The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  THURSDAY MAY 26—Then today (while I continued my hermit domesticity in the empty house . . . as a matter of fact tried to fix the wellpump just as it seemed to fix itself) the kid on the street here, Jerry, asked me to accompany him to the amusement park, Lakeside, in the evening. His mother, Johnny they call her, drove us to the park. (Her husband has disappeared somewhere.) It was the Sad Fair again. I took a few rides with Jerry (who seems to be looking for a father of some sort). However a waitress didn’t believe I was 21 and wanted proof before she gave me a beer. Jerry (14) drank rootbeer. We rode around a sad little lake in a toy railroad; in the high ferris wheel, etc., and ate hotdogs and ice cream. Still and all, it was a “sinister” night . . . sinister-seeming . . . and I became depressed:—for two days. A park cop threatened to arrest Jerry because he was fooling around with the tame fish at the motorboat dock. Then, when we rode home in an old truck after a Roy Rogers movie, a car almost rammed us in the back. It was strange. In the first place I couldn’t understand anything. I doubt if the driver of the old truck knew we were in the back. Between us sat his little son,—mysteriously wrapp’d in a blanket. No one noticed the fact we almost got rammed by the car . . . or that is, they didn’t care at all. Then, in the dark sinister country night, as Jerry and I walked home, a car of drunks almost plowed us off the road. Everything was sinister . . . like for Joe Christmas.

  FRIDAY MAY 27—Depressed all day. Full of my own private hurt and haunt. Jerry brought over a little kitty for me . . . it has sick eyes. It needs meat. It hangs around me mewing for affection. It is somewhat like that lost kid, incomprehensibly lonely. I feed the cat and do my best to achieve a talk with Jerry—and with his incomprehensible mother, who asked me to go riding in a rodeo tomorrow. That is, Sunday. My depression cannot see the light of these things. What did I do all day?—I can’t remember any more. Part of my sadness stems from the fact my family’s wasting time getting out here. Why? I hated myself all day, too . . . hurt and haunted by hurt.

  SATURDAY MAY 28—After a mopey day, I perked up and went to the beerjoints on the ridge. Gad, some beautiful waitresses up there. I really enjoyed the cowboy music . . . ate French frieds at the bar, etc. There are some good people out this way, just as I had guessed. Came home and slept, to be ready for the Ghostly Rodeo.

  SUNDAY MAY 29—So I rode in a rodeo . . . of sorts. Johnny picked me up and we drove to a farm ranch, and slicked down four horses. A remarkable woman called Doodie runs the place and dominates immense horses, including a 17-hand Palomino, with fiery contemptuous love . . . in other words, a real horsewoman. Her son Art is a mild, happy kid growing up among horses. We mounted the four horses and started off for Golden, 15 miles west. I have not ridden extensively since 1934, so I was saddle-sore pretty soon . . . but enjoyed it nevertheless. My horse Toppy, a strawberry roan colt, had a tender mouth so I could not rein him up too hard. We joined two other women, one a haughty bitch on an Arabian thoroughbred, and the other a most marvelous woman on an old circus horse . . . an old carnival woman with flaming red hair and no teeth. She said, “I hate women who don’t say shit when they’ve got a mouthful of it.” We cantered and walked and trotted to Golden. I had a beer in a bar; then we mounted again and the first thing you know we were joined by a whole posse of riders, and first thing you know, on a dirt road, something happened psychologically, I yelled “Woohee!” and off some of us went lickity-cut down the road in a race. My roan loved to run, and “he run.” Up in a glorious mountain meadow we raced around while, by arrangement, a photographer took pictures with a motion picture technicolor camera . . . I still don’t know under what auspices. We did Indian-circle runs, and Figure-Eights, and galloped en masse down a draw, and had a good time. We drank beer in the saddle. Going back to Golden we raced furiously across lots and down into a creek-bed and up out of it flying and hell-for-leather over fields gopher-holes or no gopher-holes. I’ve never been afraid of a horse falling somehow anyway. After another beer we started back . . . and the kid and I really had a race. He was in the road and I in the field parallel, and it was even. Then he beat me on the road . . . but he’s a lighter rider, and used his reins on both flanks, something I didn’t bother to do.—Finally we got back exhausted, a 30-mile day. I went to bed immediately . . . with some muscles and one bad blister.

  MONDAY MAY 30—And today I was scheduled to ride in the rodeo at Table-Top (ride a bronc for all I incomprehensibly know) but of course I was too sore. I’m sorry I missed this. Meanwhile some neighbors around here are gossiping about Johnny (Jerry’s mother) and me . . . an old hen across the street. This sort of thing goes on even here. Best thing to do, is nothing. What does it matter anyway?—No harm in it that’s real harm (like jail, etc.). Rested all day. Wrote at night. Still and all, consider how horrible it is to have an old woman like that peeking from out her shades all day, trying to figure out what you’re doing behind yours, and starting “scandalous” stories about you. Gad! It’s funny only in a horrible way. (Francis Martin.)

  But how I love horses!

  Next year:—mountain ranch.

  And tonight re-examined my literary life and I’m worried somewhat about losing touch with it in these natural-life atmospheres. After all, great art only flourishes in a school . . . even if that school is only friendship with poets like Allen, Lucien, Bill, Huncke & Neal.* Well—Hal and Ed White will be back in Denver here this summer. Besides my desk and papers will arrive soon, so I laboured a poem:—

  “The God with the Golden Nose, Ling,

  gull-like down the Mountainside did soar,

  till, with Eager Flappings, above the Lamb

  so Meek did Hang, a Giggling Ling.

  And the Chinamen of the Night

  from Immortal Jails did Creep,

  bearing the Rose that’s really White

  to the Lamb that’s really Gold,

  and offered themselves thereby, and

  the Lamb did them Receive, and Ling.”

  (I got the idea for “golden nose” while peering around at my own nose, while lying in the cornfield last week . . . in the sun it was “golden.” The “god” is a natural rhyme-idea that followed.)

  TUESDAY JUNE 1—La Kermesse de Rubens:—If only my life had been like that, but it has not been. A letter today from Allen misunderstood my mention of Rubens’ christening picture . . . which is not an Ecstatic Horizontal Dance beneath the Pipings of the Satyr in the Living Tree . . . but merely a hidden-from-attention view of all the Netherlands countryside, and fowls and greeneries, beneath the church-steps outside. This is where I’ve always been, under the steps . . . not dancing with White Arms Sailing over the Void, not even being christened by Gouty Devout Patriarchs, but just looking, looking—watching for the Lamb. Well—enough of the Lamb now.

  I’ll review things, and ask no questions. It usually boils down to how I’m going to write my next novel. I’m thinking of making On the Road a vast study of those I know as well as a study of rain and rivers. Allen expresses weariness with my “rain-&-rivers” preoccupation now, but I think it’s only because I have not explained manifestly what they mean: as I did in the notebook “Record” on pages covering “New Orleans to Tucson.” That’s clear in my mind.

  Now. About the people. People are more important than rain.

  With the “Junkey” of T & C I think I’ll re-create “Clem.” Based on his “testament written in Pennsylvania Station.”

  I think I’ll bring in the huge elements of the Cannastra-Ansen gang of 1948 in N.Y., which will someday reappear in “Christmas in N.Y.” (or “The Imbecile’s Christmas”). The only thing to do is to exert the necessary amounts of brain-power to push it through.

  The thing that stops me is Red Moultrie’s family. I think I’ll make old Bruce his stepfather, and Bruce’s (second) wife his stepmother. Where is Red’s real father hidden?—nobody knows. His real mother died when he was six or seven or so. Thus, when Red is coolly received at the end of his great quest, he realizes that he must himself become
The Father somehow. And Red has trouble with women. He is the loneliest of my characters. Nowhere to turn except to Smitty, Vern, Clem and all the countless others around the country . . . and Bea and Mary Lou and the Ginnies. His life a real “continuum of ambiguity.”

  Also, he will be intelligent, even eloquent, no Peter Martin. Laura is just an illusion. Only the past is no illusion. The future?—a claim.

  “True progress shall lie in men’s hearts.” This is what Lincoln knew, and said.

  There is never a real goldstrike, or a real “scientific advance,” only a revelation in the heart on one day or the next, subject to horrible change and further revelation. “Revelation is Revolution,” as Holmes says, insofar of course, as it is a change, miserably from mere day to day.

  There is no heaven and no reward, and no judgment either (Allen says his lawyers “will be judged”):—no:—there is only a continuum of living across preordained spaces, followed by the continuum of the Mystery of Death. That Death is a Mystery makes Death acceptable therefore; because Mystery never ends but continues.—

  Still waiting for the family.

  But then Red does find his gal, after the wreckage of his attempt to straighten out everything as before, which is of course impossible. The gal he loves very much finally, when he sees how great she is. Her name will be Bunny? Laura.

  WEDNESDAY JUNE 1—Fixed the well-pump at nine o’clock this morning. Got dirt out of the valve and tightened a loose cylinder around the pipe, and raised the pressure to 50. For awhile there I was enraged because I thought my one-year-lease was on a house with a dry well. It is okay, I think—122 feet deep. On top of that it rained today. Rain is not only poetic in the West, but necessary. So I say “Rain you bastard!”—and it rains. I’ve been goofing off those two days just listening to the radio, playing with the cat, playing solitary stud-poker, and thinking up On the Road more. I need my typewriter. No furniture, no family, nothing. I can’t understand all this delay. It took me 60 hours to get out here, and another 48 hours to get a house. It’s taken them close to three weeks . . . and all I do is wait, wait, wait. I don’t think Paul wants to leave the East actually . . . he is wasting time in North Carolina. His mother has a husband to support her, and a grandchild, and 2 other children in the East; therefore, there’s no tragedy in Paul moving out West, inasmuch as he can visit her occasionally also. So I don’t understand all this delay. They arrived in N.C. last Tuesday, and here it is nine days later—and the 1650 mile trip is a 3½ day drive. So they’re staying there at least a whole week, and here I am in an empty house paying rent. This I don’t like . . . a waste of time and money, and a waste of a good thing, and silly. Got a letter from Beverly Burford Pierceall today . . . now married, living in Colorado Springs, whose Pikes Peak I can see from the kitchen window. Wrote back at night.

  THURSDAY JUNE 2—And tonight the family is finally arriving; got a telegram in the morning. I’m now down to my last actual penny (1¢), excluding the $20 bill I’m hiding for the lawn (part of the deal on this lease is to plant a lawn). So now things will start vibrating and we’ll get our home going. Only thing is:—Where is the furniture truck? Hal Chase ought to be home by now. And soon I’ll hear from Giroux and decide about June 15, and a job, and my writing-schedule [months] for Road.—Last night I went to bed reading the New Testament. My own interpretation of Christ I will write soon: essentially the same, that he was the first, perhaps the last, to recognize the facing-up of man to life’s final enigma as the only important activity on earth. Although times have changed since then, and “Christianity” is actually Christian in method by now (socialism), still, the time has yet to come for a true “accounting,” a true Christlike world. The King who comes on an Ass, meek. “True progress shall lie in men’s hearts.” Do you hear me, Huncke of the Fires?—Also, I planned to write a “Literary Autobiography of a Young Writer” within a few years, preferably while in Paris. I’m full of ideas, yet not of real work. I keep saying I need my typewriter—I do, and my desk, books, papers too. I wish I had the will and energy of ten writers (as I did in 1947). The 1948 work on T & C was a Gift from God, for I had long ago gone on my knees like Handel prior to his Messiah-work, and Received that.

  But thank God for everything. The other night I saw that.

  *And Holmes . . . and Van Doren & Lenrow too, of course.

  : —Private Philologies — :

  THE Scythian name for earth, which is “apia,” meaning WATERY or WATER-ISSUED (or first ISLE, then LAND), is a name of great significance to me and undoubtedly explains a universal feeling concerning water. We never think of the dry desert as land or earth . . . mere sand. Water is the soul of earth, that is, that earth should be fertile, wetty, moist. Here again rain is the key.*

  It seemed to me today that, while we were crossing the So. Platte in a bus over the bridge, everyone in the bus was somewhat conscious of their connection with the water in the river. It would take a fantastical ignorance, or worse, a fantastical sophistication, to be unaware of one’s relation to water in the river. It is as though a man digging up fat dark soil, seeing worms so glistening and glutted-up, should fail to recall it is these moisty sucks that one day will feed on the very muscles he uses to wield the pitchfork.

  Incidentally: What is the meaning of that expression “There’s always room for one more”? It may be that the body of mankind is always capable of joining a little closer (in a mass) to admit another soul . . . both symbolically, and actually, in a crowd—every joint moving nearer to every other joint to make more room, every arm and leg pressing closer, every body squeezing nearer to every other body, to the point where the Universal Unity is recognized (though we are not ready for it in this life).

  Philology need not seek for this Universal Unity in the words of languages—it’s in a crowded bus, in the flesh.

  Philologies . . . not A philology.

  In Sanskrit, “tara” is to SHINE, which is connected to the Scythian “Targitavus” (a God), SHINING SUN. There is a philological connection sure enough. But here is what I seek:—

  The Latin “familia” (family) is understood to derive from “thymele”—the sacred center of fire. We learn from this everything we want to know about the origin of the family—not only the word, the sacred center of the fire, the hearth, and the family there assembled:—in raw darknesses. This reminds me of my one and only investigation in anthropology, which consisted of staring several minutes at an Esquimaux ladle (for cooking). It seemed then also that the mere ladle offered everything I needed to know about the woman who used it, and the women of the culture, and perhaps a lot about the culture itself. I can’t hope to disparage great sciences, but for my purposes, and for general later purposes of all men, I think, it is necessary to find some way of pulling out our inner knowledges and putting them to use in our studies of origin: not induction proper, for it is a realm where neither deduction or induction are so important.

  It is a realm (Jung touched on it?) approaching a true vision of the universal unity:—and one which will require the work of expressive, word-wise thinkers.

  I don’t see how a philologist should be unword-wise if he does deign to call himself a “philos-logos,” LOVER OF WORDS, which is now aridly known as the SCIENCE OF WORDS. A philologist should therefore be a Spenser and not merely a German hack—a philomath.

  To turn an expressive study of words and of the inner feelings which they darkly evoke, into a science, is perhaps unwise—and I guess impossible. There’s no need for a study to be useful in terms of what they call results—in this day when results are referred to a kind of material productivity. So long as there is the productivity and fertility in the imagination, which, like earth, may lead to a harvest if so desired. A lot of good earth goes untilled, and is merely used as a place to walk over . . . and the walker need not necessarily have an urgent destination.

  But less of this boring Victorian philosophizing, and more actual philologies. Things to find.

  There is a Western
expression which I heard from Mr. H. Huescher; goes—“It’s about to clabber up and rain all over.” I thought “clabber” was a phonetically inspired colloquialism describing thunder; but tonight I learned that milk “clabbers” when it sours. So the sky sours up to rain—which is still another colloquialism in itself, to sour up, as in sourpuss, sour grapes, and so on. This is the farmer’s, not the poet’s, angle on rain—that it is a sour matter, a clabbering-up.