I’m not sure if it was his writing as much as the idea of him that I was infatuated with. Anyway, thanks Kerouac.
To me, there were "scenes" I could imagine myself having liked to be part of, like the guys traveling on truck-bed drinking whisky to keep cold away. I wonder if it was more a "guy's novel" than for girls?
The discussion is about a novel whose main appeal is described as "scenes one can imagine themselves in" with "more style than substance". That's a valid thing to enjoy, but not for everyone.
The idea that it appeals to boys and not girls was conflicted with further nuance: while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.
While one can make the argument that the beats' values and writings are at least complimentary to misogyny, that wasn't the discussion happening here previously.
After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...
That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.
That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...
He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.
Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr
That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.
https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/
He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.
He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and build himself an 18th century manor house refuge:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA
He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173
His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (the middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".
Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her, which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:
https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...
The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr.
I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.
Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:
"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.
You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit." I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.
Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_Road
Edit:
The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.
It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D
Of possible interest to the "ramen profitable" set, there's a part in the book where she had no money and had heard you could live on just cabbage and peanut butter, so she does that for a month.
Writing is an isolating profession, and its demons compound when you introduce other vices.
Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.
On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?
They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
The similarly-titled "The Road" by Jack London does the same for an earlier America. It's one of my favorite books.
Fast forward forty years. The accountant dies. His daughter comes to clean out her father’s house. She asks a friend to help. They find a box and an envelope: Casady’s Joan Anderson letter.
The Kerouac Estate is quite a legal mess. A Florida court found that a purported will was fraudulent, but I'll leave that issue aside because the Estate has been a good steward of Kerouac's writing--unlike the Joyce Estate.
Complicated rules attach to letters. A physical letter is the property of the recipient, but IP rights remain in its author, as J.D. Salinger found out when his letters went up for auction. Salinger was saved by Peter Norton--you may have heard of his "Utilities" who bought the letters and gave them to Salinger. Casady's heirs have a claim. Other rules apply to manuscripts. This one was thrown in the trash and California has rules that vest ownership in anyone who finds treasure in someone else’s disposed-of trash, such as the accountant. A Sotheby’s auction was halted at the last minute. A settlement was reached among the parties and the letter now is archived at Emory University.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...
Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620
The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/fea...
https://www.rbth.com/history/330411-why-leo-tolstoy-was-terr...
Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning, that he is not monogamous and she should make up her mind, whether she can accept that?
That is not a flaw in my book.
And that he left household chores to her?
Well, depends how things were agreed between them, but since his dayjob was writing .. I think that article overall presents a very weak case.
"all this was also on Sophia’s shoulders, including the village’s clinic, which she paid to organize. Last but not the least, Sophia was her husband’s scribe, secretary and literary agent. She even consulted Anna Dostoevsky, another great writer’s wife who was responsible for her husband’s literary business. Sophia understood the perplexing handwriting of her husband and rewrote and edited many of his works. She copied the entire text of War and Peace seven times."
Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores.
> Because he did not cheat on his wife, like it was common, but told her from the beginning
She was 18, he was 34 and he gave her his diaries with all the details to read. And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village).
Overall he does come across as a low key asshole even if we ignore cheating as a fair play.
Like I said, it depends on the agreements they had. I have no problem giving her credit, my question was whether it makes Tolstoy bad.
"And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village)."
That would be bad, but is that a solid fact?
edit:
"not to have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent"
That is the quote from the article. Does not imply he broke it to me.
Maybe you are fine with occasional cheat, maybe your subconsciousness desperately irons out wrinkles of reality to make looking in the mirror still a pleasant activity (like all other people doing bad things who are not complete sociopaths), who cares.
Its failure in one of most important aspect of life, undefendable, and generally looked down upon. Thats it.
What promises and agreements he did break?
And it is also ok how sometimes, or even not frequently, misogynistic content makes you look cool to quite a lot of people.