The Joan Anderson Letter - Neal Cassady

 ‘The greatest piece of writing I ever saw’ - Jack Kerouac,  who went on to aver that he thought Cassady was on a par with Melville and Tolstoy. Hmm. I feel that opinion possibly derives from the bromance that existed between the two men. Although my feeling was always that the true friendship was on Jack’s side, primarily, and that Cassady made use of him on more than one occasion. But I digress. This letter was supposedly the catalyst for On The Road. And reading it now, for the first time, the elements of the spontaneous prose, the sheer exhilaration and frenetic pace of life that was always a characteristic of Cassady, is evident in abundance.

The content of the letter reinforces the perception of Cassady that Kerouac, Ginsberg and others offer. It’s an account of a young man and his, amorous exploits, shall we say. It’s written as if he can barely draw breath, as if he has to exhale every thought, idea and memory in that one moment before it is gone. No time for pauses. But there’s a sense of something manic about it too, in the writing itself  but also in the descriptions of this, somehow, dissolute life.

That Cassady was uneducated was less his fault that his upbringing. He wasn’t brought up, he seem to have had to drag himself up as he accompanied his alcoholic, often homeless father around the streets of Denver. But reading the letter conveys an articulate man on some levels with an innate way of putting words together. This writing style endures in his autobiographical work The First Third. Nature and nurture springs to mind.
If you are a student of the Beat Generation, if, like me, you are a devotee of Jack Kerouac, you’ll imbibe this book almost intravenously! There is always something curiously intimate about reading someone’s correspondence. For unless it is is a ‘Dear Sir’ letter intended for the newspapers it is not for anyone’s eyes but the recipient’s surely? There is alway a sense of eavesdropping, intruding upon something private and therefore forbidden almost which makes it an exciting thing to read. Kerouac, himself, was a prolific letter writer. So often, for me anyway, there is a sense of getting closer to someone through the reading of their correspondence. For you are getting the person rather than ‘just’ the writer. Neal Cassady, though, didn’t stray into the realms of fiction to the best of my knowledge so his letters and the aforementioned autobiography form the bulk of his ‘oeuvre’ and Cassady, the person, blasts out at you.

The letter is of it’s time, culturally and sociologically, it must be remembered, otherwise it would be easy to take offence and become enraged at the political incorrectness of some of the content. I guess it’s justified as an historic document.

This slender volume will take it’s place on my Kerouac shelf, next to the First Third and Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road and Heartbeat. And it makes me want to read On the Road again and Moby Dick just to see if I can see what Jack means by his comparison with Herman Melville.