by dang | 2025-10-31 02:47:24+00:00
I went down an epic rabbit hole the other day—a rabbit labyrinth really—learning about what happened to the children of the Beats. It started here:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...

That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.

That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...

He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.

Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr

That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.

https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/

He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.

He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA

He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173

His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".

Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:

https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...

The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr.

I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.

Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:

"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."