Belletto: Kerouac editor speaks

Beat author joins Cambridge canon

STEVEN BELLETTO is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the editor of the recently-published Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac. He is also the author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020) and No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012).

Further, he is the editor of four books of American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and the Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017) and oversees the journal Contemporary Literature. He is about to issue another important title exploring the overlapping worlds of Beat and jazz, art and race – Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans – to be published by Bloomsbury next year.

To support our review of the Cambridge Kerouac – the poet and critic Jim Cohn presents his response elsewhere within the digital pages of Rock and the Beat Generation – Cohn and Simon Warner, editor of this website, addressed some questions to Steven Belletto himself. His answers are presented below…

Simon Warner: What do you feel is the intention of the Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac?

Steven Belletto: The series aims to provide accessible introductions to topics for smart readers who want to delve more deeply into those topics. In terms of literary figures, there are Cambridge Companions to huge names such as Shakespeare and Milton and Jane Austen and James Joyce, and as a Kerouac enthusiast, I was excited to bring him into this august company.

Given his accomplished body of work, I certainly do think he deserves to have a Companion devoted to him. So on a very fundamental level, the intention is simply to remind readers that Kerouac is a complex, multifaceted author who wrote in many genres, invented some new genres, and whose poetic prose takes many surprising forms across his books.

Notice I’m not saying Kerouac was a dharma bum or hipster extraordinaire. He was those things at different moments, but he was also so much more, especially as a writer, and the Companion tries to capture that.

Pictured above: Steven Belletto

SW: Is it building on the interest swelling around the author’s 2022 Centenary?

SB: Yes, I think so. As I mention in the book’s introduction, some of the chapters began life as presentations for the Beat Studies Association’s centenary Kerouac Conference in November, 2022.

As you say, there was lots of interest around Kerouac for the 100th anniversary of his birth, and this conference was just one form that interest took. Some of the book’s contributors, including Ann Charters, Regina Weinreich and Tim Hunt, gave talks at that conference that eventually morphed into their chapters for the Kerouac Companion. So I do see it as related to that swell of interest around his Centenary.

SW: Does the decision to publish such a collection say something about the present status of this author? Is this part of an evolving 'canonisation'?

SB: I think that Kerouac has ironically been the representative ‘outsider’ in the canon for a long time: On the Road routinely appears on those ‘best of’ American novel lists and does find its way into canon-indicators such as syllabi for college courses.But I also think that On the Road casts such a long shadow that casual readers may not be as familiar with the many, many other books Kerouac wrote, which are all quite different from On the Road, and from one another.

Maybe the Companion will participate in the ongoing ‘canonization’ of Kerouac but, more importantly, I hope it gives readers a taste of his depth and breadth as a writer, and encourages people to read more of his work.

Jim Cohn: What new or revised elements of Kerouac Studies does this line-up of contributors bring?

Steven Belletto: For me, the Companion was such a pleasure to work on because doing so put me in contact with some of the newest thinking in Kerouac Studies. To take one example: in his chapter, ‘Kerouac and the Profession of Authorship’, Matt Theado explains how early on, around the time of The Town and the City, Kerouac was 'an engaged, determined, and often savvy negotiator in the literary marketplace, willing to revise, reshape, and rewrite his work in order to gain publication.’

Theado’s argument cuts against those images of Kerouac as a lone figure of romance up on some windswept mountaintop writing only for himself without any thought of the literary marketplace. In the Companion’s more theoretical chapters, contributors help us understand Kerouac and his writing in their fuller complexity.

For instance, Hassan Melehy, in ‘Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture’, extends the work he did in his great book Kerouac: Language, Poetics, Territory (2016) to show how, as he puts it, one of Kerouac’s ‘aims is to bring foreignness into his English prose by mixing it with his native language [French-Canadian French].’

Readers familiar with Kerouac Studies will notice that we were very fortunate to have many well-known figures in the Companion, including the aforementioned Ann Charters, Tim Hunt, and Ronna C. Johnson, who have been writing about Kerouac for decades.

But there are those in newer generations who have been infusing all kinds of fresh energy into Kerouac Studies, including Kurt Hemmer, Erik Mortenson, Amor Kohli, Franca Bellarsi, Sarah F. Haynes and Jean-Christophe Cloutier, among others. Brett Sigurdson contributed a very detailed chronology – which sounds straightforward but is anything but straightforward – that tells the story of Kerouac’s life (and afterlife), including information one is unlikely to encounter elsewhere.

JC: What new knowledge is brought to Kerouac's literary experimentation?

SB: While Kerouac is now, to a degree, accepted as an important American writer, I do also think that we are still coming to terms with just how radical and experimental some of his writing was.

As Kerouac aficionados know, despite all its lyrical power, On the Road is relatively tame when compared to Visions of Cody or Mexico City Blues or Old Angel Midnight. Several chapters in the Kerouac Companion are devoted to Kerouac’s literary experimentation: Nancy Grace’s ‘Truth in Confession: The Foundation of Kerouac’s Literary Experiment’, Tim Hunt’s ‘The Textuality of Performance: Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose’, George Mouratidis’ ‘The Spontaneous Aesthetic in The Subterraneans’, and Michael Hrebeniak’s ‘Visions of Cody as Metafiction’, among others.

As mentioned above, there are many eye-opening chapters in the Companion, but these in particular focus on Kerouac’s ‘literary experimentation’ and offer very useful theories of Spontaneous Prose, one of his signature techniques, and detailed analyses of important books such as Visions of Cody and The Subterraneans.

JC: Do you see a day coming when Kerouac's desire for a multivolume portrait of his life & times is published under 'one vast book' as was his intention?

SB: I certainly hope so. A version of this has already happened with the inclusion of Kerouac in the Library of America. There are currently four volumes: Road Novels, 1957-1960 (2017), which comprises On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, and some journal selections; Collected Poems (2012); Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur – all in one volume (2015); and The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016).

These are not quite the Duluoz Legend presented in a series of uniform books as Kerouac may have wished, but they are handsome volumes superbly edited and do represent another instance of canonisation and acceptance into the pantheon of great American writing.

I think it would be very cool if the Duluoz Legend were published in a series of uniform volumes because it would encourage people to read across Kerouac’s body of work – which is what I believe he intended – rather than reading individual books in isolation. He repeatedly called the books in the Duluoz Legend ‘chapters’ of that ‘one vast book’ you mention. Maybe one day!

See also: Jim Cohn writes about the new title here – ‘Book review #34: Cambridge Companion to Kerouac’, November 1st, 2024