Photo courtesy of Brenda Knight and of John
Bowers (on behalf of the Jan Kerouac estate)
“She really knows how to write from instinct and
innocence. Few women can do this. Joan Kerouac…a new writer on this old
horizon. I see me and her cutting around the world in tweeds, yass …Mierschom
[sic] pipes with youknowwhat in them, he he.”
–Jack
Kerouac
Joan Haverty Kerouac was much more than just an inspirational muse for Jack Kerouac. A loving mother, and talented writer, Joan remains one of the most head-strong women in the beat generation whose unpublished memoir Nobody’s Wife can be seen as “powerfully personal and radically retelling of literary history” (Knight 89).
Born in 1931 in Albany New York to a single mother, she was raised under her mother’s domineering ruling. Jan, Joan, and Jack’s daughter recalls her mother’s independence in the introduction to Nobody’s Wife,
“anybody who scoffed at her or told her she couldn’t do something the way she wanted, reminded her of her mother. Maybe that was the key to her very fiercly independent personality that made her do so many rebellious things in her life. My mother spent most of the days of her life trying to prove to people that she could do anything she set her mind to” (Knight 92). This independence and strength can also account for Joan’s defiance towards her first love Herb Lashinsky and then later to Jack Kerouac, both of whom seemed to stifle her.
Joan felt passionate love for Lashinsky that she did not for Kerouac. “Between [Joan and Kerouac] there was not even a physical attraction we might have mistaken for love or magic…there was no weakness in the knees, no trembling, no sigh, none of the catching in the throat that I had felt with Herb” (“Kerouac, Joan” 232). Although her relationship with Lashinsky was passionate, he seemed to control and stifle Joan’s personal lifestyle. Jan recalls her mother's relationship with Herb in the introduction to Nobody’s Wife, “She [Joan] was a woman, she was uneducated. Yet she had ideas, these incongruous abstract scientific ideas. It infuriated Herb, who was a scientist, that she had no credentials but would still attack these weighty topics in genetics, philosophy, anything that attracted her attention” (“Kerouac, Joan” 232).
She met Kerouac when her relationship was ending with Herb. Her old lover, Bill Cannastra, intended to introduce Joan to Jack, but he died in a tragically subway accident before he had the chance. They met later, when Jack yelled up to her apartment to get directions to a party. Immediately under a spell by Joan’s beauty and charm, Jack purposed marriage to her that night. They married two weeks later. “Joan, still recovering from Cannastra’s death, was ready to escape from her tumultuous relationships with other men, and married Jack within two weeks” (“Kerouac, Joan” 232).
Written
by:
Elisabeth Massie
Last updated: 22 July 2005