Naomi West meets Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal, lover of Jack and reluctant countercultural heroine
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg
Carolyn Cassady Black Spring Press (£9.95)
The page before the close of Jack Kerouac's On the Road tells that its vital hero Dean Moriarty is settled "with his most constant, most embittered and best-knowing wife Camille". This Camille is Carolyn, the well-bred young woman who married Neal Cassady (the real-life Moriarty) on April Fool's Day 1948.
Carolyn Cassady, 84, is the most intimate survivor of the Beat era. Before their divorce in 1963 she had three children (Cathy, Jami and John) with Neal, the "secret hero" of Allen Ginsberg's poems and Kerouac's "holy conman with the shining mind". She and Kerouac were also lovers. Now living in a bungalow in Berkshire (she relocated to England in her 60s), Cassady is still spirited and poised, make-up immaculate, hair in a wavy white ponytail.
Sharing her personal history with a major literary and countercultural movement has been a mixed blessing - especially since its responsibility-free values are at odds with her own. She looks forward to On the Road's 50th anniversary with weariness. "I'm awful tired of it. All the misunderstandings . . ." she sighs, referring to the countless accounts of their lives that have emerged since (one of the most embarrassing was the 1980 film Heart Beat, with Nick Nolte as Neal, supposedly based on her writings). Even her own 1952 photograph of Jack and Neal, the latter's head lolling lazily, the cover image for several editions, does not capture the pair for her. "It was the end of the roll and Neal was getting bored. Where's all that famous energy?"
Assisting countless biographers ("all except Ann Charters") and film-makers over the decades since the early deaths of both Jack and Neal in the late 1960s, Cassady's motivation has been to present her own, domestic, experience of these men - although, regarding Neal, she allows: "I'm trying to clean up his image, but I've had to accept he was living a double life."
She can never look at On the Road (partly written on her typewriter in the attic of the Cassadys' San Francisco home) with fondness. The book covers the unhappiest of times early in their marriage, when Neal would disappear on frenetic road trips accompanied by Kerouac (Sal Paradise in the book) and often Neal's highly sexed teenaged first wife, LuAnne (Marylou). While they careened between jazz joints and visits with William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), the professor's daughter Cassady was left sobbing back home, an impoverished single mother. Cassady did not read the entire book until decades later. "I didn't want to know what they'd done when they were away from me. With LuAnne."
In her own memoir, Off the Road, republished this month, her marriage to Neal Cassady frequently sounds like a feat of endurance, with his gambling, his lifelong tendency to "borrow" cars, his sexual profligacy (she once walked in on him and Ginsberg). She regards her own behaviour with an equally tough eye, criticising her naive attempts to mould Neal (a reform-school graduate raised by an alcoholic father) into a family man as conventional as her own father. "Fortunately I hung in there. I learned so much." Later in their marriage, she even befriended and counselled Neal's other lovers.
The early 1950s period when she was both wife to Neal and lover to Jack - initially prompted by Neal - was "the best time of all. I somehow overcame any old-fashioned notions when that happened," she laughs. Kerouac's letters rhapsodising about nights in with wine and homemade pizza reveal how much he prized his part in their home life. "He thought of our family as his family and always talked about my kids as though they were his."
Cassady insists that Kerouac's version of Neal's character did not acknowledge his intense desire for respectability. Although, in the years leading to his death in 1968, Neal became a drop-out icon, driving Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters' bus across America, Cassady maintains that, until their divorce, the pillars of his self-worth were his young family and his work. For eight years he worked as a brakeman for the South Pacific railroad and he tackled every odd job from tyre re-capper to parking attendant with equal vim. When On the Road was published, shortly before Neal served two years in San Quentin accused of supplying marijuana, she recalls: "He wished nobody would read it. He felt it glorified his hedonism when he was trying to be looked at as this upstanding citizen."
Cassady is thrilled that a mark of posthumous respectability is to be granted to Neal this year. Her surviving ten-minute scrap of tape with Neal reading Proust to Jack is to be added to the British Library sound archive. "This is the only evidence we have of how he spoke, in a very cultured way. They were in their prime, in 1952, before the drugs and alcohol took over. It's one of my most precious possessions."
Carolyn Cassady's "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" is published on 26 July by Black Spring Press (£9.95)
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