Neal Cassady

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Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady, left, with Jack Kerouac, photograph by Carolyn Cassady.
Born February 8, 1926(1926-02-08)
Salt Lake City, Utah
Died February 4, 1968 (aged 41)
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
Occupation Author, poet
Nationality American
Genres Beat poet
Literary movement Beat
Notable work(s) The First Third

Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, perhaps best known for being characterized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood

Cassady was born to Maude Jean Scheuer and Neal Marshall Cassady in Salt Lake City, Utah.[1] After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado. Cassady spent much of his youth living on the streets of skid row with his father, or spending time in reform schools.

In 1940, the 14-year-old Cassady was arrested for car theft and spent five months in a reformatory. He was arrested again and charged with shoplifting and car theft one year later, and was arrested for receipt of stolen property on June 6, 1944. He served eleven months of a one-year prison sentence and was released from prison in April 1945. Shortly after he was released, he married the sixteen-year-old LuAnne Henderson in October 1945. In 1946, Cassady and his wife moved to New York City.

[edit] Involvement with Beat Generation

In 1947, Cassady met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University in New York City. Although Cassady did not attend Columbia, he soon became friends with them and their acquaintances, some of whom later became members of the Beat Generation. He had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg that lasted off and on for the next twenty years[2], and he later traveled cross-country with Kerouac.

Cassady was the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, and Cody Pomeray in many of Kerouac's other novels. Ginsberg mentioned Cassady in his ground-breaking poem, "Howl" as "N.C., secret hero of these poems...". Additionally, he is commonly credited for helping Kerouac break ties with his Thomas Wolfe-inspired sentimental style (as seen in The Town and the City) and discover his own style through "spontaneous prose", a stream of consciousness type of writing first used in On the Road.

After Cassady's marriage to LuAnne Henderson was annulled, Cassady married Carolyn Robinson on April 1, 1948. The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a ranch house in Monte Sereno, California, 50 miles south of San Francisco, where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited. Cassady committed bigamy by briefly marrying a woman named Diane Hansen two years after he married Carolyn Cassady. During this period, Cassady worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his "Beat" acquaintaces even as they became increasingly different philosophically.

Following an arrest during 1958 for offering to share a small amount of marijuana with an undercover agent at a San Francisco nightclub, Cassady served a sentence at San Quentin State Prison. After his release in June 1960, he struggled to meet family obligations, and Carolyn divorced him when his parole period expired in 1963. Cassady shared an apartment with Allen Ginsberg and Charles Plymell in 1963 at 1403 Gough Street, San Francisco.

[edit] Merry Pranksters

Cassady first met author Ken Kesey during the summer of 1962, eventually becoming one of the Merry Pranksters, a group who formed around Kesey in 1964 and were proponents of the use of psychedelic drugs. During 1964, he served as the main driver of the bus Furthur, which was memorialized by Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He later played a prominent role in the California psychedelic scene of the 1960s.

In Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels, Cassady is described as "the worldly inspiration for the protagonist of two recent novels," drunkenly yelling at police at the famed Hells Angels parties at Ken Kesey's residence in La Honda, an event also chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Although his name was removed at the insistence of Thompson's publisher, the description is clearly a reference to the character based on Cassady in Jack Kerouac's works, On the Road and Visions of Cody. His name appears explicitly in the 50th anniversary edition of the original scroll of On the Road (On the Road: The Original Scroll, Viking 2007).

[edit] Later life and death

In January 1967, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George "Barely Visible" Walker and longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. In a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, they were joined by Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed drives in Walker's Lotus Elan and the use of LSD made for a classic Cassady performance – "like a trained bear," Carolyn Cassady once said. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him, "Twenty years of fast living – there's just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done."

During the next year, Cassady's life became less stable as he began to travel once again. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; New York City, New York and points in between: then returned to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio, Texas on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild); visited Ken Kesey's Oregon farm in December; and spent the New Year with Carolyn at a friend's house near San Francisco. Finally, during late January, 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.

On February 3, 1968, Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. After the party he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the track and taken to the closest hospital, where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his forty-second birthday.

The exact cause of Cassady's death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of Secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name of Seconal, that can easily lead to overdose. Cassady was not a heavy drinker, though he may have participated in a toast to the bride and groom. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply "general congestion in all systems;" when interviewed later he stated that he was unable to give an accurate report, because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved. 'Exposure' is commonly cited as his cause of death, although his widow disputes this and believes he may have died of renal failure.[3]

[edit] Legacy and influence

[edit] Literature

Ken Kesey wrote a fictional account of Cassady's death in a short story named "The Day After Superman Died", where Cassady is quoted mumbling the number of railroad ties he had counted on the line (sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight) as his last words before dying. It was published as a part of Kesey's 1986 collection Demon Box.

Cassady's autobiographical novel The First Third was published posthumously in 1971, three years after his death. His complete surviving letters are published in Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison (Blast, 1993) and Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin, 2007).

[edit] Music

Cassady lived briefly with The Grateful Dead and is immortalized in their song "The Other One" as the bus driver "Cowboy Neal." [4]. [5] A second Grateful Dead song, "Cassidy," by John Perry Barlow [6], might seem to be a misspelling of Cassady's name; in fact the song primarily celebrates the 1970 birth of baby girl Cassidy Law into the Grateful Dead family, though the lyrics also include references to Neal Cassady himself.

A New York City based folk duo, Aztec Two Step, in their 1972 debut album memorialized Cassady in the song "The Persecution & Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On The Road)"

The Beat-inspired folk revival band the Washington Squares released a song named "Neal Cassady" on their 1989 album Fair and Square.

The Doobie Brothers guitarist and songwriter Patrick Simmons refers to Cassady in his song "Neal's Fandango" as his incentive for taking to the road.

[edit] Film

The film The Last Time I Committed Suicide, with Thomas Jane as Cassady, was released in 1997 and is based on the "Joan Anderson letter" written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac in December 1950. Although much of this letter had been lost, a surviving remnant was originally published in an early 1964 edition of John Bryan's magazine Notes from Underground.

A 2007 film, Luz Del Mundo, deals with Cassady's friendship and adventures with Jack Kerouac. Cassady is played by Austin Nichols and Kerouac is played by Will Estes.[7]

Another film, the biopic Neal Cassady, is slated for a 2008 IFC Films release. This film focuses more on the Prankster years and stars Tate Donovan as Neal, Amy Ryan as Carolyn Cassady, Chris Bauer as Kesey, and Glenn Fitzgerald as Kerouac. Noah Buschel wrote and directed the film. The film deals primarily with how Neal became trapped by his fictional alter-ego, Dean Moriarty. In previews, the Cassady family has criticized this film as highly inaccurate. [8]

[edit] Published works

  • "Pull My Daisy" (1951, poetry) written with Jack Kerouac
  • "Genesis West: Volume Seven" (1965, magazine article)
  • The First Third (1971, autobiographical novel)
  • Grace Beats Karma (1993, collection of poetry and letters)
  • Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (2004, letters and essays)

[edit] Published biographies

  • The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, by William Plummer (1981)
  • Neal Cassady, Volume One, 1926-1940, by Tom Christopher (1995)
  • Neal Cassady, Volume Two, 1941-1946, by Tom Christopher (1998)
  • Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero, by David Sandison & Graham Vickers (2006)
  • Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, by Carolyn Cassady (Original version-Penguin, 1990, first revision Black Spring Press, Amazon.co.uk - sole distributor, 2007)

[edit] Literary studies

[edit] Appearances in literature

[edit] Appearances in film

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ ‘Neal Cassady’ - New York Times
  2. ^ Young, Allen: "Allen Ginsberg: the Gay Sunshine interview" , page 1 (Bolinas, California: Grey Fox Press, 1973)
  3. ^ http://www.nealcassadyestate.com/carolyn.html, retrieved 26 January 2009
  4. ^ http://www.dead.net/song/other-one, retrieved 4 August 2007
  5. ^ http://arts.ucsc.edu/GDead/AGDL/other1.html, retrieved 23 August 2007
  6. ^ Cassidy's Tale
  7. ^ IMDB title
  8. ^ http://www.nealcassadyestate.com/carolyn.html, retrieved 28 August 2007
  9. ^ On the Road (uncensored). Discovered: Kerouac 'cuts' - News, Books - Independent.co.uk
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