Jack Kerouac Estate

“This Beat Battle Goes On and On” (May 30) described the legal fights surrounding the estate of Jack Kerouac as if they were primarily ego and power battles among contending individuals--myself, John Sampas, Ann Charters and Douglas Brinkley, among others. The fights, the article claimed, were about “who owns Kerouac” and “who gets to be the Great Biographer of Jack Kerouac.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

When Jan Kerouac filed her lawsuit against the Sampas family, she knew she would die soon. She stated that the purpose of recovering her father’s archive was not to possess it herself or to make money from it, but rather to get it safely into a library, where it would be preserved and made accessible to all scholars. She signed an agreement with the Bancroft Library in Berkeley promising that, if she won, she would deliver her father’s archive to that institution.

Her battle was based upon her father’s own written intentions. Specifically, she relied upon Jack Kerouac’s letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 8, 1962, in which he writes: “My brand new 4-drawer file cabinet . . . has, now, neatly filed, some several million words of letters since 1939 in prep school and all my own loose writings I used to keep remember in old dusty boxes? and all childhood scraps, athletic clippings, in brief, a gold mine of information for scholars.”

One month before Jan died, she told an interviewer, “I would like to help in leaving the legacy [of Jack Kerouac] to all people who appreciate the Beat Generation . . . I might just die in the process. But even if I do, I want to make sure that it’s carried on.” In that interview, Jan said: “Gerry [Nicosia] is the one who winds up helping me the most.” To fulfill Jan’s testamentary wish is the primary reason for my current legal actions.

I have no desire to write another book on Kerouac. I am trying to finish a large book on the healing and readjustment of Vietnam veterans, for Henry Holt. Nor do I wish to hinder Charters, Brinkley or anyone else from writing about Kerouac. It should be apparent that by placing Kerouac’s archive in a public institution, I seek to increase Kerouac scholarship.

Finally, a word about the portrayal of me as a “punchy . . . raging” brawler, supposedly known for “frontal attacks” and threats against other biographers. A follower of Thoreau, Gandhi and King, I have been a peace activist most of my life. During the Gulf War, I worked closely with Ron Kovic, staging many events in the Los Angeles area calling for a nonviolent solution to the crisis. Recently I founded a study center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called the Vietnam Veteran Peace Archive. The father of two small children, if I could achieve one end during my lifetime, it would be to help bring about an end to violent conflicts of every kind.

GERALD NICOSIA

Corte Madera, Calif.