The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Nevertheless—600-words: It’s recording and explaining the visions and memories that rush across my brain, in narrative or otherwise logically connected sections—such as dissertative— . . . what I had during a long happy walk. If I had a portable tape-recorder everything would be okay . . . just walk & talk. Tonight I came upon a crowd in a field, with a cop in the middle, and a bloody hunk of human flesh in the weeds, apparently a miscarried baby dumped there, with a redleaf tree nearby framing a blue dark moon. How strange— And wild little pickaninnies screaming with glee, uncontrollably happy, outside a hardware store on Sutphin Blvd.— The things I know don’t last long anymore, they jump out of my head, I drink too much now . . . For the life and death of me I can’t write On the Road . . . and I have to, I have to, or I’ll just die off for God’s sake. To hell with it—I’m going to write something else. 40,000 words in this diary and nothing on Road . . . I used up all my excitement fooling around—the excitement that would have gone into another book—either I have a good time or I write a book. I don’t know anything about it—I resign—I’m not going to write another goddamn word.

  The worst mistake I made (and am now making) was ignoring my friendship with Tom Simonetti in the hospital just so I could doodle like the above in my “writing position”—& ignoring, for instance, my mother today, just for above doodlings. No—I must write only when I definitely have something to contribute to the body of the ms.—but enough rules & childish talk. I am going to go on with what I started Sept. 16—God help me—the objective Dean Road—

  It’s killing me!—Good Christ and the trouble is there’s nobody can help me or give advice!—how much longer.

  No I won’t do the objective Dean Road.

  SUNDAY OCTOBER 14, 1951—Another beautiful heartbreaking day. Took a walk, as usual; sat in the park thinking about a huge picaresque Johnny Dreamer Road; and then ONE WEEK IN AMERICA. Talking with my mother . . . she said the reason I’ve been fiddling for 3 years on Road is because Neal isn’t a big enough subject for a real novel and yet I’ve been trying to write about him—in fact I remember when I abandoned Ray Smith because Neal & Hinkle & Allen didn’t seem to be impressed (Dec. 1948). It was at that time that I became interested in the “myth of the rainy night” . . . The beginning of 3-yeared fumblings through Red Moultrie, Chad Gavin, the Walking Saint, the Cook, Pie, Sal Paradise and now Jack St. Louis (also of course Ben Boncoeur & earlier Freddy Boncoeur, the Mexican ideas); and even others; remember American Times? All a loss, a big sad loss . . . a waste of my poor sad soul . . . a nonsense . . . a foolish refusal to make an honest living (or buck anyway) and stop chiseling off people in the name of T & C (a juvenile work comparatively to what I could do now). Bah!—And some men have real troubles, like Bill.

  “Zadok the Priest” by Handel—Ah God

  Mozart Violin concerto No. 3 in G.—Where’s my work??

  My trouble is the horrible feeling that everything has happened before in a more interesting way and now nothing’s really happening—the feelings of a senile soul. I feel most like Ginsberg than anybody else in the world today—that horror of being guilty and yet no longer desiring salvation in the least . . . not caring whether you’re in hell or not because everything anyway is so vague—and strange—and to Ginsberg increasingly more malign—less innocent . . . “Out of the murderous innocence of that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” is what he wrote in my notebook in the San Remo (to me a serious place, no girlish “Remo”) . . . and are they his own words? If so he’s greater than ever. (Hart Crane, I believe.) YEATS

  NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION

  1. Start studying again . . . at least 1 hour a day in tomes, with notes, preferably in the library, to whet the appetite for knowledge and to stock up on learning for phrases, allusions, depth of imagination

  2. Listen to more classical music & especially modern (Bartók, etc)

  Looking at map of Denver, it gives me amazed sorrow to realize that we lived there in 1949 . . . actually lived there, the same home lights at night that now shine in my tragic little bedroom. Oh God I love life, I beg forgiveness, I want—TO BE SAVED but so saved as to burn, burn, burn—saved to be a burning nerve, for maybe my days on earth aren’t long (phlebitis already’s come back). I want to be like Balzac—and burn, burn—make a lot of money—burn it too—and in my love and respect for other people and for the world, burn! burn! I can’t stand it the way it is now—it’s got to be saved—etc. etc.—I wish there was a God to hear me and understand me. I abhor nature—and does that make me a vacuum?—nature’s the vacuum. And in poor Denver when I was a young man of 27 I used to waste my time with Private Philologies yet! Let me write some dialogue.

  (It wasn’t any good.) Weary of fiction, weary of time.

  TUESDAY OCTOBER 16, 1951—Drink your beer, eat your food, and do your writing—this is the sum of what I learned yesterday when I went to light the darkness of my mind at Ed White’s lamp. Also a dose of his good humor helped . . . He made me realize that the saga of all of us—not only Neal in Frisco, but Bill, Hal, Jeffries, Tomson in Mexico (and Helen Parker), Burford, Temko in Paris, Seymour, Morley etc. in England, Lucien, Allen, everybody in N.Y., Brierly in Denver, and so forth endlessly—this saga is inclusive of anything & everything I ever want to write and he told me not to worry about nonsense. “You’ve got so many things to do,” he said . . . He showed me a letter from Hal Chase, who’s half mad with hypochondria but has a love affair with “a black orchid . . . an Indian maid . . . Nilotic figure” . . . and worries someday she’ll find “an amante more blond” and forget him. Meanwhile Ginger, old Dark Eyes, is playing a guitar & singing folk songs in a Greenwich Village club! “Write!” says Ed White. And Burford in Paris told a girl that I was her best reference for a job on a small magazine out there . . . The saga of all of us—and even the ones among us who don’t really exist, yet do—like Old Bull Lewis . . . “Make sketches, like painters,” says White; and this afternoon I did, of old diner and old B movie on Sutphin Blvd. (But I need my sense of humor—a glass of beer!) I want to work, turn out novels, create the American Comedy, the master structure, my vision of life; and live, eat, drink, love, travel, & laugh . . . (but too tense about it). Well by God I resumed writing today!

  The things that men do when they’re sober make men drunker when they’re drunk—the greatness of sobriety is only appreciated by drunkenness and also high-ness of drug takers. Now you take George Arliss—in all his pictures he used to walk through affairs of state holding his two lapels . . . Had 10 brews after I wrote the above paragraph. I’m now writing this high on beer, from “the things that men do” to this . . . Spent half my precious day composing my “plans” for Guggenheim Fellowship. Ten beers were had in Clancy’s bar with Romeo Nadeau my new French Canadian friend, & his wife, & fellow-Canadian Gerard Paillard of Waterbury, Conn.—Romeo was bartender, beers on house—great! Who else can write the American Comedy? Hey?

  A little comfort won’t kill the suffering monster . . . Also, tonite reading the paper I felt that things were happening again. It’s like Joan Adams said . . . 1951 was a beat year . . . poor girl.‡

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 17, 1951—This day (it’s now 2 A.M.) will never, never, never return, so therefore I salute it now. . . . You see my pitch? Did a $5 script—went in—wrote sketches of Hector’s cafeteria—visited Bill Fox at store—Allen came—we ate pizza—drank at store and in bars—Bill threw us out—visited Allen’s room in the Mills Hotel (now called Greenwich) where we discussed the “cosmic Italian dormitory”—same place I stayed seven years ago in Fall of 1944 after I jumped ship in Norfolk to come back to Céline and Joan Adams was young & pretty & later told me I should have come back for her instead, or that is, what she really said, “That was the time when you should have tried (making love to me).” The sad bums’ hotel—Allen said Old Pomeray would regard it with awe because it is after all an enormous big-city flophouse, a universal, a cosmic vast dreamlike flophouse in the great city of New York—We dec
ided the shroudy stranger came there years ago—We decided some of the bums are not really bums but worse . . . they’re men who could live at the Y and eat at Stewart’s but want to save money! (groan, moan). We decided to ball Dusty next out . . . I shall describe Dusty soon . . . why keep a diary chaste? The Mills, or Greenwich, has at least a thousand cell-like rooms half of which face two 8-story inside courts; on the bottom there are chairs for bums; during the day great conversations go on, the ceaseless murmurous voice of men rises a hundred or more feet to the sad Italian ceiling which is webbed & strange. Allen said recently two strange beat Negroes painted an enormous mural in the great echoey hall depicting an “Egyptian-Cape Cod port, a city on orange blocks” (you’ve got to hear his descriptions to realize the precision of his madness). We also talked about the recent events in Mexico—Lucien’s drunkenness, Joan’s death, Bill out on bail & speculated on Hal. So the circle swirls. While we were drunkenly examining bookstand I realized (watching a browser) that men come here to dream . . . We discussed the Pope’s vision of Virgin Mary in the sun (last year at this time) . . . the setting sun. Allen said: “With all the Church beneath him & millions of believers including the barefoot ones of Mexico & the world and T. S. Eliot & everybody this Pope Pius, like a mad Father Ferrapont, has a completely Dostoevskyan vision of the flaming sun and everybody (including me) believes him! and this is the greatest miracle since the atom bomb in 1945, in fact much greater.” [Allen had visions in 1948 but he didn’t have the world to report it to.] Whoo! Bed at 5 A.M.

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 18, 1951—Wrote the great initial Dean Pomeray speech to Tom Watson & the football passing scene in the Denver dusk & “great riot of October joy”—a tremendous afternoon of writing. My new method is ACTING OUT what I write . . . SPEAKING OUT—(alone in the house)—and now of course don’t need wire recorder no more!!—thank God—I tell you, today, Oct. 18, 1951, On the Road § took off from the ground. At night did a $10 script—wrote important letters, my first in a long time—I’m really rolling now—here we go. I want to write a good novel each & every year . . . publishing the first one Fall of ’52 and then ’53, ’54 etc.—someday have $. If I had $ right now I’d fly to Paris this weekend.

  “Love the art in yourselves,” says Stanislavski, “don’t love yourselves in art.”

  (Wrote no such letters.)

  FRIDAY OCTOBER 19, 1951—Handed in $10 script—spent $4—Ah Lord, Ah Lord, my heart is at a mad and feverish pitch tonight—Tonight I know the greatness of the suffering of man—and the beautiful noblesse oblige of his complex, subtle loneliness in this oldfashioned dark, sad earth— Poor Fitz! poor Bill! poor Neal! and ah dear, poor me— Today, like some days in my past or any man’s past, I received rebuffs—or more importantly I THOUGHT I did,—till I made rebuffs—but no mind; I’ll remember everything from this personal (Ah mighty Proust!) itinerary:—Went to Fox, then to Support Bureau, talked with Irish clerk; then stood on corner of 23rd & 3rd Ave. for an hour thinking—then to Jerry’s store where Bill Fox laid hints down on me about my being a chiseller I guess—& as soon as I’m positive what he means I’ll ask him to be more implicit indeed—then I tried to find Johnny Holmes, fumbled on Lex (and here’s the scene of the play: couple necking in livingroom, fellow comes through with towel around waist, says “Flaming youth” and exits, next fellow looks harried: “How about a saw? how about a saw? I want to borrow a saw”; then another enters, says “What about that salami in the cellar?”—a play composed during this miserable day); then I bought knockwurst, sauerkraut, came home, beer, ate; then Tom & Ed came but were sleepy and wouldn’t get in the bag with me; and only guy I should have seen tonight is Fitz. As I write this, though, live show from Birdland—new beautiful bop, I love it, nobody knows how great it is—right now 1951!!!—when else for Christ’s sake were drums so subtle, altos so heartbreaking, trombones so vocal?

  To hell with all the doubters & bastards that lurk inside my soul. I want to dig the subterranean mysteries & the eyrieal mysteries & the jazz mysteries (as I certainly told the Guggenheim people in my new plans for artistic creation)—& the mysteries of the great bop piano—and mysteries unheard-of—& not only the mysteries of Dean Pomeray but of tremendous soaring wobbly passes in October empty lots. . . . Wheeeeeeeee! And all this goes on at my desk in the middle of the night, a poor lonely hand scribbling. . . . I no longer ask what for, it’s the only solid thing left in my life aside from the stout personality of my mother . . . who never changes an iota while I leap every day from one extreme clutching my neck to another sleeping till the sad red sun goes falling down as children scream. But today, today, today (and Terry Gibbs as I write this, sad young Jew kid from Bronx, chews gum, attacks vibes, what else? but an artist of great & heartbreaking sensibility & knows it but can’t say it though maybe in one of his notes he will cry it out & everybody knows & the man’s got to concentrate mainly like all great musicians on the architecture of the tune and get it by the balls or go back to Egypt & the Greeks and Swing)—Terry Gibbs, take a bow in my hollow roaring pages. . . . today, today, today—what indefinable charm each day in our lives has!—and even more amazing, its ineffable accomplishments—O ragged sailing heart! Ah me Sebastian! Mischa Aver! all the mad sensitive Russian screaming ones! They’re for me! Oh for an oldfashioned tea party!—with Vicki appreciating every mad twist!—to be a Normie Schnall for a Vicki Russell Armiger!—I haven’t lived, I mean it!—Mad laugh of Symphony Sid in the night! Now Terry Gibbs & Don Elliot dueling at the vibes . . . “Flying Home”—2:30 A.M. Oct. 20 ’51 and no NEW Jerry Newman to record it (but just wait till I get my tape recorder!)—

  How say it?—I wonder what my poor feet are up to, as my poor mind wanders . . . On Union Square today, dreaming (as I did 3 full years ago with my copy of Whitman’s Calamus).

  Say!—this new bop is apocalyptic!—even Jimmy Ford—New bop has a continual noisy going restless leap of drums—accents & also Chinese cymbals—driving everything ahead of it undyingly, restlessly—nobody can help but lean to the issue—go! go!—the mysteries of swing allied to the mysteries of the future—AND NOBODY KNOWS IT!—Do we have to wait for Marshall Stearns Jr. & Barry Ulanov Jr. to tell us this in 1962, that the Bop of the Fifties is GREAT??? BAH! I say.

  SATURDAY OCTOBER 20, 1951—“I’m getting more and more to feel like a haggard ghoul”—(what happens when men have those “spiritual & physical lapses” Proust attributes to women’s leaving for other lovers). Sat in Richmond Hill park for an hour in the beautiful crisp, windless, pale blue afternoon of October with dusty green leaves turning an early orange; kids playing in the field before the great black montage of a city of old locomotives gathered for Saturday afternoon in the L.I.R.R. yards. . . . I realized too much of my life is a struggle to rid myself of guilt . . . the hell with it . . . this is what is consuming poor Ginsberg . . . NO—it’s the Past and the general joy of Time that is now going to be my central mental absorption; guilt distorts the Past (the pure past of merely exactly what happened) and cripples the Present. I had 3 other big thoughts that I’ve since forgotten . . . but I’m deciding to drink less & spend more of my time now in N.Y. sketching from the Bowery to the Bronx . . . a Leonardo doesn’t faddle . . . Oiled my typewriter in the afternoon; put in new bed in my now cosy tiny room; & wrote a bit. . . . I’ll soon have a total of words. Blah blah.

  MONDAY OCTOBER 22, 1951—Didn’t want to go out Saturday night but did and just got drunk again. Somebody said I’d last 2 more years—as if I was a Cannastra. Miserable, I feel miserable . . . I’m trying to avoid the things that killed my father plus I suppose new ones. All that matters is pure gold!! Did $13 scripts Sunday—I’m not worth the paper this silly diary’s written on—thank God I’ll read it someday. [Sat. night was Dusty’s party with R. & Jerry Newman & everybody there & me too drunk to know it & passing out for at least the 25th time in 1951.] IT’S ALL MY FAULT AND I KNOW WHAT TO DO NOW.

  Liszt’s Legend No. 2 “St. Francis,” so much like Beethoven I thought until
a giveaway lapse in judgment and taste near the end . . . the trills . . . Anyhow. —When was it . . . before I learned the tremendous adult fact that in Mexico you can get all the emotion of Spanish nights, fiestas, roses and unimaginable cantinas from listening to the music on the jukebox while watching some sullen strawhatted bastard eating at a tortilla counter—

  Bop musicians don’t play what they want; not four bars later, overcome by genuine guilt because of this, they try technical show-off tricks. The reason: what they want is obvious to them (they think); they don’t know that just a step beyond is something they don’t want because they’ve never known it before. But bop has freed jazz and made way for “crazy” phrasing; at its greatest, soon, after Charlie Parker’s greatest pupil grows up, or maybe Tristano’s, it will be music like Mozart’s.¶

  It’s all my fault and I know what to do now.

  Oct. 1942 in Nova Scotia Canadian Navy guardhouse; Aug. 1933 in old magazine store Merrimack St. across from St. Jean Baptiste, the shadow; Oct. 1927 in crib at midnight, Hildreth St., woke up by mother & visiting actress in Opera House play—My women never understand—I want them to wear a housedress all the time . . . fashion, that makes me sick, works its vanity on them. Why don’t they understand that I know what I’m talking about . . . instead they’ll go and get their masculine instruction from—fags, what-all.