Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

Notes

405 notes The John Clellon Holmes Archive in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the Mugar Library at Boston University contains Holmes’ boyhood diaries, journals, notebooks, manuscripts, and carbon copies of his correspondence including letters from his family and friends, among other materials, as well as Shirley Holmes’ correspondence. The unpublished material cited here is from this archive unless otherwise noted. John Clellon Holmes will be cited as JCH. Works frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations: BIBLIO. Richard Ardinger, An Annotated Bibliography of Works by John Clellon Holmes DP John Clellon Holmes, Displaced Person NM John Clellon Holmes, Night Music Selected Poems NMTD John Clellon Holmes, Nothing More to Declare PO John Clellon Holmes, Passionate Opinions RM John Clellon Holmes, Representative Men IG Arthur and Kit Knight, Interior Geographies: An Interview with John Clellon Holmes CHAPTER 1: A USABLE PAST 1. DP, 4. 2. PO, 5. 3. Schumacher, Break the Black Heart, 16. 4. See footnote 57, chapter 11. 5. PO, 20. 6. Letter to JCH from e. A. Murkham of Brookside, Florida, on January 2, 1966, tracing the descendants of George Holmes of Roxbury, MA. 7. Family history of Doctor edwin Holmes and S. F. emmons supplied by Lila Dizefalo and elizabeth Von Vogt. 8. IG, 6. 9. Ibid., 27. 10. Ibid., 1. 11. Ibid. 12. Maher, 3–9. In an “Author’s Note” to Lonesome Traveler (1960), Kerouac listed his nationality as “Franco-American.” There he stated that his “people” originated in Cornwall, Brittany; that his first North American ancestor was Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac, “1730 or so”; and that his first U.S. ancestor was his grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac, a carpenter. Satori in Paris (1966) is an account of Kerouac’s journey to France to trace his surname. It contains what Grove Press described as his “surrealistic conversation” with his Bretan namesake, Ulysse Lebris, in which Kerouac first drunkenly asked himself, “Is he Jewish? Pretending to be a notes 406 French aristocrat?” (96), before he concluded that Lebris was “an old noble Breton” (97). 13. Kerouac, Visions of Gerard, 95. 14. NM, 61. CHAPTER 2: THE MAGIC OF WORDS 1. DP, 8. 2. PO, 21. 3. IG, 2. 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Lila Dizefalo to Ann and Sam Charters, Feb. 2, 2006 (letter and tape). 6. IG, 6. 7. PO, 21. 8. IG, 2. 9. Ibid. 10. PO, 21. 11. Ibid., 22. 12. Ibid. 13. IG, 3. 14. PO, 50. 15. Ibid. 16. Miles, Jack Kerouac, 24. 17. Ibid., 14. 18. Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard, 129–131. 19. JCH diary, Sept. 6, 1939. 20. Ibid., March 2, 1939. 21. Ibid., July 29, 1940. 22. Ibid. 23. IG, 5. 24. DP, 5. 25. Ibid., 3. CHAPTER 3: WHATEvER WORLD THERE WOULD BE 1. PO, 7. “Clearing the Field” was first published in Contact (1962) as “A Few Loves, A Few Deaths.” 2. Gewirtz, Notes. 3. Kerouac-Parker, 65. 4. Ibid., 71. 5. Ibid., 106. 6. Ibid., 71. 7. Ibid., 73. 8. Miles, Jack Kerouac, 55. 9. Jack Kerouac, Orpheus Emerged, 50. 10. Robert Creeley’s introduction to Orpheus Emerged, 13. 11. Not only Kerouac’s books. Some version of the story of the Carr-Kammerer homicide appears in memoirs and novels written by Chandler Brossard, William Gaddis, Alan Harrington, John Clellon Holmes, Anatole Broyard, Howard Mitchem, and notes 407 James Baldwin. Kerouac wrote a version of the story in The Town and the City, with his characters “Kenneth Wood” and “Waldo Meiser” based on Carr and Kammerer. Near the end of his life he also re-told the story in Vanity of Duluoz. See James Grauerholz’s afterword to And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, 194, 200. 12. Kerouac-Parker, 178. 13. Ibid., 245. During the winter of 1944–1945 on West 115th Street, when Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on the Hippos novel based on the Carr-Kammerer story, they each wrote alternate chapters. According to Grauerholz, both Carr and Kammerer had a “number of sexual encounters” with Allen Ginsberg in 1944, but Carr “had never had any sexual contact” with Kammerer. Hippos, 188–189. 14. Kerouac-Parker, 245. 15. Conversation with elizabeth Von Vogt, November 18, 2007. 16. JCH journal, Oct. 12, 1959. 17. Ibid. 18. NMTD, 206. 19. Go, 81. 20.JCH journal, Oct. 1, 1943. 21. JCH journal, Oct. 2, 1943. 22. Ibid. 23. NMTD, 214. 24. JCH to Marian Holmes, 1944 letter...