My mother and Jack Kerouac

She took radical steps for a woman of her generation -- leaving her parents' house without a husband and seeking a life for herself in the artistic milieus of the city. But they were small, safe steps compared with the Beats' pell-mell charge toward new experiences and pure freedom. Many were consumed by that pursuit. My mother's best friend Elise ended up addicted to speed, killing herself at the age of 28.

While Kerouac looks for the face of God during Mexican earthquakes and storms at sea, my mother's letters detail a series of risks not taken, adventures not pursued. Called to San Francisco by Kerouac, she hesitates, and he moves on. He asks her to meet him in Mexico City, where "we'll do our writing & cash our checks in big American banks & eat hot soup at market stalls & float on rafts of flowers & dance the rumba in mad joints with 10c beers." By the time she quits her job and buys a ticket, he is down with the flu and on his way to his mother's house in Florida.

"The trips I didn't take in the summer of 1957 have always haunted me," my mother writes in her commentary. I wish she had gone. She would have escaped the feeling she described in one letter as "desperate rootedness," holding her to New York. It took me a long time to overcome my own hesitation. In my late 20s I began to pursue Beat-style journeys, traveling in India and Nepal, visiting communes throughout America, participating in a tribal ritual in West Africa, seeking out a Mazatec shaman in Mexico. These trips validated parts of the Beat vision for me -- their "mad to live, mad to love, mad to be saved" ethos, their unironic search for mystical truth, their openness. For her part, my mother tolerates and even encourages my journeys with a certain degree of natural parental anxiety.

The letters in "Door Wide Open" contrast my mother's "desperate rootedness" to Kerouac's despairing rootlessness, his terror of commitments. There was one commitment he couldn't escape, however. As I consider this book of my mother's, I see the dark shadows of two other mothers falling across its pages. Both Jack and Joyce were in flight from their mothers, Jack's Memere and Joyce's Rosalind, Depression-era survivors who denied themselves and then hungered to consume their children's souls.

The children, in turn, escaped to freedom, but ultimately circled back to where they began. Jack ended his days living with his mother. Joyce settled on the Upper West Side, a few blocks from where she was brought up. As the survivor, my mother gets the last word, whether she wants it or not. "The reality of the past keeps fluctuating, almost as if Jack was still alive," she writes.

For me at least, Kerouac's urgency still resonates, even in this age of simulated spectacle and media narcosis. "But you decide and you always do what you want," Kerouac tells my mother. "ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU WANT." It remains a difficult demand to satisfy.

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