Good background. Raw Story:
Joyce Johnson’s new book reveals details of their relationship and how fame blighted On the Road author
The former girlfriend of the leading novelist of the beat generation Jack Kerouac has revealed details of their affair and his descent into bizarre behaviour on finding fame, in a new book to be published more than 40 years after his death.
Joyce Johnson, an accomplished author, also dispels the myth that Kerouac’s writing was effortlessly spontaneous. Where he claimed his novel On the Road was written in a blast of energy during three weeks in 1951 she recalls that he spent years revising his work and carefully crafted each paragraph.
Her book is just part of a revival of the cult that surrounded Kerouac which has this year prompted three feature films and a documentary, as well as books and an exhibition at the British Library.
Johnson, now 77, describes him as a “very odd person” who treated her dreadfully but was the love of her life. She delves more deeply into his background, his childhood and his rise to fame and chronicles the toll his celebrity status and his drinking took on their relationship.
She was 21 when she met Kerouac. “Jack was without a place to live and had no money. Since I was a young writer who had her own apartment, Allen [Ginsberg] set up a blind date.” They were together for two years.
Kerouac became a sensation after On the Road, which blighted their relationship: “Women everywhere were offering themselves. He was a celebrity, which was very hard for him. In public situations, he had to drink.”
Johnson’s book, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, to be published this month, explores how the “spontaneous” writing of On the Road was actually “a much longer process … each paragraph had to be a ‘poem’.”
She shows how Kerouac’s French Canadian background both enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of the US. She details his slow, often painful development as a writer, with early struggles to master English.
She said: “He spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French. Other biographies have not looked really deeply enough at the implications of Jack’s Franco-American heritage, the fact that English was a second language … There was always a process of translation going on, trying to find the English equivalent for the French inside his head … Now looking at the text of On the Road, I can see French inflections all the way through it.”
She recalls: “I thought I’d never met anyone who’d lived with more absolute freedom … A need to keep moving, as if whenever he stayed anywhere too long, he exhausted the present by soaking it in too intensely.”
Exhibits at the library will include the 120ft scroll on which he typed On the Road, according to his claims in 1951. After repeated rejection by publishers and years of despair, his story of a hedonistic road trip across North America was published in 1957, since when it has sold five million copies in the US alone.
Kerouac died an alcoholic recluse in 1969, aged 47, having tried in vain to interest Marlon Brando in a screen adaptation of On the Road. Francis Ford Coppola sensed the book’s cinematic potential, but it has only now been made into a film, directed by Walter Salles, with Coppola as executive producer, to be released in Britain in October.
Kerouac about Denver.
Joyce Johnson’s new book reveals details of their relationship and how fame blighted On the Road author
The former girlfriend of the leading novelist of the beat generation Jack Kerouac has revealed details of their affair and his descent into bizarre behaviour on finding fame, in a new book to be published more than 40 years after his death.
Joyce Johnson, an accomplished author, also dispels the myth that Kerouac’s writing was effortlessly spontaneous. Where he claimed his novel On the Road was written in a blast of energy during three weeks in 1951 she recalls that he spent years revising his work and carefully crafted each paragraph.
Her book is just part of a revival of the cult that surrounded Kerouac which has this year prompted three feature films and a documentary, as well as books and an exhibition at the British Library.
Johnson, now 77, describes him as a “very odd person” who treated her dreadfully but was the love of her life. She delves more deeply into his background, his childhood and his rise to fame and chronicles the toll his celebrity status and his drinking took on their relationship.
She was 21 when she met Kerouac. “Jack was without a place to live and had no money. Since I was a young writer who had her own apartment, Allen [Ginsberg] set up a blind date.” They were together for two years.
Kerouac became a sensation after On the Road, which blighted their relationship: “Women everywhere were offering themselves. He was a celebrity, which was very hard for him. In public situations, he had to drink.”
Johnson’s book, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, to be published this month, explores how the “spontaneous” writing of On the Road was actually “a much longer process … each paragraph had to be a ‘poem’.”
She shows how Kerouac’s French Canadian background both enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of the US. She details his slow, often painful development as a writer, with early struggles to master English.
She said: “He spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French. Other biographies have not looked really deeply enough at the implications of Jack’s Franco-American heritage, the fact that English was a second language … There was always a process of translation going on, trying to find the English equivalent for the French inside his head … Now looking at the text of On the Road, I can see French inflections all the way through it.”
She recalls: “I thought I’d never met anyone who’d lived with more absolute freedom … A need to keep moving, as if whenever he stayed anywhere too long, he exhausted the present by soaking it in too intensely.”
Exhibits at the library will include the 120ft scroll on which he typed On the Road, according to his claims in 1951. After repeated rejection by publishers and years of despair, his story of a hedonistic road trip across North America was published in 1957, since when it has sold five million copies in the US alone.
Kerouac died an alcoholic recluse in 1969, aged 47, having tried in vain to interest Marlon Brando in a screen adaptation of On the Road. Francis Ford Coppola sensed the book’s cinematic potential, but it has only now been made into a film, directed by Walter Salles, with Coppola as executive producer, to be released in Britain in October.
Kerouac about Denver.
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