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Kerouac's Ghost
Kerouac's Ghost
Kerouac's Ghost
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Kerouac's Ghost

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Frankie McCracken is still recovering from the Psychedelic Sixties when, while working as a fire lookout in the Canadian Rockies, he finds himself wrestling with a miracle-worker who claims to be the late Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats. This kaleidoscopic coming-of-age novel arrives in 2016 like a note in a bottle from a distant world.

Fiction writer Matt Cohen hailed this work as "an unrepentant blast from the past." It juggles timelines and narrators, asserts that Kerouac was bigger than Beat, and celebrates his French Canadian roots. This long-awaited, revised digital edition is the definitive version of a favourite novel.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherBev Editions
Release dateSep 16, 2016
ISBN9781927789568
Kerouac's Ghost
Author

Ken McGoogan

KEN MCGOOGAN has published more than a dozen books, among them Fatal Passage, How the Scots Invented Canada, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, Celtic Lightning and Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. He has won the Pierre Berton Award for History, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan has worked as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He sails with Adventure Canada, teaches creative non-fiction in the MFA program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and lives in Toronto with his artist-photographer wife, Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

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Kerouac's Ghost - Ken McGoogan

Author’s Note

(2016 Ebook)

The secret Canadian life of Jack Kerouac. So said the headline in Maclean’s magazine. A subhead elaborated: Reading Kerouac’s lost French writings reveals the travails of a Canuck in America. The date was June 2016, and I could only scratch my head. Secret Canadian life? I had published a novel highlighting that life in . . . would you believe 1993?

When I laughed about this on Facebook, a couple of friends asked if my novel was available as an ebook. I had to say no. In 2007, I did publish a revised, Satori Magic Edition via Print on Demand (see Introduction below), but that was it. My people said, hey, there’s a whole new audience out there.

In recent years, I have written mostly non-fiction. But early in my writing career, after completing an MFA at University of British Columbia, I published three novels. Kerouac’s Ghost is the only one I still like. It’s a first novel, a coming-of-age novel, a bit rough around the edges, but I find it playful and inventive and technically entertaining. Jacket copy describes it this way . . . .

Jack Kerouac, legendary King of the Beats, turns up raving in this kaleidoscopic novel about an obsessive survivor of the Psychedelic Sixties. Set mostly in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco and atop Mount Jubilation in the Canadian Rockies, the narrative shuttles from Quebec to New York City, and from California into the Timeless Void of the Golden Eternity. It juggles time-lines and narrators, asserts that Jack Kerouac is BIGGER than Beat, and celebrates Great Walking Sainthood.

The novel is resolutely unfashionable. But it has survived several incarnations, and a couple of different titles, and it arrives like a message in a bottle from another world. Because the main story-line plunges us into 1966, this digital edition marks a 50th anniversary. I have revived the better title, Kerouac’s Ghost, and poked away at the Satori Magic Edition (introduced below).

For the rest, we have here A Novel of the Nineteen-Sixties, Psychedelic San Francisco, Dharma Bums in the Rockies, the Jungian Self, Too Much Drinking and Drugging, the Quebec-French Complication, Also Known as the Secret Canadian Life, and the Quest for Great Walking Sainthood.

Ken McGoogan

Toronto, 2016

Introduction

(2007 Satori Magic Edition)

The urge to resurrect this book seized me in 2005. I occasionally teach writing, and I had been preparing a workshop on Point of View. While casting about for examples to illustrate an argument, I thought of the two Kerouac novels I had published during the previous decade. Second time around, I had radically altered the Point of View. A cursory comparison of the two works proved unsettling, however, because I preferred the first version to the second—and I vaguely remembered having touted the latter as an improvement.

Luckily, I am good at repressing painful memories, and I quickly put this one behind me. The desire to resurrect went with it. But then, early in 2007, while sorting through paper-filled boxes in our basement, seeking to create a navigable passage, I came across a sheaf of papers and clippings pertaining to Jack Kerouac and those two novels. Flipping through them, again I found myself wishing that, back in the 1990s, I had made some different decisions.

The first version of the novel, Visions of Kerouac, had drawn a lot of encouraging reviews. Here was fiction writer Matt Cohen hailing the work as an unrepentant blast from the past, a politically incorrect celebration of men as libidinous explorers of the physical and spiritual unknown. And there was novelist Robert Harlow insisting that the book was not just good, but very good indeed: in it you will find writing that has flair, headlong energy and the accessibility of a good letter home asking for money.

Several reviewers had drawn attention to the vitality of the work, among them Charles Mandel, who described Visions of Kerouac as larger than life and crackling with energy . . . an exuberant celebration of the King Beat himself. Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, had found another dimension worthy of note: "What I like best about Visions of Kerouac is the gentle voice of conscience underneath the adventure narrative, the writer who is not afraid to find his own heart and follow it amid a wilderness of souls who have lost their way . . . . McGoogan finds the trail to a new and saner life, both for himself and for those of us lucky enough to hear his words."

A couple of reviewers, obviously humorless, obtuse, insensitive types, disdained the novel's narrative antics as intrusive and fashionably postmodern. But by 1995, the publisher, Pottersfield Press of Nova Scotia, had sold out almost the entire first edition. At that point, a Montreal publisher approached me suggesting that we republish the novel to reach a wider audience.

With exemplary generosity, Lesley Choyce at Pottersfield gave me back the publishing rights. I sat down to ferret out typos—and, to my surprise, found myself engaged in a rewrite. I thought I was poking at a cadaver, I later told Quill & Quire magazine. Suddenly it sat up and started making demands. I began thinking, 'Maybe I should do this? Maybe I should do that?’

I blush to think of it now, but seized by the notion of reaching a mass audience, I strove to make the novel more accessible, and so more formally conventional. I eliminated two of the three narrators, dropped the framing tale involving the adult Frankie, and jettisoned arguments about the life and meaning of Jack Kerouac. I added a couple of scenes and tightened up language, but mainly, by confining the novel to a single Point of View, I said bon voyage to narrative hijinx, and to the playful exuberance that had distinguished the original.

Too late, as the debased rendition of the book, Kerouac's Ghost, was going to press, I received a note from literary critic David Staines, responding to the original work: It is a fine, wild, wonderful, engrossing novel, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It should have been nominated for the Smith Books First Novel Award. Staines went on: I was moved by the novel, haunted by the figure of Frankie and the relationship with the parents, especially the father.

Staines was taken with the evocation of San Francisco, a city he knew only slightly, but: Above all, I became involved in the story, in the flashbacks and flash-forwards, in the small Quebec town, in the Montreal I too know, and in the Quebec City conference.

Alas, that Quebec City conference, which dramatized clashing responses to the real-life Kerouac, had ended up on the cutting-room floor. The new book, which appeared in 1996, inspired a promotional trip to California. It was translated into French as Le Fantome de Kerouac and drew positive notices en francais—but it reached no mass audience in either language.

Meanwhile, novelist Harlow had raised a red flag. He had dipped into the revised work, he wrote, but: I had— still have—trouble getting around why, and for what gain, you did the book over. It was good the first time. I think he meant better the first time but did not have the heart to say so.

Novelist Ann Ireland felt no such qualms. The core of the original work, she wrote in Quill & Quire, is Frankie's own road tale, full of comic scenes, misadventures, and speculations on the nature of Kerouac's gift. Was he truly the King of the Beats? Did alcoholism cause the disintegration of his talent? And how important was his French-Canadian background? Most of all, it is about the obsession Frankie McCracken feels for his mentor, how he acts on it, and finds himself fusing with Kerouac's spirit-self.

In the revised work, Ireland rightly observed, because the framing tale is gone, we never see Frankie as a mature man, looking back at his young, naive self. The single Point of View, with the ghost of Kerouac narrating the entire novel, also introduces credibility problems: why would Kerouac be obsessed with this young Seeker who flees his small town to find out about himself and the world.

The ghost is driven by his quest for Great Walking Sainthood. Yet Ireland was right to suggest, Where the first novel was, to a large extent, a dialogue with the self about Kerouac and the meaning of his work and life, this second is much more focused on Frankie's spiritual awakening. By eliminating the clashing interpretations of Kerouac, the revised novel underlines the spiritual theme with a heavier hand. Ultimately, Ireland wrote, "Visions of Kerouac felt, in its less disciplined and more rambunctious way, more imbued with the Beat spirit."

In 1996, when this perceptive analysis appeared, I ground my teeth and dismissed it. I kept writing, published two more novels into oblivion, and then, with a book called Fatal Passage, turned mainly to narrative nonfiction. I did notice when another novelist scored a critical success by borrowing the interrogative voice from Visions of Kerouac (I myself had taken it from James Joyce). And I reflected fleetingly that the simpler Kerouac's Ghost would never spawn any such emulation.

Still, I let go of the agonizing. And the days ran away like wild horses over the hills, as Charles Bukowski once observed. They kept right on running until early in 2007, when in our over-crowded basement I rediscovered the responses of Harlow, Ireland and Staines. Turning to the novels themselves, I realized that, in radically revising the book, I had reduced vitality, resonance, dimension, and possibly even literary significance. Despite its flaws and gaucheries, the first version, Visions of Kerouac, was by far the better book.

Of course, it is just a first novel. As such, it had a long gestation period. I see the book now as a message from a world that has long since disappeared—a world without bank machines and cell phones and above all without the Internet, and in which you would send off a letter and expect to wait two or three weeks for a reply.

A note in a bottle, then. But as I awakened to this during that great sorting and shifting in the basement, I realized, too, that any future readers would naturally approach the second, inferior version of the novel believing it to be the one I wished to preserve. And with that I stopped fretting about what I had done and began asking, What can I do?

The answer you hold in your hands, thanks largely to yet another change in communications technology, the advent of Print On Demand publishing. For the past couple of years, while leading workshops on How to Survive as a Writer (an admittedly dubious proposition), I have been arguing that the best use of POD, at least in the early 21st century, is to revive out-of-print books—works that arrive wearing at least a fig leaf of credibility as a result of having survived the editorial process.

And when, in our basement, this suddenly occurred to me, I jumped to my feet and shazaam! had a full-blown satori, a razzle-dazzle, knock-'em-onto-the-floor-style awakening on a scale that Kerouac himself would have approved. It is also possible that I smacked my head on a low-hanging joist. Either way, this time around, having told that talkative cadaver to sit down and shut up, I have confined myself to making just a single macroscosmic change. In the original novel, whenever I shifted narrators, I altered typefaces. In this Satori Magic Edition, I have identified the narrator at the beginning of each chapter.

Beyond that, I have corrected typos, poked at the language and, all right, I admit it, made a few minor revisions. Bottom line: this is officially IT—the definitive, irrevocable, ultimate, ineluctable and incontrovertibly final version of my first published novel. . . . .

Chapter 1

FRANKIE Returns to San Francisco

Mystical mumbo jumbo was the only way to describe it. Repentances, confessions, solemn promises to avoid temptation—everything but dying to be born again. Who could believe any of it? Besides, how often did I visit San Francisco? And with that I swung into Vesuvio's bar, where thirty years before, almost to the day, in the late summer of 1960, Jack Kerouac had taken that lethal first drink of the evening.

He lost control and couldn't stop drinking—proved physically unable to stop—when what he really wanted to do was drive down the coast to visit Henry Miller. From this very bar, Vesuvio's, Kerouac had telephoned the older writer every two hours to postpone, certain that he could drink himself back to sobriety, and reach that remembered still point of controlled equilibrium. Ended up drinking until finally, disappointed, Miller told him no, Jack, it's too late, we'll do it another time. Which, of course, they never did.

Though what I remembered that afternoon in 1990, as I swung into a padded seat on a bench against the wall, was subtly different: that Kerouac had chosen to drink himself blind that afternoon rather than visit and have Old Henry realize the truth about him—realize that he had become a drunk, an alcoholic bum. I believed Kerouac had done it on purpose, motivated by shame, and not that, having taken the first drink, he lost control. I am good at revising awkward facts.

A few days before, driving north up the California coast with my wife, Camille, and our two children, I had spotted the Henry Miller Memorial Library and insisted on stopping. We were still forty miles south of Pacific Grove, where we had reserved a room at an upscale bed-and-breakfast, and the kids wailed in protest. But no way I was going to miss this opportunity, and Camille felt the same way.

It wasn't until we were inside the library, really a frame house, looking at books and watercolors and pen-and-ink sketches, that I realized the place was also the home of Emil White, once Miller's best friend. Of course! This was the domicile in which Miller, who for years had lived in a shack on a nearby ridge, had waited for Kerouac that long-ago evening, and taken those distressing telephone calls. That's what I believed, though later I discovered that Miller had taken those calls at the home of another friend who lived farther north—and mostly from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, telephoning for Kerouac.

At revising awkward facts, make that very good.

So now, sitting in Vesuvio's, I told myself I had closed a circle. And as my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness I sat savoring the place, famously unchanged from the glory days of the 1950s. A few seats away, three men my own age or a shade younger, late thirties, obviously regulars and drinking coffee, sat hunched over a chess board. A black-haired man stood at the bar, the far end, talking with a lanky bartender in sneakers and brown jeans, who glanced my way while wiping the counter but made no move to serve me.

Soft jazz established a mood, sounded like Charlie Parker, and black-and-white photographs adorned the walls. Two were of Kerouac, one of them illustrating The Jack Kerouac under a list of Vesuvio Specials that included bohemian coffee, brandy amaretto with a twist of lemon and the J.K. itself: tequila, rum, orange juice, cranberry juice and a squeeze of lime, $3.

Carefully, I copied the hand-written sign into my notebook. Might become part of the travel article I was planning—though mainly this trip was a celebration. Back home in the heart of the Canadian Rockies—which is where I sit at this moment, surrounded by snow-capped mountains—Camille and the children had rejoined me after three lonely months

To mark the occasion we flew to Los Angeles. After four days at Disneyland, we rented a car and drove north up Highway One. We followed that twisting two-laner as it swept and dove along the California coast, oohing and aahing over craggy bluffs and wind-blown trees and the Pacific Ocean crashing white-capped over black rocks— surely one of the world's great drives.

Besides the Memorial Library, the highway produced two moments. First, just north of the Esalen Institute, now closed to the public, I spotted an old fire road I remembered from the Sixties. Back then, with a rucksack on my back and a girlfriend named Misty, I had ignored a Keep Out sign, climbed a fence and hiked down the hill to camp beside a stream. Now the trees and shrubs looked different, tamer and browner, less green, but this was the place and no mistake. I ached to head down that fire road but contented myself with snapping photos from the highway.

Second moment: fourteen miles south of Monterey, I drove across Bixby Creek Bridge—sensational enough that it figures in tourist brochures—and swung right onto the Old Coast Road. No pavement now, just hard-packed dirt-road that wound steeply downhill and became a rutted track as it disappeared into a forest. The children were getting ratty, needed a play, so Camille took them out and I drove alone, thumping and banging, into the trees and across a tiny creek.

This was the road Kerouac had started down one night thirty years before. He had taken an eight-dollar taxi ride from Monterey and tumbled out at the bridge, the cabbie flatly refusing to descend into the darkness. He was making for Ferlinghetti's cabin in the woods, destined to suffer though a phantasmagorical nightmare-bout of delirium tremens that would eventually give rise to his last great novel, Big Sur. He had been drinking, of course. The night was dark and moonless and loud with crashing ocean and Kerouac lost his way in the woods, ended up bedding down in a swampy meadow.

Ferlinghetti's cabin was still down here somewhere, I had been assured. But overwhelmed by the trees and barricades and signs saying Private Property and Keep Out, I couldn't find it. I decided it was magic just to have come this close, backed the car along the rutted road for a couple of hundred yards, and finally managed to turn around without getting stuck.

In San Francisco, we stayed a short uphill-slog from Union Square. First night in town, having dropped off the car, we went walking. In 1967, I had worked here as a bicycle messenger, roared around through the downtown traffic for up to ten hours a day. From memory, I could still draw a map of streets and alleys and show you the quickest route from Grant and O'Farrell, say, to Battery and Jackson.

To Camille and the children, that first night, I proposed a shortcut: Trust me, I know my way around this burg. But suddenly I was leading them past wigged-out crazies cutting dope deals and would-be prophets proclaiming the end of the world. And homeless people, so many homeless. Camille gave me an exasperated look.

City has changed, what can I say?

Next day, like many another vacationist, I shut a mental door on the homeless so I could revel in San Francisco. We visited the Coit Tower and stared out, wind-blown, at the Bay Bridge, long since repaired from the earthquake of the previous year. In Chinatown we crowded into shopping emporiums and bought San Francisco sweatshirts. We rode cable cars, visited Pier 39, and paid a street-artist to sketch the children.

From Fisherman's Wharf we took a boat cruise that brings you within howling distance of that gloomy island prison, now unused, Alcatraz. The cruise highlight comes a few moments later, when you're standing on deck in the wind and suddenly the sea gets rough and you look up at huge red girders and shiver to realize you're sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge, and yes, you're here again, this is it, you're back in San Francisco.

Next morning, Day Three, Camille took the children to the zoo -- we had negotiated for me to give her a free day later -- and I rambled around the Haight-Ashbury. More on that later, the old haunts a story in themselves. By two-thirty I was back downtown, still on schedule and scrambling onto the running board of a Hyde Street cable car that was already standing-room-only.

We rattled up Jackson and turned onto Hyde, still climbing. I had my map out—this area relatively unfamiliar, too steep for bicycles—and paid attention as we rumbled and clanged across Pacific Avenue, then Vallejo and Green. Suddenly there it was, Union Street, and as we crested the hill I jumped off and stepped smartly to the sidewalk, watched the cable car disappear down Hyde Street towards the waterfront, a sign on its back-end shouting, Meet me at the St. Francis, and the brakeman ringing out a crazy tune.

I registered the view of the Bay as spectacular, but mainly I stood drinking in the knowledge that this was Russian Hill. This was where, while out walking one foggy night in 1952, Kerouac had chanced upon actress Joan Crawford at work on a film. He had gone back to the house to fetch Carolyn Cassady, then his mistress. But she hadn't wanted to leave the children untended, so he had returned alone to watch and scribble notes for an eight-thousand-word, non-fiction tour-de-force he called Joan Rawshanks in the Fog.

Map in hand, I danced across Hyde Street through afternoon traffic, swung back the way I had just ridden, and sure enough there it was: Russell Street. Half a block down Russell, and jammed right up tight against the sidewalk, stood Number 29—a tiny brown house with a false brick front and a peaked roof. I stood surprised at having found it so easily.

Here Jack and Neal and Carolyn Cassady had lived out their ménage a trois. Here Jack had written Visions of Cody and entertained the Cassady children with an early cartoon version of Dr. Sax. Upstairs, in an attic room behind that window and those drawn blinds, he had made love with Carolyn, then lain with her afterwards listening to the pitter-pat of rain on the roof.

Moved by this thought, so textured it was almost a memory, I snapped photos of the tiny house. I wanted to see the place from the rear, and also the court yard, but could find no alley, no way to get around back. I walked up and down out front, trying not to look suspicious. Then, enough. I wheeled and emerged onto Hyde Street, strode uphill past barbershops and laundromats and beauty parlours. At Union I swung downhill towards City Lights and Vesuvio's bar, enjoying the sunshine, buoyed by the knowledge that Kerouac must have hiked this route a hundred times.

At Vesuvio's, having realized finally that the bartender had no intention of serving me on the padded bench, I had bellied up to the bar. Now I sipped coke through a straw. Upstairs, on the balcony level, I had discovered more photos and funky folk art and copied signs into my notebook: If you drink to forget/ please pay in advance. And from W.C. Fields, Kerouac's old favourite lush, a pearl of sexist wisdom: T'was a woman who drove me to drink . . . and I never had the decency to write and thank her.

I found myself thinking that, unlike my own Baby Boomer generation, so hatefully labelled Flower Children, the Beats had left their mark on this city. A seeker could still drink coffee here or at the Cafe Trieste, as Kerouac had. And Spec's bar, where I figured to go next, doubled now as a Beat museum. City Lights Bookstore—where I had just bought a copy of Kerouac's Safe In Heaven Dead—boasted a Beat Literature section, with books not only by Kerouac but by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman and, of course, City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But now the lanky bartender, who had left off talking with the black-haired guy at the end of the bar to mix up some fruity concoction, slid a chimney glass in front of me.

What's this?

Courtesy of that gentleman there, he said, nodding down the bar. It's a Jack Kerouac Special.

The black-haired stranger made like he was tipping an imaginary hat. I waved and did likewise. The chimney glass looked frosty. Kerouac would have preferred a double bourbon and ginger ale—though a quick sniff told me The Special packed a wallop. My whole body shuddered. Hell, one drink wouldn't hurt. I picked up the chimney glass, glaned again down the bar—and saw something strange.

Maybe I had done too much hatless walking in the sunshine. Maybe I had gone to the mat with too many heavyweight memories, both Kerouac's and my own, but as I stared at the black-haired stranger, I saw his face change. This was ridiculous, I knew—but for an instant, I would have sworn I was staring at Jack Kerouac himself. Towards the end.

And then an almost forgotten yet old-familiar weirdness washed over me like a giant wave, and spun me head over heels in freeze-frame slow-motion back to that moment in the Haight more than two decades before, when I returned to the Drugstore Café to confront the Devil and discovered that I had stumbled into Hell.

At Vesuvio’s, suddenly, I was on my feet. I needed to see Camille and the kids, absolutely could not wait. And with the black-haired stranger gaping, crying wait! I tumbled out of the bar into the sunshine and broke into a run along Jack Kerouac Alley. I swung onto Columbus, my camera bag flapping, and for an instant I saw myself from above, just another nameless tourist lost in the memory lanes of San Francisco.

As I danced through the pedestrian traffic, another wave hit me and swept me back to the summer I spent on Mount Jubilation, when I made promises to Le Grand Jack and myself, and again I saw the falling snow that freed me to leave the lookout and seek Camille, the snow faintly falling on me and my father and the Great Walking Saint, who waved and disappeared over the mountains like a ghost.

And now, as I write these words, I realize with a shock that I, too,

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