‘He was light, funny – and hated women’: Gary Snyder on his friend Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac is an American monument. And, like many statues these days, he’s looking a little wobbly on his pedestal. For some, the writer – born 100 years ago today – captured the white heat of the American Dream in his 1957 novel On the Road. To others, he is the Pied Piper of lost young men, teaching them that heavy boozing, casual cruelty to women and tedious views on jazz are the highway to manhood.

Gary Snyder, though, remembers him simply as a friend. “He was always light, funny and unpredictable,” he tells me over the phone from California. “He was interesting to be around.” Snyder ought to know. Now 91, the Pulitzer-winning poet is the last surviving member of “the Beat Generation”: the constellation of writers, thinkers and hell-raisers, such as Allen Ginsberg, and William S Burroughs, who rose to prominence in the 1950s, inspiring the hippie and anti-war movements.

Beat mythologists pinpoint their literary Big Bang to a poetry reading in San Francisco on October 7 1955. It was there that Ginsberg first performed “Howl”, and Snyder read his poem, “A Berry Feast”. Kerouac was in the crowd that night, cheering drunkenly.

The publication, two years later, of On the Road saw the Beats flare to light in the public consciousness. Set in the early 1950s, it chronicled Kerouac’s helter-skelter journeys across America in beaten-up cars, chasing women, Bebop and “kicks” while stalked by depression; a sense that “everything was collapsing”. It made the author – cast in the book as narrator, Sal Paradise – the 20th-century archetype of the romantic, ragamuffin writer, and has never been out of print. Fittingly, it is one of the most stolen titles from US bookstores.

“He really picked up the street play of American English,” Snyder explains. “Consequently, a younger generation learnt how much fun they could have with their own language. But who knows if it will still be read in another 30 or 40 years? It reads like the language of the 1950s.”

It certainly does. “We saw a horrible sight at the bar,” runs one description, “a white hipster fairy”. Kerouac, a lower-middle class college graduate, celebrates the hardscrabble lives of “negros”, Mexicans and Latinos in terms that now seem patronising and naive. “Nobody had political propriety on their minds in those days, except Communists,” Snyder chuckles. “Jack was like everybody in the working class. He liked people for who they were, regardless of their race.”

The book’s dismissive depiction of women is not easy to shrug off. Sal shacks up with a “poor Mexican wench” and her young son, only to abandon them a few months later. “Jack hated women and he was probably gay,” Snyder says, before going on to clarify. “He didn’t have timely relationships with women that lasted… Talking about his affairs with women was difficult for him. And, of course, he ended up living with his mother.”

Before that, though, in 1956, Kerouac lived for a few months with Snyder and his girlfriend in the cabin north of San Francisco that Snyder had built. Kerouac, a suburban Massachusetts boy, transmuted these experiences into another novel The Dharma Bums in 1958, casting Snyder as Japhy Ryder, a rugged poet-pilgrim who inducts the narrator into mountaineering, Buddhism – and, in one eye-popping scene, Tantric sex.

Snyder laughs: “He fluffed me up a bit too much. But he was very pleased by getting out in the woods and the mountains. It was all new to him, especially the Sierra Nevada. It’s a great place to walk around in and get sunburnt and hungry.”

Kerouac was no Davy Crockett, though. “He had a very soft heart and he was very compassionate towards animals,” says Snyder. “He never chopped a chicken’s head off – have you?”

The novel brought Snyder fame, which he hated. A hurt Kerouac wrote: “You’ll look back and appreciate the job I did on ‘you’.” He was right: Snyder’s attitude has softened. “Sometimes I think he was just using me as something to write about.” Does he resent that? “No, I’m an artist. And I know that half of what people do is for art.”

An embittered Kerouac died in 1969 of cirrhosis. He was 47. When Ginsberg told Snyder the news, he “wasn’t all that sad – it was to be expected. He over-drank,” he says now. “But when he was with me he didn’t drink that much. He was too busy running around.”

And that is how Snyder prefers to think of his friend: young, scruffy, hopeful. “He got into the hearts of people; he touched them somehow. People will keep reading Jack Kerouac and keep laughing and saying: ‘Gee, that was dated. But boy was it a lot of fun.’”