Jack Kerouac’s ties to Chicago always seemed to be merely peripheral to his writing.
In “On The Road,” he did describe swooping into the city for a night in a beat-up car just to hear jazz musicians blow their tops in the Loop. He also referred to Chicago as “heaven” and the “first city on the beat map,” perhaps because it was the first stop on his legendary road trip across America in 1947.
But that was about it.
Many years after Kerouac’s death, however, it has become clear that Chicago’s literary scene and its scholarship on beat history have played key roles in changing the course of the author’s legacy.
Today, the central character in an ongoing lawsuit that will determine the rightful executor of Kerouac’s coveted literary estate is Gerald Nicosia, a Chicago native and onetime professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Nicosia is the author of 1983’s “Memory Babe,” perhaps the best-known biography of Kerouac to date. He also wrote a play about the end of Kerouac’s life called “Jack in Ghost-Town,” which was first produced by Chicago’s Prop Theater.
When Kerouac died in 1969, he left his estate to his mother, Gabrielle, who in turn left it to Stella Sampas, Kerouac’s third wife. In 1990, Stella Sampas died, leaving the estate to relatives who appointed John Sampas, her brother, as executor. But in 1994, Jan Kerouac, the writer’s daughter from another marriage, sued Sampas, claiming that her grandmother’s will had been forged. Jan Kerouac died of kidney failure in 1996 and named Nicosia literary executor of her estate, a claim that itself is being disputed in court by Jan Kerouac’s ex-husband.
Nicosia has doggedly pursued the lawsuit filed by Jan Kerouac to gain partial control of the writer’s archives, which includes unpublished manuscripts, poems and letters. A New Mexico appellate court is scheduled to determine on Wednesday whether Nicosia has the right to carry on Jan Kerouac’s lawsuit. Nicosia says he disapproves of the way the archive is being handled and that, as executor, he would make it available to the public by selling the materials to a library.
“If I get thrown out as literary executor, John Sampas will go back to selling off the archive piece by piece,” Nicosia said.
Sampas admits he has sold dozens of Kerouac’s letters to collectors and fans. He put the exact number at “20 or 30.” But Jeffrey Weinberg, a Massachusetts collector who handled sales for Sampas from 1991 to 1993, said the number was higher. He said that, at the request of Sampas, he sold large chunks of Kerouac’s private library and archive.
“I have copies of bills of sale for Jack’s books, manuscripts of books, poems, letters, paintings,” Weinberg said. Many of the works he sold for Sampas have since shown up in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library, which houses the archives of a number of famous authors. “Most of the items may be safe now, but who’s to say he won’t try to sell them again?” he said. Weinberg’s business with Sampas fell through in 1993 as Sampas consolidated his earnings and pulled back on the sales.
Sampas said he plans to sell the remainder of the archive to an institution that will make it available to scholars. But he didn’t say when or where. First he wants a personally selected biographer, University of New Orleans professor Douglas Brinkley, to get first crack at Kerouac’s private journals, notebooks and unpublished manuscripts.
He said the case against him has no merit.
“With every well-known estate, someone tries to make a grab,” Sampas said. “The real issue at hand is whether Jack’s works are getting published. That’s what’s being done.” Sampas has published a volume of Kerouac’s letters and said another is on the way.
As for his opinion of Nicosia, Sampas said: “I would never allow Nicosia to see the archive because I don’t like him.”
The controversy over the estate has bred animosity on all fronts. In March, an Internet discussion site was shut down because of accusations of threats and harassment against both Sampas and Nicosia. Nicosia said someone anonymously sent him an envelope filled with ashes and obscenities. Sampas, meanwhile, accused Nicosia of stalking him.
Central to Nicosia’s argument is that Kerouac wrote a letter to his nephew the day before he died saying that he wanted to “leave my estate to someone directly connected with the last remaining drop of my direct blood line.” In the letters, Kerouac said he didn’t want his wife’s family to get the estate. But Sampas said he is carrying out Kerouac’s wishes, as stated in a series of letters, by publishing his books and correspondence. He is the legal owner of the archive unless a judge rules otherwise.
Kerouac’s literary estate is valued at about $10 million, a stark contrast to its value at the time of his death, when all but two of his books were out of print and its net worth was estimated at $91.
Today, thanks in part to an abundance of Web sites on the topic, a new generation is discovering the rebellious and non-conformist writings of Kerouac and the beats. Since 1991, sales of “On The Road” have quadrupled, bringing the number of copies sold since 1957 to 3 million. Compilations and CD box sets featuring Kerouac’s voice have sold well beyond expectations, and all of his books are in print. Kerouac’s image today is used to sell everything from Volvos to Gap khakis.
“His mystique has gotten bigger,” said David Ulin, a Chicago-based author working on a book about the cultural impact of the beat generation. “Kerouac died before he got to do a Nike ad. But the kids who were into his books in the ’60s and ’70s became the advertising executives of the ’80s and ’90s.”
Youth longing for counterculture is another explanation for Kerouac’s rising popularity, Ulin said. The sound-bite media bring alternative trends into the mainstream so fast that a true counterculture is virtually non-existent.
Some people even believe Kerouac is still alive. Fans sometimes send letters addressed to him to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo., says Michael Smoler, a graduate student at the school who works in the office. The school, based in the Buddhist Naropa Institute, offers a creative writing program and was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in the early 1970s. Smoler, a Chicago native, says the writer’s legacy is bigger than ever.
“I now realize that I wasn’t so much influenced by the beats as writers, but by the way they lived their lives by their own rules in the repressive 1950s,” Smoler said.
No one seems to have the last word on Kerouac. Biographies about the author are constantly being written, updated or challenged. Two new biographies claiming to unmask the writer’s elusive personality are challenging Kerouac’s own account of his life and times.
“Subterranean Kerouac,” by Ellis Amburn, puts forth the argument that the writer was killed by alcoholism resulting from his inability to accept his homosexuality. St. Martin’s Press published the book on Monday. Barry Miles’ “Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats,” to be released by Henry Holt in November, suggests that Kerouac was a racist and anti-Semite despite his admiration of black culture and the fact that his best friend, Allen Ginsberg, was Jewish.
Subtitled “The Secret Life of Jack Kerouac,” Amburn’s book attempts to link the alcoholic self-destruction that led to Kerouac’s death at age 47 to a suppressed homosexual nature. Amburns, who befriended Kerouac while he edited the author’s last two books, “Desolation Angels” and “Vanity of Duluoz,” said Kerouac saw his life as a sexual tragedy.
“He told me that Neal Cassady was the only person he ever loved in his life,” Amburn said. “It was interesting for me to see how proscriptions against homoeroticism in the 1950s drove people like Kerouac up the wall and tortured him and led to his death at such a young age.”
Amburn’s assessment already has drawn criticism from fellow scholars, biographers and survivors. While some books have previously mentioned Kerouac’s bisexuality, few agree that Kerouac’s writing and alcoholism stemmed from homosexual torment. Nicosia’s biography, “Memory Babe” (Viking Penguin), remains a respected work.
Ann Charters, a biographer and editor of several Kerouac compilations, said the new biographies are sensationalistic and reduce Kerouac to something that fails to explain the magic of his books.
“It’s so much more fashionable now to talk about homosexuality as a reason for alcoholism, than, say, fathering unwanted children, or losing male figures like a brother and a father at a young age,” Charters said, referring to other torments Kerouac discussed in his books.
Gregory Corso, a beat poet and longtime friend of Kerouac, said: “I stay away from all that. Those are other people. They’re not poets. The Kerouac thing is a tragedy.”
Kerouac’s writing hasn’t always been embraced by the literary world. It was in Chicago where Kerouac first encountered censorship. It was also in Chicago where Kerouac delivered an open letter to the world three weeks before he died in an essay titled “After Me, The Deluge,” published in the Chicago Tribune magazine.
In 1958, a year after “On The Road” was published, beat authors searched the country for publications that would publish their writings. Two editors of Chicago Review at the time, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal, admired the rugged San Francisco poets and opened their arms to the beats. They were the first to publish excerpts from William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” and Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums,” as well as pieces from Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
But the notoriety of the issues caught up with the editors when Jack Mabley, then a Chicago Daily News columnist, attacked them in a piece titled “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” suggesting that the trustees of the university “take a long, hard look” at what was appearing in the magazine. The Winter, 1959, issue of Chicago Review, which already had been made up, was suppressed. Carroll and Rosenthal resigned as editors and started a publication called Big Table to publish what the University of Chicago would not. Published for the first time in the magazine’s inaugural issue were “Ten Episodes” from “Naked Lunch,” Kerouac’s “Old Angel Midnight” and three poems by Gregory Corso titled “Power,” “Army” and “Police.” Mailed copies of the issue were impounded by the Post Office in Chicago on grounds of obscenity, but later were released after a federal court ruling.
Ten years later, in 1969, the Tribune hired Kerouac for $1,500 to write an essay for its magazine addressing his reputation as a writer and his elusive politics. It appeared on Sept. 28, three weeks before he died in Florida of massive hemorrhaging due to his drinking. His words creep back like a ghost from the grave to set the record straight.
“I think I’ll drop out,” he wrote. “I think I’ll go to sleep and suddenly, in my deepest inadequacy, nightmares wake up haunted and see everyone in the world as inconsolable orphans yelling and screaming on every side to make arrangements.”
The lawsuit involving Nicosia and Sampas shows the tensions that arise in determining Kerouac’s legacy. Both say they will sell the archive to a library. Both believe they are the rightful proprietors. Both are linked by the mystique of a dead author whose ambiguous nature — saint and sinner, Catholic and Buddhist, visionary and conservative — as well as the conflicting philosophies of those who try to immortalize him make it impossible to boil down the soul of his writings.
Perhaps Kerouac said it all when he wrote in his essay: “I’m not a Tax-Free, not a Hippie-Yippie — I must be a Bippie-in-the-Middle.”
