Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac

by Paul Maher Jr. (Editor)

Empty Phantoms: Collected Interviews with Jack Kerouac gathers together, for the first time in one volume, all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews—including those celebrated, infamous, or obscure—with the acclaimed American writer and father of the Beats, Jack Kerouac. In many instances, the interviews are transcribed from original tapes and are either unabridged, like the famous "Paris Review" interview in which the journal was excised for space constraints, or unexpurgated, such as in the infamous Northport Library interview, which had been edited to avoid issues of libel and charges of anti-Semitism. Editor Paul Maher, one of the leading young lions of Kerouac scholarship, has scoured newspapers to glean interviews unseen for decades. Although many top-notch journalists, from Mike Wallace to William F. Buckley, conducted the interviews, it is Kerouac who dominates the proceedings, with his energy, wit, passion, anger, astute insights, playfulness, literary integrity, and searching spirituality. Best of all, the interviews are replete with Kerouacisms like "walking on water wasn't built in a day, wisdom is heartless," and "pity dogs and forgive men," which have been a cherished aspect of Kerouac's literature. Beyond his own works, this living portrait of Kerouac isn't available anywhere else.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2005

About the author

Maher was born in Amarillo, Texas, where his father was stationed in the Air Force. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Maher remained through childhood. Upon graduating from Dracut High School, he joined the United States Navy where he served in the Persian Gulf aboard the USS Ramsey. Upon discharge, Maher returned to Lowell. He attended Middlesex Community College and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in American studies. He later completed a master's degree in Education with a concentration in English.

From 2004 through the present, Maher authored and edited seven books for publication. He has been translated and published in five countries.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kerouac 101: Jack Kerouac, a novelist born in Lowell, Mass. to French-Canadian parents, coined the phrase “Beat Generation” to describe the disaffected youth of the late forties and early fifties, and was popularly viewed as the leader of this movement. While his first novel, The Town and the City, was written in a style reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, it is for his second novel, On the Road, written in what he termed “spontaneous prose,” that Kerouac is best known. The novel, written in a three week period and in a single unbroken paragraph on a teletype roll over 100 feet long (so Kerouac would not have to interrupt writing in order to insert new sheets of paper in the typewriter), describes a young man’s trips back and forth across America, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes “riding the rails,” and most frequently riding in a car driven for long periods at a time by his friend Dean Moriarty, whom the narrator describes as “a young jailkid shrouded in mystery” and “a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” Together, the narrator, named Sal, and his friend Dean, a manic, monologuing Zen master of the road, go looking for “kicks” in what some see, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as one of America’s greatest road trip novels. The character of Dean Moriarty is based on Kerouac’s real-life friend Neal Cassady, and it was after receiving a 40,000 word letter (!) from Cassady that Kerouac got the idea for his spontaneous writing style.

If you’ve never read anything about Kerouac anywhere, these are some of the things of which you will learn from Empty Phantoms; however, I suspect that most reading this book will have read On the Road, and will know at least something of the things I have mentioned in the preceding. Although this book of interviews with Kerouac supplies more details on each of these issues, and in the words of the man himself, in some respects the book seems to be less about Kerouac’s work as a novelist and more about his fame as leader of the Beat Generation and author of a notorious stream of consciousness book about hitchhiking. At least that’s my impression, which is based on how many times in interviews Kerouac repeats these ideas. And it was not because Kerouac was constructing a particular public image for himself that he repeated himself so often; rather, it was because the media already had a particular image of Kerouac as the wild, crazed, hedonistic, delinquent “King of the Beats,” and seemed interested only in hearing him talk about this. As Kerouac tells Ted Berrigan in his interview for the Paris Review, “I am so busy interviewing myself in my novels, and have been so busy writing down these self-interviews, that I don’t see why I should draw breath in pain every year for the last ten years to repeat and repeat to everybody who interviews me (hundreds of journalists, thousands of students) what I’ve already explained in the books themselves.” So, while on one level these interviews show Kerouac talking about his novels, and in particular On the Road, on another level they represent another instance in which an individual becomes “typecast” in a certain role by the tunnel vision of a sensationalizing media (best parallel I can think of is William Shatner, who has done many things since then, but who continues to be most closely associated in pop culture with his acting work as Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise). One way Kerouac coped with the sudden media attention was to drink, and there are a few interviews in this book in which it is obvious that he’s had a few before the cameras have started rolling.

In later interviews, one sees the movement of Kerouac’s political views to the right (one of his heroes was the ultra-right William F. Buckley Jr., an interview with whom is included here), and his increasing discomfort with what he perceives as the politicization by the Left of the Beat Generation. This is reflected in his criticism of the Hippies, and of his friends Cassady and poet Allen Ginsberg, both of whom became associated with the Hippies, and particularly with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

The book includes reminiscences of Kerouac by his friends Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes, and by one of Kerouac’s wives, Joan Kerouac, and by Carolyn Cassady, one of Cassady’s wives.

Acquired Jul 19, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[Clint Banjo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack’s the best for me so interviews and insights are top. Perfectly researched and put together.

[Tony Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the interviews and encounters with Jack Kerouac in one place. What more can I say?