The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 18, 1951—Value this day, Jack, and thank the Lord. Woke up just after Joan and apparently some lawyer unsuccessfully tried to get in the house, maybe to hand me a summons. Alackady, what do I care? Ate a hearty breakfast and settled down to work. What I wanted to say about today was this:—I feel so happy, so grateful to God for bringing my soul back to me (it had wandered away and made me mad, just like Artaud says), that I feel like writing hymns as in 1947 again, and will soon.

  Wrote in the afternoon, absorbedly—then took a long glorious walk which was full of thoughts I think I’ll write . . . (perhaps keep a notebook called “Walks”)—thoughts about the unpretentious America to be found in Negro & Italian naborhoods; things we have now that I love and will vanish . . . B-movie houses in the afternoon, penny candy stores, children’s penny & nickel toys, real old cart diners, even the rubbish in the weeds near a bus stop,—(America’s becoming so pretentious even flies are disappearing). But this was not an anti-American tzimis—merely a method of enjoying my consciousness of America . . . which is everywhere I look on a day like this. A thousand more thoughts . . . in the evening I realized the close affinity I have with Sinclair Lewis after all . . . and all day the burning will to write & write. (Wrote about Dean Pomeray in the poolroom today.) At night Joan called, got hell from my mother. Watched television; ate good dinner; enjoyed the whole day and conclude it with this prayer: “Lord, protect me from bitterness, from mad disgust, but light my soul with a portion of your love forever.” Because, too, I am an “appreciator” among men before anything else, narrative, writer & all that bunk—first and foremost one who has been called to justify the ways of God to man, to praise and explain the hidden riches heaven has bestowed to men on this dark earth, and the hidden infinite unfathomable love within it.

  Now it’s no longer loneliness I can call it, but the presence of divine love during the shallow hours of personal time; it was never loneliness—; it was the realization of not-aloneness, the roar of peopled darkness all around, the hint of great and comforting love. No, it isn’t loneliness that kills men—it’s the madness of despair. . . . It’s depression, the willingness to be discouraged . . . the ignorance, unreflecting, harried fury of so-called “busy days” . . . loss of childhood pure visions given by angels . . . ordinary misconception of values . . . I haven’t the words right now, nor proper inclination, to name the things that kill men. . . . but beautiful loneliness is every man’s first, last, and always guardian angel, amen. I wish tonight I could tell in many million words all the things I am going to tell in the next fifty years or so—tell it all in one timeless, roaring, pain-haunted, sweet consciousness of love, not girl-love, life-love, all-of-love, the entire joy and sorrow speaking.

  WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 19—Went to jail today—for 10 minutes . . .

  FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21, 1951—Hectic events of jail, etc., of Tom & Ed showing up, of Rose, etc., prevented me from keeping diary and also following the bankroll . . . nevertheless I wrote a (1000) beautiful words in yard yesterday afternoon . . . about Dean’s birth & his mother . . . “throat-choking hope.” Instead of hope I wanted a word that means fearful anticipation . . . but hope looks well there. Will write more every day. Soon I’ll type first section officially. The Joan-jail-support business almost drives me mad—to me it’s like insults rammed down from the sky, I can’t do anything to defend myself. The fruit of my labours will not go to her, they will go to me and mine; somehow I’ve got to fix things to make this certain. She has eyes for my life’s sweat-of-the-brow . . . my life’s work . . . a thief as much as any other . . . vengeful: all this started because I spoke my mind in a letter—etc. and why bother. This journal is to be about life . . . let the dead bury the dead. Tom & Ed—what a sight!—we drank the Bom as of lovely yore.

  When insults from heaven ramming down

  Crowned the rotund king with ire,

  When Xerxes fleets confused the waves,

  When Agamemnon wailed,

  The light of the sun was the same

  As on that old dry dog turd in them thar—weeds

  Mainly life, the gift, is a length of consciousness—it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s how long you can do it. A great day spent picking up my pay at Fox, paying at support bureau downtown, $5, 3rd Ave. El ride to below Chatham Square (glimpses of Chinamen in groups in crowded doorways below, the thickness of the life-scene), down to Fulton Fish Market on foot, the waterfront, seaman’s papers, clam chowder in a 106-year-old sea food restaurant overlooking wharves (Sweet’s), back uptown to Jerry Newman’s record store, 3-hour conversation with gin & coke in that great backroom (which is greatest in N.Y.) with Bill Fox and for awhile Barry Ulanov (my visions of a Balzacian N.Y. again & how I wish I owned that backroom and could record the era with tape-recorder as it confidentially tells stories behind the hand—and Jerry wants to make money with that machine!). Then Tom & Ed & Holmeses at a party at Stanley Radulevich . . . ending with a lyrical ride back to Long Island in Buick 3 A.M. (You see a cundrum in the weeds behind the garage wall and your loins swell, you see thighs, your heart sings with the air of October . . .)

  SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 22, 1951—Seriously thinking of resuming this journal on typewriter, loose leaf notebook, to get more details & phrases in that I can also be using for the novels. Sort of hungover today, but elation & joy—ate, saw TV game, sat in yard, read papers, wrote in journal.—Worked out the personal legend, the fictional family, for the whole American Comedy: I’m Jack St. Louis till death do me bury; I have, besides my real father Leo St. Louis (from Rivière du Loup Canadians, who originally were Bretons from the village of St. Louis near Brest, near Daoulas, Brittany), a distant Western uncle whose kin originated from a southern branch of the family before it changed its name from St. Louis to Santlouis (in North Carolina) and whose name is Old Bull Lewis—(W. C. Fields)—the Western branch having changed the name from St. Louis to Lewis (the same as the Moultries) and to which, by inter-marriage, Dean Pomeray is related, making Neal my Western cousin, which is exactly what he is, & W. C. Fields my lost funny uncle in the night. There are further complications of the clan, including the vast intricacies of the New England St. Louises scattered from Quebec to New Bedford, and in-laws of New York which include the family of Lucien Love or whatever I’ll call them. Tom & Ed came at night, we played pool in the Democrats club with Lucien Ouellette of Canada. Took long 3-mile walk in Jamaica colored neighborhood.

  SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 23, 1951—Apparently had nothing to write today though I wrote a little & sang a lot by the railroad yards—and did a $5 script.

  MONDAY SEPTEMBER 24, 1951—This is the first day that I’ve had death on my mind since I started this journal. Hooray for me, I always lose what I find. If what I found in the hospital—peace & joy & wisdom & dignity—isn’t mine then why should I live. Sometimes I think the whole trouble is economic—otherwise people, when I look back on my family’s life, have no destination but the grave through a road of misery & shame. But John Kelly used to wonder if I had a sense of humor.

  THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 27, 1951—Big binge—including cocktails at Kingsland’s, Walter Adams, recording Maxwell Bodenheim with Jerry, and going to Paterson with Allen. No work—except a few lines in a cafeteria. I wake up drunk in some strange house with my mind reeling—a million images race across my brain and I lay there gasping for breath and twitching . . . getting to be a drunk.

  The reason I haven’t done much writing in my room is because the light is weak and I’ve been waiting for my desk & papers to arrive—have to get them myself. Now in these fabulous past 2 days here’s what happened:—I went to Fox & picked up a book called My Turkish Adventure which is about an American schoolteacher in Turkey, in a brand new green dust jacket. I put it in my briefcase. The next thing, I despaired . . . went roaring in the streets downcast. It was cool & gray. I went to a Nedick’s for a small 10¢ hotdog—suddenly in the raw autumnal wind I felt tremendously & miraculously hungry, so much so that I was almost happy. I
was wearing my only pants, the pearl gray gabardines bought in Spring 1949 when I was a big success to be sharp in, but now only worn in beat necessity, with the cuff rolled up a peg so I wouldn’t have to hitch my pants high and could let them hang comfortably around my hip bones, a trick that makes me look like strange big-hipped Armenian fullback with woebegone trousers (etc.); wearing them plus my dirty gray flannel shirt, no tie, just this; sort of light and airy looking garb on cold gray early Fall days, with the briefcase swinging and dangling from forefinger and middle finger, with unzippered top, a trick that sometimes lets beer splash in. I decided to get drunk; already I was a mess. From then till now 48 hours later I got twice as dirty. Went to Holmes, started on brews while he typed; had long talk; for awhile in cafeteria earlier I had written a few lines about Neal and his old man in the junkyards drinking with Rex (and other things) and now I dabbled a comma or two. Then Allen came and he and I migrated to Kingsland’s . . . by now I was drunk on beer. At K’s I passed out, woke up next morning on the floor; Allen also on floor. Got up, showered, tried to sleep, lay, as I say, in a strange room with my mind reeling and a million images making me writhe and gasp and marvel and twitch and feel foolish and great. Then others got up and in a minute it was “cocktail time” and there’s K mixing martinis in the tall glass mixer used in the movie Adam’s Rib (the actual one itself) and me just having told myself I’d never drink again: and meanwhile when was my novel going to get written, my over-the-hurdle piteous second novel which was going to shoot me into my lifetime work, see? Martinis; Edith Piaf records; Marlene Dietrich; Billie Holiday; Kingsland dancing, Allen yelling, a delicious drunken lunch of hotdogs and sauce and ears of corn; scribbling long inscription in Town and City for John; then we all repair to another cocktail party, Walter Adams’, uptown, whee, in a tenement a long railroad flat done up chic with thick rugs and there’s the two mothers of the two boys in their cocktail hats and it’s five in the afternoon and cocktails and smart talk while I, ashamed in my dirty filthy clothes, read Freud’s notes on Dosty in library and Walter comes to chat with me about Lowry & Faulkner and Carson McCullers whom he considers greatest American writer; I get drunker and drunker, on Manhattans, eating only chips; off we fly now really stewed in taxi downtown with last dimes and invade store of Jerry Newman and go in backroom and start on gin and Jerry plays me my recording of my chapters on jazz in On the Road and it is on street loudspeaker, my own writings, my own lonely voice, saying, “it was a warm mad night in San Francisco in 1949 and me and Neal . . . etc.”

  Then we all fly, 4 now, to San Remo; enroute I talk to Ann Tabashnik, Normie Schmall, etc., and in San Remo I meet Barbara Hale and Marc Brandel, etc., then Maxwell Bodenheim (and Hugh Bell) and I persuade Kingsland, no I mean Newman to record Bodenheim, so off we fly the 3 of us back to record store where Bodenheim sits in small cubicle saying “I began writing poetry in Chicago in 1902 . . . etc.” and me sitting on the floor with beer and Jerry with earphones, then Bodenheim reads his poems, then he passes out awhile, and I call Allen, who comes, Bodenheim wakes up, more talk, more recording, then as I sit on floor looking him straight in the eye Allen Ginsberg recites in a hollow and crazed subterranean river night voice the epic Shroudy Stranger lines. . . . and Newman is bored and wants to call it quits, so I stagger off with Allen and the old poet and we go to his poor cell of a room on MacDougal south of Bleecker but landlady won’t have visitors after 10:30 and we have to file out of pitiful room and talk about poetry in the street. And then Allen and I stagger off to Paterson N.J., where I wake up next morning in his father’s house with a wondering fear and persuasions of my imminent death but as if the bats of whiskey consciousness & not so much an honest presagement. And Allen the Great and I, after hour of records and big breakfast, walk five miles around Paterson N.J. . . . visiting East Side Park, talking about Mexico, going down River St., gazing at the Passaic from little bridge, talking about the Stranger, down to river, mills, the Stranger’s arboreal brokendown brick piss house home by the weeds and tincans of the river slime, the Stranger’s private hiding place and beach, the horrid grim cliffs and chasm of the Falls, talking about Joan, and Bill, and Lucien, and Neal, and all, and circling around the city and looking at Garrett Mountain for the castle of Dr. Sax and going up and down until we were so exhausted Allen couldn’t talk and I took first bus back to N.Y. after snack and desultory sad communications with his father the famous poet Louis Ginsberg whom I like and who asked us how was old Bodenheim. . . . said B. drank too much and wasted his talents thereby and I’ll be goddamned if that’s not what I’m doing. But enough of this too, too weary doggerel and dread drear dream. . . . back on Times Square I saw a foolish fight on the sidewalk, 20 men stood by without moving a muscle to stop it, and I threw my briefcase on the sidewalk and moved up to stop it but the big guy looked strong and none of the watchers made a move to help me, in fact no one probably saw me, and I said fuckit, if they want the world this way, let them stew in their own evil, and I picked up the briefcase and went home. When I opened it here in my little cell and took out the book (My Turkish Adventure) which I have to do for tomorrow afternoon, it was completely torn and abrased and stained from the beating it took inside my briefcase in these past 48 hours. And so I write this as my testament of faith. . . . for I believe in life not so much in men, or women I believe in life I have nothing left to live for but life. . . . Oh God up in heaven save me and help me!

  All this written Thur. morn at 1 A.M.

  During Thur. daytime moved in my furniture with Lucien & Cessa Von Hartz his fiancée. We made a beer party of it.

  FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 28, 1951—So now I finally have my desk, radio, papers & innumerable tiny mementos (including old clothes harkening back to Fall of 1948 and the New School & early excitements of wild bop which have since subsided, for there’s no more Royal Roost and I no longer wear my Western-hip shirt). I couldn’t resist yesterday springing to the typewriter to tell my tale. . . . Think I’ll make the journal on type, then. Now I must write. Breakfast: 650 c. (And write to Neal . . . and lots of things to do, but mainly write like mad.) [Till Oct. 25.] Supper:—950 c. Wrote all afternoon—the drunkness of old Dean Pomeray . . . “the poor chagrin of bums.”

  Good Lord, spent all day breaking my head over 3 sentences. At this rate I’ll die under a rock. Got to make it—I’m sure to go crazy if I don’t. It’s just a matter of deciding to take things over!! Coffee: 100 c. Snack: 750 c. Total for the day:—2450 or more, too much. (Note: Later discarded 3 sentences.)

  Ah, I can’t even write any more. And then again, it’s not that—it’s forgetting that I have no time for poetry, only time to tell, tell, tell . . . exactly what it is. Spent the weekend at one thing or another—Carolyn & Paul arrived from South, little apartment in gladdened turmoil. I spent time with Jinny. I decided never to drink again at last . . . now I’m really on my way to something. More anon. On Saturday I ate 800 c. in food and the rest all beer—also some dexedrine, tea. It was my last foolish damn binge. On Sunday I had no more than 2000 c. all day. Decided I’m a man of 30 now, no more foolishness. More anon.

  MONDAY OCTOBER 1, 1951—Did 2 scripts, went in town with Nin—handed them in—at night, after wandering around B-Way and writing in cafeterias, attended jazz session at Birdland, saw Rudy Williams, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Terry Gibbs, Don Elliott—nothing much doing, except that Williams combines Sonny Stitt and Charlie Parker and may become great (not enough melodiousness in his tone & ideas, unlike Parker). Was with Rose—later in shroudy stranger weeds of night with her—& she be great. No drinking whatever. I’ve made up my mind. Be high on life. Ate 1500 c.

  TUESDAY OCTOBER 2, 1951—Woke up feeling fine—joined little Paul, my mother & Rose in sunny yard. Watched Giants-Dodgers playoff II. Talked to Nin & Paul. Rain in afternoon broke up Indian Summer day. Last 2 days literally (for me) fasted. Wrote in late afternoon. Oh and incidentally I finally typed first pages of official manuscript of On the Road. So here it is, Oct. 2, 1500-words. Wrot
e considerably more this evening but haven’t typed it yet. This journal grows dull?—I figure to compose 75,000 new words and incorporate 75,000 others from Road ms. before Xmas—end of book or bust:—this depends on sobriety, staying put, stamina, purpose and general soul health.

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 3, 1951—A day in baseball history, with that homerun by Thomson . . . Nin, watching on TV with Paul and me, predicted it. Fretted all day . . . my thoughts wandering from great regimen of writing to fears of physical stagnation. But more & more my plans tend to finishing On the Road by New Year’s—then I can move . . . no carousing till then. Did a script in afternoon & night. No time, no room to write in this disordered house. The peace & quiet of hours of the days for production of art works which come handed to rich writers on a golden platter, I waste my youth trying to get—Oh fuck, Gorki said it better and he was right. All the bull Giroux had about my being “free”—how can you be free when you haven’t got a moment to yourself, no security, no release from money worries, not even solitude to work in, debts, confinement (he’s in England as I write this—the editor with the money bled from the souls of writers via the company check)—nothing but shit falling from heaven even if you’re working on gold. There’ll come a day when society will provide security, basic honest security, not only for every earnest artist & writer but every child born James Joyce & T. S. Eliot, Giroux’s big heroes, would have written much more if all their youth hadn’t been consumed in banks & schoolrooms fretting at the shitty britches of others.