Interview #14: Charles Shuttleworth

The editor of a new and landmark Kerouac publication talks to Rock and the Beat Generation about that intriguing occasion when the novelist spent two whole months in mountainous isolation

WHEN Desolation Peak: Collected Writings, a new volume published by Rare Bird in association with the newly established Sal Paradise Press, recently emerged, it cast fresh light on a key moment in the Jack Kerouac history, framing fascinating materials from that summer of 1956 when the writer spent two months, employed by the US Forest Service, in a remote fire lookout in the North Cascade mountains in Washington state.

The book’s editor Charles Shuttleworth has been studying Kerouac’s work since the late 1980s. He first taught a senior elective course on Kerouac and the Beat Generation at Horace Mann School, an institution the writer attended, in New York City in 1994.

That year he researched Kerouac’s experience at the school, interviewing some three dozen of his former classmates and presenting his findings at the NYU Conference that spring.

Currently, Shuttleworth teaches Kerouac and the Beats at the Harker School in San Jose, CA. His ongoing research has been published in Beat Scene and he was the Parker lecturer for the 2020 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival.

Charles Shuttleworth spoke to Rock and the Beat Generation about the publishing project and his wider interest in the Kerouac phenomenon…

How would you describe the new Desolation Peak volume? What does it contain and how might it interest Kerouac readers older and younger?

This is a deep-dive into Kerouac, but to me it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to know the man more intimately and to understand more clearly what happened to him during the two months that he served as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak.

It's an experience chronicled in three previously published accounts – as the climax of The Dharma Bums, Part 1 of Book One of Desolation Angels, and the essay ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’ included in Lonesome Traveler. But those accounts are contradictory, and reading the actual journal he kept adds a rich new dimension.

Beyond the journal, he also did some excellent writing while he was up there. The chapters of ‘Ozone Park’ are an important addition to the Duluoz Legend especially for their portrait of his father, Leo. And if the two chapters that tell of a wild one-day binge with Big Slim (William Holmes Hubbard) were published as a short story, it would rank as one of Kerouac's best.

Kerouac's time at the fire lookout is one of the most gripping moments in his biography. What does this title add to our understanding of the man and the wider work?

In my introductory essay, I discuss five major takeaways that come from the journal: First, the extent of his poverty. For instance, in travelling to Desolation Peak, the journal reveals that he had just $14.57 while hitchhiking 900 miles over four days, and, when he arrived, his fire lookout job hadn't started yet, so he had to survive another week paying for his meals.

Second, the severity of his mood swings, which ranged from ecstatic happiness to utter despair and self-loathing. Third, the decisions he was making about his future life: whether or not to continue writing (he discusses quitting altogether and becoming a sportswriter to care for his mother), and, given that he really couldn't stop writing, what form his writing should take.

With ‘Ozone Park’ and ‘The Martin Family’ (a would-be sequel to The Town and the City also included in the book), he tries writing in a more publishable style, calling it ‘deliberate prose’ as opposed to his spontaneous sketching technique, but ultimately he became dissatisfied and recommitted himself to the latter, fully aware that it meant continuing a life of poverty:

Just re-decided & re-realized, I’m Jack Kerouac, my destiny is something greater than mere contemporary laudation, it’s the from-the-bottom-up working of the marvelous jewel which is the Duluoz Legend thru the deep, vast & wonderful reality of the world & has nothing to do with ‘being published’ – so I’ll stay a bum & eat, drink, & be merry & to hell with fame, fortune [...] and the D Legend must only be writ in happy wild spontaneous prose & there’s a lot to do.

As the journal makes clear, Part 1 of Book One of Desolation Angels was actually written on the mountaintop, with each of its short chapters being one of his sketches, and he found this style to be the most satisfying and important. As he declares in the journal, anticipating postmodernism, ‘the form of the future is no-form’.

Fourth is the extent of his religious thinking and moral concerns, as he wavers between Buddhist and Christian beliefs and at times renounces both, expressing a fierce atheism when his black moods take hold. He also suffers terribly over having killed mice in his cabin that were disturbing his sleep and invading his food stores, at one point declaring, ‘If there’s a hell and bad karma, send me hell and give me bad karma for doing this and may I be reborn a mouse.’

And fifth involves his latent alcoholism. The two months on Desolation Peak were very likely the longest stretch of sobriety in his adult life, but he wavers between declarations that he will moderate future behaviour and others where he claims, ‘I’d rather have drugs and alcohol and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop.’

The psychology of this writer is discussed almost as much as his actual adventures. What messages do you draw from his self-imposed isolation during those months in 1956? Was it linked to depression, alcoholism, an antisocial aspect to his personality, his appreciation of the wonders of the natural world or was there a religious, meditative angle to this period of isolation? There are definitely contradictions at play here: an apparently gregarious individual who wants to get away from the world.

I'll answer this in two parts. First, I think that anyone who reads the journal will come to the same conclusion that I did: Jack was bipolar. If you look up the symptoms of bipolar disorder, Jack had every one of them, particularly his moods swings, grandiosity (comparing himself to Shakespeare, Rembrandt, etc.), aural hallucinations (at one point a voice in French told him, ‘You don't need to write anymore’) and hypergraphia: Jack had an obsessive need and compulsion to write, which accounts for the vastness of his archive. On the mountaintop he wrote over 100,000 words.

Second, Kerouac's desire for extreme isolation is part and parcel with his contradictory (and again I'd say bipolar) nature, and it was always part of his character. By the time he was in his mid-twenties he was already writing in journals and letters about wanting to live Thoreau-like in a cabin in the woods. In his thirties he also fantasised about an adobe hut in the Mexican desert, and he drew elaborate plans to live as a survivalist in the woods of Northern California, studying up on mushrooms to know which ones were poisonous, and so on.

That he was utterly unsuited for such a life didn't stop him from dreaming of it, even after his experience on Desolation. He wanted to escape people and especially himself – to live a simple life away from temptations. And yes, there very much was a religious element – a desire, especially during his Buddhist phase, to live purely, atone for sins, mortify his flesh, and seek God and/or enlightenment to overcome his fear of death.  

Did Kerouac have a radio? Did the broadcasting airwaves reach as far as his remote location? Are there any references to songs or symphonies in this particular text?

Unfortunately, no. Jack was of course a huge fan of music – popular song as well as jazz – so radio connection to the outside world would have made his experience vastly more pleasant. There was only a short-wave with which the fellow lookouts chatted with each other, and Jack for whatever reason refused to join in.

Instead he sang to himself a lot – in his journal he mentions ‘singing loud and happy – great tunes’, Sinatra's ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ in particular. Also, he wrote about wanting to buy a tape recorder when he reached San Francisco to record off the radio, mentioning disc jockeys Pat Henry's jazz program on KROW and Jumpin' George Oxford's rhythm and blues program on KSAN.

How are you personally engaged with the Kerouac history? How did you discover him as a writer and what ways have you connected with him since?

I discovered Kerouac shortly after high school and was immediately drawn to him, especially in reading The Subterraneans for the wildness and confessional nature of his prose and The Dharma Bums for its spirituality and eco-consciousness. Then after reading Dennis McNally's biography Desolate Angel I found myself wanting to read everything by Kerouac and the rest of the Beats, and it also led to my jazz explorations: I became a big fan of early jazz and bebop.

As a teacher I first taught a course on Kerouac and the Beats at the Horace Mann School in New York City (which Jack attended) in 1994; and, at the Harker School in San Jose, CA, where I am now, I resumed teaching Kerouac and the Beats in 2015. That led me to the Kerouac archive in the New York Public Library in 2017, and I've been immersed in it ever since.

The Desolation Peak project was my starting point. The moment I read the journal, I felt it needed to be published, and reading the journal led me to all the other writing he did while he was there. Meanwhile, the archive is vast, and I am from New York, so I've been poring through it every chance I get to go back to see my family and friends.

Desolation Peak  is clearly part of a wider plan to publish new Kerouac-linked texts. It must be exciting to be part of such a venture. Tell me more about that…

Yes, it is very exciting. Jim Sampas, the Literary Executor of the Jack Kerouac Estate, has formed a company, Sal Paradise Press, and made an ongoing co-publishing arrangement with Rare Bird, a Los Angeles-based publisher, to produce more Kerouac volumes. It's an important venture, and I'm thrilled to be part of it.

For Kerouac fans there is a plethora of material still meriting publication. I'm working now on a volume of Kerouac's spiritual writings mostly from his Buddhist period, 1954-57, and also on studies of some of his more obscure work – The Scripture of the Golden Eternity and Book of Dreams to name two.

To me Jack Kerouac is the most important American writer of the past century because of his influence on writing (think confessional memoir, autofiction, postmodern storytelling), writers (without Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs would not have been what they became) and music (influencing untold numbers of musicians – Dylan, Garcia, Bowie, etc.), while also ushering in the whole counterculture.

Because of its social impact, Jack had the dominant culture against him, but he was his own worst enemy, sabotaging his reputation through his boorish public drunkenness and insistence that his work was entirely spontaneous. My studies should help debunk that notion, revealing that there was a lot more craft, and revision, than people are aware of. And my goal, and Jim's goal, is to elevate Jack to the status he deserves.