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Azteca’, in 1952, as Dylan Thomas is tinkering with
Under Milk Wood
in claustrophobic New York, on his fatal fourth reading tour. And just after Charles Olson returned from Yucatán: a barefoot sabbatical playing the archaeologist of morning, picking up broken shards and composing fevered letters to Robert Creeley. ‘And I waste time reading, murders.’
    Robert Frank, the great Swiss-American photographer who collaborated with Kerouac on the film
Pull My Daisy
, and the record of transcontinental drives published as
The Americans
, comes to London: for Bethnal Green hearses, tight-rolled City bankers, coalmen heaving sacks. In 1953 he undertakes a documentary record of mining life in the Welsh town where I grew up, Maesteg. Now he has me studying prints to see if I can find my ten-year-old self among the children venturing on a thinly grassed mound at the head of the
valley. I track Frank to the graveyard he passes on his way to the railway station. His return to London. ‘My absent memory rests within these photographs,’ he says.
    Like Kerouac, I heard about the early death of a sibling, in my case a sister. It happened too soon in her short life to have the haunting impact of Kerouac’s brother Gerard, who was gone at the age of nine. With all the curdling pieties and rituals of immigrant Catholic loss. Like Kerouac I was slow to draw breath, a blue baby. Provoked to shout only when hope was fading, after my visiting father dropped a book, a detective story, on my head.
Crackerjack.
Lupine Road absorbed the tragedy of new life. The writer’s fated entry to the wheel of existence. Safe in heaven dead, Kerouac said. It is all emptiness. ‘I could walk right through you.’
    Would John Sampas come to the restaurant? The place was his choice, not Henry’s. Henry knew better spots, but Sampas was the keeper of the archive. If he liked us, if I performed, we would be invited to the house. There had been so many bitter battles over the Kerouac estate, which was now worth millions of dollars; juvenilia, false starts and fragments appearing in nicely produced hardback editions. No longer Panther and Avon and WDL. The friable paper, the gaudy covers, the sensational copy.
Tristessa
: ‘The real tragedy of narcotics and prostitution. A young American writer staggering between the forces of desire for her and horror for what she has become.’
Maggie Cassidy
of Lowell: ‘The vibrant, demanding, woman-bodied girl who fascinated and confused the man she yearned for.’ 1960. The covered market by the bus station, Maesteg. Two shillings and sixpence.
    When the bloated body of Jack Kerouac was flown from Florida to the Archambault Funeral Parlor, the doorway Henry points out as we drive alongside, Gregory Corso wanted to find a way to assert the revulsion he felt, the evident fact of the thing:
Doctor Death
. His poet friends and members of the Sampas clan had to restrain him before he tipped the corpse from the open coffin and dragged it across the floor, screaming: ‘Nobody at home. Nothing left. Jack’s
gone
.’
    Already the politics of possession are established; work, published and unpublished, has become an estate. Before too many years have passed, Hollywood will take notice of a property they spurned when Kerouac was doing the pitching, and offering Marlon Brando the historic, career-defining role of Neal Cassady in the movie of
On the Road.
With Jack impersonating his mythologized self, Sal Paradise.
    Down these Lowell steps they come, the pall-bearing Greek cousins in tight coats, the bar owners, the Kerouac chauffeurs and drinking buddies of the last desperate years, along with the frowning, bearded Ginsberg in his shiny anorak, chairman of Beats Inc., the underground corporation. A glittering-eyed Jewish intellectual among mill-town working men. The old alliance, damaged and set aside, between the booze-addled Kerouac (in flight from the noise of Vietnam) and the ever-available, public Ginsberg, was mended in