Someday We’ll Build Cabins: The Letters of Jack Kerouac, Jacques Beckwith, and Lois Sorrells Beckwith

This slight compendium collects the Beat poet’s correspondence with Lois Sorrells, with whom Kerouac shared a “rocky” romantic entanglement in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and the man she eventually married, “carpenter-painter” Jacques Beckwith. Spanning 1960–1968, the letters focus on Kerouac and Beckwith’s dream of building a cabin together where Kerouac could write without distraction. The plan formed shortly after the two met in Greenwich Village in 1960, becoming instant friends. Kerouac’s entries reveal his pining for a simpler life “with nothing to do but keep warm & make hot pea soup,” and detail his failed efforts to realize his pastoral ambitions, as when he discusses how a trip to look at potential homes came to naught after he and Beckwith instead went on a bender. The letters also describe how Sorrell grew apart from Kerouac as she fell in love with Beckwith, whom she married in 1964, though the scant contextual background for their correspondence leaves the details of their relationship hazy. The couple moved into a cabin in West Cornwall, Conn., but Kerouac, distracted by a paternity suit, never got his own. Though there are flashes of Kerouac’s signature prose style (he writes of his yearning to see “God’s sunny purpose in afternoon curtains slowly moving as birds sing in pines”), the letters largely address such mundane matters as coordinating travel, and offer little insight into the poet’s character. Only die-hard Kerouac fans need apply. (July)