The Beatnik's Wife

OFF THE ROAD by Carolyn Cassady; Morrow; 436 pages; $22.95

By R.Z. SHEPPARD

"Beat Generation" was the label journalists slapped on a diverse group of writers, poets and spaghetti-and-Chianti bohemians who roosted in and around San Francisco's North Beach during the 1950s. Strictly speaking, there were not enough of them to qualify as a generation. But they had authentic roots in American tradition and produced a voice or two that spoke directly to the young and the restless -- even those who were dutifully preparing to join the conventional middle class.

The strongest, most durable voice belonged to Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl was taken up as the Beat manifesto. The tribal saga was Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel that celebrated, among other things, the nation's interstate highway system.

Ginsberg and Kerouac were both Easterners who attended Columbia University and then hit the road in search of direct experience and spontaneity. They found it personified in Neal Cassady, a Denver reform-school graduate and car thief with a gift of gab and sexual electricity that connected with the boys as well as the girls. Cassady and Ginsberg became lovers while Kerouac embraced Cassady's bebop monologues as part of his own prose style. Dean Moriarty, the hero and mobile savage of On the Road, is Neal Cassady right down to his pedal foot. "He was," wrote Kerouac early in the novel, "simply a youth tremendously excited with life; and though he was a con man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."

This is the Neal Cassady that beckons from his widow's memoir 22 years after his death in Mexico at the age of 42. That he survives Carolyn Cassady's recollections with some of the legend intact suggests not only that a successful con man sells what people want to buy but also that he must believe in the pitch himself. For the author, who was an adventuresome graduate of Bennington when she met Cassady in 1947, this meant that life could be more exciting than settling down with a guy named Bill. With a guy named Neal she got both excitement and domestic drudgery. The title, Off the Road, refers mainly to being bogged down trying to raise three children on a shoestring while waiting for Neal to return from his latest motorized jaunt.

Cassady was already married when he proposed to Carolyn. He clearly loved and needed her, but he also needed to see his estranged wife before and after their marriage was annulled. Other Beat chroniclers have noted that Cassady had a surplus of erotic energy. Carolyn recalls he was not an especially sensitive lover. Sex, it appears, was less a private act between two people than a plot element in the crowded drama he lived from day to day. Carolyn played her part when Jack Kerouac moved in. With her husband's tacit urging, she became the novelist's lover. "I provided for whichever of them was in residence according to his individual preferences," she writes of that arrangement.

For those who still fancy the image of Cassady speeding cross country -- muscled arm out the window of a Hudson Hornet, Benzedrine inhaler in nostril -- it may come as a surprise to learn how hard he worked, albeit sporadically, to support his family. He was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific, a job that required a quick mind and quicker feet. Later, fellow workers at the Los Gatos Tire Co. marveled at his speed and skill with iron and sledge.

Cassady's efforts to become a published writer never panned out. He was too busy living his autobiography to write it. For this reason he entered modern folklore through the eyes of others, his adventures fictionalized or romanticized. By the time he appears in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as the bus driver for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, he is an aging parody of himself. Carolyn Cassady does not allow this to happen in her book. Even when she is describing her former husband at his most impossible, she never totally forgets the possibilities of his youth. Others obviously felt the same way and wanted a piece of Cassady, even in death. The author understood, but kept good accounts. When his first wife, who had been married to Cassady for only a year, requested a share of his ashes, she received one tablespoonful.