Jack Kerouac Reads, Etc., at Lowell

Jack Kerouac presided over an evening of chaos in the Lowell House Junior Common Room last night. As members of the House's tutorial staff flitted about worriedly, the author of On the Road, The Subterraneans, and a dozen other books read poems, offered observations, and sometimes just snorted.

"I'm not afraid of Mao Tse-Tung or Arthur Schlesinger, 'cause I'm straight Catholic!" shouted Kerouac, who was fresh from a hearty Ford dinner.

Kerouac said he thinks Emily Dickinson, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot were the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and Marcel Proust, Jean Genet and William Faulkner the greatest prose writers. But "Hemingway was nowhere. He wrote childish sentences, like Beckett does."

Kerouac was drunk, but quite coherent. As students pulled the screens off the windows to get in, he traded gibes with Desmond O'Grady, the Irish poet of Adams House, and suggested that O'Grady should give the reading himself.

Cackling and smiling, Kerouac read poems from his Mexico City Blues and repeatedly asked for a glass of cognac. When his host, Albert J. Gelpi, Jr., instructor in English, suggested that they just forget the whole thing and go out for a drink, Kerouac gestured at the packed crowd and said, "But these people are here; they can't all go to the bar."

Finally, someone sneaked Kerouac a drink through the open window. Having won his point (and the sympathies of his audience) he read several more poems in a clear, loud voice.