FEW INDIVIDUALS have taken on the Kerouac biographical project with such seriousness and commitment, vigour and industry, as Paul Maher Jr. He has, over the last 20 years, produced a series of intensely hewn portraits of the Beat Generation legend and shows few signs of slowing down in his pursuit of the essence of the man.
Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time, Maher’s latest foray into print, has very recently appeared, a story of the novelist’s life up to 1957 when his most famous fictional work On the Road came out. The new release might, the author admits, form the first part of a two-volume survey but he currently feels the final, declining 12 years of Kerouac’s life might present darker challenges which he currently feels little appetite to address head-on.
It is two decades since Maher issued Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, an edition he revisited as Kerouac: His Life and Work in 2007. In 2005, his edited collection Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac first appeared. He has also co-written a 2013 book about On the Road itself and a collaborative effort, Jack Kerouac: Self-Portrait, a gathering of unpublished writings, emerges this summer.
In this latest contribution to our widely-read series ‘Biographical Details’, Maher reveals a deep hunger for the biographical form that extends well beyond the Beat book canon. In this deep trawl regarding his approach and process, he cites a string of biographies – those focused on Faulkner and Lawrence, Melville and Van Gogh among others – that have had a powerful effect on him.
Pictured above: Author Paul Maher Jr.
He also reveals a book-length portrait of Willie Nelson, that great country star, could be on its way, an intriguing revelation for followers of Beat biographies more generally. Holly George Warren is currently working on a new Kerouac volume but has enjoyed acclaim of late for her best-selling Dolly Parton title.
Maher has ruffled some feathers and prompted disagreements in the Kerouac camp but he has firmly stuck to his own critical guns: he possesses a self-belief in this life mission to tell his stories honestly, a trait that is both impressive and compelling. That same burning sincerity is communicated in the uncompromising account he provides below for Rock and the Beat Generation…
What is biography for?
I cannot answer to the function of biography on a mass-consumer scale. Fundamentally, a biography should capsulize any given life into a commodified form. Personally, from those biographies that I have already read, they serve a specific function, and that is to marry the life with the work (artist, writer, politician, tyrant, it doesn’t matter). One mode serves the gossip-mongers (rd. Kitty Kelley), the other serves the scholar and informed readers. In terms of writing biography, my goal is to straddle that line, for as much as there is value in facts and contexts, there is just as much value in lacings of gossip. Who doesn’t want to read what the maid and butler thought of their employers?
As a reader, I have been inspired by those writers who labor against great adversity, which is not necessarily that of most clickeconomics or war, but internal strife. As a writer with an American Studies background (history and literature), I was taught how to tap primary sources and read into them the latent stories therein. Even a census directory has its tales; all of those lives are never to be heard from again, obscure and forgotten. They are a river beneath a bridge (‘I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls’, writes Dante).
Biography isn’t a snapshot of any given person’s life. In it, one finds pieces of themselves. Perhaps a life not lived. The easier road had been taken in lieu of isolation and loneliness. The reader had maybe married, had children, found themselves in a go-nowhere job where they can only observe in happenstance, or perhaps live vicariously, through the pages of a book.
A proficient biography immerses the reader into a place and time: Blake’s London; Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha; Joyce’s Dublin; Dante’s Italy. I am currently writing a biography of Imagist poet Maxwell Bodenheim and, in it, I must wrest from newspaper research and contemporary reports the squalor of the 1940s Lower East Side. The Bowery and the 3rd Street El. A sordid world of bohemians and bums. Going to New York City for me is not enough. Society had disgorged the modern era upon the vestiges of yesterday. It is incumbent upon me to rediscover this vanished world anew and describe it within the pages of my book.
My purpose of reading biography is to study how a writer breaks form through novel concepts or ideas. Or, discovering new modes of expression whilst enduring great bouts of mental & physical suffering (rd. Kerouac in sketching mode whilst starving in the streets). To that end, I am thinking of Richard Ellmann’s bios on Joyce, Yeats, and Wilde. Joseph Frank’s magisterial biography on Dostoevsky. Or, most recently on Van Gogh which follows the hapless painter through the crudely dark Borinage to the sunlit fields of Arles. There is Hershel Parker’s double-volume of the life of Melville, a most comprehensive and engaging narrative entirely dependent on the historic record to tell its story. Melville, unpeeling the layers of his onion bulb mind to strike the innermost bulb, to cull the most radical prose he could muster and fling it into the pages of Moby-Dick and Pierre.
Before writing Kerouac, I was reading lives of Poe and D. H. Lawrence by Jeffrey Meyers who was published by my then publisher at Cooper Square Press (before being bought out by Rowman & Littlefield in 2004). Meyers’ treatment of Lawrence was especially stirring to my fresh eyes. Concise, measured and brisk, the book breathed integrity, yet it wasn’t all that thick. He trod carefully, determined not to pad the pages with every detritus of detail just for the sake of inclusion. No. Meyers had to vet the importance of each source and practice of the theory of economy. What is left out is just as important as what is left in.
However, Lawrence demanded a more vigorous treatment, and so, over the years, this had finally manifested itself in a great number of books about D. H. Lawrence’s life and writings and now even, several volumes on his wife, Frieda. I found something compelling about a writer threatening to ‘flame into being’.
Chiefly, I had been drawn to literary biography, because I was attracted to how passages of writings were utilized in the pages to either illuminate the life or the work. It amplified any given work I was reading even more. To that end, Joseph Blotner’s study of Faulkner carried me through Clifford Lewis’s undergraduate course on Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck that I took at University of Massachusetts – Lowell. By reading those two thick volumes, I was rewarded with cherished insights into The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom and Light in August. I had no trouble absorbing these difficult texts because of Blotner’s clarity in bringing these books to life.
I was a late comer to Kerouac. I began reading him in the mid-1980s. I had read all of the books that were then available, buying many of them from a little bookstore in Kearney Square, Lowell. After these, I bought a few biographies. These were helpful; however, they were not as helpful as all of those I have mentioned. There was emphasis on the Beats, telling their respective stories in broad strokes.
However, for me, there was not enough about Jack Kerouac’s writing process. His hardships were blunted by their brevity. It seemed to me that the biographers were awed by the spectacle of the Beats, rather than treating their subject exhaustively. Part of this is likely because the Kerouac archive had not been available to them (or at all!). Whether I was a naive fool, or just plain ambitious, I decided to write my own book to my own specifications.
By 2002, I had a contract in hand. I was researching what I could given my limited funds and circumstances. I did not write a proposal. I have never written a proposal in my life. Instead, I had reached an editor with the same last name as me, and discussed my ideas with him. The gods werw with me. He green-lit a book. I was paid a $1,500 advance, a motherlode of cash for me, just for writing.
I began at once, with piles of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg books on my table. I bought more: Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso. I familarized myself with the key texts. I walked around my hometown and haunted the same places Jack had written about. I sat by the Merrimack where I used to sneak to the bank with my friend David, and fish for carp and suckers (I was expressly forbidden to go there as it was regarded as dangerous). Where I sat in the sands, antique bottles, tire rims, rusted junk poked out here and there where Lowellians kept their dump back in Jack’s time there.
This being my first biography, I initially struggled with form and not the facts (usually it is the other way around). The facts were mostly there if one wanted to find them.
You have penned a number of Kerouac portraits, probably more than anyone else. It raises the thought, what makes you keep coming back?
I have it in my head that my former work can be improved upon. Maybe that’s being too ambitious. I wrote the first bio in my late 30s. I am now 60. For Becoming Kerouac, I figured that the time was right, and not for anniversary reasons. Mental faculties start to become strained. Springs pop where there once was spectacular range of motion. Joints and muscles do not work as they used to. Memory recall is blunted by stupefaction. One’s views of the world as they age grow narrower. Strained. I find that the older I get, the less I care for details and adherence to facts; nothing should get in the way of a good story. I truly believe that.
Pictured above: Becoming Kerouac, Maher’s latest biography
Since my biography of JK was published in 2004, scores of unpublished writings by Kerouac had found their way on to bookshelves. These were not then available to me for my 2004 book. I felt I had a responsibility to keep my work current. At the time, the Kerouac archives were being deposited at the New York Public Library in-between various private sales made to antiquarian book dealers. There was the first wave of material sent sometime in 2001. These papers were made available to scholars for scholarly use (though not to quote from).
Later, during another visit to New York in August, I had arrived just in time; a second wave of Kerouac archival material had been placed there. Just about everything there was what Kerouac had carefully kept during his lifetime. The head curator had graciously brought me into the backroom where all of the papers and ephemera were laid out side by side on long wooden tables. It was enough to blow anybody’s head off from the sheer awesomeness of seeing that. Of course, all I could see was all the material that I could not account for in my book(s). By then, there was already a contract in place promising American scholar Douglas Brinkley exclusive access to these papers for his authorized Kerouac biography to be published by Viking.
More pertinently, what did you hope to achieve with your account here?
Since Jack Kerouac was from my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, I felt an obligation. He was a neighbor to my paternal family. I had heard stories about him as a little boy, without being impressed by them. He was just another local character who had gone off and wrote books about Lowell. About Lowell? Who would ever care enough to write even a single page about it? For me, back then, Lowell was a crude, dumb city. The unassuming duplexes, tenements, and cottages all looked identical from when I was a boy with their veneers of monochromatic chipping and faded paints. There was abundant crime. Filth. The river was polluted from the Industrial Revolution. Even my own brethren I found to be poor, proud, pigheaded, unoriginal, and brazenly xenophobic. I was as eager to escape the clutches of the city as Jack was, and so I found no value in not only writing a book like that but even having to read it.
Boy, I was wrong.
I had lived in Lowell since I was in single digits (I was born on an air force base in Amarillo, Texas). My paternal family had all lived in Lowell and came down from the same area of Canada (Rivière-du-Loup of Old Quebec) as the Kerouacs. I was in a uniquely qualified position to tell his story from the perspective of someone who not only shared a geographical location, but a cultural, ethno, Roman Catholic, and educational background. I went to Saint Louis School and Church. I lived in Centralville. I lived and breathed the same air on the same streets and often under the same circumstances as the Kerouacs, living in almost grinding poverty as times grew tougher. So, in short, I felt as a Lowell brother, his brethren, as a Franco-American and a Lowellian, that I had a duty to write what it was that I thought had to be done. I owed it to Jack to try.
I recall, outside of John Sampas’ house (he was then the Literary Executor of the Kerouac Estate). Local poet Paul Marion advised me to not write a biography. ‘Doug Brinkley is writing one,’ he told me. I took that directly as a challenge.
Were you invited or did you pitch?
I don’t remember. I found the right person and pitched it. For Becoming Kerouac, the pitch to my editor, Rick Rinehart, was to permit me to resuscitate Kerouac: His Life and Work from its ashes (though it had always remained in print) in time for the twentieth anniversary in 2024. Nobody else gave a shit that it was 20 years old, but for me it was a great capstone, because I had achieved what I wanted in my first book. It had not suffered critically, despite the very first book review from a Toronto newspaper written by some smug prick headlining it, ‘Hit the Road, Paul!’ If that wasn’t a personal attack, I don’t know what it was. But the book endured. That was the most important thing.
Pictured above: Maher’s original 2004 Kerouac account
What problems did you face in writing this particular life story?
These problems are now legion. The initial problem was mine alone. How to write it? It looked easier than it was after reading all of those biographies. I made it my point to just tell it the best way I knew how in a straightforward manner, even though my writing lacked any style or effectiveness. I had never written a book before. Page by page, I committed myself. I did not outline any part of it, as Jack’s life had its own outline. Knowing what I know now, I feel like I would have done it differently. Back then, there was no software to help keep various drafts and research files in order (like Scrivener). I was writing as I worked full time (as a public-school teacher) and attended graduate classes. In later books that I edited or wrote, the troubles were compounded when we gave birth to twin daughters.
The key trouble, however, was with the Estate. John Sampas’ tight-fisted control of the Estate had conjured the wrath of many writers and scholars. He had mistaken his role as steward of Jack Kerouac’s legacy to be the very architect of the archive he so zealously guarded like the Lost Ark of the Covenant. He was Grima Wormtongue seated securely on a throne that wasn’t his to claim.
Sampas pored through my manuscript. I was stupid and naive. I let him do that, figuring he may add some lost details of Jack’s life and work that was lost to me but obvious to him. He underscored passages he felt to be too scurrilous. He crossed out other items that may have stepped beyond the bounds of fair use. Eventually, after consultation with my publisher’s legal counsel I wrested the manuscript back from him and let these matters remain where they were. Nothing was changed. He wanted to dictate what sordid details of Kerouac’s life went into the book and what should stay out.
Predictably, the brunt of this had to do with John Sampas wanting to elevate the role of the Sampas family in Jack’s rise to fame. He wanted it changed how Stella Sampas, Kerouac’s third wife, was represented. I did not, however. Eventually, he backed off, but not without years of mistrust thrown upon me well after the book had already been published. He actually provided a minor blurb for the back cover.
The other issue I experiences was with Viking, the then ‘official’ publisher of Kerouac, and of their new biographer, Douglas Brinkley. I had sent my manuscript to Brinkley in the hopes of garnering a promotional blurb from him (he passed out of avoiding conflict of interest, though he gave me one later for a different Kerouac book). He had passed my book on (unknowingly to me) to Viking editor, Paul Slovak who then passed it on to Viking’s in-house legal team.
They were concerned that John had broken their contract by permitting me access to the then-confined to NYPL archive. He had not. I had never used anything from the second installment of papers to the NYPL, but the initial 2001 materials (these were the key notebooks like Visions of Cody, Book of Sketches, Book of Dreams and others, scores of correspondences, and holographs of manuscripts). Viking and Brinkley were not aware of this 2001 deposit to the Berg.
Viking were so flummoxed by the publication of my biography that they forced Brinkley, who was then many months behind finishing his book, to rush out a book of Kerouac’s journals, which was already contracted, four years later as a multi-volume collection of unedited notebooks and journals. Brinkley later cancelled writing the Kerouac biography to focus instead on a book about Hurricane Katrina.
The third problem I had was its reception by fans. In Kerouac world, there are chiefly two contingents of rabid readers who somehow speak for the rest. These are the academics and the fact-checkers. On behalf of academia, there had been and exists now a conspiracy of silence in terms of reviewing or even discussing my books on Kerouac (not the others). This is fine by me, but it is there, nonetheless. Discussion or reviews of my Kerouac biographies have never existed in an academic journal, though they haves been quoted often as a resource for dissertations and other Beat books.
Per the ‘fact-checkers’, these are a tiny collection of fans who are not interested in discussing Kerouac books, or Jack’s history or writing evolution. They OCR entire books and letters, bank it in their hard drive, and will instantly answer any question through doing a ‘search and find’ execution thus giving them the appearance of great accumulated knowledge. These were among the first to attack my books, flocking to low-hanging fruit sites where anybody with an axe to grind can write anything they please in an effort to destroy an author’s reputation.
The ‘fact-checkers’ do not agree that a good story is more important than strict adherence to facts. If you write that someone’s eyes are blue, when they are actually brown, this will earn an attack, one-starring a book without bothering to write why it is that way.
Were you satisfied with the results? How have you felt about reviews so far?
No, I’m never pleased with the results. There have been scant reviews for Becoming Kerouac. There was one published in the London Times by a convoluted critic who seems to have had to pass it in by 5:00 and began writing it at 4:59. The less said the better. These types of reviews are the new norm. Informed intelligent criticism has gone the way of the Dodo bird. Another in Beat Scene was more favorable, and these are the readers I want to reach. A new generation of readers with no stake in the game.
I believe it in my heart to have written the best book that I was capable of; I presently suffer from neck, back, and shoulder pain from all the years of transcription, writing and reading, and so researching and writing Becoming Kerouac had become a grind.
Pictured above: The forthcoming collection of writings co-edited by Maher
You have written about artists who are dead – Kerouac himself, Miles Davis, for example – and artists who are alive, like Tom Waits and Terrence Malick. If you're portraying or critiquing a living individual, does that give you a particular obligation to the 'truth'?
They were books of interviews that I had compiled, if there was any ‘truth’ to those kinds of books, they are the truth according to Waits or Davis. As for Malick, he is a friend of mine and so the obligation to the truth remains especially valid. Yet, he does not dictate what I should or should not write about him and his films. Since meeting him back in 2017, I have shrugged off a biography of him, since I see him in a different light. I can no longer be objective, which nullifies an objectively written biography.
When you write about someone who is still alive, does that set you different questions?
I know enough not to make up shit about people, and thereby I don’t have to think about this as a quandary. I have never written a biography of a living person, and probably never will. On the stove, I have a new book on the last third of Neal Cassady’s troubled life being researched. My Bodenheim biography. Possibly, a continuation of Becoming Kerouac, which will take the reader to the post-On the Road years of Kerouac until his untimely death in 1969. However, because of recent incidents in regards to editing a collection of unpublished Kerouac writings, and the new biography, I have been soured on this subject for reasons I cannot go into.
It is a slow painful downward spiral for Jack. What is the fun in writing this? It must be like Mel Gibson directing The Passion of the Christ. What fun was it to direct something so violent and relentless? As the Passion was integral to Jesus’ mission as Savior of the world, so was Kerouac’s ‘Passion’ to tell the truth as he knew it in his many books. To author the books that he did, it was vital to live the life that he did. It was Jack Kerouac’s Faustian bargain. It therefore becomes unavoidable to document his many sicknesses, hangovers, mental confusions, and beatings.
Despite the Times Literary Supplement’s issues with my ‘detailed and more disgraceful’ book, I left in all that I felt could fully bring home to the reader the joys and horrors of ‘becoming Kerouac’.
I have in my possession digital scans of all of Kerouac’s letters, journals and notebooks. Each is a window into Jack’s mindscape at any given time. He wrote what he wanted no matter the reason: inspiration, economic duress, or boredom. It then becomes possible to gauge Kerouac’s mindset by not only what he was writing at the time, but how his handwriting appears: neat and intelligible or a drunken scrawl. It can be profundity or gibberish. After reading the worst of his entries, I, too, felt hungover. It was not pleasant.
Any other comments you would like to add?
I know, as a biographer, that I am not especially endearing to folks in Kerouac world. This doesn’t matter to me. I do not enjoy confrontation or strife.
I write what I write because I want to do it. I’ve edited and written many books and articles for next to nothing. I do it out of a surplus for passion, not just Kerouac or the Beats, but of writing in general. I have a respect for the sanctity of words.
My Kerouac titles earn less money than any other books that I have published. I have just signed a contract for a book on Willie Nelson, the advance of which is many thousand dollars more than anything I have ever earned from a Jack Kerouac project. Clearly, my Kerouac books are a matter of passion, and not income-derived money-grabbers as so many that have been written.
There is no camaraderie in Kerouac world. I never feel more alone than I do in this particular stratum. The only sounds I hear are not those of encouragement but of the same mouths over and over licking the same pig trough, spewing factoids, perpetuating misquotes, and relaying an idolatrous love for Kerouac’s imagery. A territorial pissing match. Fuck all that. I prefer my hovel on the coast of Maine, writing what suits me. If a new Kerouac book wants to be written, then it will likely manifest itself, perhaps in a new form. Fewer facts and more story.
Editor’s note: Paul Maher Jr.’s Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time was published by Rowman & Littlefield earlier this year. Jack Kerouac: Self-Portrait, co-edited by Paul Maher Jr. and Charles Shuttleworth, will be issued by Rare Bird Books in July
See also: ‘Beat Soundtrack #16: Paul Maher Jr.’, April 17th, 2022; PLUS ‘Biographical Details #3: William S. Burroughs by Casey Rae’, January 9th, 2024; ‘Biographical Details #2: Allen Ginsberg by Jonah Raskin’, October 29th, 2023’; and ‘Biographical Details #1: Jack Kerouac by Steve Turner’, September 30th, 2023
That was an excellent interview. The final comments about the "territorial pissing match" are sadly accurate.
Again, Paul Maher Jr. prove to me that he is my first reference to anything Kerouac along with Dave Moore.