Author: By Regina Weinreich

Date: SUNDAY, August 9, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Beginning with a urinal tour of Saint Louis-de-France Elementary School in Lowell, the book also "outs" Gerard Kerouac, tracing Jack's sexual history back to his older brother's "genital fondling" with other school chums. Much is made of Gerard, who died at age 9 of rheumatic fever, when Jack was 4. In a lengthy 1950 letter, Kerouac "confessed" to Neal Cassady a haunting memory of Gerard standing over his bed, which Amburn eroticizes and calls an attack fraught with "sexual implications." The erotic aspect remains elliptical, but allows Amburn to set up his thematic tensions: Kerouac torn between loving men and women; torn between Neal and Carolyn Cassady, his wife; drunk because he could not abide his homoerotic feelings; married to his third wife, Stella, because he could not have her brother Sammy, who died at Anzio. A rather neat package.

Perhaps Amburn's approach of building a biography around the notion of Kerouac's repressed love of men was inevitable, the next step after Gerald Nicosia stressed Jack's bisexuality in "Memory Babe." That Kerouac had sex with men is known, most famously in an account by Gore Vidal. It is one thing to acknowledge who Kerouac slept with; it is another entirely to apply current trends of thought to him -- suggesting, for example, that the way he could have reconciled his divided self was accepting "his homoerotic self as wholesome and natural."

Amburn is the first biographer to have access to Kerouac's list of female sexual partners, "complete with the number of copulations with each." Kerouac was a copious record-keeper. The frequency and variety alone would convince anyone: Though Kerouac had dozens of male partners in his lifetime, he was more interested in women.

More to the point, Kerouac romantically sought what he called a "hearthside ideal" -- tradition, stability, the girl next door. Unmarried sex of any kind was at war with his Roman Catholicism, which accounts more for his guilt about sex than what Amburn calls his "sexual dishonesty," a phrase that rings false to Kerouac's time, a gay dark ages when even Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, openly gay throughout their lives, thought their homosexuality could be cured.

Amburn is correct in saying that alcoholism, not fame, killed Kerouac in 1969, at 47. But having written that the disease was in Kerouac's family, he concludes nonetheless that living a lie, pretending not to be gay, led Kerouac to more drink, driving home his single-minded thesis.

A chapter about Amburn's key role in publishing "Desolation Angels" and "Vanity of Duluoz" provides a rare glimpse into author/editor confidences. Amburn cites a 1965 letter Kerouac wrote to him objecting to Krim's introductory essay for "Desolation Angels," which claimed that Kerouac was familiar with New York's homosexual subculture. Kerouac wrote: "I never was, or wanted to be, a homosexual" -- which Amburn omits quoting. If sexuality is an issue -- it is Amburn's preoccupation, after all -- what can you call it but a betrayal to have left out Kerouac's own explicit assertion?

As their relationship progressed, so did the verbal abuse, Amburn says. It is hard to know what to make of his presentation of a phone conversation in which Kerouac made a hideous and anti-Semitic remark. Amburn does sum up Ginsberg's dismissal of Kerouac's offensive attitude toward Jews; he might also have interviewed David Amram, Larry Rivers, Robert Frank, Joyce Johnson, and others who had relationships with Kerouac about his racism, if he meant to explore this topic. Recounted without the context given in earlier biographies and the larger humanity of Kerouac's work, the story is left as gossip, to sully further an already troubling portrait.

An irony lies in the conceit of "hidden" on which this book hinges. So little was hidden in Kerouac that ultimately his image -- as cultural icon or as the drunk who dragged women into bedrooms at parties -- eclipsed recognition of his enormous literary achievement. Rather than showing how the complexities of his life shed light on his art, this biography, with the most material to draw upon, is the most reductive and irresponsible, ghettoizing Kerouac just as his reputation grows: not gay (even if he slept with men), not Beat (even if he is most closely associated with that coterie), but as an American writer in the tradition of Twain, Whitman, and Melville. Kerouac may have the last say. "On the Road" was named last month as one of the century's 100 best novels in English by the Random House panel; all his books are in print; a cache of journals will soon be published, as will another volume of letters. The Kerouac industry grinds on.

"The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs" fares worse in a new biography by that subtitle. With crayon colors and collage obscuring the text, the graphics in "Gentleman Junkie" are so awful that whatever Graham Caveney (a lecturer in American literature at the University of East Anglia in England) has to say about his subject is virtually unreadable. What I could make out was written as sound bite; not a single idea is developed. This is perhaps a good idea run amok: Caveney might have been trying to replicate Burroughs's early scrapbooks, or reconcile the image of a writer who was also a painter and the grandfather of punk. Somehow when Burroughs said "Rub out the word," though, I don't think unintelligibility is what he had in mind.

I don't think readers who are truly interested in knowing about Burroughs, especially now that he is dead, will choose this book over Ted Morgan's 1988 "Literary Outlaw" or Barry Miles's 1993 "El Hombre Invisible." A possible audience was confirmed for me, though, when my 13-year-old asked what this unusual-looking book was. A new biography of William Burroughs, I replied, to which she approvingly said, "Coo-ool."