The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  In actual writing moments you get bored & chickenshit.

  TUESDAY OCTOBER 23, 1951—October, don’t run out!—but he has to. At 2 A.M. wrote about Tom Watson’s grandmother; at 3 A.M. about Tom Watson’s grandmother’s lace curtains. Wrote all day further into Tom Watson’s closet, from 11 A.M. on, with trip to N.Y., no script, thinking for an hour on front steps on 45th St. at B-way, back home to write, not much success but now I have a big spate ready to type tomorrow. Deciding once for all on the next six, crucial months—O dark thing . . . Reading old mad Proust; eating good food, taking long walks, getting hung up on sentences . . . This I’ve got to do for 6 months . . . then I’ll be 30, and twice an author. Worth it?—

  1. TO DEFINITELY ESTABLISH MY CAREER BY SURMOUNTING THE 2ND NOVEL PROBLEM (Mailer didn’t, Merle Miller didn’t; those who don’t, don’t rise or make it.)

  2. TO IMPROVE, CULTIVATE, UTILIZE MY SENSES & HEALTH IN GENERAL BY NOT DRINKING ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES EXCEPT STRICTLY IN MODERATION WITH FRIENDS (Every time I get stewed I notice the next day a paralysis of my ordinary working senses & the introduction of fits of guilt, horror, sorrow, wild despair that take up another 48 hours until the return of the previous sober absorptions)

  3. AS A REWARD FOR THE ASCETIC DISCIPLINE OF WRITING A WILD TRIP WHEN BOOK’S DONE (There’s been no deliberate adventure in my plans since Spring 1950—tea made me seek security not adventure—so I married Joan—If I can’t go off hitch hiking at the conclusion of On the Road when I’m 30 in March then I shall have to give up to middle age & grow fat

  4. TO MAKE A LIVING AND SAVE MONEY FOR NECESSITIES EVENTUALLY GO TO SHIPS (The time for this should be after I’ve proven I can write that 2nd novel better than the first, & after I’ve had a land-crossing fling in the Spring of ’52)

  5. MAKE A DOWN PAYMENT ON A HOUSE IN LONG ISLAND FOR HOME AND HEADQUARTERS (Headquarters in N.Y., there’d be no peace; and of course it’s my mother who will need this house when she retires on Social Security & whatever else I can arrange for her; I can’t say my house isn’t well kept etc. The place that’ll say I’m not broke; my room, my records; eventually my kids’ house?)

  6. WRITE “PROUSTIAN-WOLFEAN-FAULKNERIAN-GENETIAN-MELVILLEAN-CÉLINEAN-WHITMANESQUE-DOSTOEVSKYAN-KEROUASSADIAN” NOVELS IN BALZAC SYSTEM TO AVOID GETTING HUNG UP ON TWO OR THREE GREAT WORKS LIKE JOYCE FOR LIFE WHEN THE SAME MATERIAL CAN BE POURED INTO INSTALMENTS (This is the big subject:—a book about Neal, a book about jazz Pictorial Review Jackson and Jazz, a book about Jack St. Louis The Vanity of Doctor Sax (decided to meld Sax & Duluoz together today), etc., each in its own good time, with Old Bull Lewis** to come. In this way I stand a decent chance of making a living as a writer instead of martyrizing myself until it’s too late, like T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Proust

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 24, 1951—Went into N.Y. for work; wasn’t any, went to Holmes for chat & 3 beers; at 2 A.M. I roared through the 53rd St. subway station kicking over a huge trash barrel as Ginsberg, trying to guide me after our 20 beers with Holmes & Harrington, hustled to pick it off the ground. 3 A.M. Harold Goldfinger is lechering at me in San Remo john & telling me about Huncke in 1933; 6 A.M. I am staggering 2½ miles after sleeping to end of F train line, at 179 St., walking through gastank dark of Jamaica, splashing in puddles, weeping for my lost youth in Lowell when similarly I used to come home near dawn but never had to walk more than a mile and it was the tenements of Moody St., then the panoramic wild joy of the bridge, then the sleep of home neighborhoods in Pawtucketville—nothing like the sprawling terrifying dark hells of Long Island that reach in every direction endlessly as millions upon millions of human beings sleep in places they would like to call home but can’t because the place they’re in and I’m in is too enormous and incomprehensible and frightening. God, how I thought of my father; & when I got home my mother was just getting up (it was 5:30 rather)—and I thought of the darkness of my youth in Lowell.

  LITTLE PAUL BLAKE: “Well I shore like these red popsicles.”

  HIS PAL: “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

  LITTLE PAUL BLAKE: “Well, sometimes I do—sometimes I don’t—and sometimes I do.”

  ME: “Do you like fudgicles?”

  LITTLE PAUL: “I shore do, I say yum yum.”

  ME: “Is that what you say, yum yum?”

  LITTLE PAUL: “I say yum yum ALL the time.”

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 25, 1951—Again went in to N.Y., no work; again lured, but this time productively, sketching in 3rd El and on 9th Street near Bowery then long meditative walk down to Chinatown to look at difference between Chinese movies & B movies; and en route trailed Victor, the strange Jesus Christ who’d traveled to Provincetown with little Jeanne Nield in 1950 on a beat motorcycle and they’d slept in a pup tent in Helen Parker’s backyard the first night, in Truro woods, trailed this bearded mystery to his musty doorway at 41 First Avenue next door to a wine factory where ten husky gangsters were busy packing wino apple wine in cases so that old Pomerays (thousands of whom I subsequently saw all milling around in front of the Salvation Army trying to sell old pants, old razors, and one guy wanted to sell an old cloth khaki belt for 10¢) so these could get stoned in all sidestreet alleys. Roaming there, I noted that the bum’s got an adventurous spirit—not only like Rex wanting to sleep on the sidewalk but wanting to wear overalls, baseball hats, jackets and adventure in the open with the other boys, raise the bottle with a yell, and in fact some of them have these marvelously adventurous slouched hats and the look in their eyes is wild, daring; even tho most of them just sit on steps muttering as their brains no longer register legitimate complaints or satisfactions, just twitches of something still alive. On Lower East Side Henry St. I saw a little mother cat and kitten playing in shadows of the doorway of a busy grocery store full of women and children. It was a mighty good day.

  FRIDAY OCTOBER 26, 1951—My royalties due today. Jack Fitzgerald driving down from Poughkeepsie to get me tonight. October meanings in this greatest of my Octobers since 1941 are now reaching climax as Halloween pumpkins appear on fruitstands, as I don my red woodsman’s shirt, as trees turn fiery brown and dull red, and as I consider a trip to Lowell for Halloween. . . . and tonight, by moonlight, Fitz and I reel off the Hudson Valley of our mad dreams (Mad Murphy and Doctor Sax).—Typed up 1800-words—but wrote much more than that and much better in my scribbled secret notebooks that had better become my real work or I’m a failure—I am not satisfied with those 1800 words—the notebook sketches are greatest I’ve ever done . . . tonight I dashed off a sketch about the Bowery which is completely without sentence form and is better than the greatest of my sentences except the “heartbreaking loss” one but only because It was something special. My main ms. doesn’t live up to my sketches; it’s like a painter, his canvas oil job doesn’t equal his street sketches in pencil . . . to make everyone realize that he has not taken Mr. Stanislavski’s advice . . . love the art in yourself—. Wrote at least 4500 of them golden secret words worth a dollar each . . . heh heh heh! So today altogether I had to do with 6,500 words & that’s Oct. 25 ’51. The great hungup parts of T & C were nevertheless siphoned through sentence structure and groove (if anybody can still know what old high priest means)—(through restricting sentence forms and unnecessary statements of mood).

  THURSDAY NOVEMBER 1, 1951—I don’t know how I’m going to be able to catch up with everything that’s happened but this time unlike December 1948 I’m not going to let it all go to pot . . . tonight I have to do two scripts, write letters and already today I’ve written (in sketch books) well over 5,000 words:—it’s been fourteen years I took to reach writing maturity:—now all that remains is work, life plans, etc. Sometime in next few days I’ve got to record my trip to Poughkeepsie with Dusty & the 5-day binge in its entirety & the offer A. A. Wynn made, thru Carl Solomon his nephew, to advance me money to finish On the Road †† and my mad discovery as to how to do it into a book so revolutionary & fantastic that on that basis alone it would certainly make me famous and I hope we
althy, and soon, and launch me off on an unprecedented writing career unknown in the “literary” world before.

  SUNDAY NOVEMBER 4, 1951—(Another binge, with Dusty, Tom, Ed)—My big mad revolutionary idea was to hitch hike to Frisco with mad Dusty and write it in my secret sketch-scribble notebooks as we go along—. Nobody’s ever reached fresh from life with scenes, faces, conversation, panoramas—painful as life itself & rich . . . Not gainsaying this is a great idea but I was doing On the Road with Dean Pomeray and Carl Solomon thinks it’s really great writing “the best of your generation that I know of” and he’s an Artaud-Genet-Michaux type which is hard to please. So I’m stuck with whether I should stay home advance or no advance and finish Road as I had it (& remember it took off recently)—OR—go to the next step in my “development” & hit the humble road with pencil in hand (submissive to everything, open listening, Whitman like). I think it isn’t as good as it sounds (will ask Ed)—because the imagination of Dean’s Road is what stones Solomon, the brevities too, and Dusty’s road may only be a glorified diary??? (& drunken?)

  (Poughkeepsie is recorded elsewhere.) Here it is Sunday morn Nov. 4, 1951, and I’m alive & thinking & scribbling at my desk. I had no coat for the Winter—I got no royalties from Harcourt, still in debt—and Mrs. Whitebook and her son Jack Enoch gave me his gone Camel’s hair top-coat, brown, dark, rich, the best coat I’ve had in all my life and it was given to me. (They didn’t know I had no coat of my own.) So thank the Lord and my neighbors for my new coat. It makes absolutely no difference to Joan that I have no coat—“The only thing I care about is my baby” and probably only wants to choke it to death. She told the judge I would collect $500 semi-annual royalties, and earned $30 a week on scripts.‡‡ No wonder I have to send her that fin every week. But now, now I may get that advance. Ah balls this is absolutely the last time I think or write about her. I have to struggle on under the weight of her own shame & horror and yet try to fashion books out of my own belief & joy. VERY WELL THEN I WILL. (She used to beat her head against the wall of our 20th Street room and it was a stone wall, just because she was infuriated about something; this was supposed to be my doing, who was only trying to mind his own business in the midst of slowly realizing the mental illness of his spouse; (dumbly put but true); and that, plus the hours & hours spent at a mirror with makeup just to go out in the street to a part time waitress job or the like, that’s some of her shame and horror.)

  In Poughkeepsie I learned from Dusty that a woman can be fun again. O dear me October’s gone again . . . Paris! Paris next!

  MONDAY NOVEMBER 5, 1951—Decided yesterday to stay home till Wednesday and write at least 3,000 more words to show Solomon & Wynn in an effort not only to secure the advance but prove to them and myself too that I can “turn out” professionally:—in which interest I let the scripts go hang till then. Wrote 700 wds. yesterday afternoon, to be typed (Dean & the propitious traffic light). I can finish this Road by March 12 if I get an advance—then I can start another novel immediately & get another advance! This is really what I want to do, Balzac the thing, not moon along. Go, go, go!

  The seaman on the porch looking into the lace curtains or the oval livingroom was as much out of place as an old shawled lady on a flying bridge. Took long walk doing mental sketches (of old house) for Road chapter . . . where Neal & boys go . . . found the house under great black L.I.R.R. watertank. And also got Jack St. Louis, his sniffling nose & the long red sun in Queens.

  Pretended I was sick so Maw wouldn’t have to go out with “friends” (her idea) . . .

  How good is my writing?—Working today on thousands of words of mad material . . . Dean throwing the passes, driving to Wyoming girls, etc. “—The moon in the red tree . . .” I go on and on in relative ignorance . . .

  Ah the cafeterias of the Mexican night . . . the sad voices, the poor guitars . . . I want to go to Frisco, to Mexico, to Ecuador, and then Paris and Rome . . . yes.

  TUESDAY NOVEMBER 6, 1951—Still writing those 3000 words in a bid for that thousand bucks. At times I weaken, even get bored—but I’m doing it for my own fun anyhow so I go on, quickly recovering . . . blah blah . . . But I haven’t worked as absorbebly as this (and without benzedrine) since I was a kid drawing cartoons, & that’s what I prayed for in the hospital.

  Because all I have to do now is work on visions of Dean Pomeray, eventually visions of character itself . . . visions, visions,—to hell with “narrative.” Such as, for instance, “Oh tenormen of the American bop night, Oh four brothers, that ineffable grace that came into your pale hands, your thin sweet faces, your bent studious neck we see here under these rosy lights of jazz—where did it come from?”—It’s all I care about, the things that haunt me not someone else—& getting down to the bottom of it even if it takes till five o’clock in the morning. Working like that gives me such muscles that tonight for instance I did two full scripts from 11 to 3 A.M. and went right on, after a 2-mile walk and chinning 15 times, with this. (It’s Wednesday now.) Dostoevsky me no Dostoevskies!!—I’m finally interested in exactly what I’m doing and there’s no reason for me to do it—as, for instance, Under the Volcano is now out of print. Like a child again I’m absorbed in my own imagination—and speaking of cartoons Solomon (whether or not but he did) said my work, to him, was mainly & completely visual. It’s now Thursday, 4 A.M., I have 3500 new-words to show and I will now write a few more. Why did Blake address his rose the way he did?—So he’d be noticed by the Poetry Society, or get a job on Puck, or make five farthings?—No, because he told the rose and he recorded the fact that he told the rose and he really told that rose. (It’s about 11,000 words written now on Road since Sept. 16—pretty “slow.”)

  THURSDAY NOVEMBER 8, 1951—(That Dusty, or similar, Road is going to be merely an added thing that I’m going to do, not the shit end of a dualism—

  And now, today, I took in those new words to Carl Solomon’s pad on Prince St.—(digging the Bowery again en route, looking for soup, one joint full of afterwork Puerto Ricans drinking beer and singing in chorus with the jukebox unfortunately didn’t have soup [I had 25¢], finally I found some barley soup in a little tiny lunchroom on a cold dark howling corner run by a Greek . . . With steam in the windows, sawdust on floor, I’m going to sketch it, digging the Bowery and Italian teamsters on Thompson St. again as I did in Spring of ’46). Carl said I must write a synopsis or prospectus of Road so that his uncle will know where it’s headed before he considers parting with moneymoolah . . . and I tried to write a synopsis in Carl’s (after lovely supper of succotash hotdogs Olive called Frankfurt pederaste) but couldn’t. What is the synopsis of Road? What, in fact, is Road? On the Road is the first in a series of novels about members of my generation who interest and haunt me because they—but I’ll try it on foolscap—or should I tell it here? The point is, be a Roman with a Roman; I’ll “talk Turkey”? (“Road” is “Cody.”)

  MONDAY NOVEMBER 12, 1951—I’m beginning to see my own tragedy. All I have to do is look in the mirror. The moment is coming when I really and truly must decide to go cold-turkey on all alcohol . . . I just can’t restrain myself after 3 brews. This last weekend was too much for me—I’m so depressed tonight (Sunday) that I don’t know what to do. The hospital month of great self-discovering joy is already being blurred and that’s the story of my last ten years . . . too much drunkenness, it finally eats at the sources of your strength & belief, especially if you’re insanely sensitive. Poor Wolfe, that’s what it was killed him.

  TUESDAY NOVEMBER 13, 1951—Further confirmation today about advance. Alright, I’ll spend the winter in honest work. And last night ah me I read The Vanity of Duluoz and cried—there’s my 3rd book already . . . (Vanity of Sax). Solomon and I had a tremendous talk too—he saw Artaud in 1947 screaming in the Rue Jacob at 7 o’clock in the evening and doesn’t know whether he was the old man on the couch or the poet who trembled. We also picked up John H’s book for A. A. Wyn. I walked around Rockefeller Center today wondering if I could w
rite a N.Y. Vanity of Duluoz with a portable tape recorder . . . it’s almost impossible to capture this ocean in a thimble but I think I could but again I might write (or tell) too much with a machine—Oh phooey. Scratching his chest, showing his teeth to no mirror—Shakespeare’s soul is now waiting for release from the inanimate object called the moon. Solomon says he won’t go traveling till the atom bomb is captured . . . otherwise traveling is fleeing. We talked about mad Legman—who makes exposés of new images like Solomon & Harrington the joking symbolist. Ginsberg knows. (About my “tragedy” yesterday, it’s taking care of my responsibilities that counts, not stop-drinking or such—it’s being a man, taking care of things. Now I go to work for the winter. And now that I’m getting money I don’t know what to write any more.)

  Well, and so, I’ve just, now, 5 A.M. Tuesday morning, read most of this diary and I do find that the mental condition in the hospital was far superior to the mental condition after the first five or six drunks (not before, though). Drinking is OK, I just overdo it. Agreed . . . I’ll try to take it easy. Another curious thing, the smallprint pages from 46 to 50 are curiously devoid of any humor . . . some reason connected with the print mayhap; a crabbedness . . . as if, for me, it’s be wild, not cautious. What anxieties. Tonight was the first night that I can remember that I couldn’t think of what to write, as if it was upstairs again (used to live upstairs in big flat, big literary position, weed couldn’t ride, Giroux first, that is, the baneful influence of success (on a fool like me) (check in black CASH 1949 notebook) then the baneful weed). How much happier it is down here where my mother and I don’t even have enough room to turn at the same time in the kitchen. That’s because of what I learned in the hospital. Now that I’ve got Dusty out of my mind because of her deal the other night I can return to the strengths the secrets of which I learned and didn’t and won’t forget. There are some beautiful lines in this book on the subject. Last night, as I say, I read Duluoz—something is coming, a wonderful joy. I won’t lose it. I think heaven punished me this past weekend when just before I danced so crazily to Stravinski that I tore my own shirt off in Dusty’s livingroom I had told Allen I wasn’t interested in God any more, just people, in dumb unmemoried contradiction of that “infinite unfathomable love heaven bestowed to men”—words I wrote a matter of hours before jail and which reminds me that it was also in jail I wrote “Ever moreso gentle am I than death.” Also, reading Duluoz makes me realize that where once I was like two men now I’m like five and it’s curious to figure whether this means I’m crazy or just some kind of Great Shaman Fool of New York, from the provinces, some crazy dumbsaint of the mind, or maybe just New Man or something. I don’t feel crazy, it seems if I want to I can be perfectly normal, stop the machine, go to sleep, say something quiet & sensible. But the way I forget one thing after another—and this is principally because I live by every 24 hours—and I wish this was a 24 hours like the ones I discovered Konitz in, so I could write—I often wonder if I’m clinically crazy, as for instance, my mother once asked me about that Vermont car crash, its effect on my head. Or maybe I’m just simply “maniacally self centered,” as Allen says of John Hohnsbein now; this is a diary; it has a millions I’s. Since Duluoz, for one thing, I’ve become more boyish & silly but there’s no doubt that I’ve become more intelligent too (& boyishness is a trap to make people teach me?). What anxieties. Dear Lord, I give you my soul.