This novel is about interracial love, jack kerouac’s obsessive relationship with his mother, and
his confrontation with his homosexual tendencies.
Kerouac wrote it in three days while fueled by Benzedrine, and it is perhaps the best example of his
spontaneous prose style. joyce johnson found
the book astonishing in that she had no idea how
conscious Kerouac was that his wild behavior and
all-night drinking caused him to lose the women
in his life. The Subterraneans is emotionally raw
and heartbreaking and is Kerouac’s most sexually explicit novel. Charles Frazier, author of Cold
Mountain (1997), writes, “In The Subterraneans
the theory and the practice mesh perfectly, and
Kerouac—before the train wreck of fame and selfdestruction—created a remarkable writing style
capable of capturing the manic energy flooding the
country just after World War II, when, contrary to
the stereotype of the period, many different elements of the nation emerged from the Depression
and the war years wild for life.”
Soon after the events that were fictionalized in
the novel occurred, Kerouac sat down and wrote
The Subterraneans in three October nights in 1953
at his mother’s kitchen table. This amazing feat of
spontaneous writing impressed even Kerouac, who
reported that he lost several pounds in the process
and ended up white as a sheet. allen ginsberg
and william s. burroughs, astonished at how
the book was created, asked Kerouac to write an
essay on his methods. Kerouac’s famous “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was the result.
The Subterraneans details Leo Percepied’s
(based on Kerouac) love affair with Mardou Fox
(based on Alene Lee) in Summer 1953. Lee was
the half American Indian and half African American girlfriend of Allen Ginsberg; when Kerouac
first met her, she was typing copies of Burroughs’s
junky and queer, which Ginsberg was trying to
sell for Burroughs. Ginsberg (the inspiration for
Adam Moorad in the novel) dubbed Alene and
her ultracool friends at the San Remo bar “the subterraneans” (from which bob dylan derived the
title of his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,”
the video of which includes Ginsberg). Primarily, though, the book is a deep Oedipal confession
by Kerouac. Gerald Nicosia, Kerouac biographer,
writes in the introduction to the 1981 edition,
“Leo was the first name of Kerouac’s father, and
Percepied is French for ‘pierced foot,’ an equivalent
of the Greek oedipus. Leo Percepied has the classic Oedipal complex as described by Freud: he has
replaced his father in his mother’s affections, and
has in turn accepted her as his wife.” Nicosia informs his readers that Kerouac had recently read
Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm before
starting his relationship with Alene Lee. James T.
Jones argues, “The Subterraneans presents an argument against Freudian psychoananlysis based on
Kerouac’s recent reading of Wilhelm Reich’s Function of the Orgasm.”
Commentators and biographers have pointed
out the extensive fictionalizing of this supposedly
uncensored, unrevised confession by Kerouac. Some
of these alterations were made to avoid a libel suit.
Alene Lee, for example, was horrified by the personal details that Kerouac revealed about her. New
York City thus becomes, rather implausibly at points,
San Francisco. Other “truths” in the book are obscured, such as Kerouac’s one-night stand with Gore
Vidal, discussed in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest. A film
version of the novel, released in 1960 by MGM and
starring George Peppard, made Kerouac cringe as
Mardou is changed into a white woman.
The book’s style is its most famous feature,
Kerouac’s bop prosody at its best. Kerouac had to
battle with Donald Allen at Grove Press to print
the book as he wrote it, with his dash punctuation intact. The novel was first published in both
paperback and hardback editions and received few
serious reviews until decades later. Today it is considered one of Kerouac’s masterpieces.
The book centers around a group of artists
and intellectuals. Leo is more of an observer of this
group than a member and has hidden motives for
hanging out with them: He is consciously seeking
out a great love affair and is immediately struck by
the “fellaheen” princess of this group, who is called
Mardou. From the beginning, it is evident that this
romance will fail; in fact, the book’s interest is exactly that. Leo realizes that he is “hot” and that
her crowd, younger than he, is “cool.” He also fears
that he is too brash and roughly masculine to fit
in with this effiminate crowd. Leo, fresh from his
lover’s betrayal as he writes these opening pages,
questions whether or not he wanted her simply because he felt the need as a great writer to have a
great love or if it is simply that he is courting rejection by choosing an impossible partner.
Moorad tells Leo of his aborted affair with
Mardou. She is, he tells Leo, in therapy and subject to hallucinations. The three of them—Leo,
Mardou, and Moorad—go out for jazz and beers,
and Leo sketches a portrait of this moment. Charlie Parker sees Mardou and Leo dancing, and Leo
thinks the jazz great can see how it will all end.
Moorad leaves the two alone (as planned), and
Leo and Mardou return to her apartment. They
dance and inevitably make love. In their postcoitus
conversation, Mardou wants to know why men
find their essence in women but rush away from it
to build things and start wars. Leo makes a graceless exit the next morning, feigning a hangover and
the need to work on his books. She finds him in
Moorad’s apartment a few days later and sits in his
lap and tells him the story of her life.
Her story sends Leo off on a reverie about
Mardou’s Cherokee father. Leo, too, is part Native
American. He transcribes her story as well as he
can remember it, confessing that he has probably
forgotten much, an admission that matches Alene
Lee’s claim after reading the book that Kerouac
mostly put his own words into her mouth in the
novel. Percepied blames Mardou’s neurosis on the
other subterraneans. She loses her identity living
with these men and one night ends up wandering
naked on the San Francisco streets. Mardou recounts the days in her life when she verges on psychosis from too much Benzedrine, marijuana, and
general exposure. She has an epiphany about the
endless depth of reality and the interconnectedness of things, but this beautiful vision eventually
becomes sinister. She is put in a hospital, where,
once and for all, she realizes that she must not risk
her freedom by going too far out.
Mardou stays overnight with Leo at Adam’s
and the next day misses her appointment with
her analyst at the county hospital. Moorad tries
to tell Leo how serious this oversight is, but Leo
misses the significance of such events as they unfold. That night, after a round of parties in literary San Francisco, Leo makes another crucial error.
Drunk and in the company of some witty gay men,
he sends Mardou home in a taxi at 3 a.m. while
he continues partying. On the surface, the fault of
the narrator lies in his alcoholism and late-night
habits—both hardly conducive to a long-term relationship. However, there is the suggestion that Leo
prefers the company of homosexuals to the company of women. Leo’s failure here leads directly
to Mardou beginning an affair the next night with
Yuri Gligoric (based on gregory corso). For the
rest of his life Corso felt the need to defend himself about this relationship, which he claims happened before he was truly friends with Kerouac.
Other pressures separate Leo and Mardou as well,
particularly Leo’s need to go back to the domestic
stability of his mother’s apartment, where he can
dry out and write. Mardou resents that he has such
a stable place to which to return.
The second half of the book begins with a
long self-examination by the narrator regarding
his feelings about Mardou as a “Negro” and how
that might have been affecting their relationship.
He notes that it will be impossible for him to visit
his family in the South with a half Cherokee, half
African-American girlfriend. He also confesses
his childish fears of Mardou’s black body, and she
allows him to closely study her anatomy in full
daylight. Leo exorcises all kinds of fears and hangups in his portrait of their relationship. He feels a
competition between Mardou and his mother. The
subterraneans also question his sexual orientation,
calling him a fag, and Leo even compares himself
to the “little fag whose broken to bits” at the hand
of the African-American masseur in Tennessee Williams’s short story “Desire and the Black Masseur.”
Leo recounts the night that he spent with
Arial Lavalina (based on Gore Vidal). (The details of his one-night stand with Kerouac were later
revealed by Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.) The
evening begins with Leo meeting up with Frank
Carmody (based on Burroughs), who is just back
from Africa. Leo takes the opportunity to introduce Carmody to Lavalina, who is across the bar
from them. Leo once again puts Mardou in a cab
and stays out partying. Carmody leaves the two to
their own fun, and Leo and Arial go back to his
hotel. Leo wakes up the next morning guilt-ridden
but unspecific about the details of the night. He
later writes Lavalina a letter apologizing for being
drunk and acting the way he did.
Mardou does not stay mad at Leo because
of this incident, but a few days later she writes a
rather abstract letter to him, which he analyzes for
the next several pages. In the letter he reads between the lines that she hates to see him making
himself sick with drink, and Leo recalls a disastrous
drunken party with Yuri and Mardou at the house
of Sam Vedder (based on Lucien Carr), ending up
with Sam falling-down drunk next to his wife, who
is holding their newborn. The letter also reveals
to Leo what he sees as Mardou’s fear of losing her
sanity.
The next section of the book centers on a
dream that Leo has following a long night of drinking with Mardou, Moorad, Carmody, and Yuri. Leo
makes a fool of himself by insisting that a beautiful young man in a red shirt accompany them on
their rounds—further fueling speculation regarding
his sexuality. They become completely inebriated,
and back at Mardou’s apartment, she rolls around
with a balloon, pantomiming lovemaking and trying to arouse jealousy in Leo. That morning, they
both have the same dream that features all of their
friends; most significantly, Leo sees Mardou making love to Yuri in the dream. Later, it becomes
clear that Leo has, in a way, created a love affair
between the two—dreamed it into existence. In
fact, he tells Yuri and the rest of the subterraneans about the dream. Mardou, too, seems to understand that Yuri will provide her a way out of
the affair with Leo. Later, he tells Yuri that he is
in love with Mardou, a fact that makes the young
poet even more heartless in his betrayal. Leo believes that he betrays him because the younger
poet wants the status of older poets Leo, Carmody,
and Moorad, and he can show his mastery of them
by taking Mardou.
Leo admires Mardou for her deep understanding of jazz and literature. He dreams of the two of
them disappearing as Indians down into Mexico.
But he later stands her up on a date, disappears for
no reason, and tortures her unnecessarily by telling her that Moorad broke it off with her because
she is a “Negro.” When she goes off on a date with
a young black man, he takes it out on Mardou’s
neighbor. Later, in an infamous passage Leo describes performing cunnilingus on Mardou. One
drunken evening, Yuri steals a pushcart and pushes
Mardou and Leo all the way to Moorad’s apartment. Moorad is upset that stolen property has
been parked in front of his apartment, but Leo is
less upset about this situation than he is at discovering Yuri and Mardou playing intimately like children in the next room. Leo feels the age difference
keenly. His instinct to be jealous conflicts with his
desire to break-up with Mardou to return to his
mother and the writing of his books.
As the book moves between good and bad
times, Leo describes the “most awful [night] of all.”
Yuri accompanies him and Mardou, and Leo discusses Yuri’s emerging vision as a poet. Throughout the evening, various men approach Leo and
ask him if Mardou is his girl, and each time he
draws up short of claiming her. They drive out of
the city with a young novelist and visit an estate.
Leo, knowing how out-of-place Mardou is becoming in his drunken wanderings, sees his relationship with her falling apart. He knows that he is in
trouble when even the dawn birds sound bleak. He
chastises himself for past infidelities and for dragging along Mardou, who is unstable at best, on an
exhausting alcohol-fueled nightmare in which she
figures as an outsider.
The book takes on a tragic tone. Leo sees the
relationship breaking up, but it is already too late
to stop. Race really does come between them. Mardou will not let Leo hold her hand in public for fear
that people will think that she is a prostitute. His
attitude toward her blackness changes from loving
her as an “essential” woman to now seeing her as
the “hustler” whom she dreads resembling. (Readers should note that Kerouac portrays Leo’s changing attitude with self-awareness.) They go to a
birthday party for Balliol MacJones (based on john
clellon holmes), and in the subsequent scene in
a downtown bar Leo bounces off the crowd delivering half insults and embarrassing people at random, such as Julien Alexander, whom he hits on in
mock-homosexual interest. The night of the party
for MacJones ends with Leo insisting on continuing
on to one more bar and leaving Mardou stranded
in a cab with no fare for home. Having made a
dreadful mistake, Leo remembers her kind words
in a letter, wishing he were not a drunk.
Leo has lost all ability to balance the tensions in his life and thus loses Mardou. She seems
to have honestly hoped that someday they would
be together. Knowing that he is on the brink of
despair, Leo, with Sam, heads to Adam’s apartment where he and Sam become intoxicated. He
awakens the next morning truly ill and heads out
of the city where, at the end of one of Kerouac’s
greatest long sentences, he “went in the San Francisco railyard and cried.” Staring at the moon, he
sees his mother’s face, and it is apparent to him
that only a mother, quite literally, could love him
in this state.
Leo and Mardou reunite only to discuss their
break-up. She tells him that she has had sex with
Yuri, a fact that almost completely undercuts
Leo. Mardou explains to him how she knows that
women are only trophies to men and that she now
has less value in Yuri’s eyes for having slept with
him. Originally the novel ended with Leo breaking a chair over the knife-wielding Yuri’s head.
Corso himself convinced Kerouac to render this
in a fantasy that merely flashes in the narrator’s
mind. Mardou has the last calm word: “I want to
be independent like I say.” Then the narrator goes
home to his mother—as did Kerouac—and writes
this book.
Jon Panish criticizes Kerouac’s portrayal of
Mardou in The Subterraneans: “Not recognizing
their own complicity in perpetuating racist ideology, Kerouac and others continued the tradition of
primitivizing and romanticizing the experiences of
racial minorities (particularly African Americans)
and raiding their culture and contemporary experience for the purpose of enhancing their own
position as white outsiders.” Nancy McCampbell
Grace reminds us that “It’s critical that we not
lose sight of Kerouac’s [ethnic] hybrid status.” In
recent years more attention has been spent looking at Kerouac’s portrayal of race than in his use of
language. Yet during its time Henry Miller praised
Kerouac’s artistry: “Jack Kerouac has done something to our immaculate prose from which it may
never recover. A passionate lover of language, he
knows how to use it. Born virtuoso that he is, he
takes pleasure in defying the laws and conventions of literary expression which cripple genuine,
untrammeled communication between reader and
writer.”
Bibliography
Grace, Nancy McCampbell. “A White Man in Love: A
Study of Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Jack
Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and
Tristessa.” In The Beat Generation: Critical Essays,
edited by Kostas Myrsiades, 93–120. New York:
Peter Lang, 2002.
Jones, James T. Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic
Form of an Autobiographical Fiction. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
Miller, Henry. Preface. The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. New York: Avon, 1959. i–iii.
Nicosia, Gerald. Introduction. The Subterraneans, by Jack
Kerouac. New York: Grove Press, 1981, i–iv.
Panish, Jon. “Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: A Study of
‘Romantic Primitivism.’” MELUS 19, no. 3 (Fall
1994): 107–123.
Rob Johnson and Kurt Hemmer