The Kerouac Saga: Extended Version

By Sterling Lord -- Publishers Weekly, 8/23/2007 9:23:00 AM

It was a Sunday morning in early autumn and near the end of the 20th century. The sun was bright and the sky was a delicate blue with a few scattered clouds. I was in Lowell, Mass., the old mill town where Jack Kerouac had grown up, and this was the last day of my appearance at the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival. There’s an extraordinary Jack Kerouac Commemorative in the center of the town, and I had come to Kerouac Park, as it is officially called, in a sense to say good-bye to the memory of Jack before returning to New York City.

Surrounded by old mills and other buildings of another time, the park is a patch of green on which stand eight triangular columns of carnelian granite, on which are carved quotations from Jack’s various books. All but one have Kerouac prose on two sides, the eighth has Kerouac’s name on one side and his prose on another. In front of the columns are 12 gracefully curved granite benches.

The park suggests and seems to promote thoughtfulness, reflection and tranquillity. It is a work of beauty, and like Jack, it embraces America: the granite was quarried in South Dakota; it was cut in Minnesota; the graphic design was done in Virginia; and the sculptor—Ben Woitena—who is from Texas had studied in California.

There was no one in the park at that hour—no one except me and a friend. As I stood there reading the inscription on the granite column devoted to Jack’s best-known work, On The Road, my thoughts turned back to almost 50 years earlier, when Jack came into my life, and to all the vivid memories in between.

It was 1951 when he first rang the bell and walked through the door of my office, a below-ground-level room I had liberated from being a one-room-plus-bath dwelling just off Park Avenue. Through our windows, we could see the knees and lower legs of people passing on the 36th Street sidewalk.

Two weeks earlier, Bob Giroux, of Harcourt, Brace, had called me. Giroux had edited The Town and the City, Jack’s first and conventional novel. Jack had just been in to see him, and he needed a literary agent. Giroux thought I would be the right man. He added that Jack had a new manuscript typed on a 120-foot scroll of architectural tracing paper. That would be my problem to deal with.

When Jack came in he had a manuscript wrapped in newspaper, which he extracted from a weather-beaten rucksack. He called it The Beat Generation, and he had already taken Bob Giroux’s advice and retyped it on regular typing paper.

He was wearing a light-colored weather-resistant jacket with a lightweight checkered shirt underneath. He was handsome, striking-looking and unique in appearance—”diamond in the rough” was the phrase that came to mind. He was courteous, respectful, but we didn’t talk at length and he was leaving the product of years of work (and three weeks of typing) in my hands. He told me Giroux had rejected it.

As we started working together, I came to respect him. I was impressed with Jack’s commitment to serious writing. I felt that his was a fresh, distinctive voice that should be heard. For more than four years I could not find an editor or a publisher who felt the same way. During that time, discouraged by my lack of success, Jack wrote me (it was June 28, 1955) that he wanted to “pull my manuscripts back and forget publishing.” I thought I knew Jack well, so I ignored his request and continued submitting. Twelve days later he changed his mind and we went on merrily together.

The responses of two editors both highly regarded and employed by major publishing houses with literary reputations were typical of the rejections. Surprisingly each of these editors was approximately Jack’s age, which in my mind should have increased the likelihood of their responding positively to the manuscript. The most striking rejection was the following: “ Kerouac does have enormous talent of a very special kind. But this is not a well made novel, nor a salable one nor even, I think, a good one. His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly expresses the feverish travels, geographically and mentally, of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so.”

That was six months after the following rejection came in from another publisher: “I know this will be discouraging news for you and Jack Kerouac, for you’ve both waited so long and patiently. Our response to Kerouac’s work was singular almost to a man, in that there was genuine admiration for his vigorous prose, his capacity to create a living sense of America, of life in this country, and the force and originality of his conception. But there were serious objections to the people and situations he writes about, whether they would be of compelling interest to many readers.... [A]ll I might suggest is that he should strive for a clearer vision of the novel itself.”

After almost four years of trying to sell Jack’s manuscript—now called On The Road—to a U.S. publisher, I sold a piece of his to the Paris Review. A few months later, I sold one piece and then another of the manuscript to New World Writing, a very good but short-lived literary magazine in pocket book format published at that time by New American Library and edited by Arabelle Porter. Shortly after the second story appeared in New World Writing, I had a call from Keith Jennison, a young Viking editor. He, Malcolm Cowley and Tom Guinzburg were the strong Kerouac fans at Viking, and of course Malcolm Cowley had had the original scroll.

“Dammit, Sterling,” Keith said, “ we can’t let that manuscript go unpublished any longer.” He made me an offer of $900 against royalties. I said no, got him up to $1,000 and closed the deal. Jack took the good news in stride. It was as if he knew it would eventually be published and that it was happening now was merely a confirmation of his belief. The fact that Viking thought Jack was profligate and might blow the entire advance in one night on the town prompted them to pay it out in $100 increments. That didn’t bother Jack. He had a publisher.

Shortly after the contract was signed, Helen Taylor, a fine senior editor, began working with Jack in editing the manuscript, while the lawyers expressed their concerns about names and likenesses of some of the book’s characters. Her editing was extremely sensitive: she made cuts and changes without in any way impeding the flow of Jack’s prose. This turned out to be the last time any manuscript of Jack’s was edited. I sold a subsequent book of his, The Subterraneans, to another publisher whose initial editing was totally insensitive. (We caught it before publication). Thereafter, at Jack’s request, I would include in each contract the following clause: “the publisher may not change a word of the manuscript nor alter the punctuation,” or some variation thereof.

Both Jack and Viking had wavered on the title. It was to be either The Beat Generation or On The Road. (Jack’s friend and my friend and client John Clellon Holmes had put the name beat generation in a popular publication for the first time. His article “This Is the Beat Generation” appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of November 16, 1952. But in the end On The Road won out.

A year later, during July and August 1957—On The Road had not yet been published—I began to feel the growing wave of enthusiasm for it. Half a dozen times, in early afternoon, I had calls from one publishing person after another, and they were all the same: “Sterling, I just had lunch with [blank] of Viking, and all he [or she] could talk about was the Kerouac novel.” It didn’t make any difference which Viking editor they had lunched with, the comment was the same. It was the book they were all excited about.

September 5, 1957, On The Road was published with an electrifying New York Times review by Gilbert Millstein, an extremely perceptive and talented writer himself and a man of great integrity. He was filling in for the regular New York Times reviewer, Orville Prescott, who was on vacation. The review had enormous impact.

I will never forget those days. The press wanted Jack in New York immediately. I phoned him in Florida and left word. He called back shortly asking if he could borrow $25 for a bus ticket back to New York. (It was only years later that I learned he had also contacted his friend Joyce Glassman asking for $30.) At that time Joyce’s apartment was Jack’s headquarters when he came to New York. And using our money, he got a seat on a bus and managed to get to New York immediately.

Once the book was out, he was taken in hand by Pat McManus, Viking’s head publicist. But shortly after publication, around 11:15 one morning, Viking phoned—”Where was Jack, he was about to miss appointments.” I thought I knew where. I hailed a taxi to take me to 65 W. 65th St., Joyce’s apartment. When I arrived, Jack was lying on his back on the living room floor. He was overwhelmed, shocked by the swift change from obscurity to smothering adulation.

But the review had an impact on others. It was and is rare that any editor working in book publishing actually buys a book he wants to read. He usually just phones a friend in the house that published the book and gets a gift copy. On September 5, an excellent young literary editor at Lippincott, Corlies “Cork” Smith, was taking the train from his native Philadelphia to Manhattan and reading the New York Times en route. He was so moved by the Millstein review of Kerouac that when he reached Penn Station, he hopped off and instead of going to his office, hurried to the closest bookstore and actually bought a copy of On The Road.

The display of adulation, hero worship and curiosity continued for months. One night after Jack had spent a tiring day in New York City, he took the train back to Northport, Long Island, arriving shortly before midnight. He had to walk across a couple of fields to get home to 34 Gilbert St. But when he arrived, his front porch was crowded with young people—none of whom Jack knew—who had been waiting for hours to have a party with Jack. It was almost dawn when he got to bed.

The effects of sudden fame caused all sorts of problems for Jack. I felt he was basically shy, and any time he came to New York City, he had to fortify himself with drink. Initially, I tried to help Jack battle his drinking problem, including taking him to a doctor who thought he could help. The doctor turned out to be totally ineffective.

But I began to realize that, fond as I was of him, I was only his literary agent, not his life agent.

I was reminded, too, of all these things, as I stood in front of the On The Road column, of the writers who streamed into my office from all over the country, all of whom had read the Millstein review and most of whom had read Jack’s book. I remember one in particular who drove in nonstop from Denver with a broken window patched up with cardboard on his battered Ford, and a number of other imitations of a trip described in On The Road. His manuscript, as you might guess, was totally unpublishable, as were most of the others. Almost all were superficially imitative of Jack’s writing, but without his talent.

At the time Esquire magazine, known for publishing new and interesting writers, had been sitting on a Jack Kerouac story for months. I couldn’t get a decision from them. But the day after the Millstein review appeared they called and made me an offer for “Ronnie on the Mound.” It was published two months later.

In the 12 years he lived after the publication of On The Road, he and Mémère constantly moved. Northport; Orlando, Fla.; Northport again, Hyannisport, Mass.; St. Petersburg, Fla. There was always what seemed like a good reason to move at the time. It could have been motivated by Jack’s wishes or by Mémère—after all, Jack had promised his father on Leo Kerouac’s deathbed that he would take care of Mémère.

During one of his early times in Northport, Jack invited me out to spend a weekend—or at least part of a weekend—with him and his mother. This was before he married Stella, and he and Mémère were living in a rambling frame house at 34 Gilbert Street with a spacious front porch and a garage behind the house. They didn’t own a car, but the garage supported a basketball bank board and basket at regulation height, and there was a flat dirt and light gravel area in front of the garage where you could bounce the basketball and expect it to come back up almost as predictably as it would from a hardwood floor.

Both Jack and James T. Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan and also a client, thought of me as a deskbound shirt-and-tie man, far from being athletic. But Jack had vaguely heard I was interested in tennis. So he had, in honor of my appearance in Northport, created a basketball game scored like a tennis match. And he had, I discovered later, been practicing all week before I arrived. I didn’t tell him I had played basketball in junior high, high school and college (as well as half a dozen other sports), and I beat him soundly. Jack was stunned. And he never forgot it. Years later, the last time I saw him before he died, he brought it up again, still astounded at the outcome.|

The last night I spent with Jack was a sad one. I was in Tampa to lecture at the University of South Florida at the request of Professor Ed Hirshberg, brother of my longtime client Al Hirshberg, and was able to spend one free evening with Jack in St. Petersburg. I had not realized how much he had been drinking. The bars in St. Petersburg in those days had a bar room and a pool room, and the elegant bars also had a third room—a dance floor. At our first stop, I ordered a beer, and Jack ordered a double scotch with a bottle of beer as a chaser. By the time I finished one-third of a glass of my beer, Jack had consumed both scotches and the entire bottle of beer.

At the second bar, just a few streets away, the same thing happened. But as we moved on to a third, luxury bar, I noted Jack was still pretty steady on his feet. At the luxury bar a pool game was in progress, and you could get in the game for 25 cents. Jack did so, but as he did I looked around at the other players and looked outside at the trucks and realized this was no ordinary pickup game. As I found out later, these players were mainly truck drivers en route from Chicago to Miami (and for some, vice versa) who had by prearrangement all shown up to play. Fortunately, the player in charge realized Jack was a little shaky and gently eased him out of the game before he could rip the felt, and we soberly and drunkenly went back to Jack’s house.

Two weeks later, when I was back in New York, Jack more or less repeated his tour of the St. Petersburg bars. This time he was alone, and the men he confronted were not gentle. This time they broke his arm.

Almost 12 years after On The Road was published, one night when I was sound asleep in my New York City apartment, the phone rang. It was 4:30 in the morning of October 21, 1969. The call was from Stella, Jack’s wife. She was choked up with emotion as she told me that Jack had just died. I expressed my sorrow and had the presence of mind to tell her I was in the process that very week of negotiating the film sale of On The Road to GJL Productions at Warner Bros. It was too much for her to address and with a short gasp she hung up. But she was alert enough to call the St. Petersburg bank, which was the trustee of Jack’s estate, so that by the time I reached my office at 9:30 that morning, the bank was on the phone assuring me of my right to go ahead, in general, to continue functioning as Jack’s agent. And of course I told the bank that Jack had of his own initiative on March 4, 1958, signed a note appointing me his literary executor.

A few days later I was on a plane to Boston en route to the funeral at Lowell, Mass. It was a Friday morning, and I wasn’t flying alone. The night before, my friend the writer Jimmy Breslin had phoned and hearing of my next day plans, he said, “No one should go alone to a funeral,” and he promptly arranged to fly with me. Since he didn’t know Kerouac, although they had by coincidence lived near each other in the Queens neighborhood of Richmond Hill, he asked me a good deal about Jack during the flight, including how he died at the young age of 47. As nearly as I knew, from what I had heard from family and friends, Jack had had nothing to eat—he drank constantly—for the last four or five days of his life, and I told Jimmy so.

“That’s impossible,” Jimmy said speaking with the authority of a man who had seen it all, in that area at least. “You’ve got to eat something around 10 or 11 in the morning, you can’t avoid it,” and he promised to find out at the wake. He did; Jack had been taking bennies.

As the plane came on to its final approach to Logan Airport, Jimmy turned to ask me how I planned to get from Logan to Lowell. “Rent a car,” I said, but that wasn’t good enough for such an occasion, in Jimmy’s view.

At the time Jimmy was probably the best-known journalist/columnist in the United States, and he certainly was well-known in the Irish community of Boston. So when we reached a phone booth in the airport, Jimmy thumbed through the yellow pages until he found the largest ad for a limousine service with an Irish proprietor. It was around 9 a.m., and the owner of that particular service was still in bed. But hearing it was really Jimmy Breslin on the phone, he jumped out of bed with no thought of assigning another driver for the trip and was at our disposal in 20 minutes. All that Irish brogue up and back between Jimmy and the owner/driver did a great deal to mollify the pain of Jack’s death for me.

I can still see the scene around the grave. The sunlight filtering through the trees, the leaves brown after shedding their fall colors. John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg full of sadness, Edie Parker (Jack’s first wife), members of the Sampas family and a group of working press, some of whom came up to Jimmy Breslin, who didn’t get out of the car we’d hired to bring us up from Boston. “No,” he said to the journalists who asked him questions, “it’s not my day, it’s his,” as he pointed to the fresh grave containing Jack’s body.

At Kerouac Park, my thoughts returned to the present, as I noticed a man waving at me from the sidewalk across the street. I thought I had seen him before, but I couldn’t remember his name if I’d ever known it. He turned, striding across the street toward me, 35mm camera (it turned out to be a Nikon 6006) in hand, and he asked if he could take my picture as I stood in front of the monolith containing an inscription from On The Road. I agreed, of course, and after he had snapped three photos and thanked me, he said, “You know, Sterling, none of this would have happened without you.” Although that was more than a slight exaggeration, I thanked him.

Long after all this had happened, I called Bob Giroux, who was then retired. “ I did not reject On The Road,” Bob told me. “I never read it. I merely told him, ‘Jack, don’t you realize that the way authors present manuscripts now, they put them on 8.5 by 11-inch white paper.’ “ At that point Bob rolled up the scroll and handed it back to Jack.

Years later, Ed Adler, artist, art historian and professor at New York University, was interviewing a number of prominent artists about influences that had shaped their work. This was in the period of 1975 to 1980, or, as Adler says, “the end of the ‘60s when the last Marines were out of Saigon.” He talked with Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann among others as he was researching his master’s thesis. Man for man, they told Adler, their greatest influence was Jack Kerouac and particularly On The Road.

In 1999 at the funeral service for Gilbert Millstein at Frank E. Campbell’s on 81st Street in Manhattan, among the many laudatory comments on Millstein’s life, the one specific event mentioned was his review of September 5, 1957, of On The Road.

Today—2007—50 years after original publication, On The Road sells 100,000 copies each year in the U.S. and Canada. It is read, taught and assigned in high schools and colleges all over the U.S. In Manhattan, in Greenwich Village bookstores, paperback editions are often kept under lock and key. It has also been published in 24 foreign countries.

The city of San Francisco has named a street after Jack: Jack Kerouac Alley, just off Columbus Avenue, right next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s legendary bookstore, City Lights.

Sterling Lord is the founder of Sterling Lord Literistic Inc. He has been a literary agent for 56 years. This article, a shorter version of which appears in the print edition of PW (Aug. 27), is taken from his forthcoming memoir, Hard Work and Good Luck, which will be published by Public Affairs in 2008.

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