WHO OWNS JACK KEROUAC?...interview with Jack Shea

I wondered if you could start by telling me how you became interested in Kerouac
and came to your current project. How long have you been working on
it?

I grew up in the same part of the world as Kerouac, I have the same kind of
family roots, French Canadian, Catholic, working class. I read "On the Road"
as a teenager, like everyone else, and there was some kind of an epiphany but
there were a lot of epiphanies going around at that time in the late sixties in
literature and especially in music.

I think Kerouac's best novel is "Big Sur". Most people read “Big Sur” as Jack’s
"crackup" but I see it as as a kind of Last Testament, where Kerouac sees through all his illusions, his illusions of Beatness, his illusions of being a great writer, his illusions of alcoholism, ultimately his illusions of self. He ends the book talking in the language of the ocean, the sound of the waves. It's like a prefiguring of his own death, his dissolution into pure sound, which for a writer is a pretty amazing thing to
contemplate and do. I use this image, a lone figure standing against the Pacific Ocean, to end my film, to illustrate that after all is said and done we are really just small creatures in an enormous universe.

My film is a road movie. It starts with an image of the house my father built in the 1950s and then I buy an old car, a broken-down ‘85 Oldsmobile and head out on the road looking for Jan Kerouac, Jack's abandoned daughter. Fatherhood is a big theme in the film. I learned of Jan's existence on March 12, 1997, what would have been Jack's 75th or 76th birthday. I was trawling the internet and I came across an article describing Jan Kerouac's lawsuit, her lengthy campaign, her expulsion from a Jack Kerouac conference at New York University and her final death in poverty in 1996. This was an untold story so I decided to make a film about it.

It’s an unusual kind of documentary because I weave in a lot of poets and a lot of interesting characters who have nothing to do with Jan Kerouac’s story but a lot to do with the Kerouac spirit. The film stays true to its inspirational force, Kerouac's work, which always celebrates the life lived close to necessity and simplicity. It’s a low budget movie, one man and a movie camera, it’s a Beat movie and it’s on the road. I wanted to use Kerouac’s example, to tell the true story of the people I met, especially Jack's daughter, but also to give something of my own take on things. I made the trip and shot the film in the summer of 1998 and it took the next 4 years for me to raise the money I needed to edit and finish the
film. But now it’s done and waiting to get out in the world.

What do you think kerouac himself would think of the longstanding
litigation?

He would be grumpy and sad and pissed off but ultimately he would see it all
as the sorry wranglings of flesh and blood creatures over flesh and blood
things. Jack was obsessed with the transience of the things of the world, the people he loved passing away, the fantastic, exhilirating times fading away, everything moving, everything slipping into the past. He wrote to try to freeze that movement in time, to express its mystery, joy, wonder, but he knew that his work and his words were part of the moment's passing. He would see the litigation as the sorry, dramatic mess it is, and then get on to other things in the sorry, dramatic mess of life.

Why do you think kerouac's estate has been so embroiled in controversy
all these years. I know there are no simple answers. But I wonder if
this unending litigation says anything about kerouac himself, i.e. did
he plant the seeds of disunity with his messy personal life?

When you touch truth the way Kerouac did it generates enormous antagonism. When “On the Road was first published it was like a seismic blast in America, with half the world adoring this guy who broke the mould and showed the way and the other half wanting to annihilate him because they didn’t want to know about it. The estate fight is small potatoes compared to the controversy Kerouac generated all around the world with his words and his life. He blew everything wide open and became the symbol of a sea-change in world consciousness. He became the voice of something that was happening all around him, not the creator but the representative and voice. Kerouac courted controversy all his life so it isn’t surprising that he courts controversy after his death.

I loved the title of your film, "Who owns Jack Kerouac?" Is there any
answer to that at this point?

No one owns Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac is a spirit embodied in words, in
honesty, in art, in truth, in life. Anyone who reads Kerouac participates in that
spirit but no one owns it. It's free for the taking. Who owns the books and the
pieces of paper and the typewriters and the desks is irrelevant. Who owns
Buddha? Who owns Jesus? The fight for ownership of the physical stuff of Kerouac
is interesting only insofar as it is an ironic illustration of the suffering and
transience inherent in material things, which Jack wrote about and knew all his
life, but that's as far as it goes. You could burn every piece of paper Jack ever
wrote on and the words would still remain. They're printed in the human heart
and until and unless you destroy humanity the words will still be there, the
inspiration will still be there.

In talking to so many of the players, how would you describe the level
of mutual distrust? There seems to be more bad blood here than in most
lawsuits I have covered. Why is there so much enmity?

The greater the human being the greater the fighting, argument and love he or
she provokes in the world. The drama of the estate controversy has actually been a very energetic, Kerouac-and-life-affirming thing. It's forced a lot of people to think about the meaning of Kerouac's work. It's also generated a lot of publicity that has caused some people to read Kerouac for the first time and inspired others to re-read him. It’s probably stimulated book sales, which is good for the Estate and good for Kerouac and good for us. Some people have gotten rich on it, but money generates its own problems and certainly isn't something to be envied.

The Estate published "Some of the Dharma" for example, which Kerouac could never get published in his lifetime because it's two hundred pages of very esoteric
meditations on the Buddhist view of existence seen through very American
eyes. That is a major accomplishment and I don't think they could have made any money on it. The Estate wouldn't be able to take a knock like this if they didn't have the confidence that money in the bank gives.

So the prosperity of the Estate is not a bad thing, and to my mind selling manuscripts and letters to private collectors is also not a bad thing. Kerouac might disagree with me because he often said that he wanted it all kept in a single unit in a library, for scholars. But I think he would have been just as pleased to find that his work was kept in people's homes, which are much more sacred places than museums. And by scattering Kerouac's manuscripts all around the world you force academics and scholars to get out and do some travelling, see some of the world, meet different people, "hit the road", which is after all a big part of the
Kerouac message.

I actually like the fact that Jim Irsay, owner of the Indiana Colts, has the OTR scroll and that he has a glass of wine and a cigarette inches away from the sacred text. Kerouac was a football star in high school and he was no enemy to booze and butts. Wouldn't it be a great cosmic joke if Jim spilled his glass on the scroll, dropped his cigarette on it and it all went up in an alcohol-fuelled inferno? I’m sure Jack would get the joke, he’d crack his sides laughing “hee hee hee!”. What would be tragic though is if “On the Road” had been censored, never published, strangled in the womb. The scroll is just the shed skin of a very living animal. There is a big difference between censorship and archiving.

It's sad and tragic that there are martyrs to the cause in the fight over the papers but martyrs are self-appointed and they’re a great way to kick-start a new or floundering religion, as Christianity proved. Ultimately the message is more important than the individuals who transmit the message, no matter how hard the messengers kick and scream that they are the ones we should be paying attention to. That is a pure Kerouac sentiment, and he kicked and screamed like the rest of us.

Jack abandoned a daughter and fathered a generation, or at least the paternity tests seem to suggest that Jack is the father of that generation. It may be that Jan and Jack's sacrifice of their relationship provided the necessary conditions for Jack to
produce his painfully wrought, transformative literature. In the larger scheme
of things Jack's personal failings may have been sacrifices performed for
reasons beyond even his understanding of himself.

Are researchers such as yourself having any difficulty gaining access
to kerouac archival materials?

I believe in providing complete, unfettered access to a writer’s papers but the world doesn’t work that way. Writing is an art but publishing is a business. Kerouac himself wanted to release his books into the world without any editorial revision but his editors made him change things. It might seem tragic for scholars who want to finger the raw materials of Kerouac’s books but how tragic is it really compared to the fact the Jack’s books are in print, his words are out there in the world? The scholarly work I find most interesting and worthwhile is the translations of Kerouac into many different languages, which is a thriving contemporary industry and gets right to the heart of the matter, which is the books themselves.
Censorship is a different matter. Artists are valuable to society, whether society knows it or not, and the job of artists is to define the spirit of the time. When you hold the mirror up to nature the picture that you see isn’t always pretty but it’s a crime to break the mirror. Once a society starts censoring its artists, as American society tried to censor Kerouac by ridiculing him and his work, you have the beginnings of totalitarianism. The Nazis took it all the way and burned books and paintings. It’s a dangerous road and contrary to every American principle of democracy and freedom of speech.

My film is a song to the Kerouac spirit and to the poets and writers and
artists and musicians who are working in that tradition. The film is
as much about my own quest for Kerouacian truth as it is about Jan Kerouac's
claim to her father's estate. There may be opposition to my work because not everyone wants the truth to be told. Kerouac experienced may different types of obstruction and suppression of his work and yet he more than survived, he prospered from the conflict and the conflict he generated has become an integral part of the understanding of his art. As Blake said “Without Contrarities there is no Progression”.

FINIS

...well, not quite. If you've gotten this far you get a treat. Here is a URL to a site which contains JACK KEROUAC talking...and reading. Little clips, tantalizing. The Master's Voice.

KEROUAC READS:

http://www-hsc.usc.edu/~gallaher/k_speaks/kerouacspeaks.html

And here is a link to the KICKS, JOY, DARKNESS cd rom which also has Kerouac reading. Some Real Audio tasters.

http://www.rykodisc.com/Catalog/dump/rykoalbums_666.asp

BUT THE BEST WAY TO HEAR JACK IS TO HIT THE KEYS BELOW. THEY'LL TAKE YOU TO THE
TI POUSSE PIANO!