The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Here is our second illuminative nugget, with no emotions this time: that the fear of the family album is pursuant to the city’s general fear of time and particularly of the past (“Oh the stupid Victorian 19th Century!” they keep crying, as though Victorianism were the whole sum of that great century). Fear of the past is in the city, thus a love, a frantic need of the present—with all the hedonistic overtones involved, the psychological doctrines of “alertness” and the so-called liberation of sexuality: in other words, giving the moment over to the dictates of sexuality (divorce is such a dictate) and leaving time, the future—which is to them equivalent to the past, as a moral factor rather than a hedonistic factor of the “pulsing present”—leaving the future to the dogs, childless marriages, or one-child “families,” broken-up families, and thus leaving the future of mankind and the race to the dogs: to the destruction at the hands of a society’s inward atom bomb of organic-familial-societal disintegration: in short, the end of a race, as in Rome. This fear of reaching back into the past, into lineality and tradition, and of extending similarly forward into the future, is like a plant drying up, dying. Where I say this, they speak of the “reality of the moment” and the danger of suppressing the urges of the moment for any reason—but I find good reason if it is to spell the continuation of our own cultural mankind. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want, like children who resent all brothers and sisters burgeoning in their mother’s womb, resenting the future after them, feeling they should be the last, final men, that none must follow—a childish emotion. But to give oneself over to childish emotions is the aim of these city intellectuals, they abstrusely find much to “scientifically” substantiate this desire in the cult of psychoanalysis and its sub-cults, the Orgone “Institute” for one splendid example, and so they go ahead blithely, and I am not the one to oppose their concepts, their march off the ship’s plank—since I am marching to a plank of my own, since I do not wish to be reviled as a neurotic and an atavistic neo-fascist, since the other night, when mentioning these objections of mine, a city intellectual had apoplexy right before me.

  Oh for an earnest sensitivity!—for someone like Sebastian again!—for more of that, and less of this critical malcontented sensitivity all around! And give me one, if miserable, to be sincerely miserable! For more men and women in my life, for the old friends to come back, for me to grow and die among persons I have always known!—this nomadic existence, this irreverent inconsequential time-dripping sun-slanting afternoon in the city suburb no more!—this lack of rich bloody dark life—this unmanly way to live—No Joy, No Beauty, Nothing!

  ON CONTEMPORARY JAZZ—“BEBOP”

  On Contemporary Jazz—“Bebop”

  At the conclusion of The Town and the City, Kerouac’s alter ego, Peter Martin, flees suburban Galloway for life on the road. Cloaked in a black leather jacket, thumbing beside the highway for a ride, Peter prefigures the 1950s cultural styles that emerged so powerfully along with the popularity of rock-n-roll. Yet, for the most part, Kerouac’s musical affinities remained rooted in 1940s culture—especially modern jazz. Jazz supplied an aesthetic model for Kerouac’s interests in improvisational and spontaneous aesthetics.

  “On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.

  AN INTERESTING CHANGE has come about in modern jazz music in the past few years, since 1944 and thereabouts. And this, a tremendous kind of step forward in rhythmic and harmonic ideas, has taken jazz, once seemingly so infinite, and yet established, set, and concluded, and given it an astounding new power and beauty that makes everything else in jazz which has come before seem obsolete. Thus it is when an art is in its developing stages: the life of an idea is brief when it does not contain profoundest resiliencies and possibilities. This is why the Ellington idea and the Lester Young idea has lived through 3 jazz eras.

  The newest jazz—only a step forward in the development of what may well become a great formal musical system comparable to the European Classical—has been called “bebop” for the sake of popular identification. But this frivolous name is far from serviceable in describing the enormous complexities inherent in the new feeling for rhythm and harmony, and for melodic and contrapuntal expression as well which jazz is now undergoing. It is an explosion of music, an exciting renaissance of musical force, one which has seized the imaginations of all young musicians up-coming, and troubled the minds of all veteran musicians down-going in a swirl of change. Literally, one can feel it in the air—there has not been an authentic excitement of music in jazz since the last great step forward in the late Thirties, in the burgeoning time of arranged big-band jazz, the time of Basie, Lunceford, Goodman, Shaw, Benny Carter, Don Redman.

  Troubled veterans and jazz critics ask nowadays: “Where is jazz going?” Some say “swing” is dead, some say jazz has stopped developing, and finally some say “bebop” represents a last incoherent mélange of a music once formal and cogent. The change from pre-1944 jazz to modern progressing jazz is so violent that this confusion of the diehards in the art, and the terrific exhilaration of the new musicians in “bebop,” stand side by side in the field, creating an utter chaos probably comparable to any other upheavals in other art-forms of the past. There is here the same force and counter-force reminiscent of the great European change from Classical to Romantic idioms.

  “Where is jazz going?” they then ask, those whose conception of jazz is fixed within its former rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal and melodic limits. And Dizzy Gillespie, principal founder of “bebop,” of modern progressing jazz, answers— “It’s going where it’s going, it can’t go anyplace else.” He points out that all young jazz musicians rising out of the struggle and obscurity of study and preparation, are actually falling into the “bebop groove” without forethought or assistance, with a naturalness and an ease that belies a new spirit of the musical time, one that is “in the air” after the fashion of great renascences of feelings.

  These are the main features of the modern progressing jazz: rhythm has been subordinated to harmony, and in the process, changed in its function from a simple carrying beat to a coloring of tones. One of the foremost new drummers, 20-year-old Shelly Manne of the Stan Kenton progressive organization, is the first known jazz drummer to actually perform melodic functions on the drum by means of intonation and emphasis and by the use of vari-toned drums. It is useful to mention here that one of the major complaints lodged against the new jazz-feeling is that the rhythm no longer predominates, “the beat is lost.” Actually the beat is not lost—it is only given a new function and a new life of its own. Manne is also a forerunner of new drumbeats, identifiable as primitive African in variation and freedom.

  Harmony is the keypoint of this new jazz. Changes in its structure have been astonishing, in some cases incomprehensible to the old jazz imagination. An example of this is in the big-band arrangements by Pete Rugolo for the Kenton band, the Boyd Raeburn arrangements (assisted by the brilliant Dizzy Gillespie & Ray Brown), the new Mercer Ellington arrangements, scorings for the 1946 Herman band, and so forth. Here harmony, in close cooperation with in
finitely new modes of rhythm, melody and counterpoint, is presented in an excitingly new mood and method that can only be described as “exploitable”—that is, it can be exploited and experimented with to the point of dissonance, yet never quite. For what would seem dissonant by itself, now becomes harmonic within strange new melodic interpretations that carry the idea of jazz beyond old boundaries. Music is an unutterable—it’s difficult to describe adequately what goes on in these new harmonic reaches.

  In the new melodic feeling, ninths are sought after continually. Unheard-of diminisheds are framed, forming the key structure of the new scale-idea, also incidentally implying the sound “bebop.”

  In this music rhythm is no longer the primary vehicle of the musical idea nor the principal impact of expression. Harmony is exploited anew. And melody is made over to conform to a new concept of rhythm and harmony, and to a new mood.

  The result is electrifying. The result is also a music which, when understood, produces a “relaxation” of former jazz tension, takes it from monotonous pounding regularity with fugal variations and established chord changes and harmony changes, and leads into a realm of freedom, “relaxed” freedom, with possibilities greatly multiplied.

  Timing is one of the keys of this relaxation. The soloists do not depend on the beat, which has been subordinated, rather they understand the beat and do with it what they will—offbeat, afterbeat, “drag.” The subtlety is striking, the complexity is amazing.

  PRIVATE PHILOLOGIES, RIDDLES, AND A TEN–DAY WRITING LOG

  Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log

  Kerouac moved in May 1949 to the Westwood neighborhood of Denver, where he intended to settle permanently with his family: his mother Gabrielle, his sister Caroline, Caroline’s husband Paul, and their young son Paul Jr. In Denver he resumed work earnestly on what would become On the Road, a book that had already gone through a series of partially drafted versions in which the protagonist was successively named Ray Smith and Red Moultrie; while in Denver, Kerouac also considered a further draft featuring Chad Gavin, a talented young football player and petty criminal. At the same time, he began the notebook he subsequently labeled Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, whose early pages describe his activities in Denver and his impatience for the arrival of his family.

  As things turned out, the relocation scheme quickly floundered, in large part because of his family’s reluctance to remain in Denver. Kerouac returned to New York in August 1949 with Neal Cassady after a brief stopover in San Francisco, a journey memorialized in Part Three of On the Road. The final entries in Private Philologies were completed in Richmond Hill, Queens, where Kerouac was living with his mother. The journal testifies to Kerouac’s wide-ranging intellectual and artistic interests as he entered his fertile period of the 1950s, among them Shakespeare, Joyce, and Spenser; the section titled “Riddles” makes plain Kerouac’s indebtedness to surrealism and Rimbaud.

  Log

  Westwood, Colo.

  SUNDAY MAY 22—Took a walk up to Morrison Rd. to buy this notebook and had a beer in a big Sunday afternoon roadhouse up there on the ridge. How less sad Sunday afternoon is in the West. I sat near the back door and listened to the mid-American music and looked out on the fields of golden green and the great mountains. Walking around the fields with my notebooks I might have been Rubens and all this my Netherlands. Came home, ate, and made preparatory notes at night. Starting On the Road back in Ozone, and here, is difficult. I wrote one full year before starting T & C (1946)—but this mustn’t happen again. Writing is my work now both in the world and the “moor of myself”—so I’ve got to move. Planned an earlier beginning before the 8,000 words already written in N.Y. first 2 weeks of May. Went to bed after midnight reading a Western dime novel.

  MONDAY MAY 23—Got up refreshed at nine, walked to the grocery store, came back and ate breakfast. It’s a sin how happy I can be living alone like a hermit. Mailed some letters I had written yesterday. Drank coffee on the back steps, where the western wind in bright afternoon airs hums across the grass. (Why do I read Western dime novels?—for the beautiful and authentic descriptions of benchlands, desert heat, horses, night stars, and so forth; the characterizations are of course non-authentic.) I worked in the afternoon, and till eleven at night, knocking off 1500-words or so. I sometimes wonder if On the Road will be any good, although very likely it will be popular. It’s not at all like T & C. I suppose that’s allowable—(but sad)—now.

  TUESDAY MAY 24—Woke up at 9:30 with the first “worried mind” in a week, since I’ve been here. Just a kind of haggard sorrow—and later some worries about money until my next stipend from the publishers. This is a better kind of money-worry than before T & C was bought, for then I had nothing, absolutely nothing. What they call the “proverbial shoestring” was for me then a mad mysticism. Hal and Ed White must feel today what I used to feel then—a loveless existence in a greedy money-world. I still feel that way even though I know I’ll have some money all my life from writing, and will never starve or have to hole up in a canyon, eating vegetables like Huescher, or wash dishes in the great-city slops. Someday perhaps I myself will look back on those days (before selling book) with the same kind of wonder that we now look back upon the pioneers living in the wilderness on their wits and grit—someday when some form of social insurance will be in effect for all mortal beings. Because most of the jobs nowadays by which you can earn just enough to live are insupportable to imaginative men . . . like Hal, Ed, Allen, Bill B. and numerous others. It is just as difficult for that kind of man to punch a clock and do the same stupid thing all day as it is for an unimaginative man to go hungry—for that too is “going hungry.” I am continually amazed nowadays that an actual Progress is underway in spite of everything. This Progress should aim at meaningful work and social security and greater facilities for minimal comfort for all—so that energies may be liberated for the great things that will come in the Atomic Energy Age. In that day there will be opportunity to arrive at the final questions of life . . . whatever they really are. I feel that I’m working on the periphery of these final things, as all poets have always done . . . and even Einstein in his deepest investigations. “Solving problems,” as Dan Burmeister insists, is essential now (and may or may not be a tendency in late-civilization anxiety)—but after that there is the question of the knowable that is now called “unknowable.” I feel that the most important facts in human life are of a moral nature:—communication between souls (or minds), recognition of what the Lamb means, the putting-aside of vanity as impractical and destructive (psychoanalysis points there), and the consolation of the mortal enigma by means of a recognition of the State of Gratitude which was once called the Fear of God. And many other things as yet unplumbed.

  But these are all sunny Colorado reflections and may not apply in the Dark Corridor where something far stranger is burgeoning (I mean Allen). It may be that Allen is deliberately insane to justify his mother, or that he has really seen the Last Truth of the Giggling Lings. Even if that were so, I, as Ling, could not use it. (All this refers to the fable “Ling’s Woe.”) Then again, since all of us are really the same man, he may, or I may only be fooling now.

  Finally I recognize this at least as an absorption of the life-mind . . . which may be the only thing we have, like flowers that have nothing but petals that grow. All is likely. “This was life,” as I wrote yesterday in Road. Ripeness is all.

  There is a dynamic philosophy behind the Progress of the 20th Century, but we need to reach the depths of a Static Metaphysical Admission—a Manifesto of Confessions—as well, or the dynamics will just explode out of control like Kafka’s penal machine. Perhaps something like this should happen:—after the age of five, every human being should become a shmoo and feed the little ones; shmoos with wings like guardian angels.

  There should be no giant shmoos to kick Good Old Gus across the valley. This is not the Lamb, not peace. Even Good Old Gus, at his depths, is standing a
lone weeping on the plain looking around for confirmation of his tears; and his vanity is his evil. . . . Dostoevsky knew that even about Father Karamazov.

  Worked all day, wrote 2000-words. Not too satisfied, but enough. Retired at night with papers & the Western dime novel. Anxious for the folks to get here, especially ma:— What a joy it will be for her! Heh heh heh—(a cackle of satisfaction on my part, you see).

  WEDNESDAY MAY 25—Went to Denver University and to the home of the Whites. The Denver campus is beautiful and interesting. I walked into the rambling structure of the Students Union just as a jukebox was booming Charley Ventura . . . first bop in weeks. My hair stood on end. I floated in. I realized that the music of a generation whether it is swing, jazz, or bop—(at least this law applies to 20th century America)—is a keypoint of mood, an identification, and a seeking-out. Anyway, I looked for Dan, drank milkshakes, sat in the grass, looked at the gals, visited the buildings, etc., and finally hitch-hiked in the hot afternoon countryside to the Whites’ house. This is the house they built themselves, that Ed and Jeffries and Burt worked on all winter. Frank White was there. I was somewhat amazed by him. He is more like Ed than people think . . . the same quick understanding of all statements; in fact, the same fore-knowledge of the trend of what one is about to say. Also he has the some cool, modest ability of much variety. His only drawback is a garrulousness that one can’t follow due to his tumbling speech and inward-preoccupation with details. Then the rest of the family arrived for supper. Mrs. White made me feel most at home (like Frank). Of course I was unexpected and shouldn’t have crashed in so casually. Jeanne seemed thoughtful about something else. After supper Frank and I drove back to the D.U. campus, where he spoke on cosmic ray research of some kind, to a physics class. They applauded his talk admiringly; I was unable myself to follow the scientific language. Another speaker, on geophysics, was Wally Mureray, friend of Frank’s, whom I liked. He was born & raised in Leadville and like his father & grandfather has mining in his blood. Also he is a genuine mining type while being a scientist:—a remarkable combination. We met Dan Burmeister at his social science seminar and there ensued an endless argument between the physical scientists and the social scientist, with much reference to relativity, Oppenheimer, atomic research, etc. I finally announced (in these flood-tides) that it was all a “continuum of ambiguity.” Okay?—for relativity is just the idea that one point of reference is as good as another. We got mellow on beer; went home. Frank drove me home.