert always had a keen interest in the personal lives of others and was a great story teller, so he seemed to enjoy my interest in what we came to refer to as “The Beats.” As the years passed, Elbert’s friendship with these two young men produced tales of their social lives, travels, and writing. They shared time over drinks in local bars, he invited them to musical performances and art events, and they were always welcome in his home. Their friendships continued for many years and off-and-on included other young writers– , William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, and . For many years Jack, Allen, and Elbert exchanged letters and postcards keeping each other in touch about endeavors in each of their lives. Elbert sent me a copy of Kerouac Ascending in the late 1980s and occasionally mailed me autographed books from Ginsberg and Kerouac, in which they also wrote personal notes. After Elbert’s death in 1993, I received a box of folders containing all of the original Ginsberg letters which appear in Elbert’s memoir and several he did not include but to which he refers. These items date from March 1949 through June1980. What makes this material particularly interesting is the fact that Elbert kept copies of every letter or postcard he ever wrote, so reading the collection seems more like hearing a conversation than reading letters. Included in that box was a folder of articles from The New York Times and a variety of literary brochures and lecture notices that featured Kerouac, Ginsberg, and their literary friends mentioned above. The materials date from 1958, and because I have since added to the collection, they go beyond Elbert’s death. During the past few days, I have read through all

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road xiii that material and learned even more about the lives of his young friends– their successes, sad times, deaths, and families. In one article in that folder, I learned that Allen Ginsberg kept copies of any correspondence he wrote and I wonder if he was introduced to that habit by Elbert. Other articles include those referred to in the memoir and a transcript of the radio talk The by Gilbert Highet, mentioned in the memoir. For me, this material rounds out the lives of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and their friends in a most personal way. Katherine Burkman mentions that some critics of the Beats suggest Kerouac and Ginsberg were looking for a father figure. After hearing stories from Elbert about the friendships and reading their correspondence and a mass of printed material about the writers and their families and activities, I have a different perception. They were simply very close friends who trusted him and each other enough to share the most intimate stories of their lives. He had the same deep interest in their work as he did in the work of his Fieldston students plus the excitement of hearing details of their personal lives. As Elbert states in his memoir, he was “refreshed by their carefree zest–they looked for excitement in life and language itself.” Elbert adored and respected his father, from whom he derived firm ideas about parenting and making certain that children “were brought up” rather than being allowed to simply just “grow up.” As a first-generation American, son of late 1800 immigrants from what is now Slovakia, and one of five children, Elbert knew exactly what was expected of him in terms of sharing family chores, education, a strong work ethic, and maintaining family connections. For years Elbert repeatedly told me he wanted me to have the letters that his father wrote him from the time he entered college at age 16 until his father’s death. He said they contained “wonderful advice and important information.” After Elbert’s death in 1993, I received a box containing those letters. And not only his father’s letters were included but those of his mother, his siblings, and all the nieces and nephews. And, again, because he kept copies of all correspondence he wrote, the collection reads like conversations among the entire family. Those letters confirm that Elbert did all the “right” things expected of him. He worked hard to obtain a solid education in his strengths (literature, English, and music), while at home and during his college experiences and beyond he always had jobs, and he excelled in his field until he retired. Then, in the fall of 1948, this young writer Kerouac registers for his class, “The 20th Century Novel in America,” at the New School. He was taking advantage of the G.I. Bill for Veterans. And he has a friend,

xiv Preface

Ginsberg, who often meets him after class. Elbert was a generation older than these two young men and what a change they were from his usual Fieldston students. They were bright, full of ideas about life and writing, had other interesting young friends, and their activities seemed unbounded by social restrictions, implied or overt, that may have existed for Elbert when he was their age. I think Elbert admired their depth of knowledge and their fierce pursuit of their writing. He encouraged their efforts and ideas without, as Katherine Burkman says, being judgmental. And in addition to all this, they shared in the most open way all the adventures, misadventures, emotional and vocational ups-and-downs in their lives and those of their friends for many years. Elbert was pleased to be in their confidence and, I believe, was thrilled to share those experiences in a vicarious fashion–experiences he dared not choose in his youth. They enjoyed spending time in Elbert’s home with his thousands of recordings and books and being able to “bed down” there occasionally when there was nowhere else to sleep or the evening just got very late. Ginsberg writes, “I’m eager to see you again and learn further things from you and from your marvelous collection of great works. In your one apartment all the Royal Guts themselves. And those pleasant evenings are matchless.” And in his January 13, 1958, letter to Elbert Kerouac writes, “We’ll have a lot to talk about and I can hardly wait to see you. I hope you still have those rare monastic cheeses and do still sit at your desk and at the touch of a button play me Provençal boys’ choirs in French. (Not to mention some good pernod.) Until I see you, then, as ever, your friend and admirer, Jack.” Later, Ginsberg writes: “I keep meeting ex students of yours who all speak of you tenderly. It seems to me (seemed then) that you were really helpful in sympathy to our literary desires & ken, that was an encouraging tradition of humane curiosity toward us that you displayed. At least I got the feeling of an old secret tradition, maybe connected with the Wolfe Memorabilia you showed Jack.” I met Ginsberg at a book signing on May 24, 1996, in Rochester, New York. He was in town to speak at Nazareth College that evening, an event co-sponsored by The Village Green Bookstore in cooperation with Writers & Books. There I stood in line for over an hour in my “office clothes”–a sixty-year-old woman among a crush of young students from an assortment of colleges and universities in this area clutching selected Harper Collins titles by Ginsberg, including “Cosmopolitan Greetings” and “.” I placed a copy of Journals: Early Fifties/Early Sixties on the table in front of him. It was autographed with “for Elbert Lenrow” on October 7, 1982, and included “Earlier passages here closer to the times

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road xv

Jack and I visited you than now.” He seemed stunned to see the book, asked who I was and where I obtained the book, asked for my business card, and then signed my book again with his full name—then again with his initials in a circle. This encounter led to several telephone calls during the following summer from Bill Morgan and Bob Rosenthal who worked with Allen. They expressed interest in the correspondence and autographed books I have and then sent me a limited edition copy, number 106, of the book they prepared as a surprise for Ginsberg’s 60th birthday in 1986. The book, Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg , contains tributes from over 300 friends of Ginsberg, including Elbert, whose short piece contains some of the material from his Memoir and has a title parallel to the title of this book, “Allen Ascending.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful to John Sampas, executor of the Estate of Jack Kerouac, for his advice and encouragement. He also provided the picture on the cover of this work. I would also like to thank Peter Hale for his permission to use Allen Ginsberg materials in the manuscript and for his keen understanding of the project. My cousin Barbara Phillips is in possession of many of the original letters and documents that Elbert Lenrow uses and has not only given me permission to use what is in her possession, but also has been deeply involved in the project from the beginning. Thanks as well to Angelin Borsics, formerly of the Wylie Agency, Inc., who was unusually helpful and to Lynn Hall for her expert help with the manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to Elbert Lenrow himself, from whom I learned so much throughout the years.

A note on the text: Please note that Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s spelling and grammar in Elbert Lenrow’s memoir has not been corrected. It is interesting to see that early communications from Kerouac and Ginsberg were written to “Mr. Lenrow,” but as time went on there is informality (Dear El), a lack of commas, and a certain tendency toward creative spelling. KHB.

I wish to thank the following for permission to quote from various works: Jack Kerouac material appears by permission of John Sampas, Literary Representative the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac.

Copyright 2010 The Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac.

Also, reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., copyright by Jack Kerouac.

All poems, postcards, letters, and a drawing by Allen Ginsberg, as well as copies of several of these items in handwriting, Copyright The Allen Ginsberg Trust, used with permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

INTRODUCTION

HOWARD CUNNELL

Had the vision of Neal in the Hudson - it, the car, the very shape of it, and Neal in it, was the perfect metaphysical representation of our time: it was Neal’s way of clarifying all our issues, putting them together and on the road, holding us close, making himself right captain, and on; so that even when we gave Professor Lenrow a ride and chatted about the last time he saw Tom Wolfe as we drove up Fifth Avenue, it must have all been justified at last for Western Neal, all tied-in... —Jack Kerouac Journal entry dated Monday, September 3, 1951.

I

This is Elbert Lenrow’s fond account of his friendship with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, written in 1984 and first published in incomplete form ten years later in Ohio State University’s journal Narrative as Memoir: The Young Kerouac. A much-loved instructor at the New School for Social Research in New York, Lenrow first met Kerouac in the fall of 1948, when the young writer signed up for classes in literature including Lenrow’s course: “The 20th Century Novel in America.”1 Attracted by Kerouac’s youth, intelligence, and devotion to writing, Lenrow began a friendship with him, sometimes joining Kerouac and friends including Ginsberg, , and (who Kerouac had met that summer and who was also taking classes at the New School), for beers and conversation after class. Lenrow, 20 years older, reports that he “felt refreshed by their carefree zest,” and entertained and stimulated by their “high-spirited exchanges.” He subsequently kept

1 According to completed grade cards for 1948 Fall Term (September1948-January 1949) signed by registrar Charles F. Godley, ‘John L. Kerouac’ took the class with Lenrow (Grade B+, Hours 30, credits 2); Harry Slochower’s class in ‘Culture Epochs in the Myth Patterns of literature’ (B, 30, 2); Brom Weber’s ‘Writing Workshop’ (B, 30, 2), and Elias Tarak’s ‘Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Artists and Thinkers’ (B, 30, 2). 2 Introduction up an intermittent but affectionate correspondence with both Kerouac and Ginsberg. And, as the journal entry above shows, Elbert Lenrow also got to ride in what would become the most famous car in modern American literature. Here they are again in fragments of familiar storied history. The young Jack and Allen are “almost like children,” looking for “excitement in life and language,” and exulting in “reporting on and exchanging every fresh discovery.” Kerouac is represented as stocky, dark, and intense while Ginsberg is in shell-rimmed disguise. The ungovernable wild boy, Neal Cassady, with emblematic bandaged thumb, is for once silent here and without agency. 2 We read Kerouac’s reports from the road and the West. His long struggle to write and publish On the Road. Deadly fame and his reported sorrow (“deeper than anyone I know” writes Ginsberg to Lenrow in 1968). The unseasonable deaths of Cassady and Kerouac. The brave survivor Ginsberg becoming a radical activist, an archivist of the revolution, Whitman for the nuclear age. In the 1930s Lenrow had known , a significant connection for Kerouac of course, and kept a collection of Wolfe memorabilia. As Lenrow’s original subtitle indicates, Kerouac Ascending is in the same way more a treasured, personal collection of texts held by Lenrow—Kerouac’s New School essays on Dreiser and Lewis and Wolfe, letters and postcards, “souvenirs” ranging over almost 40 years and promoting a dialogue with the informed reader alive to what is not here— than a conventional memoir. The material is linked by Lenrow’s quiet reflective narration and interpretation. When we read his supplementary commentary, the effect is as if we are sitting with Lenrow in his book- filled brownstone apartment on West 55th Street, as he shows us the material piece by piece and talks us quietly through it, just as he had talked the aspirant writer Kerouac through his collection of Wolfe memorabilia. In addition, and because this is a multi-authored composite text, the voices

2 Neal Cassady had left his pregnant wife Carolyn in San Francisco and come with Kerouac to New York in August 1949. His damaged thumb was the result of his hitting his first wife, LuAnne. During his stay in New York, Cassady met Diane Hansen at a party and quickly moved into her East 75th Street apartment. Diane became pregnant, and, as fictionalized in On the Road, Cassady, picking up Frank Jeffries and Jack Kerouac in Denver on the way, went to Mexico in June 1950 to obtain a divorce from Carolyn. Cassady married Diane Hansen on July 10, 1950, and an hour after the ceremony he headed back to California and Carolyn. See David Sandison and Graham Vickers, Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero (: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 179-183.

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road 3 of Kerouac and Ginsberg, even of Thomas Wolfe, are also heard. In his letters and cards to Lenrow, Kerouac demonstrates what Ann Charters called his extraordinary “gift for mimicry...His letters reveal the apparent ease with which he projected different self-images.”3 Ginsberg is open but businesslike, concerned with the record (he quietly and loyally disputes Lenrow’s claim that Cassady had robbed his apartment in 1950). Ginsberg’s letters to Lenrow in the 1960s and beyond are concerned with communicating developments in the counterculture to a longstanding friend and sympathetic connection inside the academy.

II

Founded by the same radical and liberal intellectuals who had begun publishing the New Republic in 1914—including Thorstein Veblen, Harold Laski, and Franz Boas—the New School for Social Research was opened in February 1919 as an avowedly progressive centre for adult education at West 23rd Street in Chelsea, New York. In 1930 Joseph Urban was commissioned to design a new and permanent home at 66 West 12th Street. Urban’s building is an understated grey-black modernist structure on a street distinguished by a sequence of 19th-century row houses, marked at its eastern end by the chalky, bulldog-squat offices of Forbes magazine and the bruised-plum coloured spires and towers of the First Presbyterian Church. In the early 1930s New School director Alvin Johnson, initiating a fundraising campaign in the immediate aftermath of the first boycott of the Jews in Germany beginning April 1, 1933, had effected the rescue of nearly 200 blacklisted German scholars fleeing or expelled by Nazi Germany. Johnson established the “University in Exile” on October 1, 1933, subsequently the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, more European scholars arrived at the New School in a “second wave” of refugees. 4 As a result both of this history and the founding principles of academic freedom and political liberalism, and in comparison to Columbia (where Kerouac had studied before the war and where Ginsberg had finally completed his degree in the summer of 1948), the New School had

3 Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956 , edited by Ann Charters. (New York: Viking, 1995), xxii. 4 See Peter M. Rutkoft and William B. Scott, New School: A History of The New School for Social Research (New York: The Free Press, 1986), and Claus-Dieter Kohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and The New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

4 Introduction an embedded culture of radicalism and free-thinking. Kerouac, however, did not respond positively to the febrile intellectual and political atmosphere he encountered there. 5 His time at Columbia, his encounters with his fellow students at the New School, and his explorations in the urban American underground, had convinced Kerouac that any “revolutionary intelligensia” in America “do not go to school, they are on all the Times Squares of America smoking hay, talking Reich, reading the papers, listening to bop—the New School intellectuals do not count—this is part of the American Sexual Revolution coming, the revolutionaries don’t even believe in schools.”6 The political and cultural climate of 1948 meant that discussions about the responsibilities of artists and intellectuals commanded a sharp urgency. A post-war, post-Atomic bomb, culture of surveillance and fearful conformity masked anxiety and paranoia and was joined to the hamster-wheel existence of what Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums calls the imprisoning system of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.”7 The question for Kerouac and Ginsberg as writers and outsiders is how to personally and creatively interpret and respond to this environment. How to construct, as Penny Vlagopoulos writes, “a vocabulary that could adequately account for the relationship between the individual” and the state, when “dissent and contradiction were seen as malignancies threatening the very sovereignty of the nation by bolstering the enemy.”8 In its endless permutations, this was the question that would have dominated the New School after-class discussions in the nearby bars of Greenwich Village—an ideal location for exploring the emerging trans- racial and trans-gendered subterranean outsider communities and learning the different lessons of the street and the night. By 1948 the two young writers, open to all experience, no matter how personally destabilizing or

5 As Rutkoft and Scott illustrate, the New School had a high proportion of Jewish students and faculty from the outset. It's difficult to judge how much this contributed to Kerouac's animosity to The New School. Certainly Allen Ginsberg was on the receiving end of Kerouac's anti-semitic outbursts more than once, and in later life, as Kerouac's alcoholism took a greater hold, a belligerent anti- semitism, most often directed at what Kerouac saw as a Jewish-dominated New York publishing industry hostile to his work, surfaced more frequently. 6 Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac , edited by Douglas Brinkley (New York: Penguin, 2006), 166. 7 Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1958, 2006), 73. 8 Penny Vlagopoulos, “Rewriting America: Kerouac's Nation of ‘Underground Monsters,’” in Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll , edited by Howard Cunnell (New York: Penguin, 2008), 54-55.

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road 5 jeopardizing, had already looked all over for answers: in books, at sea and on the road, and with the pharmacological and sexual adventurers, outsiders, and underworld fugitives congregated at the West 118th Street apartment of Adams. I’ll talk some more about this later, but for Kerouac the fall of 1948 is the beginning of the defining period in his development as a fiction writer (from John to Jack, as Lenrow says here). He was 26 and unemployed. After a long period of determined and lonely work he was close to completing , the first novel he alternately believed would either make his fortune or never be published. As accomplished as that novel was, Kerouac knew that he had to escape the influence of Thomas Wolfe. In his new work he had begun the painful, frustrating search for voice and method that would finally result in a series of creative breakthroughs, starting in April 1951 when he would write the first full- length version of On the Road, and culminating in the sustained revolutionary magic of Visions of Cody, written between the fall of 1951 and the spring of 1952. In the fall of 1948 everything is still to come and everything is still in the balance. All that happens, everything he sees or hears in the classroom, in the nighttime streets and jazz clubs, and on the road might be what puts him on the true scent. An assignment to write about Wolfe (where Kerouac attacks the dominance of a literary criticism that values fiction only “if it reflects the struggles of men to achieve material advances,” and puts himself firmly on the side of a writer who is “writing to arrive at the divine secrets of solemn existence”). A “quick trip west in the ‘49 Hudson.” Everything is material. His journals and letters at this time appear almost overloaded with information, while Kerouac sometimes appears overwhelmed with ideas intended to decode that information and put it to his own use. Behind the denotative shell-rimmed glasses, Allen Ginsberg was in no less a state of flux. By 1948 he had fallen helplessly in love with, and had his heart shattered by, Neal Cassady. To try and recover his crumbling soul and mind he had travelled to Dakar. Returning to the crushing pressure of life in a hostile culture, the need for self-suppression and the struggle against that, Ginsberg continued to seek temporary refuge in drugs, hoping perhaps that they might offer a trajectory out through the visions they promoted. He sought a subterranean world where he might find sustaining connections with other outsiders, like , who accepted rather than denied their own outcast status. Like Kerouac, Ginsberg was searching for his voice, a search that would culminate in the self-revealing and connective radical vision of Howl, but through necessity

6 Introduction and self-hatred in the half decade from 1945-50, as Jonah Raskin writes, the search had foundered and left his work encoded with mostly private and indecipherable symbols. “In the poems from the mid- to late 1940s,” Raskin writes, “Ginsberg was mostly in hiding... His only recourse was to smuggle (his homosexuality) into his poems, so he disguised his naked self, camouflaged it, and buried it.”9 The United Press job Lenrow refers to was part of a systematic but doomed attempt by Ginsberg to live the straight life. In the spring of 1949, Ginsberg was arrested and subsequently committed (as a way to avoid imprisonment) to the New York State Psychiatric Institute as a result of his association with the various criminal activities of Herbert Huncke, Vickie Russell, and Little Jack Melody. Activities that culminated in a high speed chase through in a stolen car. Although Ginsberg was able to leave the hospital on weekends, he would not formally leave the Institute until April 1950. By the time Ginsberg was committed in June 1949, Kerouac had dropped his New School classes and arrived in Denver, hoping to make a new home in the West (he would return to the New School in the fall of 1949 and was still ‘signing’ there in the month before the publication of The Town and the City in March 1950. 10 Behind the “high-spirited exchanges” and “carefree zest” remembered by Lenrow, there was, then, a wild history of personal and creative instability and psychological turbulence. For Kerouac and Ginsberg, in 1948 unsettled and ambitious young pioneer artists in love with the possibilities of literature and language, the anchored and sympathetic Lenrow was a connection to, and source of “an old secret tradition” that the younger writers were working to place themselves in. Ginsberg writes in a letter to Lenrow dated August 24, 1968, from Cherry Valley:

It seems to me (seemed then) that you were really helpful in sympathy to our literary desires & ken, that was an encouraging tradition of humane curiosity toward us that you displayed. At least I got the feeling of an old secret tradition, maybe connected with the Wolfe memorabilia you showed Jack.

By 1968 the de facto establishment response to the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg was hostility and ridicule. Ginsberg here

9 Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 73. 10 Brinkley (ed), op. cit., 265.

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road 7 remembers and honours a man who took the young artists seriously from the beginning.

III

Kerouac’s first attendance at the New School in the fall of 1948 was concurrent not only with his finishing work on his first novel, The Town and the City, but also with his beginning sustained work on two new projects, Dr. Sax and On the Road. Kerouac’s first priority at this time was to see The Town and the City completed and published and to have money to fund his new work. Beyond this ever present need for money, as Nicosia has suggested, Kerouac might well have been influenced to sign up for classes at the New School by the idea that the influential critic, Alfred Kazin, was then teaching there (for whose course Kerouac would write an essay on Whitman) and could be persuaded to read The Town and the City and recommend publication. 11 The idea to show Kazin the manuscript of The Town and the City began in the summer of 1948 when Kerouac was still locked into what seemed to him to be the endless nocturnal work of re-typing and revising his manuscript, but when Kerouac decided to enroll in the New School is unclear. Perhaps the idea was suggested by his new friend John Clellon Holmes. In a journal entry from May 1948, Kerouac writes that the summer “ends with school.” As late as August he’s talking about a United Press job or getting out of New York altogether when the novel is finally finished. “I don’t know what to do yet,” he writes.12 The approach to Kazin was initially part of a scattergun strategy which saw Kerouac’s friends, notably Allen Ginsberg, exploit any and all connections to get the novel published. Kerouac himself had first approached Scribners, but they rejected the novel in May. In a journal entry dated Tuesday June 1, 1948, Kerouac writes, “Now Ed Stringham, whom I met just once, who read my chapters (2 or 3), is supposed to be arranging a meeting with Alfred Kazin for me. Kazin is a wheel in the field allright...the amazing thing is that all this is happening without any of my own finagling....Also Ginsberg wrote a letter to for me. And then I have an agent looking for me, and Lucien’s girl ( Time

11 See Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 226. 12 Brinkley (ed), op. cit., 85, 122, 124.

8 Introduction magazine’s Barbara Hale) says she has a connection at Macmillan, and others.”13 In an entry dated Saturday, June 19, Kerouac writes, “Went into N.Y. and met the composer David Diamond, and others. Diamond is to introduce me to Kazin, I guess, after which my book will start going into the right hands. The typing must be stepped up...but I go on getting drunk, dammit.”14 Macmillan rejected the novel by “form letter” in August. 15 In a September 5, 1948, letter to Neal Cassady, Kerouac writes that Kazin had not yet read the manuscript. Kerouac is now hoping that Kazin will “read a selection of chapters.”16 By November 3, 1948, and now enrolled at the New School, Kerouac had talked “to Alfred Kazin after his class.” Kerouac writes that Kazin calls “me ‘John.’ Wants to see the whole novel now. From that remote fury of himself he looks at me out of the corner of his eye and says, ‘It’s obvious now that you have something there!’” 17 Kazin’s good opinion of the novel did move him to recommend it to Harcourt Brace, and this recommendation was underscored by ’s enthusiasm for the book. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg at the end of June 1955, Kerouac writes, “Do you realize it was you got Town & City published, you gave it to Stringham, Stringham gave it Diamond, etc., then Kazin.”18 While there is a clear connection between The Town and the City and Alfred Kazin, Kerouac principally attended the New School for the money he could get from the G. I. Bill for doing so. He would not have done so if either Scribners or Macmillan had bought the novel and paid him a big enough advance to live on. This seems transparent from a reading of Kerouac’s letters and journal entries and from his ill-fated move to Denver after placing the novel with Harcourt Brace in the late spring of 1949. Always Kerouac needed money to fund his writing, and to use the provisions of the G. I. Bill in this way was hardly an idea that came to him alone. The significance of the legislation for the post-World War Two underground generation of artists and writers, is a story perhaps not yet fully told. Clearly, by providing funds for education and training programs and a subsistence allowance, the 1944 G.I. Bill enabled huge numbers of returning veterans to realize career and social ambitions that might otherwise have been impossible for reasons, predominantly, of class and

13 Ibid. , 88. 14 Ibid. , 95. 15 Ibid. , 129. 16 Charters (ed), op. cit. , 162. 17 Brinkley (ed), op. cit. , 161. 18 Charters (ed), op. cit. , 490.

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road 9 race. If the majority of veterans gratefully used the bill to more fully enter into American society, however, others used it to fund a way out. In 1949, and on the run from drugs charges in New Orleans, William Burroughs fled to Mexico where he “enrolled in some courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. The G. I. Bill paid for my books and tuition, and a seventy-five-dollar-per-month living allowance. I thought I might go into farming, or perhaps open a bar on the American border.”19 In an October 19, 1948, letter to Hal Chase in which Kerouac told his friend of his plans to write a novel called On the Road, “dealing simply with hitch-hiking and the sorrows, hardship, adventures, sweats and labors of that,” Kerouac writes, “To get $75 a month I now attend the New School a terrible school where the restraints of the lady-students goes hand in hand with weary utterances from the front of class...(but) goddamit I need $75 a month.”20 On November 13 Kerouac reported that he had written 3,000 words for On the Road, and writes: “Nothing matters but my writing...” He reports “I may be losing my school-money for negligence... why don’t they just give me my subsistence allowance, I’ve nothing to learn in school, especially that pale school.”21 Kerouac clearly did take seriously those assignments that engaged his interest. Kerouac’s paper for Kazin is titled “Whitman: Prophet of the Sexual Revolution.” On the front page of a collection of Kerouac’s revised draft typescripts of term papers—including the Whitman paper and a draft of Kerouac’s essay on Lewis and Dreiser, another on Dostoevsky and Stendal, and a paper on Tolstoy—Kerouac has handwritten in red, “Term Papers for the Silly New School.” The papers are notable for ideas that resonate in the context of The Town and the City; the new fictional work Kerouac is undertaking at this time, principally his proto-versions of On the Road; and the work still to come. In particular, Kerouac had a lot to say about Thomas Wolfe, and he embraced the chance to closely read, write about, and defend the writer who had long been a favorite. In preparatory handwritten notes, Kerouac writes that he is concerned with Wolfe as a “writer of the ‘soul’—a soul- worker—in the tradition of ‘sacred letters.’ His absorption with great poets; & time (as manifestation of God).” The archived drafts of the essay—one holograph and two heavily corrected and revised typescripts— illustrate the care Kerouac took with the paper. Both explicitly and

19 William S. Burroughs, Queer (New York: Viking, 1985), vi. 20 Charters (ed), op. cit. , 169. 21 Brinkley (ed), op. cit., 167.

10 Introduction implicitly, Kerouac makes clear his indebtedness to Wolfe, and by articulating the reasons for Wolfe’s diminishing critical reputation sadly anticipates his own fate as a writer of “sacred” books in an age of profanity and materialism. Through this critical work Kerouac is trying to mediate and weigh the reciprocal relationship of influence between the fictional texts he is reading and those he is writing. In his paper on Whitman, Kerouac argues that there has not yet been a revolution that “has surged up from the central human feeling for life itself.” Song of Myself , he writes, “sings the preciousness of self which we must never betray. Each one of us be proud of our holy bodies which are our souls...each one of us be proud of living in mankind, and of the miracle of crowds and life.” Like Whitman in the 19th century, and as Douglas writes, Kerouac would come to believe that the “true story of postwar America in all its speed, tomfoolery, and sorrowfulness...could only be told in interior monologue and confession.” 22 In addition to these resonating ideas, Kerouac’s essays reveal the struggle he is having with the formal language traditionally deployed both to write fiction and to write about it. “I can’t write essays,” he says halfway through his draft paper on Whitman, “...it is not light enough, it does not float joyously over the abyss like a balloon.” Just as he battles to express himself freely in his term papers and valorizes those writers like Whitman who demonstrate that freedom in their creative work, so, to his great frustration, is his fiction of this time mannered, freighted with symbolism, and encoded in language insufficient to express his vision.

IV

Kerouac’s criticism of the New School, taken together with his careful essays and his evident fondness and respect for Elbert Lenrow, is then contiguous with the fierce and complex ongoing debate Kerouac is permanently having with himself (and with his friends) about what kind of writer he wants to be or can be within the cultural and political context of late-1940s America, and the connected question of how the writer learns to write. In a classroom, or by exploring the neon streets and traveling on the open road? How to place himself in the American literary tradition when he cannot find himself, his Franco-American people, or the new American underground represented there?

22 Ann Douglas, “A Hoop for the Lowly,” in Kerouac, The Dharma Bums , op. cit. , viii.

Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road 11

In a journal entry about “creative writing courses at the universities,” Kerouac writes, “We are told that a certain amount of restraint, tempered by modern enlightened education, and a close study of the science of writing...are needed in order to successfully...represent life on earth. Of lyric joy, of poetry, of Dostoevskyan moral fury, of emotional grandeur, of sweep and architectural earnestness,—not a word in the universities.”23 In October 1949, and after Kerouac had gone to school “and sat out several lectures,” he drew up a curriculum for “The New School for Comedians.” Herbert Huncke would teach a class called “What To Do When You’re Beat.” Neal Cassady would teach several classes including, “How To Dig the Streets,” “Love, Sex, and the Soul,” “Green Tea Visions,” and “New Psychology, New Philosophy, New Morality.” Ginsberg would lead a class in “The Types and Meaning of Visions.” “Don’t you think one could really learn there?” Kerouac writes in his journal. “Learn something you never learn in school?”24 In the wider sense, Kerouac’s uncertainty is most often expressed as a desire to be somewhere and somebody he isn’t. (‘“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take,’” asks Mardou Fox in ). An expression both of Kerouac’s lifelong dualism and a key source of that dualism is his difficulty in finding a place to belong in America except the mythologized “foreign neighborhoods” of his childhood; where Kerouac lived in “the hot strange sun and jabbering hum of French-Canadian time.”25 In the search to belong, Kerouac is forever caught between what George Mouratidis has called the opposed imperatives of “domesticity and ‘kicks,’ tradition and progressiveness, nostalgia and possibility—an ambivalence on both a personal as well as a broader sociocultural level of significance.”26 When in On the Road Sal Paradise wakes up in a strange room by the railroad tracks in Des Moines, Iowa, not knowing who he is, he articulates Kerouac’s conflict that is perhaps most pronounced at the

23 Brinkley (ed), op. cit., 143. 24 Ibid., 227. 25 In the first of a series of letters written in response to Neal Cassady's “Joan Anderson and Cherry Mary” letter of December 1950, and in which he determines to give “a full confession of my life to you,” Kerouac writes, “You never spoke my tongue nor lived in foreign neighborhoods; spent noons musing in washlined alleys among hundreds of little jabberfrogs; railed flaptongued and wild in rubbish heaps...it was I, sad grownup Jack of today, mooning ragtail among the tincans and clinkers, in the hot strange sun and jabbering hum of French-Canadian time.” Charters (ed), op. cit. , 255. 26 George Mouratidis, “‘Into the Heart of Things’: Neal Cassady and the Search for the Authentic,” in Cunnell (ed) op. cit. , 73.

12 Introduction time Lenrow first met him. Paradise is “halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”27 In both literal and aesthetic terms, Kerouac was constantly being pulled between these geographical and cultural positions; the closed-in East was the place where Kerouac the outsider had first sought to realize and then to question the conventional ambitions of his youth. “I lay in bed thinking I was going to be a big hero of New York with rosy features and white teeth,” Jack Duluoz says in Maggie Cassidy (1959), before he heads off to prep school. An “incarnation of the American Super Dream Winner, Go Getter, Wheel, and white snowy scarf and big topcoat with corsaged girls in tow” (166). The East represented the academy and an American literary establishment still dominated by European influence and tradition. The West was freedom and joy as exemplified by Cassady, openness, and individualism, the authentic America waiting to be rediscovered and written. Simultaneously, and when he was away from it, the East also represented glamour and the “denser and richer excitements of a city” as Kerouac calls them in a letter to Lenrow. Greenwich Village and parties and bop and ideas, while the West was lonely teenage girls staring out across the prairie and dreaming of the big city. These were not new questions and concerns for Kerouac in 1948. In the first version of what would become Dr Sax, written in 1943, a purple faced, red-haired, and emerald-eyed Doctor Sax gatecrashes a party given by decadent millionairess socialite Emilia St. Claire. Sax’s surprise appearance at St. Claire’s turreted and granite mansion shatters the carefully constructed world-weariness and affected superiority of the “the non-conformists... intellectuals...rebels...gay barbarians...Dadaists” and members of the “set” who have congregated for the party. The story can be read as an imaginative recreation of Kerouac’s experiences of, and ambiguous responses to, the privileged European-influenced New York society and intellectual worlds he had then recently encountered as a football scholarship student at Horace Mann prep school and ; worlds he would defensively engage with again at the New School. St. Claire’s European mansion is “situated on a hill” overlooking the “White Mountains” of New Hampshire, while Sax, made from the materials of American popular culture, lives in “a wooden shack at the foot” of the same hill. Sax’s physical outlandishness and determined agency can be seen both as an expression of and answer to Kerouac’s own shyness and social and class awkwardness while simultaneously

27 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 1957, 1982), 20.