When Allen Ginsberg died a year ago, a mailing list for fans and scholars of Beat Generation literature called Beat-L became a global grieving place for those who had been touched and transformed by the poet's work.
It was a difficult year for those whose vision was inspired by the Beats, as Ginsberg's death was followed four months later by the death of his former mentor, novelist William Burroughs.
The latest loss in the Beat family, however, is the Beat-L list itself. It was shut down last week by its beleaguered founder, Brooklyn College librarian Bill Gargan, following a storm of acrimony related to the fate of Jack Kerouac's estate, valued at over US$20 million.
Gargan says Beat-L was flamed out of existence. After an unsuccessful attempt to cool off the dialogue by banning discussion of the estate on the 500-member list last week, Gargan says he himself became the target of "all kinds of threats, complaints, and accusations" in email.
Last Saturday, one of the most heated combatants – Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia – fired off a message to Gargan complaining about libelous comments on Beat-L, threatening to "go to the head of the university with this" if Gargan, as moderator of the list, refused to "stop posting personal attacks on me that are not completely substantiated."
Nicosia had been especially vexed by a post by journalist Diane DeRooy that charged that his Kerouac biography, Memory Babe, was based on "invented" facts.
Gargan, who struggled to maintain neutrality during the flamefests over the estate, finally gave up. "I just couldn't do it anymore," he says.
The immolation of Beat-L is just the latest development in a tortuous saga of events bedeviling the legacy of Jack Kerouac, whose novels and poems have found a whole new generation of appreciators among the young, three decades after his death.
Though the intensification of interest in Kerouac's work and outrider image has inspired a spate of hip tributes in recent years – and the novelist's bemused visage was leased by the Gap to push khakis – Gargan warns that ongoing battles over control of the estate are "really having a dampening effect on Kerouac scholarship." With the loss of one of the most spirited literary resources on the Net, that dampening effect advances into the online world.
Baby Driver
Much of the controversy that finally overwhelmed Beat-L is rooted in a years-long dispute between Nicosia and Kerouac's heirs over the handling of the Kerouac archive, and the heirs' treatment of Kerouac's daughter, Jan, who only met her famous father twice.
Born to Kerouac's second wife, Joan Haverty, Jan was abandoned by her father before she was born. Their first meeting took place when she was 9, on the occasion of the blood test that verified Kerouac's paternity. At 15, pregnant and on the road to Mexico, Jan again sought her roots by visiting Jack.
"Write a book. You can use my name," he told her.
When she published her own autobiographical novels, Baby Driver and Trainsong, she did.
Jan befriended Nicosia in 1978 when he was researching Memory Babe. By 1992, Jan's mother had died and Jan was deeply in debt, weathering a succession of ailments in the wake of massive kidney failure, staying alive by giving herself dialysis through a leaky shunt four times a day. Nicosia became Jan's champion in her battles with the Sampas family for control of the estate and disposition of the Kerouac archives.
In June 1996, Jan died at age 44, in the midst of waging a legal battle in an attempt to prove that her grandmother Gabrielle's will – which awarded Kerouac's entire body of work to his third wife, Stella Sampas – was forged. The case has not yet gone to trial in Florida.
Jeffrey Weinberg, a Beat-L regular who grew up in Kerouac's old neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, and is now the owner of Water Row Books, says help for Jan during her years of hardship was not forthcoming from the Sampases.
Weinberg, who acted as a consultant for John Sampas – Stella's brother and executor – from 1991 to 1993, says Sampas "did absolutely nothing to help Jan Kerouac, which I think is despicable. It was legal, but it wasn't moral."
Jan also alleged in interviews that Sampas was selling off the Kerouac hoard of manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia piecemeal to collectors, rather than placing it in a comprehensive archive for scholarly use. Weinberg says he negotiated the sale of a hand-illuminated manuscript of Kerouac's Book of Dreams – still half unpublished – to a lawyer in Rhode Island for over $25,000, and sold off letters and other rarities at Sampas' request.
Sampas pointedly refutes Weinberg's allegations that he did nothing to help Jan. In fact, Sampas says, he was on friendly terms with Jan before her death, and asked her at one point if she needed more money. Jan refused the offer.
"She asked me if I needed money," Sampas claims.
Sampas concedes Nicosia's assertion that Jan was cut off from receiving royalties from the foreign sales of Kerouac's books, but points out that Jan never had the right to receive those royalties, since the estate had been willed to Stella.
Bob Rosenthal of the Allen Ginsberg Trust says that several of the private collectors who bought items sold off by the Kerouac estate were intending to donate them to the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library in the first place.
A colleague of Sampas' observes that he has "grown into the job" of handling the estate properly. Many of the sold items have since been bought back and added to the Berg Collection.
In addition, Sampas has successfully ridden the wave of Beat interest by Generation Xers hungry for models of creative community outside of the mainstream, releasing long sought-after unpublished manuscripts – like Some of the Dharma, a massive collection of journals and ruminations on Buddhism published by Viking Penguin last year – to readers eager for Kerouac "outtakes." A book of short stories the novelist wrote in his teens and early 20s, Atop an Underwood, is due out next year.
A promise to the dead
Nicosia became more deeply entangled in Kerouac karma when Jan named him her literary executor, and her former husband, John Lash, general executor. Now Lash and Nicosia are locked in a probate case in New Mexico, the main issue of which is Nicosia's right to take Jan's case against Gabrielle's will to trial.
If the estate of Jan Kerouac were to succeed in disqualifying Gabrielle's will, the Sampas family could be liable for millions of dollars of royalties, film rights, and other income generated by the estate. The court could also grant Nicosia a measure of control over the disposition of the archive.
Nicosia, who is writing a book about Vietnam veterans called Home to War, talks about finishing the battles that Jan started with obsessive fervor. He points out that Kerouac's other blood descendant, Paul Blake Jr., was also disinherited, and was living homeless on the streets of Sacramento as recently as four months ago.
"I'm fulfilling a promise I made to a dead woman who was my friend," Nicosia declares.
When Nicosia signed on to Beat-L, he shared stories from his research for Memory Babe, and made it a point to guide the younger readers on the list to the work of lesser-known Beat writers like Bob Kaufman, Harold Norse, and Jack Micheline.
He was in learned and enthusiastic company. Other regulars – like Charles Plymell, author of The Last of the Moccasins, and Leon Tabory, a former friend of Neal Cassady's – had known the Beats intimately, and posted stories about Beat life that never made it into the history books.
Patricia Elliott, a longtime friend of William Burroughs, noticed that Nicosia's posts drew an unusual amount of heat. "I thought Gerald was interesting," she says, "but any time he posted about anything, there would be these bizarre responses, very nasty."
Especially after Nicosia began posting impassioned dispatches on the progress of his various court battles, anyone who expressed support for Nicosia's right to speak would be flamed to a crisp, both on the list and off, Elliott observes.
"I got real vile email, very personal," she says.
Nicosia's long-winded confrontational style didn't help. "He never found a way to disengage," Elliott says.
As the loudest voices on Beat-L split into two camps, the insults became more and more vicious.
Even after Gargan shut the list down, one of Nicosia's most relentless critics, Kerouac Quarterly editor Paul Maher, put up a Web page that taunted, "There is a famous quote about Gerry Nicosia, 'His touch is the touch of death' .... Gerry I think they have an open teaching position for you over at that Arkansas school."
Practicing beatness
John Sampas himself was a lurker on Beat-L, but never posted. He signed on, he says, when friends told him that Nicosia was using Beat-L as a forum to criticize his role in handling the Kerouac legacy.
Nicosia suspects that some of the attacks were orchestrated by Sampas, but Sampas denies this. Those who attacked Nicosia were not speaking for him, he says – though he acknowledges giving verbal encouragement to some of the posters offline.
Sampas says he liked being on Beat-L because he "liked the conversation about Jack's books. I thought it was kind of wonderful, the personal way that people reacted to Jack's poetry."
These days, Sampas, who is in his 70s, visits Jack's gravesite in Edson Cemetery regularly, chatting with the enthusiastic young people who make pilgrimages to it. He collects the hand-written tributes and mementos they leave by the gravestone, which carries the simple inscription chosen by Stella: "He honored life."
Luke Kelly, a 24-year-old programmer in Lincoln, Nebraska, who runs a Burroughs Web site called Big Table, hopes to launch another Beat list with Diane Carter, a freelance sportswriter. Unlike Beat-L, which started as an open, unmoderated free-for-all, the new list may have to be moderated, Carter says.
What made the list so "creative, crazed, and chaotic," says Levi Asher, founder of the oldest Beat resource on the Web, Literary Kicks, was the number of regular contributors who were themselves writers.
"Being on Beat-L became a kind of performance art," Asher says. "People were not just discussing Beat literature on the list. They were practicing it."
