September 3, 1968—In his last TV appearance, more than a decade after the success that made him a celebrity and wrecked his life, Jack Kerouac gave unmistakable evidence of his physical and mental deterioration in a rambling, bibulous appearance on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line.
Offhand, I can think of only one author interview on TV more embarrassing and excruciating to watch: Truman Capote’s July 1978 appearance on The Stanley Siegel Show.
(Ah, Stanley Siegel—remember him? How he used to hold sessions with his analyst right on the air? Thirty years ago, he counterposed his edgy neurosis to Phil Donahue’s Sensitive New Age Guy on the morning television talk show scene. He was only in the New York market for, like, four—six-eight—years? But while he was around my college newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator, decided in its wisdom to present him with a Blue Pencil Dinner at the dinner in which our boards of editors changed hands. Don’t ask me why we—or, rather, the upperclassmen who ran the paper at the time—did so. Chalk it up to youth!)
Once, Capote cut Kerouac to the quick with one of the more memorable insults--“That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Naturally, that’s what you would expect from someone who, by his own statement, would spend an afternoon first putting a comma in, then taking it out. Yet Capote shared this with his contemporary: an alcohol-fueled slide that was probably hastened by a monster success (in Capote’s case, for In Cold Blood).
In that session, Siegel exuded an almost palpably smarmy concern for his subject. Buckley, on the other hand, was like a matador egging on his bull—or, if you prefer the image concocted by David Remnick: "He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat."
Take a look at this video of the interview. The amused Buckley (who, during a break, unsuccessfully attempted to induce Kerouac friend Allen Ginsberg to step in for the massively inebriated guest) can barely believe what he’s seeing and hearing:
* a man stoned from consuming uppers all day long, so he would be alert during taping (you be the judge how well this worked or not);
Offhand, I can think of only one author interview on TV more embarrassing and excruciating to watch: Truman Capote’s July 1978 appearance on The Stanley Siegel Show.
(Ah, Stanley Siegel—remember him? How he used to hold sessions with his analyst right on the air? Thirty years ago, he counterposed his edgy neurosis to Phil Donahue’s Sensitive New Age Guy on the morning television talk show scene. He was only in the New York market for, like, four—six-eight—years? But while he was around my college newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator, decided in its wisdom to present him with a Blue Pencil Dinner at the dinner in which our boards of editors changed hands. Don’t ask me why we—or, rather, the upperclassmen who ran the paper at the time—did so. Chalk it up to youth!)
Once, Capote cut Kerouac to the quick with one of the more memorable insults--“That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Naturally, that’s what you would expect from someone who, by his own statement, would spend an afternoon first putting a comma in, then taking it out. Yet Capote shared this with his contemporary: an alcohol-fueled slide that was probably hastened by a monster success (in Capote’s case, for In Cold Blood).
In that session, Siegel exuded an almost palpably smarmy concern for his subject. Buckley, on the other hand, was like a matador egging on his bull—or, if you prefer the image concocted by David Remnick: "He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat."
Take a look at this video of the interview. The amused Buckley (who, during a break, unsuccessfully attempted to induce Kerouac friend Allen Ginsberg to step in for the massively inebriated guest) can barely believe what he’s seeing and hearing:
* a man stoned from consuming uppers all day long, so he would be alert during taping (you be the judge how well this worked or not);
* A guest already drunk by the time he got to the studio—and periodically downing even more throughout the interview—that is, when he wasn’t busy blowing smoke rings into the air with his cigar;
* A guest suddenly leaning to one side, grabbing hold of the right side of his face, and laughing hysterically;
* A formerly lean, handsome face, now puffed out from drinking and drugs, atop a body barely fitting into his blue polyester jacket, looking like Pat Buchanan’s younger, ne’er-do-well brother;
* An incredibly bad haircut, done by a friend at the behest of the guest, who insisted on a short, tight cut so he wouldn’t be connected with the hippies he despised—then suffered the consequences (the friend, pressed into service as a barber, accidentally grazed Kerouac’s ear and cut him somewhat).
* Farcical mishearings by the guest (Buckley’s use of the word “Adamite” was construed as “atomite”) and loud non-sequiturs from the same source (one that brought the house down was the Joycean bit of nonsense, “flat foot flujie with the floy floy”)
In a letter to his agent, Sterling Lord, printed in Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 2: 1957-1969, the author was briefly able, nearly a month after the show’s airing, to snap out of earlier delusions about the conservative (“Now Bill Buckley, there’s a guy I admire. I know him from way back”) and admit the condescension his host couldn’t help showing: “Buckley kept kicking my shoes and telling me to shush so the other guests could demonstrate how dull they were, or stupid.”
Most dismaying to his core audience was what the lead prose writer of the Beats was saying, and the environment in which he was saying it. He wasn’t in some jazz club where he’d be digging Lester Young or Dexter Gordon or some other “strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade.” Instead, he was in the WOR studio, where the music of choice on this particular day was the Second Brandenberg Concerto.
Furthermore, the writer whose work had once celebrated with Whitmanesque fervor the noncomformists in American life--"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing"—was decidedly skeptical about the young, and explaining his attachment to the Roman Catholic faith in which he was raised: "I believe in order, tenderness and piety.” Moreover, he believed in the necessity of the Vietnam War at a time when that conflict had thrown the nation into turmoil.
Kerouac’s financial and personal situation was as desperate as his physical one. After a nervous breakdown in the early 1960s, his health had steadily declined and he had taken to moving north and south with his mother. (He had married his third wife on the assumption that she would look after things while he tended to his mother.) His critical reputation had gone into freefall along with his health. With his income already dwindling to $157 a week, his publisher chose that moment to notify him that his royalty payments would be cut, too.
At the end of the first chapter of On the Road—not only the Bible of the “beats” but of the hippies who followed—Kerouac’s narrator-alter ego, the ironically named Sal Paradise, observes: “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
By the time of Kerouac’s appearance on Firing Line, those aspirations were far behind him. Instead, he was face to face with the realization that had come on him through the rest of his novel of discovering himself and America: “I realized I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.”
Thirteen months later, Kerouac died in a St. Petersburg hospital of complications from the alcoholism that had been taking larger and larger pieces of him since he’d had his first drink at Thanksgiving in 1938. In my senior year of college, On the Road was on the reading list for the course I took on Postwar American Literature with Professor Ann Douglas, an astute and sympathetic reader of his work. Last year, the novel, along with several of his other works, became one of the Library of America series devoted to classics of our nation’s literature.
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