Archive for February 12th, 2007
subterranean fox
(photo and Q&A from here)
Question: I am interested in Mardou Fox (really Alene Lee) of Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Can you tell me more about her, and possibly indicate where I might find a photo of her?
Dave Responds: Despite the fact that she was undoubtedly one of Kerouac’s main inspirations, there’s little to be found about Alene Lee anywhere, and surprisingly, perhaps, nothing at all in those books devoted to the female muses and writers: Women of the Beat Generation, A Different Beat, and Girls Who Wore Black.Alene Lee was an attractive, intelligent black woman, half-Cherokee. Kerouac met her in the late summer of 1953 when she was typing up the manuscripts of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who at that time were sharing an apartment in New York’s Lower East Side.Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in New York has a small section on Alene, and a photo of her with William Burroughs in 1953, the time of her romance with Kerouac (p.125).
There’s a different photo of Alene with Burroughs from the same time in the anthology The Beat Journey (p.172), and this is reprinted in The Beat Vision (p.208).
The Kerouac ROMnibus contains an excellent photograph of Alene, and Steven Turner’s Angelheaded Hipster (p.142) shows Kerouac holding that photo.
On the same page of Turner’s book there’s a photograph of Alene with Kerouac from 1953, and this can also be found in David Sandison’s biography of Jack Kerouac (p.106).
According to Aram Saroyan’s autobiographical work, The Street, in the 1960s Alene was living with Kerouac’s old friend Lucien Carr in New York.
Alene also appears as Irene [May] in Kerouac’s other works, Book of Dreams, and Big Sur.
sound sleep begins with
two drops of honey
There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it.
His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon’s jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them.
—from tolstoy’s “a confession“
