Door Wide Open
(by Joyce Johnson)

Review is written and copyright by Adrien Begrand.

Over the past thirty-one years, since Jack Kerouac's death in 1969, countless biographies and memoirs by Kerouac's friends, contemporaries, lovers, and scholars have been published, and today they seem to be coming out faster and faster. There are several biographies that would form an 'indispenible' pile of books, while the majority fall under the 'average' to 'mediocre' to 'out-and-out trash' categories. Trouble is, so much Kerouac's life was so frenetic, enigmatic, and factually hazy that it has taken several biographies and memoirs to paint a seemingly complete, but still out-of-focus, picture of the troubled genius. Only until recently, all Kerouac biographers have been refused complete access to the myriad journals, letters, and manuscripts that make up the vast Kerouac archive.

Near the top of all the Kerouac biographies/memoirs is Joyce Johnson's stellar 1983 memoir, Minor Characters. Superbly written, it not only paints us a picture of a pivotal time in Kerouac's life, but also tells the tale of a Barnard-schooled, upper middle class, Jewish girl who was lured from the staid, comfortable home in uptown Manhattan to the vibrant, bohemian life of Greenwich Village, gradually gaining independence and developing her own voice as a writer (something few women did in the 1950's), and at the same time falling in love with a man who would turn out to be a very famous writer.

In writing Minor Characters, Johnson was not allowed to look at the letters she wrote to Kerouac (which he'd saved), which were housed in the Kerouac archive, as per usual, back when the Kerouac Estate was known for its stinginess more than anything else. She was also refused permission to reprint the letters Kerouac had sent her, letters that she'd saved for years. Despite the absence of any correspondence from her two years with Kerouac, Johnson's memoir was still an excellent book, with Johnson's vivid descriptions from memory more than making up for it. The relationship between her and the Kerouac Estate would change in 1998, however, when the Los Angeles Times printed an article written by Johnson on August 23 of that year.

In the article, Johnson wrote about the factual inaccuracies and complete lack of responsible writing in 1998's two most infamous Kerouac biographies: Kerouac: King Of The Beats, by Barry Miles, and Ellis Amburn's Subterranean Kerouac. She mentioned that Miles' book was mainly comprised of anecdotes fetched from several other biographies that were published, some of which were grossly untrue. She saved her most pointed barbs for the latter book. Amburn, a former editor of Kerouac's, wrote a book that seemed determined to 'out' Kerouac as a raging homosexual in his own distorted version of the Kerouac story. Johnson called the book "shoddy" and politically correct, pointing out also that while reading the book she "began to reflect upon the ways in which biographical fabrication can stop just short of sheer fiction."

She must have written something the Kerouac Estate wholeheartedly agreed with, because that fall, she received all of the existing correspondence between herself and Kerouac dating back to 1957 and 1958, along with the suggestion of making a book out of it. A year and a half later, Door Wide Open is out, and we're all the better for it.

Most of Minor Characters is devoted to Johnson's two years with Kerouac, and for those familar with the book, there isn't much in the way of new revelations in the new book (seven of Kerouac's letters to Johnson previously appeared in 1999's Selected Letters: Volume Two). What Door Wide Open does, however, is fine-tune those two years she spent with Kerouac, adding new insight to the Kerouac story. The book lets the letters do the talking, along with well-written commentary by Johnson, and we're given an intimate glimpse into a happy, but tumultuous time for both Kerouac and Johnson.

Johnson, whose name then was Joyce Glassman (I'll stick to the name Johnson from here on, just to avoid confusion), met Kerouac in early 1957, nine months before On The Road was published. The period of '57/'58 was an important one for Kerouac, when he was instantly, practically overnight, transformed from an unknown writer to a cultural phenomenon and so-called 'spokesman for a generation.' As you read Door Wide Open, while seeing the couple's romance bloom, you also feel the distant rumbling of instant fame getting closer and closer. It all comes to a head when Kerouac and Johnson celebrate the famous review of On The Road one night, and the next morning are awakened by a constantly ringing telephone and are forced to deal with a media frenzy that lasts weeks.

The media attention wasn't the only thing that put a strain on the relationship. Kerouac was still almost always living a life on the run, and Joyce had to deal with his constantly running off. Whether he was in Tangier, Paris, San Francisco, Orlando, Northport, Long Island, or constantly planning trips for Joyce only to force her to cancel the plans later, Johnson patiently waited for Jack to get the rootlessness out of his system, but unfortunately for her, Kerouac never could stay in New York. All his running did make Johnson envious, and there's a pang of regret in her present-day commentary:

"The trips I didn't take in 1957 have always haunted me. They would have tested me profoundly, altered the future course of my life in unknown ways. I still regret that I couldn't move faster than Jack Kerouac could change his mind..."

The role women were expected to play in the 1950's didn't help Johnson, either. While Kerouac was out cavorting abroad, Joyce was stuck in New York, trying to make ends meet living alone. When Kerouac did spend time with her, though, the outings they took were often exhilarating for her. In a letter to Jack, she writes:

"...I remember walking with you at night through the Brooklyn docks and seeing the white steam rising from the ships against the black sky and how beautiful it was and I'd never seen it before...but if I'd walked through it with anyone else, I wouldn't have seen it either, because I wouldn't have felt safe in what my mother would categorically call a 'bad neighborhood...'. You don't know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night."

As their relationship was ending, Johnson knew it would never work out if they stuck together, but still, the glossy, romantic view of marriage was still there. In her narration, Joyce writes:

"I would have married him if he'd asked me--despite Memere, despite his drinking--and tried to hang on. Wasn't that how you proved yourself--by taking on a difficult love and enduring somehow? If you were a woman, wasn't your 'road' the man you gave yourself to?"

And there's the everpresent Memere. Kerouac's mother, as all those who know Kerouac's story, held a tight grip on her son's life, and was rather cantankerous to almost any outsider who dared to come between herself and her son. Johnson wasn't spared the cold glare of Memere, and her present-day description of a highly uncomfortable day spent at the Kerouac house in Northport is a highlight of the book. The story was mentioned briefly in Minor Characters, but in Door Wide Open she describes the events in more detail, forming a surreal, dark comedy, which included an hours-long trip out to Long Island, Kerouac being drunk in the early afternoon, the house teeming with obnoxious, rich teens who take Jack and Joyce to a party, a dinner with uncomfortable silences, and Memere castigating Joyce and her dishwashing skills while Kerouac sat passed out at the dining room table.

After On The Road was published, Kerouac was forced to defend his and his friends' writing alone. When Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' was peaking in popularity and notoriety, Ginsberg himself was away in Europe, something that didn't impress Joyce in the least:

"[Jack] had never wanted to become the spokesman for a generation, despite his proprietary feelings about originating the whole concept of Beat. That was a role Allen Ginsberg could have played brilliantly in the fall of 1957--if he had been around to share the spotlight instead of being in Paris."

All the sudden fame and attention took its toll on Kerouac, and as seen in the second volume of Kerouac's Collected Letters, he started sounding more and more jaded in his letters to Joyce, whether hilariously making fun of the British Angry Young Men writers ("I'm just so angry!...(lisp)...I mean, dearie, I'm jus so m-a-d..."), snipping at other mediocre contemporary poets ("If there's anything they hate it's somebody else's poems. I can just see them bristling like porcupines."), and even grumblig about Lawrence Ferlinghetti ("[He] asked to see my poems and then said there were too many of them to publish, as if he couldn't make a selection.").

While living alone and writing to Jack, Joyce witnessed firsthand the explosion of Beatnik culture, with all its coffee, bongos, and awful, awful poetry, and being in her early twenties, she was wise enough to tell the good from the bad (well, she had a heckuva teacher). In 1958, she writes Jack:

"It's depressing to see how a lot of bad writers have now picked up on what they think is a Beat style--went to a poetry reading, where poems by five poets were all greyly alike, hip language already solidified into cliche by lack of imagination...There's never been so much poetry and such bad poetry--from both sides."

A good example how Kerouac's fame affected him is an incident mentioned by Johnson in 1958. The previous year, the now-famous photo of Kerouac (with Joyce in the background), lit by the red-orange neon of the sign at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village, was taken. Mere months later, Kerouac and Gregory Corso got into a fight with some toughs at the same bar, resulting in Jack being pummeled out in the street, right where that idyllic, happy picture was shot.

Kerouac and Johnson gradually drifted apart, as we all know, but in her letters we see that Joyce was still reluctant to let go of Jack. In a letter to Elise Cowen she says:

"What should I do? What can I do?...Funny how happiness can be just lugging a sweet, groggy drunk home in a taxi. Acceptance, I guess, is the answer..."

As mentioned earlier, Johnson took some shots at Miles' and Amburn's biographies, and in the Door Wide Open the two writers are still not spared her poison pen.

As a seemingly final literary touch, Johnson saves her best for Amburn:

"Desperate enough for money to follow a misguided suggestion from his latest editor, Ellis Amburn, [Jack] would combine ['An American Passes Through'] with the previously written Desolation Angels. The two stylistically different halves of the resulting book proved to be an awkward fit."

Door Wide Open is a worthwhile read, blowing away some of the biographical fog that has blurred the real Jack Kerouac, taking a look in greater detail at a period in Kerouac's life that would change him forever. Not only is the book essential reading for Kerouac enthusiasts, but it will also prove to be enthralling reading for those interested in the life of independent-minded women in an age where they were years ahead of their time. Looking back at Kerouac's life, out of all of his wives and girlfriends, Joyce Johnson stands out as the best of the lot. Their relationship was never meant to last very long, but I feel Joyce was the one woman who Jack had naively let slip away...Jack even admitted years later that "it was perhaps the best love affair I ever had." After reading this sweet, funny, sad, wistful book, you can't help but agree.