“Unrequited love’s a bore!”

Fucking Jack Kerouac, man.

This weekend I read Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, as research for my current novel. Folks, it was a damn good read. If you’re in any way interested in the Beats, and could do with a correction to the intensely male legacy that’s been built up around the movement, do check it out.

Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac met in January 1957, when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-four, when publication of On the Road, and his subsequent fame, were still nine months away. They were introduced by Allen Ginsberg, at least in part because Kerouac had no money and no place to stay, though it was framed as Allen setting them up on a blind date. Jack moved in with Joyce that first night, and whenever he was in New York, be it for months or just passing through for a few days, he would stay with her. She’d provide a bed, food, comfort and company, a compassionate ear, and sex. She became his home base, a safe place, there whenever he needed her, making no demands.

At one point, he went to Mexico, intending to settle in for a long stretch, and sent her letters begging her to come join him as soon as she could. He wove a romantic picture of what their life together would be like, all marble bathtubs and 7-cent glasses of fresh orange juice. Joyce quit her job in publishing, an editorial assistant position at Farrar, Straus that was a hard-won achievement for any woman at the time, so she could go be with Jack. A week before her scheduled flight, he sent a hasty airmail note saying that he’d left Mexico, so she shouldn’t come after all. He was returning to his mother’s house in Orlando, and he would see her in New York when he was back in town for On the Road’s release that September. No acknowledgment or apology that he’d asked her to turn her life upside down to join him. (Yes, she was the one who made that choice, which I as a reader of the memoir I was SCREAMING at her not to make, but she was twenty-two years old.)

Throughout their relationship, she was there for him, caring for him, rescuing him, bailing him out of binds. He was ill-equipped for his sudden success when On the Road came out, and handled it poorly, his alcoholism ratcheting up several notches in response. Joyce was there for that as well, and helped to guide him through it as best she could. It seems that he expected it of her, that he simply took it as his due.

She loved him deeply. He liked her, yes. He liked her a great deal. He would say that often, in person and in letters. But only once, toward the end, did he use the word love, and then only in a letter.

In the fall of 1958, she’d finally had enough.

She writes, “There’d been another woman in the restaurant where we’d sat at a table full of artists...and after much wine, when she and Jack were publicly discovering they were soul mates, I reached the point of ‘it’s never going to change,’ when what you’ve been bearing all along suddenly becomes unbearable.”

She made him step out of the restaurant, and confronted him, and he shouted, “Unrequited love’s a bore!”

Just like that. Throwing the absence of his love in her face. When I read that line, it reverberated through every heartsick choice I made in my own younger years. All of the love I had to give that went unreturned, love that was sometimes thrown back in my face. The alcoholics and addicts, my own Kerouacs who I couldn’t seem to resist.

I want to get that tattooed somewhere, or at least scrawl it across my notebook in Sharpie and send it back in time to my younger self. UNREQUITED LOVE’S A BORE.

It isn’t his fault that he didn’t love her. It is his fault that he knew that she did love him, and he used it to get his needs met. And when she pushed back too hard, when she wanted something in return, a shred of loyalty or just the barest hint of respect, he wielded her love like a weapon against her.

To Johnson’s credit, that was the end of her relationship with Jack Kerouac.

I’ve also been reading Monsters: a Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, which has made for an interesting pairing with Johnson’s story. Dederer explores, among other things, the leeway given to geniuses, who are always men.

Dederer writes, “A genius has special power, and with that special power comes a special dispensation. Genius gets a hall pass. We count ourselves lucky that he walks among us; who are we to say that he must also behave himself.”

In Johnson and Kerouac we find the all-too-familiar story of an older man taking advantage of a younger woman, but we also find the also all-too-common male artist who’s freed himself from any obligation toward his fellow humans. (Apart from his mother, but even her he carts around from one house to another around the country, according to his own desires, as if she were a cherished lamp rather than an autonomous being.) It was Kerouac’s perceived genius that gave him this pass, that granted him permission to consume the lives of the women who loved him, to rely on them to prop him up and smooth the path and make his freedom possible. He had important work to do, and they were in service to it. He treated women terribly, but the art! the art! (or so society would have us believe). Never mind that Joyce Johnson was already a gifted writer as well, with her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, begun a full year before she met Kerouac, under contract.

To be honest, I’m not in the camp who considers Kerouac to be a genius. I say this as someone who read A LOT of his work in my youth. Hell, I even had the spoken-word box set (shudder). (“Bee! Why are you staring at me? I’m not a flower!” *cue bongos*) Was he influential? Yes. Tremendously so. But not a genius. (What does that even mean? I find I’ve begun to mistrust the word.) Even if he were a genius, I’ve had enough of these men who burn down everything around them in the name of art.

I have to confess that I haven’t revisited Kerouac’s work in decades, though. I intend to do so this summer, if only for due diligence. I loved it at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. Of course, I did. I was precisely the sort of kid who connected with the Beats. My teenage heart that had never been truly oppressed or made to suffer (though plenty of real suffering was coming my way, and soon) yearned for the freedom and escape I found in the Beats. Jack Kerouac gave generations of arty, awkward young people words for that longing, and a path to follow. Credit where it’s due. You can’t blame him that the path was trampled into cliché long before I found it in 1988.

That said, of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg’s work always spoke to me more, and still does, even though he was rude to me in Madrid in 1993 or maybe it was ‘94. (A story for another day.) Maybe it’s an Ashkenazi Jewish connection, a cultural vibration we share, or maybe it’s just that Ginsberg was by far the bigger talent.

(Ginsberg was by far the bigger talent.)

Jack Kerouac was one of the first and most beloved of my dead boyfriends, but I’ve always had a soft spot for drunken assholes. Joyce Johnson deserved better. And you know what? I think she may have been the better writer.

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The 8-Week Novel Workshop: Revision Techniques for Your Novel is a great fit if you’re looking to revise a novel manuscript in an engaged, supportive group, with guidance and accountability to get you moving through to a revised draft. Limited to 8 students. The class will meet via Zoom on Monday evenings, 5:30 – 7:30pm PT / 8:30 – 10:30pm ET, September 11^th  - November 13^th, 2023.

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September 13, 2023 – May 15, 2024

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September 14, 2023 – May 16, 2024