Helen Weaver, "who fell in love with Jack Kerouac months before On the Road rocketed him into the literary stratosphere, and who 53 years later made a record of their romance in an enduring book of her own," died April 13, the New York Times reported. She was 89.
Weaver spent nearly 20 years working on her memoir, The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties (2009), beginning "the story of her life with the Sunday morning in November 1956 when the doorbell of her Greenwich Village apartment rang; she and her roommate looked out the window and saw a band of Beats, including Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, amid the snow," the Times noted. "Weaver sat on the floor with Kerouac. He showed her his unpublished manuscripts, and they debated the relative merits of Thomas Wolfe and Henry James. Ms. Weaver's windowless living room was 'like a stage set that had finally found its play,' she wrote."
Kerouac eventually moved in with her, but his initial sweetness did not sustain their relationship. Weaver wrote: "I was beginning to feel that his Buddhism was just one big philosophical rationalization for doing whatever he wanted." Kerouac memorialized their affair in his novel Desolation Angels (1965).
Weaver "wrung all she could out of Greenwich Village," the Times noted. "She cut her hair short, wore dark glasses at night, maintained a list of hip expressions and smoked pot, keeping her stash in the back of her desk drawer at the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where she worked in production. She counted Ginsberg among her friends and Lenny Bruce among her flings."
Weaver went on to become a translator of French texts and a writer on astrology, settling in Woodstock, N.Y. Her work on Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1976) was nominated for the National Book Award for translation. Later in life, she "fell in love with Jack all over again," she wrote. In addition to assisting the Kerouac archives at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, she attended festivals and academic conferences devoted to the Beats.