The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties Book

Helen Weaver And Jack Kerouac

A good deal of the extensive writing on Jack Kerouac (1922 -- 1969) has been done by the women in his life. In 1983, Joyce Johnson published a famous memoir, "Minor Characters" centering upon her relationship (as Joyce Glassman) with Kerouac from 1957- 1959, the years of his notoriety surrounding the publication of "On the Road". Johnson has recently published a biography of Kerouac's early life,"The Voice is All" which covers the years up to 1951.

After reading Johnson's books, I discovered Helen Weaver's "The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties" (2007). Weaver, (b. 1931) had a relationship with Kerouac just before Johnson, in late 1956 -- 1957. Weaver's memoir discusses her understandably icy early relationship with Johnson, which slowly turned to friendship late in the lives of both women. Weaver has had an eventful life in her own right. She became a translator of many important works in French, the best-known of which is her translation of Antoine Artaud, with Susan Sontag, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Weaver is also something of a famous writer on astrology, an interest she developed late in life. She discusses, but for good reasons does not emphasize, her astrological endeavors in her Kerouac memoir, which remains the book for which she will probably be best remembered.

In "The Awakener", Weaver offers a reflective look at her life and of Kerouac's place in it. Although much of the book takes place later, it centers upon, as the subtitle indicates, a portrayal of bohemian life in the Greenwich Village of the 1950's with its music, art, cold-water flats, and young people trying to escape convention. Weaver herself was the product of educated, upper-middle class American life. Her family lived in Scarsdale, and her father was for many years the Director of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Weaver's father was at first shocked by his grown daughter's interest in astrology before becoming against his better judgment intrigued.) She was a precocious child who spent much time alone. Weaver portrays herself as rebelling against her family's conformity, 9 to 5 work ethic mentality, and especially sexual repression. After an unsuccessful short marriage following college, she settled in Greenwich Village, sexually experimented with both women and men, and worked for various publishing houses. She met a young woman named Helen Elliott who became her roommate and, interrupted by long quarrels and silences, life-long friend.

The two Helens were interested in rock and roll and psychoanalysis, both of which receive much attention in Weaver's memoir. In 1956, Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and the two Orlovsky brothers arrived at the Helens' door after a trip to Mexico looking for a place to crash.The young men had earlier been friends with Helen Elliott. Kerouac and Weaver quickly developed a relationship. Although she loved Kerouac, Weaver soon developed doubts about him due to what she understood of his Buddhism and his alcoholism, among other things. When a drunken Kerouac stormed into the apartment late one night with a friend, Weaver physically attacked him and ordered him to leave. That was essentially the end of the relationship. About a week after the breakup, Allen Ginsberg set up a blind date for Kerouac with Glassman. Kerouac avoided Weaver thereafter, although the two had lunch together and a reconciliation as friends in the early 1960's. When Kerouac tried to contact Weaver over the phone in the last sad years of his life, Weaver avoided him.

Looking back at the relationship from the passage of many years, Weaver tries to make amends. She writes:

"I asked Jack to leave not because my analyst told me to and not because of some proto-feminist declaration of independence on my part. I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him: he woke us up in the middle of the night in the long dream of the fifties. He interfered with our sleep."

Weaver ultimately comes to see Kerouac as her "Awakener" from her early life of conformity, denying and avoiding what she wanted from life, and sexual unresponsiveness. (She says she was unable to respond fully to a man until the mid 1960's.) In the years following her relationship with Kerouac, Weaver became involved briefly with Lenny Bruce and worked to assist Bruce's defense in the obscenity trial which left him broken and poor. She traveled to Europe before settling into her own path as a translator and a writer.

The latter chapters of her memoir describe her reconciliation with Kerouac after his death, as Weaver travels to Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, becomes involved in many scholarly and popular tributes to his memory, and rereads his books. Weaver describes the gradual rise in Kerouac's literary reputation, and she writes perceptively about his books, including "Dr. Sax", "Visions of Cody", and Kerouac's own biography of the Buddha, "Wake Up!". Late in her life, Weaver became highly sympathetic to Buddhism and the the understanding of it which Kerouac tried to express when they were together. She writes insightfully about Kerouac's and her own relationship to Buddhism:

"In his early enthusiasm for Buddhism and his eloquent transmission of its teachings he showed us a path he couldn't take himself. The bridge doesn't get to the other side: it remains suspended, a bridge for others to pass over."

Weaver has written a thoughtful portrayal of Kerouac for the many readers who remain interested in his writings and his times. The book is also an engaging autobiography, as Weaver comes to understand her life, her friends, her relationship with Kerouac, and to find a degree of peace with herself.

Robin Friedman