Jack Kerouac: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Jack Kerouac (Photo by Wilbur T. Pippin)
The effects of notoriety (from introductory remarks describing the interview by Ted Berrigan):
The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Jack Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place Berrigan simply showed up at the Kerouacs' house. Two friends, the poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him. Kerouac answered the door, and Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit's purpose. Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.
"Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying 'Paris Review!,' 'Interview!,' etcetera," Berrigan recalls, "while Duncan and Aram began to slink back toward the car. All seemed lost, but I kept talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for twenty minutes, on the condition that there be no drinking.
"Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were able to commence the interview. It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs' looking for the author of On the Road and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations. As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess."
The interview with Kerouac ripples through discussions of writers, the writing process (Kerouac believes editing and revision damage the integrity of the writing process itself), and the writing life. Most humorous, particularly in comparison with Berrigan's introductory remarks, is Kerouac's discussion of the travails of the well-known author. In an era of publishing where contacts and references seem the only way to publish one's first story or novel, perhaps his words will give struggling writers something to laugh about before diving back into query letters:
Work destroyers . . . work destroyers. Time killers? I'd say mainly the attentions which are tendered to a writer of "notoriety" (notice I don't say "fame") by secretly ambitious would-be writers who come around, or write, or call, for the sake of the services that are properly the services of a bloody literary agent. When I was an unknown struggling young writer, as the saying goes, I did my own footwork, I hot-footed up and down Madison Avenue for years, publisher to publisher, agent to agent, and never once in my life wrote a letter to a published famous author asking for advice, or help, or, in Heaven above, had the nerve to actually mail my manuscripts to some poor author who then has to hustle to mail it back before he's accused of stealing my ideas. My advice to young writers is to get themselves an agent on their own, maybe through their college professors (as I got my first publishers through my prof Mark Van Dorent), and do their own footwork, or "thing" as the slang goes . . . So the work destroyers are nothing but certain people.
The work preservers are the solitudes of night, "when the whole wide world is fast asleep."
Jack Kerouac's Paris Review interview was published in 1968.
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