‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive shown in New York | Jack Kerouac

AAmong the great literary myths, the legend of Jack Kerouac is often reduced to the atmosphere of the open road, a cigarette, a post-war rebel leaning against an old car – a masculine archetype of rebellion and hedonism. Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road was the bible of the beat and records generation, in its stunningly unfiltered prose, and its travels across the United States with fellow writers Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and his lifelong muse, the dashing Neal Cassady. The book changed the course of American literature and captured the imagination of a rapidly changing world. Kerouac was crowned King of Beats, a title he later despised.

This, at least, is what many students of American literature know. But the new exhibition “Running Across the Sky: Visions of Jack Kerouac” at New York’s Grulier Club aims to bring back the legend’s humanity, through letters from Kerouac that have never been publicly displayed before.

Jacob Lowenthal, a collector and historian who owns all the items in the exhibit and is also a curator, says his collection began with Kerouac’s copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, which will be on display. On the inside cover, Lowenthal found the author’s handwritten note: “As if they were all running through the sky.” This inspired the show’s title.

At a “lesser-known auction house,” Lowenthal later found letters and correspondence from Kerouac’s years at Columbia University, most of which were written to a friend back home in Lowell, Massachusetts. The correspondence shows Kerouac “just coming to New York and his world expanding from Lowell to this enormous urban life,” Lowenthal says in a video call. The letters describe “the books he read at school and his thoughts about them.”

Loewentheil believes that they display early forms and experiments of what would become Kerouac’s distinctive style of “spontaneous prose.” “He tried it on his friends,” Lowenthal says.

The exhibition coincides with Loewentheil’s new book, which has the same title as the exhibition and includes an introduction by Anne Charters, a Beat scholar and Kerouac collaborator. Lowenthal writes in the book that the letters relate “to a young man in the midst of shaping the vision and voice that would define a generation.”

It is clear in the letters that Kerouac believed from a young age that he would be famous and that his letters would be read by future readers. “He was so sure he was going to be a great writer,” Lowenthal says. “But he was very concerned with how everyone saw him, and how everyone around him saw him.”

The exhibition raises questions: Should personal letters be considered part of Kerouac’s literary work? Should it be read at all? These are the themes Lowenthal hopes the exhibition will invite: how readers should view these documents and other texts that are more clearly understood as private writings. “I have documents that Kerouac called ‘Notes to Myself’ in the collection,” Lowenthal says, describing them as a “stream of consciousness.” At least one is in the show.

The show also displays personal objects, which Lowenthal calls “relics,” that shake up the image of the road tramp. “Kerouac spent most of his time at home,” Lowenthal says. His collection includes casual trousers and house slippers, although the slippers had to be cut from the exhibition for conservation reasons. On display is Kerouac’s glass ashtray, still bearing the remains of cigarette ash, which is described in the exhibition notes as evoking “Kerouac bent over a typewriter, stubbing out one cigarette after another in a smoky aura of creativity.”

There is a handwritten work schedule from April 1953 recording Kerouac’s hours and wages as a brakeman, which the exhibition considers evidence of “the working-class reality beyond the myths.” This framing rings true and resonates: Kerouac grew up working-class in Lowell, a French-Canadian mill town, and worked odd manual jobs all his life. Even at the height of his fame, he relied on advances and intermittent income. In the latter part of his life, as his alcoholism worsened, most historians note that his financial situation became ever more precarious, even as he became a household name.

Perhaps the most intimate item in the exhibition is Kerouac’s tobacco pouch, Lowenthal’s favorite product. It still contains coarse tobacco leaves and was likely found in Kerouac’s pocket.

“I appreciate his personal items,” Lowenthal says. “But I also feel, for lack of a better word, a little weird about owning someone else’s material, tangible things.” Manuscripts and books are one thing, but it seems “strange” for him to carry “a mala bead with which Kerouac prayed without feeling some interference.”

This sense of voyeurism is evident in the show and book. It’s a fine line to walk. Kerouac expected his letters to be viewed, but at the age of eighteen, he was writing to a friend in his homeland, still “expressing his own thoughts.” To address this problem, Lowenthal chose pages that explained “who Kerouac was” without being “unnecessarily intrusive.”

One somewhat disappointing example of this approach: “Not every visitor needs to read graphic depictions of their gender in college.” So those are not displayed.

There are concerns at present. Kerouac “uses, at times, completely unacceptable language” and “says things that are difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities.” The book notes Kerouac’s anti-Semitism, which continued even as he befriended Jewish peers like Ginsberg.

Then, everyone’s favorite topic: Kerouac’s sex life. “We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom and who was there,” Lowenthal laughs. “Evidence from Kerouac’s diaries, texts, and letters…suggests that he was deeply repressed or perhaps bisexual,” he wrote in the book. However, “the desire to categorize him is a mistake,” Lowenthal feels, and he resists the idea that any classification can contain Kerouac.

However, it would undoubtedly mean a great deal to LGBTQ+ readers to claim him as an American icon, but Lowenthal believes that even a figure as widely confessional and self-mythical as Kerouac deserves some mystery and privacy, perhaps especially so in his struggles and conflicts. “Out of respect for Kerouac, I don’t think there’s a category we can put him in. If he’s not at all sure, how can we be?”

Perhaps the greatest tension in Kerouac’s life was between his Catholic upbringing and his adult Buddhist studies. This lives on in the show as well. Kerouac’s rosary, worn around his neck, is displayed with mala beads used in Buddhist meditation.

The timing of this exhibition seems resonant – and a bit ominous. In January, news broke that Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road, 37 meters long, would be up for auction. When it was last sold in 2001, Carolyn Cassady – Neal Cassady’s ex-wife – denounced the auction as “blasphemous”, saying the manuscript belonged to a library, not a private collection. “Jack loved public libraries,” she said at the time. “If they auctioned it off, any rich person could buy it and keep it out of sight,” she said at the time.

Regarding the upcoming sale of the manuscript, Lowenthal says: “The manuscript for ‘On the Road’ is not just a manuscript; it is a foundational document of postwar American literature. I hope it finds a home with a host who appreciates its importance and will allow it to remain part of the ongoing public conversation about Kerouac.”

The exhibition makes a compelling case for separating the artist’s stereotype and mythology from his living self, although Kerouac makes this separation difficult, and perhaps ultimately impossible. His work straddles the line between nonfiction and fiction, making it difficult for historians to extract truth from embellishment. It was his life’s work.

But continued efforts to uncover him bring good things, and Lowenthal hopes to revive interest in an arguably fallen 20th-century icon among younger readers. Through the letters, Lowenthal believes we can soften the popular image of the author: seen through a modern lens, he is a more suitable example of non-toxic masculinity than the brash postwar cowboy. The letters prove that he was a romantic and ultimately a conservative. “People have a tough idea of ​​Kerouac, but that macho look is not very accurate,” Lowenthal says. “He had a tremendous open heart,” and “on a certain level, he was too kind and gentle a person for the world he was in.”