[Michael Millner is an old friend of mine from the New England ASA, and has been a professor of English and American Studies at UMass Lowell for many years. Mia Moriarty is a first-year English Major at UML, and interviewed him about Jack Kerouac, his writing & life, & his connections to UML. Here’s a transcript of their conversation!]
Kerouac Conversation
A Conversation Between Dr. Michael Millner & Mia Moriarty
MORIARTY: My name is Mia Moriarty. I am a first-year student at UMass Lowell. I’m studying literature. Today, I’m going to have a conversation with someone who knows a lot about Jack Kerouac’s place in American culture, a lot about [Kerouac’s] work, and, generally a lot about American popular culture in the twentieth century. He is the Nancy Donahue Professor of the Arts at the University, as well as the Director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities at the University: Michael Millner. Thank you, Michael, for your time, your conversation, and your care in answering these questions.
MILLNER: I’m looking forward to it!
MORIARTY: To begin, I’d like to ask why Lowell is important for the Kerouac Center. Of course, Jack Kerouac was born and raised in Lowell, but, in my mind, he is most often associated with other locations (mostly larger cities). I think of the literary scenes of New York and San Francisco, his journeys to Denver, his time in Mexico City when he wrote his best and greatest work in poetry, his adventures in New Orleans to visit Burroughs, or even his months on Desolation Peak—so my question is: what makes Lowell the right place for a Jack and Stella Kerouac Center?
MILLNER: [Kerouac is] Also associated with San Francisco and Tangiers; Paris, Montreal—other places, too. I’ll say two things: one is that [Lowell] is where Kerouac’s primal scene, I think, is located. Freud talked about the way that we all have places and events and relationships that are dramatically forming—constructive of us … that we experience [and] that we spend the rest of our lives attempting to process. And I think that the city of Lowell was the place—and I might even want to say that it’s something about the city itself—that for Kerouac produced this primal scene. One of the things that’s important, in Freudian terms, about the primal scene is that it shapes you, but you cannot quite remember it—that it is an event, or a series of events or experiences, that construct who you are, but you can’t actually get your hands around what that was. And Kerouac returns to [Lowell], in these deeply psychological ways, throughout his work. In fact, one of the early drafts of On the Road (this book that doesn’t mention Lowell much at all—and is about Denver, New York and San Francisco, New Orleans, and so forth—and the road, really—these places in between those big cities) … one of the earliest drafts began with the first sentence mentioning the death of Kerouac’s father. In other words, it begins back in Lowell with the Kerouac family. He also wrote a number of other novels that are about the city. He wrote repeatedly about … Gerard’s [Kerouac’s older brother’s] death—and all those serve as primal scenes … for him. So he’s always returning to Lowell—
MORIARTY: And Dr. Sax, I believe.
MILLNER: And Dr. Sax! Yep, yeah—completely. That is one of the major novels that is set in Lowell, and there are other ones, too. These novels are not often read today, but I do think that they’re ultimately at the heart of some of the novels that are still read today, like On the Road. I also think that the fact that Kerouac grew up in a French-Canadian community—spoke French, really, before he spoke English—[that he] was part of a recently immigrated community—is important to who he is, and helps us understand where he comes from—and it helps us understand something about the way that he thought of himself as part of American culture more generally.
MORIARTY: Definitely—and you mention French-speaking—I just wanted to note that on his headstone (the original headstone, not the newer one), it is written his French name: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
MILLNER: Yes.
MORIARTY: I’d like to ask about the Archive, and I have a question written here that is: how does the legacy of Kerouac, whose art pervaded every sphere of American culture in the latter half of twentieth century, benefit from this organization—and how does the interested public benefit?—(from the Kerouac Archive or the Kerouac Center generally).
MILLNER: Yeah, that’s a super question! So, just a couple of different things about the Archive: it’s made up of, I think, fifteen different collections, at this point in time. The major collection at the center of the Kerouac Archive here at the University is the John Sampas Collection. John Sampas was the brother of Sebastian Sampas—one of Kerouac’s greatest friends from here in Lowell—and [John was] also the brother of Stella Sampas, who was Kerouac’s last wife. And the Sampas Collection within the greater archive is the most comprehensive collection of Kerouac’s works in the world—because when John Sampas ran the Estate, he made xerox copies of everything. So, what we have in the center of the Kerouac Archive, here, is a collection—I call it a research collection because it’s mostly copies—not a lot of original materials … but it is the one place in the world that you can go see all these materials. The [original] materials are held in various different archives, especially at the Berg collection of The New York Public Library. There’s some at Columbia; there’s some at the University of Texas. Some of the Kerouac material is owned by private collectors and other archives around the [United States], and really around the world, but, if you really want to come see it all in one place, you can come here. Now, like I said, there are fourteen additional collections … which do all sorts of interesting things in relationship to Kerouac. Another nice thing about our collection is that John Sampas went out and collected a lot of letters that Kerouac sent to other people—that were in other people’s hands. He made copies of all of that. There’s also, in our collection, a great deal about the publication history of Kerouac, which is interesting to scholars who want to know both about publication in Kerouac’s life—and how he got published, and the order (and so forth) that things were published in—which is very complicated, actually—but also the publication history since then. We have a lot on the resurgence of Kerouac that John brought into being in the 1990s. It’s a little bit hard to believe, but Kerouac had sort of fallen out of print—a lot of the Kerouac texts had fallen out of print from the late 1960s up until the mid-1990s—and John Sampas brought it back into print. And we have that history, too, so there’s a lot in there. We just got a new collection, which is awesome because it includes hour-long interviews with just about every major Beat figure who was still alive when the interviews were made, in 2008—and, also [with] a number of artists that came from the generation of the 1960s who were deeply influenced by Kerouac, like Tom Waits and Patti Smith, just to name a couple—and then an even more recent collection of artists influenced by Kerouac—so came of age in the 1980s and 1990s.
MORIARTY: A younger generation.
MILLNER: A younger generation, yeah.
MORIARTY: Mentioning that, let me just skip to one of my questions which is about a generation—my generation—of young people. It’s often said that we might have more difficulty staying on task—reading—the actual task of reading a book—than previous generations. So, why should we, the young generation, read Kerouac … why does his art, still, in the twenty-first century, speak to us young people?
MILLNER: I don’t know; I think that’s a better question for you than for me
MORIARTY: Laughs.
MILLNER: It’s true! Laughs.
MORIARTY: Well, let me speak to that!
MILLNER: Laughing: Okay, why don’t you speak to that!
MORIARTY: Yeah, I will! I think, as someone who picked up Kerouac a couple years ago when I was in my late teens—maybe eighteen years old … I tried to read On the Road about three times; I got bored of it in the first part. Then, I picked up a copy of his Scattered Poems—that was published by City Lights—and I was charged … by them. And I was really excited about both what he was saying (his ideas about religion and philosophy)—but also the form of his verse was just really … it felt new to me—it was not like the verse of Byron, or of Shakespeare, [both of] which I was more familiar with. And I had read some other free-verse poets, but none quite as imaginative as Kerouac—[Though,] I mean, Walt Whitman certainly has an incredible imagination … I think, secondly, what drew me into Kerouac (and his poetry in particular) was the Jazz influence, which we’ll talk about in a second—I have a question about—but, it seemed to me that his lines were written in that mode—in the mode of maybe a Bebop line from a saxophonist’s solo. And, I guess, the romance of that era kind of speaks to a young person, but, for me, it was the form of his writing, more than the aesthetic …
MILLNER: Yeah … I don’t really know how people who’re nineteen or twenty years old relate to Kerouac today, so I don’t know if I have a good answer to that. [But,] I can remember how I related to Kerouac when I was a young person—and I do remember that very distinctly. First of all, I think I saw a photograph of Kerouac on the back of a book, and I was just struck by the way he looks. He was incredibly handsome, and there was this idea of, “oh, this is what an artist is and what an artist looks like,” and I was quite struck by that. And I read On the Road when I was pretty young—I think I was probably a sophomore in high school—it was probably about the time I got my driver’s license (and so forth). But I wasn’t so enamored with Kerouac [as] the person who lit out across the country hitchhiking, driving, etc.—I wasn’t so interested in his freedom on the road—I was interested in all these friends that he had, right? Kerouac says early on in On the Road, “I want friends who never yawn and never say anything that’s boring whatsoever,” and those are the sorts of friends that I wanted. So, when people think about Kerouac, or talk about Kerouac, as an emblem of freedom and liberation (and he, of course, is) … but, when I was a kid, I always saw him as an emblem of community—a kind of artistic community—and that was very powerful to me. And when I was young, I also loved Ginsberg more than Kerouac—clearly more than Kerouac—but the idea that there was this collection of authors and artists (that Kerouac was a part of) was something that I was really taken with. And I’m not sure, exactly, how that works today with young people—maybe you have some thoughts on that.
MORIARTY: I do! I was also attracted to the community and the friendship of the Beat generation—and, like you, I read Ginsberg (and kind of preferred Ginsberg to Kerouac. I read Howl when I was probably sixteen years old, and I kept going back to Howl every couple of months). But, what is relatable to a young person, now, about Kerouac and the friendships of the Beat generation, is that we—young people—young artists—want the same community. We want to be in a group of artists who are friends, or at least who are amicable and who share ideas, and who adventure together—we want that, and we think it benefits our art. I am a poet who … personally, I put together a literary magazine, kind of guerilla-style—just from work of my friends and [myself]. And [my friends and I] talk a lot about how to create art in a community in the twenty-first century … Especially when it seems like the internet is the primary way of communicating—both [communicating] ideas about art, but also of publishing art. And we talk about the decentralized communities we have, today, of artists … And it’s very localized to five-ten people who are in a group, who create art—together—and who talk about art. And I think, especially with generative artificial intelligence … it seems like, to me, [the way] to combat the kind of anti-artistic that arises from [Gen. AI], is (and I say this in the journal) not to explicitly denounce it, but just to disregard it and keep on making our art as we would if it didn’t exist … So, that’s something that Kerouac speaks to me about, because in Kerouac (and in Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti), you have both a group of great friends … but they’re also so diverse—I mean, Burroughs was fifteen years older than Ginsberg was … You have a diverse group of friends who’re creating art together and who are sharing their ideas about art together … in their case not in a localized area, but [definitely] in a group.
MILLNER: Yeah … That’s great—I wonder how common it is … Do you have other people outside the Beat generation that you admire for the way they create artistic communities?
MORIARTY: …
MILLNER: Maybe not, I don’t know.
MORIARTY: Well, my other big interest is the modernists, but the impression I get from the modernists and their community—or their communities—is that [they’re] more exclusionary and more elitist than those of the Beat generation, which were not quite hippy-ish … definitely precursor to that … but more like … celebrating what we might call “low-brow culture,” … or something not as exclusionary as the modernists. So, when I think of a community of artists working together, I think of either some of my favorite bands—The Velvet Underground or Bob Dylan and The Band (maybe The Velvet Underground’s not a great example because of the animosity between Lou Reed and John Cale in the late ‘60s, but they had performed together after the fact, and, seemingly, were friends. But definitely Bob Dylan and The Band … is something that … inspires me to be in a community of artists or a group of artists who are also friends)
…
I do want to touch on Jazz, because I think it was one of Kerouac’s chief artistic concerns. Specifically, I’m thinking about Mexico City Blues. Several of the final cantos in that poem were dedicated to the memory of Charlie Parker. [Kerouac] also has a track, on an album of his readings published by Verve Records, called the History of Bop—referring to Bebop—and there’s all these references to Jazz and Jazz culture in On the Road. And going back to the Beat Generation in general, I’m thinking Ginsberg’s line from Howl—or his fragment from Howl, “smashing phonograph records of European nostalgic 1930s German Jazz.” I don’t have a very specific question, but I was just wondering if you would speak to the importance of Jazz on Kerouac’s art and on the art of the Beat generation in general.
MILLNER: I think it’s pretty typical to talk about Kerouac’s prose style as related to Jazz. I’m not going to try to explain how that works, but I think that anyone who reads Kerouac’s language in a work like On the Road or Big Sur—or in most of his works … you get a sense of that—that it reads like Jazz—like Charlie Parker or like other [artists of] 1940s and ‘50s Jazz. So, that’s one way of thinking about it. I also … Kerouac, for better or for worse, adored—loved—African American men. What they represented, for him, at least, was a freedom—an outsider quality that led to art—that enabled their art, and this is, at least … the lens through which [Kerouac] thought about these African American artists. So that’s another important part of the jazz interest for him. I mean, he writes pretty incredibly about Jazz performances—
MORIARTY: He does!
MILLNER: Laughs. —and part of that is that he spent a lot of time thinking about developing this voice that is derived from Jazz—and then he feeds it back into a description of Jazz. It’s really quite amazing, I think. Kerouac and Ginsberg (and Burroughs to some degree, too) … they were authors that changed American literature in the 1950s. There’s sort of pre-Kerouac/Ginsberg/Beat Literature, in the American canon, and there’s post-Kerouac/Beat literature in American canon—and they may not get enough credit for that. The Six Gallery reading in 1956 is really a turning point—it’s one of the great turning points—it’s up there with what T.S. Eliot had done with the publication of The Waste Land—and even Prufrock half a dozen years earlier. Things changed when those works came out—people stopped writing in the ways that they were writing and they started writing in new ways. All that said, I do think that Kerouac’s deepest influence is on music … it is on the music of the 1960s—
MORIARTY: —of Rock & Roll—
MILLNER: —of Rock & Roll, yeah! I see that as the realm in which he was most influential. I actually think that maybe he was more influential in film than we was in … long-form literature. So, [Kerouac is] interesting because he allows for that Jazz of the ‘40s and ‘50s to be turned into language, which then is turned into lyrics, which transforms American songwriting in the 1960s. He serves that interesting sort of lynchpin …
MORIARTY: I’m thinking of—around the Rolling Thunder Revue—when Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg go to Lowell to Kerouac’s grave, and Bob Dylan talks about On the Road as being the book which opened his eyes to a world of literature … So, thinking about Rock & Roll specifically … it’s not just Jazz … it’s sort of Jazz influences Kerouac who influences the Rock & Roll musicians.
MILLNER: Yeah, it’s hard to imagine Dylan in the mid-‘60s without the Beats.
MORIARTY: Definitely.
MILLNER: Ginsberg [Dylan] was close friends with, but you can hear Kerouac in the song titles and so forth—
MORIARTY: Yeah, On the Road Again—
MILLNER: Yeah, completely … So, [Kerouac is] really important to Dylan, and, of course, Dylan’s important to everyone else who follows.
MORIARTY: Right.
MILLNER: Yeah. It’s interesting that the Jazz sounds and rhythms and improv and so forth Kerouac translates into language—into words on the page … and then Dylan and other people translating the song lyrics … with Ginsberg’s help, too, I mean Ginsberg plays a big role in that—Ginsberg is also important to what Dylan and other people are doing …
MORIARTY: I have one more question just about how the interested public—people in Lowell, in particular, who are interested in the celebration of Jack Kerouac’s art … how might we get involved in that celebration. Are there events or … volunteer opportunities with … the Center or the Archive?
MILLNER: Yeah, well, I’ll just say [that] there are lots of opportunities. All you have to do is come to me with any idea that you have, and I’ll help you bring it into fruition through the Center. So, if you want to talk about Kerouac’s poetry—have a panel discussion of that sort—let’s do it! Let’s talk about Beat poetry; let’s talk about anything that you want to! … And … from that era … you can construe Kerouac in the broadest possible terms … (You can construe Dylan as part of Kerouac’s …) All these things that we’ve been talking about, here—Jazz, etc.—[bring us an idea], and we’ll support it! There are also opportunities to work in the Archive—and we can pay people to work in the Archive. So, if you’re interested in that, you should come talk to me (like you yourself might be interested in that)—and we have a little bit of money to pay people to do that. There [are] also opportunities that are … outside of the University, but connected to Lowell. For example, each year there is a Kerouac festival (that just happened this weekend) by a community group called “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac.” Typically, we at the University provide a little bit for that, but they have other programming that they do … If students were interested in doing more programming, we could certainly help with that … especially if you get to them early on … the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac people are usually happy to have us involved. The past few years we’ve done one event, but we can always do more … Their roster—their schedule—fills up pretty fast, but if you have an idea, we should pose it to them sometime before the summer … in the winter or spring, maybe, for the following fall. So, I really encourage creative, interesting, funky ideas! …
MORIARTY: I just want to thank you again for your time and for answering these questions—
MILLNER: Yeah, it was a pleasure!
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