http://www.metrotimes.com/arts/story.asp?id=14719
Before On the Road, Jack Kerouac drank, wrote, loved and lost in Detroit
1/20/2010
By John Cohassey
In 1944 "a very strange screw of events began to turn," Jack Kerouac
later reflected about the life-changing paths among rebellious writer
friends. That year, Kerouac lived briefly with his first wife,
Detroit-born Frankie Edie Parker. While in New York, Edie's network
of friends helped to form the 1940s beat circle. Like many of
Kerouac's friends, Edie figured in his writing, fictionally appearing
as the Town and the City's Judy Smith, Vision of Cody's Elly, and
Vanity of Dulouz's Edna "Johnnie" Palmer, and under her own name in
the recently published The Original Scroll version of On the Road.
Though Kerouac lived only a few months in Grosse Pointe, he made
trips back to Detroit in search of Edie, of lost love and a friend's
company with whom he could recall days past events that give us
insight into the foibles and vulnerability of the young artist before
he found fame as the "King of the Beats."
Born the same year as Kerouac in 1922, Edie grew up in the wealthy
Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Park. A lover of life more than of
books, Edie had long dreamed of following a bohemian artist's route
of migration to New York, then Paris. At 17, Edie went to live with
her maternal grandparents in New York at an apartment near Columbia
University. Edie represented a new generation of independent women,
often living alone or with a roommate. In the spirit of newly
liberated women, Edie soon dated and made love to Henri Cru,
Kerouac's former Horace Mann Prep School friend and the son of a
Columbia University French instructor. Cru's mother lived in the same
New York apartment building as Edie's grandmother. In fall of 1940,
Cru introduced the shy, intelligent and inwardly intense Kerouac to
Edie near the Columbia campus, while Kerouac was on crutches as the
result of a hairline fracture to his tibia suffered on the football field.
Edie enrolled at Columbia's School of the Fine Arts, studying with
the German modernist George Grosz, who taught there from 1941 to
1942. Around this time, Edie met a well-read and art-minded Barnard
student, Joan Vollmer Adams, whose husband was away serving in the
Army. Known today as two exemplars of the 1940s beat women, Edie and
Joan rented a fourth-floor apartment on 119th Street. Edie,
neglecting her art studies, frequented the same off-campus dives and
Greenwich Village nightspots and restaurants as Kerouac, who, after
leaving the Columbia football team and unable to pay for his studies,
was struggling to chart his future.
During the 1942 Christmas holiday season, Henri Cru and Edie saw
Kerouac at a church concert. Cru suggested they meet him the next day
at a nearby deli. When Edie arrived early, she was instantly
attracted to the sweater-wearing Kerouac, his shirt opened at the
collar. Kerouac sensed a carefree boldness in this Barbara
Stanwyck-like woman with an endearing "buck-tooth grin." During this
encounter, Edie nervously consumed five sauerkraut-topped hot dogs
a feat that she claims won the writer's heart. While serving in the
merchant marine, Henri Cru put Edie in Kerouac's care. Cru soon
regretted this decision when he returned to find that Edie had become
his friend's new companion and, some considered, his lover.
In a confession-like journal entry, Kerouac candidly addressed his
expectations about women: He'd either have "a wild Edie who matches
my own impatience and madness ... or a simple girl (similar to my
mother) who absorbs and understands and accepts all that."
Torn between his mother, his lovers and his wives, Kerouac had little
or no interest in marriage, but he sometimes broke from his bachelor
status. On New Year's Eve 1942, Kerouac moved into Edie and Joan's
119th Street apartment. Edie's aspiring writer friend, Lucien Carr,
frequently visited the apartment. Kerouac and Carr became friends and
collaborated in their "New Vision," a symbolist-influenced literary
movement. Carr thought Edie "the best woman Jack ever got involved
with, bar none." Even the street-hardened denizen of Times Square,
Herbert Huncke, who'd later visit Edie in Detroit while living on the
city's skid row, considered her a "cute-looking" green-eyed blonde,
with a nice figure, who "carried herself well."
To pay the rent, Joan, Edie and Kerouac worked odd jobs. The writer
waited dining-hall tables, while Edie worked as a longshoreman,
driving a hi-low for the New York Port of Disembarkation.
In March 1943, while Kerouac trained at a Navy boot camp, Edie and
Joan found another apartment at 421 W. 118th St. For more than a
year, this four-bedroom, six-floor walk-up served as the main meeting
place of the original beat circle. Littered with bottles, books, and
manuscripts, this communal bohemian hangout had none of the
sophistication of a salon as people came and went. Honorably
discharged with the diagnosis of "indifferent character" from the
Navy in June 1943, Kerouac eventually stayed with Edie and Joan,
spending his time between weekdays at his parents' home in Ozone
Park, Queens, and the 118th Street apartment on the weekends. News of
Kerouac's living with Edie eventually got back to his mother,
Gabrielle, who called upon his sister, Caroline, to intervene.
While serving in the Women's Army Corps, Caroline expressed in a
letter her disappointment regarding her brother's living arrangement.
"That kind of living is for other people," she wrote, "but not for
us. We may be poor and haven't always had the best but we must always
have family values for Gabe [Gabrielle] and Leo [Kerouac's dad
Leo-Alcide] ... for the best fortunes come to those who lead a good
clean life."
But Kerouac immersed himself in a bohemian underworld that
traditionally linked art and criminality. At the 118th Street
apartment, Kerouac met William Burroughs in February 1944, and that
spring was introduced to Allen Ginsberg, forming the triumvirate of
the original beat circle. Kerouac became involved in Carr's stalker
stabbing murder of David Kammerer, when on a sweltering New York
night on Aug. 14, 1944, he and Edie were awakened by Carr, excitedly
announcing that he had rid himself "of the old man." Along with
Burroughs, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness to the crime
and held in the Bronx jail "The Bronx Opera House" pending a $500
bail bond. Because Kerouac's father refused to send money, Edie now
had an opportunity to marry Kerouac.
Edie's family sent the money, and she joined Kerouac in what Ginsberg
later recalled "as a brief experiment" under the most "bizarre" of
"circumstances." Briefly let out of jail for their wedding on Aug.
22, 1944, Kerouac accompanied by Edie, their friend Celine Young,
and a detective went to Municipal Hall for a civil ceremony.
Kerouac wrote Edie's mother, Charlotte Parker, promising to repay the
bail money and denying any part in the crime. Kerouac claimed in the
letter that he was on board a ship in dry dock at the time and knew
nothing of the murder and vowed: "I shall be willing to work at
anything in Detroit. I'll try several things I have in mind first
the first day and without success, I shall settle with other
employments. But there is no doubt in my mind that I can get along
and Edith as well."
Edie envisioned their stay in Michigan as a short interlude before
going to France and living on the Parisian Left Bank, though she
didn't give much thought to the fact the Germans were occupying the
city. Kerouac, on the other hand, saw this as a temporary situation
and harbored notions of once more going to sea with the merchant
marine. The newlyweds visited Kerouac's parents in Ozone Park,
Queens, then, after Labor Day 1944, boarded a crowded New
York-to-Detroit train, riding in a baggage car containing the
flag-draped coffin of a fallen serviceman.
Wartime Detroit, "the arsenal of democracy," teemed with employment
opportunities. Edie's father helped Kerouac get a job at the Fruehauf
Trailer Company. Kerouac later claimed to have worked from midnight
to 8 a.m. at Federal Mogul, which he considered the best job he ever
had. At this factory, one of the scores that Federal Mogul operated
at the time, he sat at a desk intermittently reading books of
literary criticism. Given the availability of jobs and the writer's
restless pattern of quitting them, Kerouac could have been employed
at both companies, which had been converted to producing military
vehicles and parts. He sent part of the money he made to his parents,
while the rest went to pay back Edie's mother in $20-a-week installments.
Kerouac described Edie's Grosse Pointe Park home on Somerset Street
as beautiful and quiet. At 7 o'clock each evening Kerouac enjoyed the
dinners prepared by Edie, served on china under a chandelier. But
Grosse Pointe represented a stratum of society unknown to Kerouac and
one to which he never aspired; its country-club airs were
antithetical to Kerouac's moral and aesthetic sensibilities. Yet in
Vanity of Dulouz, the beat writer recalled the "big wild parties of
teenage troupes," and their "various houses around Grosse Pointe,"
where a guy would ring the doorbell and yell, 'Hey, a beer wants to
come out of the ice box.' I went to the backyard through the screen
door and looked out at the stars and listened to the revelry and
shure [sic] did love America AS America in those days."
Soon, Kerouac's defiance showed. Unshaven, wearing near worn-out
clothes, he didn't always impress Edie's cliquish friends. At the
Parker's home, he passed the time, as he did while living in most
places, sitting in the bathroom reading the Bible or Shakespeare.
Seeking respite from the family home, Kerouac took a short walk from
Somerset Street to a bar called the Rustic Cabins, a Grosse Pointe
Park jazz spot and popular college-student hangout on Kercheval
Avenue. According to the Rustic's recent owner, the then-unknown
writer sat in a corner by the pay phone, brooding, reluctant to part
with his money.
There were brighter moments. On Sundays, he and Edie often went to
the family farm in Dexter, traveling to the village in what Kerouac
described as "the lovely northern October of Michigan." The farm had
been established by Edie's grandfather, Dr. Emil Lewis Maire, a
well-respected Grosse Pointe Park physician and ophthalmologist.
Through the Maire's French Huguenot lineage, Edie shared some of her
husband's ancestry. In 1922, the same year of Edie's birth, a book
about noted Detroiters included her grandfather's decades of
contributions to Grosse Pointe Park's development.
"He is a man of culture and ideals," the book stated, "who found time
outside of his professional and public activities to make such
extensive study of the arts that he is considered a connoisseur and
he has contributed several scholarly articles on art and general literature."
Edie's parents had divorced when she was 8. The Maire family disliked
her New York-born father, Walter Milton Parker, womanizer and lover
of the good life; Edie credited his carefree existence as giving rise
to her rebellious, tomboy nature. Kerouac enjoyed it when Edie's
father took them boating on Lake St. Clair and out into Lake Erie on
his 38-foot yacht, "The Cigarette." As recounted by both Kerouac and
Edie, they made love below the boat deck on a double bed, covered by
red Hudson Bay blankets.
Though employed, well-fed, and having access to elements of high
society, Kerouac the lonely artist sought his own kind of folk,
informing Edie that there "was no tragedy in Grosse Pointe." Edie's
father arranged for a truck to take the writer to New York. Within
months, however, Edie followed, and by December 1944, she and Kerouac
lived at an apartment that she and Joan rented on West 115th Street.
To support the couple, Edie worked as a cigarette girl at the
Zanzibar Night Club on Broadway. At this time, hard drugs entered the
scene. Kerouac, experiencing the ill-effects of Benzedrine, recalled
this troubled period, writing: "I was no use to [Edie] as a husband.
I sent her home." Yearning for home and tired of scraping by
financially, Edie finally left for the Grosse Pointe comforts. On
Sep. 18, 1946, Edie filed for an annulment with the Archdiocese of
Detroit that ended the marriage.
Though Kerouac defied the responsibilities of traditional marriage,
he often missed Edie and frequently hoped for her return or his
return to her. In April 1949, he wrote Allen Ginsberg, "I've been
thinking of going back to my 1st wife, Edie." In January 1949, he
joined Neal Cassady, On the Road's Dean Moriarty, and two other
passengers his ex-wife Luanne and Ed Hinkle on a cross-country
trip in which Cassady's Hudson Hornet sped more than 100 miles an
hour over the open road, from North Carolina to New York to
Louisiana, then to San Francisco where Cassady drove off, leaving
behind Kerouac and Luanne.
Stranded in San Francisco in early February, Kerouac received a check
from his mother paying for a bus trip eastward. On his way back from
Portland, Ore. by way of Montana and Minnesota he was determined
to see Edie and took a bus to Toledo. From there, three different
rides brought the weary hitchhiker to Detroit, where he phoned Edie.
Her mother, having remarried an heir to the Berry Paint Company,
lived with Edie in a Grosse Pointe Farms mansion. Edie's mother
answered, informing Kerouac that her daughter was in Lansing; she was
attending Michigan State University to study horticulture. When
Kerouac asked for three dollars, she adamantly refused. With only
$.25 cents left, he angrily sat down on his travel bag in the
Greyhound terminal men's room. He was low, and he wrote: "Her
relatives were conspiring to keep us separated; not that they were
wrong, but they felt I was a bum and would only reopen old wounds in
her heart." He spent his last money in a skid-row eatery and took
shelter in a local library, reading books about the Old West.
Later, back in New York, Kerouac told Edie via phone that with the
royalties from his forthcoming first novel, The Town and the City, he
wanted them to travel to Trieste in the footsteps of James Joyce.
But the American road beckoned once more. In August 1949, Neal and
Jack, returning from a westward 5,000-mile road trip, drove a Travel
Bureau car a 1947 Cadillac limousine from Denver to Chicago.
After a rollicking night in Chicago, Kerouac wanted to see Edie, so
the two road-weary travelers took a bus that "roared across Michigan"
to Detroit. Cassady fell asleep, giving him relief from his injured
blackened thumb, while Kerouac talked to an attractive small-town
Michigan girl, admiring her tanned breast-tops exposed by her low-cut
cotton blouse. From the Greyhound terminal on Washington Boulevard
and Grand River, they checked into a dilapidated hotel run by two
tough-looking women, their decrepit room lit by one hanging light bulb.
Kerouac and Cassady ate a "meatloaf meal in a bum cafeteria" and
walked five to six miles at dusk, eastward along Jefferson Avenue. At
Edie's home they sat waiting on the front lawn, "under summer moonlit
trees." Seeing the two vagabond-like characters sitting on the lawn,
across-the-street neighbors, thinking these suspicious characters
were casing their homes, called the police. About 10 o'clock a patrol
car stopped and two police frisked the two. Kerouac explained they
had come from California and were waiting to take his former wife
back to New York. Satisfied with their explanation, the police
ordered them out of the neighborhood.
At a local bar, where the police had earlier stopped to warn the
owner about them, the pair waited an hour before Cassady went back to
the house to find that Edie's mother had been roused out of bed by
the police and that she had told them she wanted nothing to do with
her former son-in-law. The next morning, when Kerouac spoke with Edie
on the phone, she excitedly told them to meet up with her. He was let
down when he saw her. She'd gained weight and acquired the habit of
eating candy and drinking beer. For three days, as Kerouac later
wrote, he spent his time "trying to understand Edie."
At this time, Kerouac failed in marriage, beset with personal
troubles, and unable to get his writing published had doubts about
his future. This may have had much to do with his bleak descriptions
of the "arsenal of democracy" that had given thousands of workers,
white and black, jobs the very working class that Kerouac
championed along with America's downtrodden outsiders. In On the Road
Kerouac wrote, "If you sifted all Detroit through a wire basket the
better solid core of dregs couldn't be better gathered." In the
book's Original Scroll version, he added: "Detroit is actually one of
the worst towns possible in America. It's nothing but miles and miles
of factories and the downtown section is no bigger than Troy, N.Y.,
except that the population is way up in the millions." His dismissing
Detroit as being money-obsessed was, ironically, a criticism he never
leveled at centers of wealth like New York or Los Angeles.
During the next several days, Kerouac made the best of his visit.
Edie, now 27, had taken up with a younger crowd she called "The
Kids," privileged teenage deviants who Kerouac considered somewhat
obnoxious. In the afternoons they rode in "the back of her teenage
friends' cars, open rumble seat [sic], looking for Vernors Ginger Ale
in the moppy clouds of afternoon among red brick factories." Sharing
a passion for jazz, Edie took Kerouac, Cassady and two other friends
to Hastings Street, Detroit's legendary thoroughfare of black
business and nighttime entertainment. They watched a group perform on
a small, elevated stage. "Down on Hastings Street the boys were
blowing," wrote Kerouac. The "baritone blew and rocked his big horn
on a fast blues." While watching Edie's spirited response to the
music Kerouac felt for a brief moment a glimmer of their past days together.
Low on money and banned from Edie's home, Kerouac and Cassady were
put up at the Grosse Pointe residence of her friend, Virginia Tyson,
whose father was out of town. Virginia's father Edwin "Ty" Tyson was
a popular WWJ and WJLB sports announcer who had broadcast the first
Tiger baseball game in 1927 initiating baseball's first full-season
radio coverage and had announced the 1935 and 1936 World Series for
NBC. According to Edie, the pair's stay at the Tyson home went on for
days, an interval of time that certainly does not fit the three-day
visit as described by Kerouac. The two attended a party in the
Tyson's basement recreation room, complete with a black music trio
and played baseball on the lawn. Through Virginia's connections, they
found an affordable room at the Savarine Hotel on East Jefferson and
Lenox, a room later paid for by Virginia and Edie. The Savarine
afforded Kerouac, an avid baseball fan, a chance to meet the hotel's
Detroit Tigers tenants.
According to Kerouac in The Original Scroll, it was not long before
Edie had had enough of her former husband and his traveling
companion. One evening when she was to meet the two, she left them
outside a Mack Avenue bar and departed without a word in a car with a
male friend. In his journal, Kerouac commented about this incident:
"And Edie, not a care, not a straight, long care in the world. She
never even looked at me once with anything approaching seriousness.
She was tired and wanted to sleep, and drove home and left me to walk
4 miles not pique so much, just tired."
Unable to afford a hotel, Kerouac and Cassady stored their belongings
in the Greyhound station locker. They took refuge until morning in
the balcony of an all-night movie theater among bottle-drinking
winos, its floor covered with discarded matchbooks and cigarette
butts. A double feature played repeatedly through the night a Roy
Dean cowboy picture and Background to Danger (1943) set in neutral
Turkey during World II and starring George Raft, Peter Lorre and
Sidney Greenstreet. Prominently described in On The Road, these films
played as the writer drifted in and out of sleep, hearing a singing
cowboy's voice intermingled with a sneering Lorre, and the pompous,
wily voice of Greenstreet.
The next day at the Travel Bureau, Kerouac and Cassady paid five
dollars each for a car ride to New York. They bided their time
sitting on the grass in a park, listening to the screeching trolleys.
When they learned their ride would not depart until the following
day, they contacted Edie. That evening she drove the two back to
Hastings Street. She sped through a red light and was pulled over by
police. Wearing T-shirts, Kerouac and Cassady appeared at the police
station but were released after Edie's threats of involving her
well-connected family. The next day, the pair met up with their
Travel Bureau ride by hauling their gear several miles to the
car-owner's house. When passing Briggs Stadium, the driver, a
bespectacled middle-aged man, discussed with his passengers the
Tigers' next baseball season.
Whether this Detroit visit lasted three days as Kerouac later
claimed, or longer as Edie suggests in her memoir, Kerouac and
Cassady never visited again. Within a year, Kerouac's Thomas
Wolfe-inspired first novel, The Town and the City, met with critical
praise but disappointing sales. Meanwhile, Kerouac's experiences in
Michigan made their way into his fiction, first in the Scroll and
later its edited and expurgated sections mentioned in On the Road,
and the posthumously published Visions of Cody. Though Kerouac once
admitted to his sister that he should not have married Edie "but
just gone on knowing" her "in a casual sort of way" he too
admitted: "The happiest days of my life, I can tell you, were spent
living with her at Columbia when all the kids were around. You'd wake
up in the morning and find the house full of people talking or
reading books, and you'd go to bed at night with most of them still
there and getting ready to curl up on couches and pillows on the floor."
Whether in fiction or in life, Kerouac never forgot close friends.
Before his 1969 death, he called Edie, suggesting she visit his
Florida home, where he and his third wife, Stella Sampas, were
looking after his bed-ridden mother. But the two women of the house
forbade the visit, and within months Keroauc died, succeeding in his
alcoholic self-destruction. One will never know if the written
experiences of youth remain the same in reflection later in life
how the writer longed at times to return to Edie (who died in 1993)
and, if just briefly, to her privileged world along Lake St. Clair.
Later in life, as in his writing, Kerouac lived in the past his
childhood Lowell, the New York of the war years, the many stops along
the road of youth, an America rapidly disappearing places like
Detroit that would never be the same.
--
Roll call: Excerpts from On the Road: The Original Scroll
The February trip Jack writing about Edie:
"My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no
matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you
might as well go mad. All I wanted was to drown my soul in my wife's
soul and reach her through the tangle of shrouds which is flesh in
bed. At the end of the American road is a man and woman making love
in a hotel room." p. 278
The August 1949 trip with Neal:
"It was time for us to move on to Detroit and conclude the final
thing in our disordered life together on the road." p. 340
"And Neal and I, ragged and dirty like as if we lived off locust,
stumbled out of the bus in Detroit and went across the street and got
a cheap hotel with the bulb hanging from the ceiling and raised the
brown torn shade and looked out on the brick alley." p. 341
"Summer was over. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the bar and
what the hell were we doing in Detroit? and it grew cold. It was
the first cold dusk since the Spring. We huddled in our T-Shirts." p. 345
"Neal and I struggled five miles in local buses with all of our beat
gear and got to the home of the man who was going to charge $4 apiece
for the ride to N.Y. He was a middleaged [cq] blond fellow with
glasses, with a wife and a kid and a good home ... The moment we were
in the new Chrysler and off to New York the poor man realized he had
contracted a ride with two maniacs ... In the misty night we crossed
Toledo and went across old Ohio. I realized I was beginning to cross
and re-cross towns in America as though I was a traveling salesman
ragged travellings [cq], bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my
bag of tricks, nobody buying." p. 348-349.
--
John Cohassey is co-author of the award-winning book, Toast of the
Town: The Life and Times of Sunnie Wilson (Wayne State University
Press, 1998), and co-author of American Cultural Rebels: Avant-garde
and Bohemian Artists, Writers and Musicians from the 1850s through
the 1960s (McFarland and Co., 2008). For more about his work, see
americanavantgarde.com.
--------
Get back, Jack
http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14809
2/17/2010
Thanks for the article on Jack Kerouac. ("Winter of his discontent,"
Jan. 20). I learned even more about the man from it.
In my youth I lived about six blocks away from the house on Somerset
and, thanks to an article in the Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine,
I knew which one it was. I sometimes walked there in the evening and
smoked pot on the porch, then hung out briefly between the houses,
beneath the bathroom window, trying to catch his vibe. In those days
I felt proud of the fact that Kerouac had once lived nearby; it made
me feel somehow connected. In later years, however, I realized that
Kerouac had lived in a great many locations in America, which kind of
dulled the luster of it. I also realized that perhaps I should've
drank some cheap wine on the porch, in order to feel the way that
Kerouac had while staying there.
One aspect of the article that I take issue with is the author's
claim "that Kerouac championed" the "working class." In the novel
that Kerouac wrote with William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were
Boiled in Their Tanks, he displays a rather callous attitude toward
the longshoreman's union, the dues of which he didn't even bother to
pay. I've long thought that Woody Guthrie's "autobiography," Bound
For Glory, was an archetype for the Beats, so I was intrigued to see
it mentioned by Kerouac in that novel. However, the dismissive manner
in which he mentioned it bothered me.
Edie Kerouac Parker once gave a lecture, as well as a
question-and-answer session, at a bookstore a block over from the
Rustic Cabins Bar, on Kercheval, in Grosse Pointe Park. At it, as I
remember, she identified the Fox Theatre as the place where her
former husband and Neal Cassady spent a night in the balcony. The
author might find this of as much interest, as I found the bit about
Kerouac and Cassady spending time at a hotel on Lenox and Jefferson,
as two friends of mine lived in a hotel on that corner in the '70s.
Like much of Detroit, it has been torn down, and so I feel that such
documentation is culturally important. Thanks!
Don Handy, Mount Clemens
.
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