Free When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner

shouted, as Peter squeezed the sponge over my head.
    It occurred to me that if the Howl obscenity trial had occurred today instead of in 1957, Allen wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
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    Around the same time as the Howl trial, On the Road was published. But Jack Kerouac would never recover from that joyful event. Unlike Allen, fame didn’t sit well on Kerouac; ultimately, he’d have almost no time to get used to it.
    Allen once said that “everything in life is timing,” and that was certainly true of the publication of On the Road. Had the novel been published six years earlier, when it was first written, it might have gone unnoticed, but the obscenity trial for Howl had put a spotlight on the Beats. Still, no one could have predicted the kind of success On the Road had in the fall of 1957—certainly not Jack. “It just exploded—it was the big one. No one knew where it would lead, or that it would lead to Jack just wanting to be left alone,” Allen explained. “The story—and it’s true—is a legend now, about how he got off the bus at the Greyhound station in New York, walked along Broadway till he got to Sixty-sixth Street, and bought a copy of the New York Times. There he saw a review of On the Road. I’m sure it had to have blown his mind. I’m sure he thought, ‘What will become of me?’ At the same time, it must have been so exciting. The reviewer compared it to The Sun Also Rises, the way Hemingway’s novel gave voice to the Lost Generation. Jack said hefelt paralyzed reading the review. The phone didn’t stop ringing for years.”
    Allen explained how the novel was on the best-seller list for eleven weeks; how Warner Bros. bought the film rights for $110,000, how Marlon Brando wanted to play Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady); how Jack was overwhelmed with offers to write for Playboy and Esquire, to read at the Village Vanguard, to appear on The Steve Allen Show. Kerouac’s dark, handsome face became the face of the Beat generation; men everywhere wanted to fight him or to be him, and women wanted to fuck him. It was too much, and Kerouac responded by going on a five-week bender. It didn’t help that all his buddies were away, leaving him to face fame alone: Peter and Allen in Europe, Burroughs in Tangier, Neal Cassady somewhere in California.
    Burroughs later wrote about his old friend that “Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis…[but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life. We will all die and the stars will go out one after another…”
    Then it was Bill’s turn. Talk about the criminal boredom of men. Burroughs tried working as a private detective, a bartender, a bug exterminator, and, when all that failed, a criminal. Naked Lunch had begun as a series of sketches acted out by Jack and Allen. They used daggers brought back from Morocco and assumed different identities. After City Lights declined to publish Naked Lunch, Allen launched a campaign to get it published in the little magazines and periodicals where he had some pull. A few of the sketches thus made it into print, one in the final issue of the Black Mountain Review in 1957; the following year, The Chicago Review published nine pages (a columnist writing in the Chicago Daily News described the nine pages as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated”). University of Chicago officials then refused to publish any more of the novel, which caused the staff of the Review to resign and start up their own publication, called Big Table. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso appeared at a benefitreading to raise money for the new publication so that it could publish the suppressed pages of Naked Lunch. The first issue came out in March of 1959, with ten episodes from the novel, and it was immediately seized