From Door Wide Open
A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
By Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson
Introduction and Commentary by Joyce Johnson
“Saw Sheila off to Europe Wednesday on a little white ship not much bigger than
a ferry boat, full of waving singing young kids. Everybody smiling and throwing
streamers, Sheila too, but I don’t know how she felt. It’s funny the way you and
Allen and Peter came to town this winter and shook us all up. Just think—we had
been here all our lives, and now suddenly Elise is in Frisco, Sheila in Paris, and I’m
going to Mexico— most peculiar. I feel rather friendless in New York at present, miss
talking to Elise a lot, especially. She called me collect from San Francisco this week
because she needed money and we tried to talk but couldn’t hear each other and kept screaming, ‘Wh-a-a-t! Wh-a-a-t!’ But then I remembered walking with you at
night through the Brooklyn docks and seeing the white steam rising from the ships
against the black sky and how beautiful it was and I’d never seen it before—imagine!—
but if I’d walked through it with anyone else, I wouldn’t have seen it either, because I wouldn‘t have
felt safe in what my mother would categorically call ‘a bad neighborhood,’ I would have been thinking,
‘Where’s the subway?’ and missed everything. But with you—I felt as though nothing could touch me,
and if anything happened, the Hell with it. You don’t know what narrow lives girls have, how few real
adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in
subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night. So that’s why we’ve all taken off like this, and
that’s also part of why I love you.”
–Joyce (Glassman) to Jack Kerouac
July 26, 1957
“Wonderful…conveys Johnson’s own growth as a woman writer in the 1950’s, absorbing
Kerouac’s remarkable freedom.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“A tantalizing glimpse of Bohemia in full flower.”
–-The Boston Globe
“A touching commentary not only on the Beat Generation but on what it’s like to be a
young woman who loves a gifted, troubled guy with other things—besides love—on his
mind.”
–Elle
“Johnson’s writing…is near-perfect, at once compact and magnanimous.”
–San Francisco Chronicle