The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac by Ellis Amburn
Tim Hunt

Ellis Amburn. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin’s, 1998. 448 pp. $27.95.

In Subterranean Kerouac, yet another Jack Kerouac biography, Ellis Amburn (Kerouac’s last editor) uses his knowledge of the publishing industry to give the best exploration yet of how Kerouac was published and marketed, the impact of this, and how he and other Beats were enmeshed with other writers and artists of the period. The account of Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz (which Amburn edited) is particularly rich, covering both the evolution of the two and Amburn’s strategies for using the publishing campaigns to salvage Kerouac’s reputation.
But Amburn’s primary focus is Kerouac’s alcoholic self-destructiveness, which he links to Kerouac’s sexual confusions. To Amburn, Kerouac was homosexual, unable to accept it, and simultaneously homoerotic and deeply homophobic—a dishonesty which drove Kerouac to drink, drugs, mental illness, and an early death. Amburn is plausibly at least partly right (others have made similar claims), but at times Amburn seems more concerned with fitting the evidence to the formula than the other way around, and material that might modify this formula (or lead to a more nuanced cultural or social or historical context for it) isn’t fully developed. As a result, his readings of events, letters, and passages from the books often seem excessively overdetermined. And given this aggressively formulaic approach to the evidence, Amburn’s decision to scavenge Kerouac’s books—even the densely imagined, multiple, and lyric takes of Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax—“as accurate accounts of real events” becomes particularly troubling.
What Amburn does show is that we need a serious study of Kerouac’s sexuality and its relationship to his art—but one that’s more nuanced and contextualized than Subterranean Kerouac (and which doesn’t have Whittier writing “Evangeline,” Hawthorne founding Brook Farm, and Dizzy Gillespie as the precursor to Roy Eldridge). [Tim Hunt]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac by Ellis Amburn Tim Hunt Ellis Amburn. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin’s, 1998. 448 pp. $27.95. In Subterranean Kerouac, yet another Jack Kerouac biography, Ellis Amburn (Kerouac’s last editor) uses his knowledge of the publishing industry to give the best exploration yet of how Kerouac was published and marketed, the impact of this, and how he and other Beats were enmeshed with other writers and artists of the period. The account of Desolation Angels and Vanity of Duluoz (which Amburn edited) is particularly rich, covering both the evolution of the two and Amburn’s strategies for using the publishing campaigns to salvage Kerouac’s reputation. But Amburn’s primary focus is Kerouac’s alcoholic self-destructiveness, which he links to Kerouac’s sexual confusions. To Amburn, Kerouac was homosexual, unable to accept it, and simultaneously homoerotic and deeply homophobic—a dishonesty which drove Kerouac to drink, drugs, mental illness, and an early death. Amburn is plausibly at least partly right (others have made similar claims), but at times Amburn seems more concerned with fitting the evidence to the formula than the other way around, and material that might modify this formula (or lead to a more nuanced cultural or social or historical context for it) isn’t fully developed. As a result, his readings of events, letters, and passages from the books often seem excessively overdetermined. And given this aggressively formulaic approach to the evidence, Amburn’s decision to scavenge Kerouac’s books—even the densely imagined, multiple, and lyric takes of Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax—“as accurate accounts of real events” becomes particularly troubling. What Amburn does show is that we need a serious study of Kerouac’s sexuality and its relationship to his art—but one that’s more nuanced and contextualized than Subterranean Kerouac (and which doesn’t have Whittier writing “Evangeline,” Hawthorne founding Brook Farm, and Dizzy Gillespie as the precursor to Roy Eldridge). [Tim Hunt]

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