You spend your high school years playing football, dreaming about college, about being “on a campus somewhere smoking a pipe, with a button-down sweater.” In a more far-off dream, you see yourself as a “big insurance salesman wearing a gray felt hat getting off the train in Chicago with a briefcase and being embraced by a blond wife on the platform, in the smoke and soot of the bigcity hum and excitement.” You get into Columbia on an athletic scholarship, but you drop out because you can’t get along with the coach. You join the Merchant Marine during the war and write a draft of a novel, which you hate. You come back and settle into New York, unsure of what to do next. Your friend murders a homosexual stalker and you help him hide the evidence; you are arrested as a material witness. Your father won’t pay your bail, but, if you marry your girlfriend, her parents will. The murderer had introduced you to some writer friends of his, and you start hanging out with them when you get released from prison. They encourage you to take up their life of semi-criminality, convincing you it is the path to poetry.
Before long, you are traveling with them back and forth across America. Your first marriage has been annulled, you’ve published your first novel, which showed improvement, and you’re already onto your second book and your second wife. On a long scroll, you begin typing out your story of hitchhiking and driving “across the mad American night” with your friends. Your new wife Joan plies you with pea soup, coffee, cigs, and benzos as you hammer at the keys. You finish the whole thing in three weeks. You love it. In celebration, you engage your wife in passionate lovemaking; a few weeks later, she informs you she’s pregnant, but you’re broke, so you ask her to get an abortion, which is illegal. She divorces you. You turn thirty. You rarely hear from her after that, and eventually your second book makes you famous, allowing you to write, drink, and ramble around the country for a couple decades. But the notoriety wears on you, and to combat your parodic image you write a book on Buddhism, which the experts sharply criticize. You begin to spiral into alcoholism, feeling locked out of beatification, insisting you are a Catholic with traditional family values to the reporters who attribute the growing number of kids dropping out of society for the hippie life to your writings.
Along the way, though, you did see your ex-wife a few times. You met up with her about nine years after the divorce, when you had become a slurring wino. She wanted child support payments. You brought your lawyer, she brought your daughter, Jan. You got a paternity test, and it proved she was yours. You went back to their apartment for the evening. You were shy, a little ashamed of yourself, but you mustered up a feeling of resentment to protect your ego. It wasn’t your fault: Your mother, a strict Catholic, would have been appalled at the situation, so you kept Jan’s existence secret to protect her. There’s a part of you that knew this was crap. You felt a strong connection to the girl when you beheld her face. But there was so much out there in the world to see. Plus, Joan had had three more kids with two different men. You left.
But one day you see Jan again, for the second and last time. She shows up at your house, uninvited, in Massachusetts, where you’re living with your mother and your third wife, Stella, a girl from your hometown. Stella takes care of you while you and your mother sit around, she nearly dead, you drinking yourself sick daily. Jan, a teenager, has brought some guy with her who seems like he’s in his mid-twenties. You don’t know this, but Jan’s pregnant—with another man’s child. You hardly make eye contact with her. Stella gets agitated and kicks them out. But just before that, they said they were going to drive down to Mexico. You said great, write a book about it and use your name to get published. Jan does. She mentions you throughout. She describes this very scene in it, writing that you had to make someone else turn the TV down for you while you “continued to guzzle [your] giant baby bottle, rocking [yourself] as if in a cradle.” She didn’t write this venomously. In fact, she writes that after reading your famous book she felt great sympathy for you, that it finally made sense to her why you didn’t have time to be a father, and that it made her joyous to see the similarity between your thought patterns. She was dying to get to know you. You didn’t seem too interested in her, though, so she went on to reenact your cross-country exploits to connect with your soul through shared experience. But before she could tell you about her travels, you died from cirrhosis, caused by life-long alcohol abuse.
In the end, you felt angry at the world, sensing that you were missing some salvation. If you could look back over your life, would you not do it all over with this funny, happy girl at the center?
Baby Driver is the first novel of Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac. Concerning events of her youth between 1960 and 1974, the book was published in 1981 and has now been reprinted as an NYRB Classic. Half of it is a roman à clef in the style of her father’s On the Road, charting her odyssey from Washington State to New Mexico to the deep jungles of South America.
The other half departs from Road subject matter but applies its rollicking style to a depiction of her childhood, when she and her siblings are shunted from one precarious living situation to the next, from New England to Missouri to the Lower East Side, the last of which makes her exceedingly tough, numb to the gang wars and cockroach infestations around. It is poetic, full of laughter and exploration; she maintains throughout a cheerful tone of carefree scrappiness, though occasionally sounding a somber note when she wonders about the whereabouts of her dad.
She is shielded from nothing, fends off city girls in fist fights, and sleeps with grown men. But the exposure to adult things gets to be too much. She eventually breaks down and must leave school for juvenile detention halls and psychiatric wards. She hardly makes a fuss, but you grow angry with her father nonetheless. You can’t help feeling that his absence had something to do with her teenage pregnancy, her eagerness to exchange sex for favors, her working as a prostitute, her heroin use, her nearly getting murdered by a fugitive in the rainforests of Costa Rica, and so on. Not that her mother is innocent. When Jan is pregnant by one manchild, another lets her drink Pernod in the presence of Joan, who says nothing. Lo and behold, the baby is delivered stillborn at seven months.
There is a marked difference between Jan and the earlier Beats, including the early Beat girlfriends. Jan is like the kid who takes something too far and shows up proudly, causing everyone around to cringe with guilt, saying, “…Oh…hey man…you alright?” She ends up enjoying prostitution so much she continues at it for several months after paying off her boyfriend’s fines. She lies in pink blankets by the light of a red bulb in heroin-induced stupor as customers knock on her window: “I took care of them as they came through a trance of blissful numbness, half-noticing they were there, lost in my own reveries.… I have to admit there was a certain attraction in spending the whole day lounging dazily and then suddenly feeling crinkly little notes materialize in my hand.”
While most things don’t bother Jan—she can’t let them—occasionally she feels a pang of conscience, a fear and revulsion at her predicament, and longs for religion, to be, in her words, “traditional—French Canadian—to belong to some kind of family I never had.” Despite being even pluckier than her father, Jan went further into the dark night than he, lasting only until age 44 compared to his 47.
But it’s not all bad. Jan, just like her father, charms us with her bottomless love for life and for human beings. She is at home with the written word and turns phrases effortlessly. She has both his vitality and his tenderness, and they were expressed in prose that favors giddy, heartbeat-quickening montage over slow microscopic analysis. Their method was to squeeze as much out of life as they could—without being wealthy. Indeed, much can be revealed from an economic angle: Their behavior was coded as subversive because they were poor, but if they had been aristocrats, would it not have been characterized as decadence, high scandal? Like her father, Jan did not want to give into “Moloch,” as Allen Ginsberg called the middle-class life—the control grid, the trough. The spiritual despair Moloch engenders, they wagered, was more destructive than the bohemian life. In the novel, Jan freely acknowledges that children would make her “more responsible, less happy.” She rarely complains about her father’s absentee status, only tries to understand it.
Conservatives like to blame the sixties for every social ill, and the counterculture is at the center of their critique. But is our illiteracy, our greedy selfishness, and our increasingly sedentary and virtual existence owed to the rebellious, nomadic Kerouacs? The Beats and their successors in the counterculture were responding to something already deadening, a passive conformism they viewed as a betrayal of the Frontier Spirit.
The problem with the mainstream, which Baby Driver tackles when Jan discusses “Gramby’s grim Hellfire and Brimstone,” on display in her “white Baptist Sunday school,” was that Life requires seduction. Jan reflects on the church ladies from Missouri: “Most Sundays we’d all go to church where I’d sit behind blue polka-dotted dresses stuffed with flesh and listen to a miserable droning voice for hours on end.” Of her time in the Midwest, “the zenith of my short-lived experience in the straight life,” Jan concludes that an existence of strictly determined routine flies in the face of our inborn sense of freedom, leading people to infertility or madness in rebellion. There must be some state of exception, beyond the reality principle, to connect life with more life. Against the planned-out future, there is the spontaneous future that interrupts the plan, a future of exhilarating optimism—and that is the deeply American future that the Kerouacs tried to celebrate in their art.
Then from where comes the forlornness, the addiction, the early deaths? Are the only options fat-stuffed polka-dots on the one hand and bad-father cirrhosis on the other? Comparing the stories of father and daughter, we might discover that the destructive element lies in the desire to be seen taking drugs and bucking society, rather than simply living the adventurous nomadic life, daring even to sin boldly. It was this unquenchable need, and not the limit experiences themselves, that led the Beats’ lives, including Jan’s, to such unhappy endings. Sheer hedonism, the doctrine of pleasure and avoidance of pain, could never have brought about such journeys into the territory of extreme suffering. For those is required an insatiable need for Validation.
It was a craving for respect from the critical and rebellious, from an imaginary canon of past beatniks and those to come, that drove the Kerouacs away from what could have saved them. Jan's novel, for one, is both an honest quest for unconventional adventure born out of a pure thirst for embodied transcendence and a covert attempt to win recognition from her father and his fans based on what he represented. Their mutual biographer, Gerald Nicosia, a close confidante of Jan’s, seemed to agree. Nicosia also lamented that Jack never made more of an effort to know Jan, with whom he shared so much. The presence of a loving and brilliant daughter, he suggested, would have saved him from isolated despair.
But the original Beats were ruthless self-promoters, not mere bon vivants whose antics just so happened to gain the attention of the nation. In his memoir Palimpsest, Gore Vidal recounts Ginsberg’s “masterful” gift for “public relations” as well as Jack’s bragging to the whole San Remo Café that he had hooked up with Vidal (until someone advised him that this would not help his reputation). Norman Podhoretz, in his essay recounting the time Ginsberg and Kerouac invited him to their downtown lair after he had criticized them in the press, paints a picture that implies a strong if covert concern for reputation beneath their society-flaunting behavior. The real tragedy for both Kerouacs was that their attachment to social image prevailed over their admittedly excessive pursuits of greater meaning and deeper connection. At the end of Baby Driver, Jan ends her journey by safely returning to her mother, with whom she cuddles up in bed. In an alternative story, in which Jack cared a little less about his “edge,” he could have been there with them, too.