Door wide open

Anthony Venutolo

Like Hemingway, writer Jack Kerouac is ingrained into the very fabric of "The American Literary Experience." Where Hemingway was distinguished, Kerouac was cool...pop culture's guy's guy. A hip scribe who thought nothing of hopping a freighter in the middle of nowhere to arrive at an even more remote destination and work as a farmhand, Kerouac would earn just enough for a pack of Chesterfields, a bottle of Dewar's and, possibly, a copy of the newest Charlie Parker LP. He didn't give a rat's ass about conforming. The "nine-to-five" wasn't in his vernacular.

That's why Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, a collection of quite conventional postcards, letters and poems through which Kerouac corresponded with girlfriend Joyce Johnson in 1957 and '58, is so illuminating. Filled with the same literary scatting and spontaneous prose for which Kerouac is best known, Door starts in a Greenwich Village Howard Johnson shortly before the publication of On the Road made him a household name. Broke and womanless, Kerouac, 34, was set up on a blind date with 21-year-old aspiring writer (and beat groupie) Johnson by poet Allen Ginsberg.

Interspersed between letters, Johnson's commentary reads almost like guilty-pleasure fiction in this supreme soap opera of star-crossed beat lovers.

Door Wide Open is a remarkable portrait of Kerouac as he struggles to cope with his bewildered public, dodge critical attacks against his subsequent works and balance his relationship with the only woman who might have truly understood him.
—Playboy.com

Denver Post

Door Wide Open offers an interesting look at women in that world in a manner that is never tedious or, worse, preachy. While no knowledge of the Beat canon is needed, this book -definitely not cut from the kiss-and-tell school - is an excellent introduction and a good, crisp read.

New York Times Book Review

Wonderful...conveys Johnson's own growth as a woman and writer in the 1950s, absorbing Kerouac's remarkable freedom.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a hip, literate correspondence marked by high diction and '50s slang, 21-year-old Johnson (born Glassman) and 35-year-old Kerouac chart the flowering of the Beats and their complicated love affair. An initial matchmaking move by Allen Ginsberg led to Johnson's and Kerouac's first meeting in Greenwich Village, followed by 22 months of romance, withdrawal and, eventually, friendship. Through her understated commentary and narrative links, NBCC-Award winner Johnson (Minor Characters) provides tender insight into Kerouac's troubles, particularly his unease at becoming the Beat spokesman with the 1957 publication of On the Road and his "convoluted attachment" to his mother, Memere, which made it impossible for him to sustain relationships with other women. Johnson's presence throughout makes the story hers--that of a sheltered Barnard grad who considered writing "an illicit and transgressive act" and who must have found in Kerouac a kindred soul. Yet it was her desire for a more lasting union than Kerouac would give that led to their breakup: "`You're nothing but a big bag of wind," she told a dallying Kerouac, and left. Although the Kerouac romance dominates the text, the author's brief description of her happy marriage to James Johnson, which ended with his death in a motorcycle accident, puts the affair in perspective and shows readers a greater reason for the sadness that suffuses the book. First serial to Vanity Fair; 3-city author tour. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

In January 1957, 21-year-old Joyce Johnson (then Glassman) met and fell in love with Jack Kerouac. These letters chart the course of their unsteady relationship over the better part of two years. By her own admission, Johnson was "naively, dangerously romantic," a firm believer that love could conquer all. Considerably older and twice divorced, Kerouac harbored no such illusions--making the love affair fairly one-sided. Although his letters frequently express affection and concern, Kerouac is always wary of making a commitment. Burdened by his new-found celebrity after the publication of On the Road (1957), he seems intent on retreating from life, while Johnson yearns for love and adventure with an open heart. These letters, amplified by Johnson's commentary and insightful analysis, make for absorbing reading and add a new dimension to Johnson's portrayal of the affair in her award-winning memoir, Minor Character (LJ 1/15/83). Highly recommended.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Internet Book Watch

Door Wide Open is a gathering of love letters between two major figures of the Beat Generation presents works written between 1957-58, exchanged in the course of an on-off relationship across countries. A side of Kerouac's personality not previously viewed is observed in the course of these letters.
—Internet Book Watch

Paul Evans

Coming across as more of a boor or baby than the Buddha he strived to be, Jack Kerouac haunts this bittersweet romance. Johnson, a gifted memoirist (Minor Characters), recounts charitably her year's amour with the "King of the Beats," circa On the Road. A deft sketch, in her sharp phrase, "of the bland and sinister 1950s," it finds a wannabe desperado colliding with the genuine article--Jack waxes ecstatic, breaks dates, sees God, runs to Mama. Joyce endures. What remains moving is less the book's portrait of self-destructive genius than its simple elegy for the end of an affair.

Vince Passaro

Some readers of this wonderful new collection of letters between Johnson and Kerouac, Door Wide Open, will feel a bit uncomfortable with the recognition that the young Joyce Glassman (Johnson's maiden name) -- more than a decade Kerouac's junior, a bourgeois Barnard girl who'd rarely left the Upper West Side, never mind the continent, and an artist who, unlike Kerouac, found respect but little fame or fortune -- by 1957 was already a better writer than he was.
—The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

An annotated collection of letters exchanged between novelist Johnson (In the Night Café, 1989, etc.) and Kerouac (1922-69) during the two years (1957-58) of their stormy (and not terribly romantic) love affair. When Johnson met Kerouac in 1957, she was only 21 (Kerouac was 34), had recently left Barnard, and was living on her own while working at a dreary job in a literary agency. An aspiring novelist, she was passionately drawn to the moody, French-Canadian Kerouac, who had already published one novel but had yet to achieve the fame that he would soon win with On the Road. Although it is difficult to see (in either the letters or her annotations) what satisfaction Johnson was able to take from her relations with Kerouac—who appears as continually drunk, quite remarkably insensitive, and utterly ungrateful to his adoring young acolyte—her collection provides an intimate glimpse of the writer at just the moment when he began to achieve (and, in some sense, be ruined by) his fame as one of the leaders of the Beat Generation, and it will be welcomed by all scholars and fans of that movement. A depressing but fascinating account of one of the sadder figures of modern American letters.