It was Allen Ginsberg who introduced us -- if that's the appropriate word for what happened that evening in spring, San Francisco, 1956. I'd come into the city for the first time a few weeks before and had met Allen through the fact that both he and poet friend Ed Dorn were working at the Greyhound Bus Station on Market Street. So Allen had come up to the Dorns' apartment where I was staying -- crashed is the better term -- and we talked most of the night, remaining till Ed's shift was done. Not very long after Allen told us that his friend Jack Kerouac would shortly be coming into town and that if we went the next night to The Place, a local bar in North Beach run by old Black Mountaineers, he'd be meeting Jack there after work. At that time just one of Jack's novels had been published, The Town and the City, and that book by itself would probably have made little difference finally, either to us or the world. It was what hadn't been published yet -- the great unwinding string of narratives, the veritable river of "spontaneous prose" -- we so respected. Few had read any of it but the word was out. He was the astounding writer who had managed to keep a thousand pages moving wherein the only external action was a neon light going off and on out the window, over a drugstore across the street. So we went, hoping to meet the young novelist, already legendary at least to such as ourselves.

Memory recalls a young man sitting by himself at a far corner of the small space of the bar, just to the left of the turn for the toilets, where the sidewall met the back. There was no remarkable lighting focused on him, but I do see him now as singular, isolated, quite still as he drinks. At some point he must have caught me looking at him, so he looks back -- his eyes a striking blue, intense, very particular. I had no idea as yet this person was Jack but when Allen came in, seeing us, he asked if Jack had come, then saw the same fellow and said, "There he is!" Going over, we found his seeming quiet was a fact of his being altogether drunk, and I never did meet him that evening more than to help with getting him across the Bay and into bed in Berkeley.

I knew that drinking, however. I'd grown up in a farm town in New England close to Lowell, Jack's family home, some fifteen miles east. For us Lowell was the big city, along with places like Waltham. Boston itself was a glowing metropolis almost beyond imagination. My mother got my annual outfit for Easter in the Bon Marche in Lowell. Route 3 went through it on its way north to New Hampshire and the Boston and Maine Railroad took the same route as well along the Merrimac River. In the awkwardness of that time, drinking, it appeared, eased the male confusion, made inarticulate feelings far simpler to accommodate, and let one feel an unaccustomed comfort in the increasingly blurred surroundings. Whatever the fact, drinking was the way through, be it sexual delight -- although how drunkenness helps such circumstance is hard to fathom -- or rapport with a various social world not one's own. Hale fellow, well met! might quickly turn to Throw that bum out! -- but by then one heard nothing anyhow.

So, in this poignantly fledgling novella what males do, along with write and talk, is drink -- with women then as an ambience, even a resource and company, but always with a marked distance, made into objects as they are, from the real exchange apparent. If they do enter the action, it's with a wry and dislocating sense of contest. For example, Marie is Anthony's securing wife but then Anthony is given a determinedly vulnerable person. When Marie goes off with Michael to have an "affair," she is the most substantial of all three. She also smokes!

Michael followed her into the bedroom. Anthony was peacefully asleep, with just the hint of a smile on his lips.

"What a big baby!" Michael exclaimed softly. Marie turned to him and almost smiled. But solemnly she said, "And what do you think you are?"

"I'm not a baby."

"Hmm?"

Marie lowered the window pane, arranged Anthony's blankets, motioned Michael out of the room, and quietly closed the door. She went over to a desk drawer and took out a cigarette and lit it.

Jack's journals provide an interesting reference to Orpheus Emerged -- "The Half Jest" as he calls it then, dated "Jan. 1944." As The Book of Symbols (February 1945) otherwise makes clear, he is casting his thoughts and work into large, symbolizing patterns with the sense of heroic forbears writ large indeed: "Saroyan period," "Joycean period," "Wolfean period," "Nietzschean period (Neo-Rimbaudian)," "post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period)," which is where he locates Orpheus Emerged, "Spenglerian period," "American period (Dos Passos)," with the concluding one being the "post-neurotic period," aptly enough. It does him no disservice, like they say, to note that he is still not twenty-two years old. (His birthday is March 12, 1922.) No one's told him how to write other than what he's got from books as best he can. There's no defining tradition for such as he is, no social habit sustaining him. He's gloriously making it up as he goes along but trying with such moving determination to be a real writer, an encompassing writer, a great writer. When his lifelong friend and elder, William Burroughs, was asked to give his sense of Kerouac, he emphasized that, first and last, he was a writer.

Here then he is at work, at the beginning of it all, and whatever one makes of the result, it's fascinating to see his moves, call them, the interaction he manages between his characters, foretelling what will be the "story" of so much of his subsequent work. Allen Ginsberg is the character "Leo," for example, or so he seems to me. Who else would ask those charming questions? But it is the way the imagination of a life is conceived, that life and art must find a viable company; that the relations of men, among themselves and with that outer "other" of women, must be endlessly rehearsed -- all such matters are those of his own life as book after book records.

"Art is the only true twin life has," Charles Olson, fellow poet, wrote in these same years. He lived in Gloucester and was said to be the inventor of "Projective Verse," just as Jack was credited with "Spontaneous Prose." In fact, there was even an edge of contest between the two groups comprising their followers as to just who was first in authority. Despite Olsen's having written him in September, 1957 to acknowledge his powers as a poet, Jack was not to meet Olson until well along in his life after he had come back to live in Lowell -- as Olson had himself returned to Gloucester, to live on the upper floor of a fisherman's family house. One Sunday two of Jack's wife Stella Sampas' brothers drove him the short distance from Lowell to Gloucester to meet Olson. They sat in the car while Jack went in. As it happened, the Boston Globe had reviewed a novel of Jack's that day -- which one I can't now remember -- and gave it solid approval. Olson had taken the pages of the paper and spread them on the wooden steps outside leading up to his place, so that Jack might walk up in regal manner.

In America one has to find one's own way, step by difficult step. At any time there is much to be learned, much to be discarded, much to be engaged and contested. To the young man or woman it must seem often that the world they try finally to enter, whatever their hopes, has locked its doors. Is this what it means to be taught? To be nurtured? To be recognized as existing? Why doesn't Kerouac use the French he knows instead of those literary "Parisian" tags? Because he's learning, because he's young, because he wants to be let in. We know, of course, that a few years later it will be Kerouac who, as Allen Ginsberg usefully noted, makes the very transforming point, that one can write in the same manner as one would speak to friends. But now he is in New York, has dropped out of Columbia, is trying with all his powers simply to write.

There will never be another moment like this one.

Buffalo, N.Y.
October 28, 2000