Jack's Book
Wynard, Eleanor
In brief Jacks Book: An Oral Biography of JACK KEROUAC by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, St. Martin's Press, $10.95, 339 pp. Whatever else can be said about Jack Kerouac's contribution to...
...For others, the beatnik is a social deformity sprung from the repressive soil of the fifties...
...Alas, the reviewer commits the arch sin of literary criticism by otherwise wishing...
...ELEANOR WYMARO Commonweal: 158...
...Because the cast reached Russian-novel proportions, we provided the character key as an aid to following their appearances in this book and those of their fictional shades in Kerouac's...
...Free of materialism and the nation's accumulated sins, he is the peace-seeker, the absurd saint...
...Whether seriously considering or seriously dismissing the Beat (for beatific) Generation, one must greet with some cordiality Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee...
...To fulfill their pur14 March 1980: 157 pose of separating Kerouac the man from Kerouac the cult figure created, they contend, by the media, Gifford and Lee interview a litany of people who figure in Kerouac's works...
...The legacy of Gifford and Lee is in their energetic technique of wedding oral history and literary biography...
...Just as one can feel jammed with the innards of life while reading a Kerouac novel, one is similarly glutted with biographical minutiae in Jack's Book...
...Among the cast are the novelist's widow Stella Sampas Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and Malcolm Cowley...
...For some critics, the beatnik embodies the positive values of the American Dream...
...The interviews, structured in six chapters which follow kerouac from birth to his death in 1969 at age fortyseven, are threaded together by the authors' interpretive commentary...
...For that reason alone, Jack's Book must be greeted cordially...
...What if Gallagher and Lee had turned their oral history on Frost of New England, Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha, even, in wild fantasy, the Bloomsbury Group...
...Whatever else can be said about Jack Kerouac's contribution to American letters, only one judgment seems clear: the beatnik is one of the well-established American images through which we have tried to understand ourselves...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
