Press: Jack Kerouac is a writer who must be mentioned in the history of American literature, and his novel "On the Road" is regarded as a spiritual portrayal of the "Beat Generation" and has been read and studied by literature departments in universities around the world. In China, Kerouac's books have always been best-selling, and Ma Ling, a professor at the School of Journalism of Fudan University, mentioned that in 2020, "On the Road" will be published in more than a dozen different simplified Chinese translations, and some publishing houses will even launch two translations at the same time, and the only one that can be compared is Hemingway's "A Feast of Flow".
In the first anthology of On the Road, Kerouac adopted the term "Beat Generation", and a collection of young poets and writers represented by him later became known as "Beat Writers", including Alan Ginsburg and William Burroughs, who were regarded by academics as important branches of postmodernist literature. Under the fame, there is little talk about the beat writers' attitude toward women, they rarely depict full and three-dimensional female figures, in life, Kerouac always refuses to admit that the child born to his girlfriend Billie Hollyday is his own, although his other girlfriend thinks that the child is very similar to him; the writer William Burroughs shot his wife's head with a gun, and he is sad but glad that it freed him from the family suffering. The only women Alan Ginsburg really respected were their mothers. In The Little People by women Beat writer Joyce Johnson, she writes a memoir of the Beat Generation, arguing that women in this circle are more like bystanders than participants, and that "they're just unpopular characters." Author Angela Carter said after reading Joyce's book, "This is a story told from the muse's point of view. It turned out that the muse could write as well as anyone else. ”
But women should not only be seen as the literary muse and emotional backing of male writers, but as we commemorate Jack Kerouac, revisit "On the Road" again and again, and talk about the literary historical significance of the Beat school, we should perhaps also understand how women are treated and coerced in this cultural trend. The Book of Jack: What They Call Kerouac is one of the few translated biographies of Kerouac in the Chinese world, in which the two authors visited relatives and friends of Jack Kerouac six years after his death and recorded their memories of Kerouac. The book collects oral materials from more than thirty interviewees, and in the noisy narrative, contains a limited but delicate number of vivid female memories, and on the occasion of the centenary of Jack Kerouac's birth, Interface Culture (ID: booksandfun) was authorized by the publisher to select one or two for the benefit of readers.
The Book of Jack: What They Call Kerouac
Barry Gifford, translated by Jiang Yi
Watchmen | Nanjing University Press 2022-4 The Book of Jack: The Kerouac in Their Mouths
|.S. Barry Gifford translated | Jiang Yi
Neil Casati, the prototype of Dean Morrietti in On the Road, is not a writer himself, but many Beat writers borrow from his free-flowing style of language in correspondence. When Neil and Luna Henderson married, Luna was only 15 years old.
Luna Henderson:
When I met Neil, he lived with a girl named Jenny. He lived in her house, with her, her mother, and her grandmother. Such a combination is really strange. The grandmother was an alcoholic, and so was the mother, and the grandmother must have been in her seventies at the time. The mother was about fifty years old, and Jenny was a little younger than me because she was in lower grades than me in school. For some reason, I don't know what's going on, she and Neil have become very acquainted, but he has no money in his pocket and no place to live, so Jenny takes him home. He immediately coaxed the three of them into submission, taking turns coaxing grandma and mother.
I was sitting in the Walgreens drugstore and Neil and Jenny walked in. He walked up to me, turned back to Jenny, and said, "This is the girl I'm going to marry." "We had never met before, but he didn't know Jenny knew me. Right next to it is a billiard room, where all the boys often go to spend time.
Denver was really a very small city at the time. It's quite big, but you know everyone in the city, and after dark, it's young people wandering around. So Neil asked Jenny to come over and get close, and she finally told him that she knew me, so he asked her to come over and ask me if I would like to go to a party together. Then I gave Jenny my phone number, she called, I spoke to Neil and he said he wanted to help me introduce my date. He introduced Me to Dickie Reed, a man I'd known years ago. I took Reed as my brother, but I accepted It because I was interested in Neil. It started that night.
When we went to the bowling alley, he handed me a note that read, "I'll call you in the morning." "I was thrilled to death. Oh my God, my heart was pounding. People are particularly emotional about things like small notes at the age of fifteen. That's where we started. I see him every day.
I moved along the coastline to Watsonville to the south, where Neil ran the other end of the train, caroline was once again in the dark, and I got a job at a drive-thru restaurant. But Neil was so possessive that he stood in a phone booth and watched me all night. Three nights a week he would be there. I never knew when he came. I didn't know anyone there, not a single person I knew, and I was completely alone in the guesthouse where we were staying. He often spied on me to see who I would be going home with. I never took anyone back and he was always very disappointed.
He would go away at any time and throw me there like that, no matter what our relationship was, but his possessiveness was strong enough to strangle me. But that lasted only about a month at most, and I told him that it was ridiculous that he was spying on me like this.
I told him that if he wasn't going to believe me, I wouldn't live like that. This time, I became a little more mature, And Neil wasn't used to having a little bit of independence or to me saying how I felt, and I felt like it was a blow to him. When I left, he was really hit. He thought I wouldn't go, but I did. I was right. It was the best decision for me, him, Caroline, and everyone else.
Beat poet Alan Ginsburg speaks to San Francisco street hippies in 1967 (Credit: Visual China)
Joan Walmer was an influential participant in the early circles of the Beat Generation, a roommate of Eddie Parker (Jack Kerouac's first wife) while studying at Barnard College in New York, whose apartment was a meeting place for Beat writers in the 1940s. She is also the wife of Beat writer William Burroughs, who during a game play after their marriage, Joan puts a cup of water on her head, and Burroughs aims at the cup and shoots, but the shot deflects into Joan's head, resulting in her death
Helen Hinkel:
Joan walked with a limp. She spoke very little and looked like an overworked, gloomy housewife. Her straight hair was tied behind her back, and a few strands of it that were not tied in hung on the side. She never wore a bra. She didn't seem to like decoration and restraint. I don't think she ever wore shoes or socks. She looked rather childish.
It was as if I had gone to another world, And Algiers was another world, and I think that Burroughs was frightened by his neighbors, and they were frightened by him.
Of course, Joan never slept. Because part of the night, the kids were going to sleep, Bill was going to sleep, she had to do something. There was a bare tree outside the porch. The house was L-shaped, surrounded by porches, and that terrible dead tree. The trees were crawling with lizards, and she used a rake to rake the lizards off the trees at night. I guess she didn't kill them. Of course, they will climb up again, which is their home. She was looking for something to do in the moonlight at four o'clock in the morning. After we left, Burroughs made a table that could last a thousand years, and it was full of moth holes. They eat very well. I mean they eat a lot, have a well-balanced diet, and care about what kind of meat and which vegetables to eat. I think Burroughs used marijuana as an appetizer so he had a reason to eat.
He carried a holster with him and often shot the caps of amphetamines with an airsoft gun.
You always have to knock on the door when you walk through his room, and the nearest way to the toilet is directly through his room. Otherwise, you'll have to walk outside the hallway and walk through the kitchen. You'll often hear him shooting. He would arrange the caps of her amphetamines and sit down on the couch. bang! bang! bang!
He had a shoulder strap holster and a small pistol he carried with him. The first day Jack got there, he and Bill went to the front yard, and each of them bundled up their guns and played with pulling out their guns and firing fast.
Media coverage of Joan Walmer's death by her husband.com
Joyce Johnson is a Beat writer whose real name is Joyce Grassman, and her 1962 novel Let's Dance is considered to be the first Beat novel by a female writer, and her Little People chronicles the stories of the Beat writers circle, and she had a relationship with Jack Kerouac.
Joyce Grassman:
There are no women at beat parties, and they can't attend as artists. The real communication takes place between men, where women are just viewers, their girlfriends. You shut up, and if you're smart and interested in what they say, you can learn what you want to learn. That's a very masculine-centric aesthetic.
I basically accepted it, and I was inexplicably looking forward to it. It didn't bother me at the time, it was very exciting and I felt like I had learned something.
Jack and I talk a lot about writing because I'm writing novels. It took me years to write it, and he was very interested in what I wrote, often encouraged me, would tell me that I was the best female writer in America, and so on. He really takes my writing very seriously, which is important to me.
My way of writing is very, very different from his. He would write down his dreams, and he had small notebooks. In the fall of 1957, I think he began to write what would become Dharma Wanderer. He has been writing poetry and writing it persistently. He would even write small poems in his letters. I admire his improvisational poetry and envy him. I belong to the kind of person who writes and writes and writes very painfully. I know he wouldn't approve of it, but that's the way I write.
Little People: Memoirs of the Beat Generation
[American] Joyce Johnson by Li Lan translation
Big Fish Library| Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2020-6
He would give me some advice on the subject. He wanted me to title the book I was writing called Pay Me After the Fact. He liked the subject. Later, the title of the book was "Come and Dance Together", from Alice in Wonderland. But he still likes Pay Me After the Fact. He had a hunch that something was going to happen to him. He sometimes gets excited to go out and meet people, but he's actually a very introverted person, very shy, and basically likes to sit in the house and not make any movements. I remember he often didn't say a word. I don't feel particularly uncomfortable. I can accept it. Of course, his memory is amazing. He would meet a stranger and say, "Oh yes, I remember you." I met you at a West End bar five years ago, in October. We talked about baseball together. "It's that kind of short-term memory, it's amazing.
He was obsessed with Buddhism, not Catholicism. I knew that was a serious thing for him. I think that has something to do with his obsession with thinking about death, and he always talks to me about death. His health is really bad. He had been hospitalized in a veterans' hospital and suffered from blood clots. He knows very, very well about his body. He had a feeling that his life would come to an abrupt end, that he could die at any moment. He really cares more about life than everyone realizes, such as the passage of time. This has a lot to do with his fear of dying.
Jack's relationship with women is very messy. I don't think our relationship will last long, and although we've been in a relationship for about two years, it's important to me. Once or twice, we talked about getting married, but I never took it seriously. Here's how I see our relationship: "Well, I'm enjoying the experience right now, and it might end, but I've enjoyed it for two years. "That's a very pragmatic point of view. He spoke of his marriage to Joan—how tragic. He didn't admit that her child might be his, showed me a picture of the child, and said to his face, "This is not my child." How could this child be mine? I said, "Well, you know she looks like you." What can I say? It looks a lot like you. "I think the idea of having children terrifies him. I don't know exactly why this is the case. I think it has something to do with his sense of the perishability of life, that all of us are doomed to death, and that he has that sense of fatalism, a general sense of fatalism. At the same time, he knew he couldn't be a good father like his father. That's impossible, so if he's a father, he can't do it well. He would stay with me and then leave again. This has happened three or four times. He wanted me to go to San Francisco and stay with him.
Excerpts from The Book of Jack: The Kerouac in Their Mouths are excerpted from the original text and published with the permission of the publisher.