'Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of A Beat Hero' & The Dark Side of Fame
http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=10208
by Shaun Mullen
24 June 2009
Like many a child of the Sixties, I exalted over the writings and the
adventures of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the
other Beats, but it was a free spirit by the name of Neal Cassady who
held a special attraction for me.
For want of a better way of saying it, Cassady was the Beats' mascot.
He was the catalyst for many of their writings and figured most
prominently in the novels of Kerouac. While an underachieving writer
who had a tortured relationship with his own literary muse, Cassady
is credited with weaning the author of On the Road and Dharma Bums,
my favorite Kerouac book, from his realist moorings into his now
legendary stream of consciousness approach.
Years later - and after a fair number of adventures myself, including
some with a friend who is in some respects the epitome of Cassady - I
came to understand that there was a dark side to some of the most
prominent Beats: A raging narcissism, alcohol and drug abuse,
thievery, plagiarism and a "Me First Always" approach to life that
left friends and lovers feeling victimized.
As I wrote here in an article titled "The Summer of Love
Reconsidered," much the same can be said of the hippie movement that
grew out of the Beat Generation. Cassady was a central figure in some
of the most hallowed antics of that era, most notoriously as the
driver of Furthur, the road trip bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry
Pranksters immortalized in Tom Wolfe's marvelous Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
There certainly was a dark side to Cassady, which is on full display
in Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero, a newish book by David
Sandison and Graham Vickers.
While Neal Cassady is sometimes ploddingly written, it is invaluable
because the authors had access to hitherto uninterviewed family
members and the full cooperation of Cassady's long suffering wife,
Carolyn, a remarkable person in her own right who bore him three
children and stood by him long after their divorce.
Sandison, who took over the book when Vickers became terminally ill,
nicely balances the darkness and light in this folk hero's life and
debunks a fair number of myths along the way. This is especially
valuable because Cassady was a serial exaggerator and little he has
said and written about his past whether it is his childhood or his
exploits behind the wheel on many a long-distance trip can be taken
as gospel.
As Sandison puts it, Cassady was "a uniquely creative mind that
somehow managed to change the course of American literature by
proxy," and was celebrated (usually pseudononymously) in the best
sellers of Kerouac and Ginsberg:
"Jack and Allen had, each in his own way, captured a little of Neal's
lightning in a jar. If they would never completely understand him,
they had managed to incorporate something of his extraordinary
life-affirming presence in their work."
Cassady's own writing was considerable more problematic and The First
Third & Other Writings, his posthumously published autobiographical
novel, is a mess.
Kerouac borrowed big chunks of Cassady's letters to him and
shamelessly used them without attribution. This pained Cassady,
especially after his friend became a celebrity, albeit an awkward
one. Little of Cassady's surviving prose rises to the level of
Kerouac at his best. While he was a natural storyteller, he did not
have the chops to stretch himself like Kerouac could.
An exception is the so-called Joan Anderson Letter to Kerouac in
1950. About 5,000 of the original 13,000 words survive, the rest
having been accidentally dumped overboard from a Sausalito houseboat
according to one unsubstantiated explanation that is a part of the
Cassady mythos.
The surviving fragment begins with Cassady's reminiscence of a
youthful hospital visit to Anderson, who had just aborted his child:
"To have seen a specter isn't everything, and there are deathmasks
piled, one atop the other, clear to heaven. Commoner still are the
wan visages of those returning from the shadow of the valley. This
means little to those who have not lifted the veil.
"The ward nurse cautioned me not to excite her (how can one prevent
that?) and I was allowed only a few minutes. The headnurse also
stopped me to say I was permitted to see her just because she always
called my name and I must cheer her. She had had a very near brush
and was not rallying properly, actually was in marked decline, and
still much in danger. Quite impressed to my duties, I entered and
gazed down on her slender form resting so quietly on the high white
bed. Her pale face was whiter; like chalk. It was pathetically clear
how utterly weak she was, there seemed absolutely no blood left in
her body. I stared and stared, she didn't breathe, didn't move; I
would never have recognized her, she was a waxed mummy. . . . "
Cassady equated freedom with travel and the journeys he undertook for
one purpose always took on diversions and other purposes along the way.
Typical was a trip to Mexico taken with Kerouac for the ostensible
purpose of Cassady getting a quickie divorce from Carolyn. It became
a series of hedonistic adventures and later the central theme of Part
Four of On the Road.
Writes Sandison:
"Once again the point of Neal Cassady's adventure somehow became
secondary to the seductive vagaries of the itinerary . . . which led
to the question of whether the seductive vagaries had not in fact
been the real point of the adventure all along."
Cassady was happiest when he was earning an honest living and could
provide for his family.
Despite his ability to be a heartless SOB to Carolyn and his closest
friends, he doted on his children. A spiritual awakening in the
mid-1950s based on the writings of mystic Edgar Cayce flickered on
and off and on again, then beginning in 1958 Cassady served a
two-year sentence, most of it at notorious San Quentin Prison, for
giving three marijuana joints to undercover San Francisco cops who
had offered to give him a ride.
His inner demons were relentless, and by the time he had fallen in
with Kesey and the Pranksters in the early 1960s and the hippies
gradually supersceded the Beats in the public imagination, Cassady
had lost any semblance of self restraint. (The photo above of a
ravaged Cassady was taken when he was only 39, although he looks many
years older.)
When the end came on February 4, 1969, the man for whom being the
center of attention was a contact high died alone.
After apparently binging on Seconal, Cassady went walking along a
railroad track near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He passed out in
the cold and rain wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, fell into a coma
and died a few hours later, four days short of his 42nd birthday.
Kesey, in an interview with Sandison, looks back on one of his
childhood heroes in providing a fitting epitaph:
"Kid Eternity was one of the comic book characters we had back then.
He could contact people from anyplace or anytime in history, people
like Davey Crockett anybody. "In the 1990s, I think, they brought
Kid Eternity back again. Somebody sent me a copy of one issue where
Kid Eternity needed somebody to help him enlightened. He called for
Neal who became the main character. In the background were nice
pictures of Ginsberg and Burroughs."
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