Triumph of the will

Less than a few hours after my grandmother was buried some 20 years ago, my cousins rolled up to her house with a moving van and cleared out some of the more precious family heirlooms, some that had not been itemised in my grandmother's will. We all deal with death in our own way; some grieve, some think 'what's in this for me?'

I thought about this the other day when I read the news that a judge in Florida has deemed there has been some dodgy dealing in the estate of Jack Kerouac. A forged signature coming to light on the will of his mother (who controlled his estate after he died) after a lengthy court battle.

Besides the issue of who should own the estate - the legal wrangling was begun in the early 1990s by Kerouac's daughter, who died in 1996 and had been excluded from it - the handling of the estate has not been without controversy. Strictly on a monetary level John Sampas, the brother of Kerouac's last wife who has run the estate since Kerouac's mother died in 1973, has turned it into quite a gold mine. Kerouac had $91 in his bank account when he died; now his estate is worth about $20m.

Sampas has been deft commercially, making Kerouac into a marketable brand, increasing the publishing output, licensing Kerouac's image, famously to Gap in order to sell khakis. But what angers most fanboys and girls, is that he has sold various Kerouaciana piecemeal: Kerouac's rain coat to Johnny Depp, the original scroll manuscript for On the Road to Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts (for a cool $2.43m).

To be fair to Sampas, all his commercial operating has arguably kept Kerouac's literary star shining, both among academics and regular folk. But the estate has not been so forthcoming about some things, keen to keep some of the more, shall we say marketable, aspects of Kerouac's life, such as his bisexuality, out of the spotlight. Does this matter? Maybe a writer's life should be about the work. Yet I am not so sure. This may be the voyeur in me, but when I connect with a writer, I do like to know what makes them tick, and an unexpurgated version of their lives helps. I would have liked to have seen a lot of those letters that Cassandra Austen destroyed. Or Byron's memoir that John Murray burned.