Beat King for Sale

Beat King for Sale James Janko (bio) Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century Gerald Nicosia Noodlebrain Press 192 Pages; Print, $24.95 When poet Gary Snyder first met Jack Kerouac in San Francisco in 1955, he noticed "a palpable aura of fame and death." Kerouac was largely unknown at the time, but Snyder sensed in him a cauldron of creative energy, a volcano about to erupt. Perhaps no one knows more about the life and work of Jack Kerouac than biographer Gerald Nicosia, the author of Memory Babe (1983). Allen Ginsberg hailed this book as "a monument of Kerouac." Unfortunately, Memory Babe has been out of print for more than eighteen years, not because it lacks an audience but because it has been systematically removed from the Kerouac canon. I read Nicosia's newest book, Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century, with a mixture of fascination and horror. In the hands of a lesser writer, the fate of Jack Kerouac's archive would read like a legal brief. Instead, Nicosia's prose sparks with insight and drama at every turn. At center stage is the multi-million-dollar heist of a literary estate. When Jack Kerouac died in October of 1969, his mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, was the sole beneficiary. Gabrielle died four years later. Her will specified that the entire estate and all assets go to Stella Sampas Kerouac, Jack's widow. In 2009, almost thirty-eight years after Gabrielle's death, her will was proven to be a forgery in a Florida courtroom. In the meantime, the siblings of Stella, led by the late John Sampas, had sold off much of the estate, including the famous rolled manuscript of On the Road (1957), which netted 2.43 million dollars in 2001. Troves of Jack Kerouac's papers ended up in the hands of private collectors and dealers. An arcane statute protects the Sampas family from having to return the stolen property and the profits thereby generated. To this day, the family retains control of Jack Kerouac's literary estate. What is at stake besides money? According to Nicosia, Jack Kerouac carefully organized his archive in filing cabinets in the hope that his papers would be available to scholars and biographers. His daughter Jan, despite being disowned by her father, helped to lead an effort to preserve her father's writings in one public institution. Instead, Jack Kerouac's estate is a literary diaspora. The examples are too numerous to cite, so I will offer just one. As a boy, Jack wrote more than one hundred letters to his friend, J. G. Apostolos. Since these letters are now the property of private collectors and dealers, they are largely inaccessible to biographers, scholars, and the general public. The author who helped to shape a generation of Americans, who died with ninetyone dollars in his bank account, has been divided and dispersed by money and power and greed. Nicosia acknowledges that there is no shortage of information about Jack Kerouac. Many of his books have been reissued, and articles and biographies continue to be written. According to Nicosia, however, there is a problem of censorship. The Sampas family was not only able to choose the editors for reissued books, but to determine—to some extent—what would be revealed about Jack Kerouac and what was best kept in the shadows. The intention was to create the best possible product for consumption. Nicosia's Memory Babe has long been confined to the shadows. The critical biography of Jack Kerouac was first published by Grove Press in 1983, and the paperback edition, under Viking Penguin, appeared two years later. William S. Burroughs called it "the best of many books published about Jack Kerouac's life and work, accurately and clearly written, with a sure feeling for Jack's own prose." Praise came from all corners. Jean-Francois Duval, France's most authoritative Kerouac scholar, called it a "masterful book." The London Times Literary Supplement called it "the best biography of Jack Kerouac." Why, then, has Memory Babe been out of print for more than eighteen years? Nicosia supported Jan Kerouac and Jack Kerouac's nephew, Paul Blake, Jr., in their attempts...

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