One and Only (5 page)

T
urning transcribed interviews into a readable text is a fine art. In this case, I was working with two different interviews, one that I had taken down in handwriting in a notebook, and another that I had taped and then transcribed on a typewriter. The pitfalls are many. Most verbatim interviews are barely readable—broken syntax, too many false starts, repetitions, thoughts left hanging and picked up many pages later. The editor has to “clean up” the interview, but there is a great danger in overcleaning. There is a tendency to correct all incorrect grammar, to replace all slangy expressions with higher-class vocabulary words, and so forth. On the other hand, a reader stumbling through a too-faithful rendition of the words out of an interviewee's mouth can lose patience very quickly and feel that the text is not worth the trouble of reading, let alone trying to understand.

When the interviewee is dead, as Lu Anne now is, there is an even heavier responsibility to try to keep the exactness of her meaning, since she isn't around to correct the misrepresentation of it. I tried to
err on the side of fidelity, rather than on the side of a suave-sounding text. But there was something more going on as I tried to render those tens of thousands of taped words into a coherent, readable narrative. Lu Anne had little formal education, but her language had its own flavor, its own homespun charm, much like the tinge of western accent with which she spoke. I tried very hard to keep the sound of her voice in the printed interview. She had a way of repeating certain words for emphasis—“a beautiful, beautiful house,” for example—that was very typical of her speech patterns. That sort of repetition tends to get cut immediately by editors, but I left most such instances in, because it was a unique signature of her speech and, even more importantly, part of the way she thought. She was excitable; she was filled with enthusiasm—those were things Jack Kerouac and others loved about her. That enthusiasm showed up so clearly in her doubling of words—as well as in the frequent “My Gods,” a smattering of which I also left in. Furthermore, I chose to keep solecisms like “we laid in the grass,” “he was gonna write,” and such incorrect but common usages as “I could've cared less”—because this is the way she talked. She didn't sound like a high-society lady, and I didn't intend to make her sound like one.

Another reason I was hesitant to excise too much, even of her repetitions, was that she tended to think aloud as she was talking, to think things through even as she was recalling them to me; and it was clear she was learning new things about her life even as she purported simply to tell me what had happened to her over the years. I wanted the reader of this interview to get that sense of her thinking aloud and following her own thoughts down new and unknown trails. To some extent, I did follow the normal procedure in redacting an interview, bringing together passages on the same subject that might appear at different points in the conversation. Interviewees often start to talk about a subject, then go off to something
else, then return to the first subject when some new thought or memory strikes them about what they had been saying previously. It can be too disruptive to the reader to print accounts of various events broken up the way that people actually remember and speak them. So, for example, when Lu Anne tells of her trip from Denver to North Carolina with Neal and Al Hinkle in December 1948, I meld the several incomplete versions of the trip she gave at different points in the taped interview. But there were several places where I chose to go with a much more faithful rendition of the actual flow of her speech.

One of the charms of listening to Lu Anne was the pleasure of watching the associative trains, and occasional leaps, of her thoughts—the way one memory triggered another somewhat deeper, and then another deeper still, or the way she would sometimes keep getting pulled back to retell a story by the insistent demands of feelings that had not yet gotten fully expressed. An example of the former process is how, early in the taped interview, when she is talking about meeting Jack Kerouac and being puzzled by how shy he was in approaching girls, her mind suddenly jumps ahead a couple of years to the infamous New Year's Eve party chronicled in both
On the Road
and John Clellon Holmes's novel
Go.
She uses an event at that party to drive home her point about Jack's inability to be subtle with women, and his bitterness about his own ineptitude. Since she talked at length later on about that party, the traditional approach would have been to cut the party scene from the chronicle of late 1946, where it didn't belong, and move it up to the passages about late 1948 / early 1949. But you learn a lot about Jack quickly by getting to that party scene early, and you also learn a lot about the way Lu Anne's mind works in her remembering of it—so I left the flow there just as it came from her lips.

The latter reason for keeping the flow intact, the fact that she
could not resist trying and trying again to get a story told right, until her own feelings were satisfied, is shown most strongly in the section of the interview where she relates how Neal, after a wonderfully companionable trip across the country together in Neal's brand-new Hudson in early 1949, coldly and callously abandons Lu Anne and Jack on a street corner in San Francisco. I retained the order of her thoughts in that long section exactly as they were recorded on the tape. In some ways, that section is the climax of the interview, just as Jack used that scene for the climactic moment in
On the Road
. Lu Anne tells how hurt Jack was by Neal's deserting them, and how the incident merely reinforced her own knowledge and acceptance of Neal's ability to inflict hurt; but then Lu Anne circles back to it, retells it with more detail, begins to focus more on the fact that she and Jack talked of getting married, revisits it again and reveals something she says she has told no one else, that Jack cried in her arms that first night at the Blackstone Hotel, and then, finally, comes back to it again and begins to muse on the prospect that, had the facts of the situation been only a little different, she and Jack might have ended up happily married and gone on to lead entirely different lives than the tragic and unfulfilled ones they did live.

I thought it was essential that the reader see—that is, listen to—Lu Anne going back again and again to that episode, as its impact and ramifications began to strike her with greater and greater force,
as she let it sink into her own conscious mind
, and allowed herself to understand what had really happened between her and Jack at that time. There is no question—after hearing Lu Anne's account—that she and Jack had both reached a critical point in their lives during the two weeks they spent at the Blackstone Hotel. There can also be no doubt that, had she married Jack, her subsequent life would have been vastly different—perhaps not easier, but certainly less disjointed, less disconnected, and filled with a far greater
satisfaction of her emotional needs, and perhaps a far greater flowering of her own gifts.

For Jack, it would have meant marriage to a woman who truly loved him, and he would have been saved from the debacle of that impromptu marriage to Joan Haverty a year and a half later, born far more of his desperation to put his life in order than from any kind of real love or even respect between them. Jan Kerouac would never have been born, to live out her life with two uncaring parents, or maybe she would have been born in a different body—if you believe in reincarnation—to Jack and Lu Anne. But now we're in the realm of speculation. To return to facts, it's pretty evident that Jack's iron-fisted Catholic mother, Mémère, would never have allowed him to marry “that type of woman”—for Lu Anne would have seemed like the worst kind of tramp to her narrow-minded morality.

In any case, it's interesting to see that Kerouac himself felt the critical importance of that juncture in his life, just as Lu Anne did. In a scene from
On the Road
that he told Allen Ginsberg was the most important in the book, just after Neal abandons Jack and Lu Anne (Sal and Marylou), Sal wanders the streets of San Francisco penniless, picking up cigarette butts from the pavement, and suddenly imagines that a woman in a fish-and-chips joint on Market Street gives him a “terrified look,” as if she sees their past lives together two hundred years earlier, when Sal is her thieving son just returned from jail. “I stopped, frozen in ecstasy on the sidewalk,” Kerouac writes, and then goes on for two more pages of the most dazzling, poetic and metaphysical prose he ever wrote, describing “the plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness,” and on and on and on, leaving the reader dizzy and exhausted at the end of a literary ride like no other I can think of.
²

There is nothing in the novel about Jack considering getting married to Lu Anne, or about crying in her arms, but he could not have come up with any more powerful metaphor for the emotional trauma and transformations he was going through at that moment.

One more point needs mentioning briefly. Besides the fact that the second and longer interview I did with Lu Anne, which was taped, provides a far more accurate rendering of her words than the notes I took in longhand (though one can mishear words on a tape too), there is the additional problem that the tone of the two interviews differs a great deal. In the hospital, not sure how much of what she was saying was “on the record,” Lu Anne was a lot franker with me about many things, including her feelings about Carolyn Cassady; and she was also, because of her helpless situation—penniless in a hospital bed while others seemed to be making hay off the Beat life she'd led—a lot angrier than when she was safely ensconced back in her friend Joe's house. Her language in the hospital was in general a lot rawer and more uncensored. On tape, she was milder in what she said about Carolyn, only once throwing a mild jab at her, where she says that after Neal broke his thumb he “ran back to his mother,” meaning Carolyn and implying the essentially nonsexual relationship between them that she had spelled out for me in the hospital. Although I chose to blend some accounts from the hospital with the same events narrated on the tape, I chose to keep others separate, to avoid creating a jarring shift in the tone. Thus I saved much of what she said about Carolyn for the introduction to this book. I also felt certain things, such as Lu Anne's reactions to the filming of
Heart Beat
, needed to be kept discrete from the main text of the interview. Hence they are now also part of the introduction instead.

 

Gerald Nicosia
January 18, 2011