The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Goodnight gentle readers, sleep; sweet music to your dreams.

  (And now I remember a dream . . . a river, the Concord River, night, Mary Carney’s house . . . and I tell you, I swear, all I have to do is look at “sweet music to your dreams” to rouse the image of that dream of the Mary Carney river night§§ . . . as Proust says, or might have said, inanimate objects and even words in themselves contain the imprisoned spirit of something we once lost).

  The reason why I didn’t write tonight, I think, is really because I wanted to describe a second story corner office that’s closed for the night but you can see through it from one window to another around the corner because a red neon is shining around that corner . . . (as you can see, nothing could be harder to describe & mainly I had no room for fitting it with Neal & the gang bound for Wyoming in the car). This scene haunted me tonight and because of my “advance” I foolishly looked for myself in art instead of the art in myself. That window might have been Chin Lee’s on Kearney Square. Anyway I know now, advance or no advance, the unspeakable visions of the individual, dealing with the source of the mind; no time for poetry but telling exactly what it is, and other such discoveries scattered in this book (and this being the reason why I re-read it tonight) are the thing for me to do . . . how intelligently put . . . and tomorrow, therefore, I’ll go on writing. (Or that is, today.)

  Did a $6 script after fried clam supper. That shivering-in-the-chest feeling of joy only just now returning, 48 hours after the drunk ended. And this afternoon, seeing a dark part of 5th Avenue near St. Patrick’s I had a lovely visionary tic . . . of a dark shoe repair or similar repair shop on some gloomy afternoon on Aiken Street in my observant infancy, yair. (The best journal entries are those that know when to stop.) —A full November moon, and mild.

  WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 14, 1951—I’m on the verge of some kind of crazy discovery that’ll tear my head off for good—or make me great. The system of writing I use when sketching is tranced fixation upon an object before me, “dreaming on it” expresses it exactly; now I’m about to try the most dangerous experiment of my life, the same tranced unconscious fixation upon the object which will now be the successive chronological “visions” of Neal, in other words, I’ll decide ahead of time generally where he’s at, with who, what doing, and dream on it. As in the sketches, as in all portraitures, present tense. So that the second draft may be the only conscious and of course the only grammatical and what’s most important maybe—the only legible. It’s 4 a.m. in the morning and I am about to try the experiment and I’m scared.

  IT WORKED—but I would have written it in huge letters if I was positive it would work when the time comes for dialog, for voices of others. Generally speaking, it works, and I can report here, as if I was an inventor at his peak, that I’ve gone still another greater step beyond the fruits of the hospital discoveries . . . and I knew this was so, because I couldn’t sleep the night I first realized it, Oct. 25, the day I wrote the Bowery sketch from memory, realizing that I was in myself revolutionizing writing by removing literary & that curious “literary grammatical” inhibition from its moment of inception, removing most of all of course, the obstacles that came from my own personal stupidity which is still with me but temporarily under control. (And someday must tell the strangest tale of tonight’s discovery which is actually going to influence my entire life and yet I’m not excited and why should I be—the scatological block I had, the fear of “soiling” bound notebooks no matter how small.) Incidentally, I sketched a bakery window and a bleak rectory across the street today, at Parsons Blvd., and spent an hour in the Jamaica library & read photographs.

  THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15, 1951—Because I go to bed at 5 I’m all screwed about days, but at 1 A.M. this morning I did an $8 script, walked 2½ miles. During day, in N.Y., I sketched people going by Stewart’s cafeteria in the rain—another mad discovery, to sketch visions of people who in flashing by clutch at the heart for unspeakably individual reasons. Oh Proust’s Combray cathedral and that aunt who eats “creamed eggs on one of the flat plates with writing”!—my God that old teahead of time! Realized tonight that I read a lot of Proust last July in No. Carolina when I thought Faulkner was influencing me to write of “facebones” Pomeray. I love Proust so much now that in the history of my affections he ranks with Wolfe & the man of the Karamazov darkness. . . . (nothing but gloom, turrets, dark wood and one white hurdle fence, that’s Karamazov-town to me). And now to Dean Pomeray and the Wyoming girls. (Failed miserably) (Because girls didn’t exist.)

  The secret of “what happened next” is not a narrative secret but merely what the teller genuinely hung-uply wants to explain & unfold next about the subject he’s on, whether it’s action or a turd.

  THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15, 1951—A miserable, one of the worst days I can remember—all indecisive, pepsic, stupid, lost, dull, irritable, terribly empty . . . and I lost a 20th Century Fox play script in the subway . . . and got no joy out of anything I saw or did all day, in fact suspected the worst . . . and even stared glumly at my Proust. Lack of sleep . . . a touch of phlebitis . . . constipation, making my belly swell . . . long hair, no money to spare for haircut . . . can’t write, failed last night . . . can’t even look anybody in the eyes . . . baggy pants, sweaty shirt that should have been in the laundry 2 weeks ago . . . remembering things about my past life that I never remembered before and which are unutterably dreary (I used to like James Melton & identify him with the hero of Serenade when he sang, all this while my father dozed in a chair so that now I can’t even begin to estimate how many hours I wasted in my youth, which is now gone, doing fruitless, asinine & futureless dull-assed things like that instead of hitch hiking on the wild, wild road or throwing flowers into the rooms of pretty dancers, Goddamit to hell I’m getting sick & tired of it & I’m leaving I’m going to French Morocco.) Sketched in the 42nd St. White Rose Bar tonight . . . “Following Lee Konitz” was the subject, I saw the lucky bastard in the street. Ah shit, I say . . . it’s a terrible enough world without having to be divided in yr. own fucking soul. Divided—divided—divided—divided. (Now I’m using a better lead in my pencil.)

  Oh what turmoils!—I’m about to become an unspeakable reporter! It’s taken me all this time since Oct. 25th to really realize why I couldn’t sleep that night and why my “IT WORKED” of 2 days ago wasn’t enthusiastic at all; to realize that 3 things prevented me from seeing clearly what had happened, which was so gigantic that it cancelled out even what I decided in the hospital. The 3 things were the brief real falling-in-love with Dusty; the deadening effects of the 5-day binge (on the 5th day I lost complete control & defecated a runny lost liquid in my shorts while Dusty & Allen were so out that when they woke up they both asked, like fighters, “What happened?”); and thirdly the offer from A. A. Wyn to give me money on a book in progress which was already subconsciously rejected by my development psyche. So since that time I’ve been “sketching” [which is in effect the discovery itself] and “writing” as of yore, both at the same time, lamenting and realizing now & then that the writing isn’t as pure and really truly as good prose as the sketching. And because money was about to be paid to me. . . .

  No, my road is clearly & undeniably now this:—

  1. So-called sketching is merely writing about living things, either in front of you or foremost haunting yr. memory (latter is Proust), & the result is not “literature” and certainly not fiction but definitely something living (all this applies to me at least, for I know that Dostoevsky imagined a living thing almost every time, & so Balzac, but my idea is, these were 19th century absorptions & hangups no longer genuinely possible, the thing now, as Céline, Proust, Wolfe, Genet & Joyce have shown, being no longer fictions, imaginings of reality, but the great interior monologue of the modern tongue written either in exile, jail or sickbed . . . what I’d call THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD—IN AN UNDERTONE—FROM UNDERGROUND—“behind the hand,” as in Jerry Newman’s great Lips Page record, “shh!”) and generally speaking
I’m to be forgiven for saying that it is not “fiction” or even “literature” in the literary & publishing sense. Add Henry Miller to the list—an imitator of Céline but a man who in my estimation is more important than Henry James.

  2. This “sketching” is the actual writing that I will have to do from now on because I don’t believe in the rest any more—so-called “objectivity,” so-called “story,” the pretense of it, the smirk.

  3. A new concept beyond the one I figured in the hospital of how to “divide” my work into books, sections, parts. My Balzac-idea was one character at a time—Neal, then Bill, then Seymour, then Henri, then Lucien, then Vicki, then Dusty, then Ma and so on. Now what should it be?—(as, for instance, “sketching” a trip to Ecuador; to Frisco to resurrect Neal; to Europe to cry; to sea to this and that (to Ecuador to find Bill)—a month in N.Y. looking up everybody, sort of underground interviews, that’s what I meant by unspeakable reporter . . . In effect, mon vieux, this might mean a permanent complete daily journal!!) Some new division, a legitimate one, for this living mass of visions of people, places, confessions, sounds etc.—in other words, some way of forming the sketchings in major units. O talk.

  Now I’m thinking out loud & wasting diary space. More anon.

  I haven’t really said why I want to sketch & tell the true story of the world as my appointed part of it flows through my soul—it’s because I am in love with my life and I don’t want to sell it or fluff it or betray it, and that’s what I mean.

  Soon now, this journal will end

  And I believe that there is a general movement at this very moment among the great hidden honest writers living in the world today, some of them bearded saints, one of them that old Spanish Reichian eccentric who lived in the California woods and wrote the legends of the Pomos and other Indians in his own hip crazy way, but he only one of many, a movement of men who in the 19th century would have been great novelists but are now so bared down to the bony truth that fiction can only be fiction to them from this moment onward, who know that the modern world can only be expressed in great straight statements made on the spot almost like Christ speaking from the Cross as the winds rise and just as crucial & fatal as that, men who have come to learn that there is nothing more amazing, instructive, filled with soul-saving love or apocalyptic and world-making than what actually happens anywhere at any moment, and soon, (as Whitman knew).

  I say this movement is growing the more so as cheap novels increase on bookstands and quite naturally.

  But I’m not concerned with reforms, only my love life.

  From now on when I say “write” I therefore mean “sketch”—Another great discovery, to sketch, or write, to music—to any sound.

  Find the center of the long tirade and add another eye within the eye — Wrote till 5—sketches of “Voyeurs” & “Jamaica Night.”

  Now I’m REALLY a “writer”—no more stultifying artifice. . .

  The Saturday nights of my boyhood are haunted by the Hit Parade and the funnies . . . the HP, always big harps unfolding new tunes, it’s been going on since I can remember, back to 1930. In a minute—

  FRIDAY NOVEMBER 16, 1951—Talked with A. A. Wyn in his office; verbal agreement about money after Farrar Straus sees my ms.—If they offer, Wyn will up them, if they don’t he might try to keep it down to next to nothing. Anyway I really ought to go to sea immediately—black gang, S.I.U., at once, then I’ll be a writer. Then got gloriously drunk in Glennon’s—It’s becoming such a universal bar I knew everybody there—Allen, Dusty, mad Paul Fopatitch, Harrington came in, Raduleviches, suddenly Tom & Ed came in and I was stoned; ended up going to Dusty’s with a young kid called Dick Davalos who lifted me drunk off the table and said he didn’t like to see me “abandoned” by my friends, which I was by then. Allen, meanwhile, had a joybangful from a doctor for kidney stones and at dawn I remember him telling me the greatest stories I ever heard about Africa . . . the real Africa. Came home the next day, a little sick, bringing food. Incidentally on Thursday I lost a script in subway, which was luckily returned. Also I got orders from VA hospital to report for re-check Friday . . . I shall go and dig it in the November now. Feel okay. Made important decision about the Neal book—no false action, just visions of what I know he did, NO TIME, NO CHRONOLOGY, composing willy-nilly, as Holmes says, a book surpassing the problem of time by itself being full of the roar of Time (not his words).—Now, if I go to sea—what difference does it make to us today that, or that is, if Dostoevsky had gone to sea on unutterably dreary 19th century Russian merchantman, or Proust, or even Genet . . . but maybe my soul is interested in the quality of the red light on the Buenos Aires waterfront roofs . . . eh? I feel that my nature, which now’s reached violent maturities, that express themselves in super-sobrieties of enormously absorbed writing-work or complete money-flinging happy drunkenness, can best find itself what it needs if I were a seaman with money on land, solitude at sea, hell on earth, write on water, gabble in cities, scribble in ships, etc. I’m about to be 30. I’ve finally solved the lifework. What remains is intensities only. Intense writing, intense drunks, intense travels, intense responsibilities, intense laughter—Duluoz abroad in the international world! Duluoz taking care of himself, money in his wallet, awed, scribbling around the world, a great friend of many, a lover of beautiful women in distant rooms, a man recording the secret consciousness of the times around the world—.

  SATURDAY NOVEMBER 17, 1951—Wedding anniversary. The one with Edie is Aug. 22 which was a date that had mystic significance in my childhood because it was yearly the traditional opening day of the big meets in my marble-racing Turf . . . great races went down in history on that date, say Repulsion winning (beating Kransleet a length) the Sarah Downs Handicap. Nov. 17 had no significance whatever & neither did marriage. There’s no sense talking about death unless you really know something about it, which is only when you’re dying or someone dying around you like Polonius. The sado-masochism of modernity is its blind spot, its Achilles’ heel, its ambiguity, its failure—I’m thinking of Cocteau, Ginsberg, Genet, the painter Fopatitch, maybe Peter Van Meter. I had a dream this afternoon, woke up at noon, deliberately dozed back, and I was taking a young hipster to the Yale Club for a big alumni party to which I was invited, I was wearing a leather jacket & didn’t care, I was going to set a new chic style thereby, & I told the kid “We can even smoke weed in here it’s so cool, that is to say, so chic & unknowing of things like weed,” but lo and behold it was a wild party, almost everybody was in leather jackets, hundreds of hipsters, smoke, wild girls, confusion, queers & one guy who waved me over and I thought it was Peter Van Meter but it wasn’t & I said across the room “Peter?” and he shook his head, his buddy also smiling at me, their wild girls sitting on the floor with inscrutable faces.¶¶ I know now that an anarchy will come in America in this decade or the next . . . a rockbottom strange virility like the one in the dream and yet tremendously opposed to the virility-idea of the 1900’s, some kind of Dostoevskyan change is due—and it will be sado-masochistic, bisexual, futuristic. My position, when it comes, will be inconceivably oldfashioned though I’m sharp enough now to be able to predict it & as I say, to be able to reject it with one hand while accepting it with the other, because, really, I’m too busy for politics, for modes, say, having to do things that span the old and the new, for a reason which will be unknown to them but will teach. And my teachings, as Proust’s teachings through Neal, earlier Wolfe’s teachings through Sammy, and Joyce’s teachings thru the young man who called himself Duluoz & was myself, will reach somebody through somebody and something else strange and living will happen, the purpose of which will always be a mystery but the existence of which will be accepted as permanently valuable & contributing to some great wave of understanding and acceptance through the world . . . the world that ever proceeds towards a light, a thing, won’t be able to talk about it till it happens and it always happens, that is to say, it’s already happened, is happening in fact now and every singl
e moment, and the name of it is Life. O wiggling life! HOW ELSE CAN YOU KNOW HAPPINESS EXCEPT IN LIFE?

  So this is my last “prophecy”—I prophesy life. (The trouble, after that dream, is I should have dealt in facts to support my prophecy but later . . . I want to save this page to include the closing factor of the entire diary, my re-visit to the Hospital . . .) Did a $6 script, walked a few miles, dug sunset clouds, sketched midnight lunchroom; pondering “Go to sea now or finish Dean Road first?” Maw’s all for sea in long run.—Hot tapioca pudding with cold vanilla sauce . . . This is like Proust’s cake soaked in tea, it rouses a million sensations of Lowell. Goddamit I want to use the Proustian method of recollection and amazement but as I go along in life, not after, so therefore why don’t I allow myself to write about Neal and using his real name in my own private scribble book for my own joy!—Doesn’t my own work & joy belong to me any more? IF I DON’T DO THIS, I LIE. —Tonite’s “work” consisted of nothing but expositions about “Dean” for the “reader”—ASSEZ, maudit Christ de Batême—Si tu va être un écrivain commence à ce soir ou commence jamais!! [Here’s what I wrote—“Of course Dean immediately conned the whole gang, Bill Johnson who was the central golden boy before him, Al Buckle the real pillar . . .” —what mincing camping crap]— and I have a real tragic actual Neal in my thoughts all the time that I repress for this kind of coal, here I am with a real mind & won’t use it. If I can’t begin tonight I simply never really will—that’s all. The real, the real, afraid of the rest— Oh Jesus forgive me—