The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Teach me to write “for your own future reference”—if I were in Istanbul tonight wouldn’t it be best to fill an entire notebook with the things that I see in front of me & with my visions of what I see plus whatever haunted hangup was underway (say my relation to ship or whatnot) instead of . . . some dumb story or other. The story is the echo chamber of my own brain maybe . . . let me tell the story of right now for instance . . . but not now . . . but if I do, completely, I might get to Neal via the honest way. Oh help me!—And supposing Allen had kept complete track of all that Africa adventure; who is it always says fiction is more interesting than truth? There’s only one story and that’s completely what happened in actual life somewhere, sometime; and there’s no way of knowing it unless you were there and scribbled it down as it took place. Another possibility is the complete memory of someone, or something, which can only be, as Proust said, the memory that haunts, not the necessity memory, the one that says . . . “What belongs here now is—”; rather, the memory that begins “Oh God that time that he—”

  TUESDAY NOVEMBER 20, 1951—Why does the mere sight of the French word, future-tense verb BOULEVERSERA in a review from La Voix du Nord fill me with a premonition not only of the great joy I will get from Paris next year, next Spring, but the joy and purpose of all my life? These past days I sketched in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Garden cafeteria, & was standing in front of 42nd St. Grant’s picking my teeth when old Dark Eyes Ginger stopped in the flowing crowd & stared at me with amazement—We talked & sang all night; I showed her “Home in Wounded Knee” for her folk repertory—Poor Ginger!—lost, eager, idealistic, mad . . . Poor Hal!—sick, broken, crazy, confused, blind. I Accept lostness Forever

  Tonight I know everything. It’s also the night I discovered that I can write down the entire universe of my dreams, my subconscious dreams, as well as the rest . . . And how to REALLY do Neal or anybody, bless my soul, bless and protect my bursting, my breakable, my unlosable soul. (I’ll win.) It’s like Bobby Thomson’s homerun, my soul tonight—Oh fancy name for childlike place. —Happiness is like a baby olive; you can’t take big bites out of it, or hurry it along; despair is like the pit, the closer you are to it the sweeter is happiness. So it’s this (baby olive or no baby olive):—everything is really lost, don’t ever be fooled. My own destruction is nevertheless the only thing that will ever prevent me from believing in the holy contour of life.

  FRIDAY NOVEMBER 23, 1951—What to say? Went to the hospital this morning at 10, rising from Dusty’s couch after a big Thanksgiving party with Ginger, Mardean, Alan Ansen, Lucien, Jerry Newman, Cessa, Allen, and others. Ansen is amazing . . . and reminds me of the fact that my communication on every level of the mind is only possible with people like Ansen with the sole exception of Neal . . . how sad my life will be even later than this. At the hospital nothing really happened, maybe because of hangover, or maybe I forsaw all of it anyhow. Tonight I’m writing a big letter to Neal. Wrote 3300 words of it at midnite—I think my next journal should be in “scribble” instead of print.— (I think I drink because I want to make people respond wildly, be happy, enthusiastic.)

  SATURDAY NOVEMBER 24, 1951—Walked 2 miles in Jamaica, sketched a little; typed up Neal’s letter; ate beans & ham, bought cider & bread; walked again at night, thought “Now, and now, the time is coming to ‘sketch’ your own mind, and what is more specific, sketch the flow of the universe of Neal or anyone else that already exists intact in yr. mind.” Is this the answer? Maybe the only answer is work—ragged work no; the answer is absorbed & profound work, profoundly hungup struggles with the pencil to go fast enough to delineate what I really know. This really dear diary now comes to a close . . . I may have decided the great work-factors of my life in its pages, I may not—but anyway it’s dear, and Duluoz went on. —The truth is hilarious, that’s what. . . and garrulous . . . and ridiculous. The value is in the dream; life is a dream. Feeling is the key for me. Admit it, putting together a ms. for publication form is hack work . . . composing itself must be wild, undisciplined, pure, eager, coming in deep from under, the crazier the better. Thought all, all night—I decided to write till Xmas, then put papers together & see what I’ve got.

  SUNDAY NOVEMBER 25, 1951—Something that you feel will find its own form. That’s all there is to it. So, after a 1½ mile walk, I started on the redbrick wall behind the neons to prove this & begin my-life-alone-in-America: I’m lost, but my work is found. Last night there was a face in my window, saying “Write what you want.” I thought it was Faulkner, I think it was really Dr. Sax. I’m going to write over 3000 words a day like this and see what I have at Xmas.

  So the growing peace, and the most beautiful visions of life, that began three months ago & which were great enough for a Remembrance 10,000,000 words long, the peace has led to a mind filled with work and a soul fortified with the knowledge of the inevitability of loss—and so goodbye sweet journal, adieu calm book, may the best hearts find you.

  *Of course meanwhile earning $25 a week on 20th Century Fox synopses.

  †I think—

  ‡[(It was actually the great year of my enlightenment, & Gary Snyder’s, too, (1960 I say this)]

  §[(Visions of Cody . . . later title)]

  ¶[(Q. V. Chet Baker 1953) (John Griffin 1958) (Ornette Coleman 1960)]

  **Old Bull Baloon

  ††[Visions of Cody]

  ‡‡It’s actually $20 average—$18 this week.

  §§Maggie Cassidy

  ¶¶A dream prophecy of the “Beat Generation” in 1960!

  Epilogue

  I think a change has come in my life

  and though that’ll mean so very little

  a few years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years

  from now, maybe the work that I’ll do

  because of it will mean a lot and

  I hope it does—whether my children,

  historians, or that ancient-history worm

  reads this, I say it anyway, I hope

  it is true that a man can die and

  yet not only live in others but give

  them life, and not only life but

  that great consciousness of life that

  made cathedrals rise from the smoke

  & rickets of the poor, mantles fall

  from illuminated kings, gospels spread

  from twisted tortured mouths or living

  saints that sit in dust, crying, crying

  crying, till all eyes see.

  ON THE ROAD

  OLD BULL IN THE BOWERY

  (1952, MEXICO CITY)

  [WRITTEN IN FRENCH PATOIS]

  Old Bull in the Bowery

  Between the completion of the 1951 scroll manuscript and the publication of the 1957 Viking Press edition of On the Road, Kerouac continued to tinker with and reimagine the parameters of his narrative. In a January 10, 1953, letter to Neal Cassady, composed in Richmond Hill, Kerouac proclaimed: “In Mexico, after you left, I in 5 days wrote, in French, a novel about me and you when we was kids in 1935 meeting in Chinatown with Uncle Bill Balloon, your father and my father and some sexy blondes in a bedroom with a French Canadian rake and an old Model T. You’ll read it in print someday and laugh. It’s the solution to the ‘On the Road’ plots all of em and I will hand it in soon as I finish translating and typing.”

  Kerouac composed this French text primarily in two separate notebooks from December 1952, in which he had given it two working titles: Sur le chemin and French Old Bull in the Bowery. Despite his claim to have found the solution to On the Road—which involved creating an imaginary narrative of Kerouac and Neal meeting as children during the Great Depression—he was not yet finished with this particular draft. In 1954, he set about translating Sur le chemin into English, embellishing as he went, an effort resulting in a forty-three-page typescript, Old Bull in the Bowery.

  Kerouac never completed that translation, however, and Sur le chemin exists in Kerouac’s archive as a bilingual text scattered across several 1952 patois man
uscripts, his partial 1954 translation, and English-language inserts, two of which he also inserted into Visions of Cody.

  The text included here, edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, represents a conflation of Kerouac’s unfinished translation and Cloutier’s translation of the remainder, along with some passages originally in English that have been interpolated according to Kerouac’s indications.

  IN THE MONTH OF OCTOBER, 1935, in the night of our real restless lives, a car came from the West, from Denver, on the road for New York. In the car were Dean Pomeray, a wino; Dean Pomeray Jr. his little son of nine; and Rolfe Glendiver, his step son, 24. It was an old Model T Ford. All three had their eyes tied on the road in the night through the windshield; when they closed their eyes they saw the road roll, white line in black floor; but it was Rolfe driving all the way. The others didn’t know they had the right to sleep in back on the blankets and the old cans and the old suitcases deboxed with their ropes tied around, if they wanted.

  Rolfe wore cowboy boots, he was a cowboy on the Robeson Bar O Bar Ranch at Gunnison, Colorado, the other side of the Great Divide from Denver; a real cowboy, he broke boncs, he’d have a broken back in ten years; he castrated bulls and rode the long fences with shears and pliers, eyes half closed in the wind. He had a handsome face, a fine nose, blue eyes, and laughed with white teeth. He was very nice but lost himself in his thoughts; they didn’t understand him at home. He was the tragic son of broken marriage and death of both parents, he was all alone among the aunts of eternity in a big house full of incomprehensible bustle with doors that opened on the mountains of snow and rock, the Rockies, and the great dun bleak land of Denver plain. The house was on the foot of the mountain, near Morrison Road.

  Old Pomeray had his wine, a bottle of port wine, California Four Star brand; he was a Larimer Street wino in Denver; his little son panhandled for him; had spoken for him in the night courts with great teeth of district juvenile courts going in his face; at present they lived in a flophouse together, the “Skylark” near the Windsor Hotel at Larimer and 19th. Rolfe was the son of Pomeray’s wife from another marriage, his poor wife tragic and dead who’d had the big jaw draped and fallen like the drapes of life . . . all kinds of death we had not so long ago. Rolfe was the only one of the Glendivers who took pains with the old widowed alcoholic and his little son with the dirty ears the family’d occasionally let stay in the field house. There had been nights when you saw the light of the big house and the brown light of the shack at the same time in the same wind. . . .

  Okay, he was going to drive them to New York to meet Uncle Bull Baloon who had found them a place to live in the “Bowery,” in New York—near Chatham Square and Chinatown. Baloon was the brother of the mother. They believed that, they were going to live in New York in a real place with sinks and a stove and the father was going to work his trade as a barber in the exciting blue morning of the Bowery, with rags whipping in the wind, “We’ll cook our steaks ourselves,” he’d say, the old man, explaining to his little son beside the cold radiators of poor Western hotels during the Depression, “we’ll be able to save our money to eat.” It was not a practical idea, but there was no one in the car who knew that.

  The car crossed the great gray studies of Indiana in the fall when the sun isn’t lighting the harvest stacks. It was vast, beautiful; the boys didn’t see anything, they talked about their plans; in the nights the harvest moon came out and they saw the harvest stacks with their melancholy frowse making little hairs in the somberness, clear like that. It was the great land around where Pomeray’s parents came from. “Near Dakota, Rolfe? We all come from here, we all had pitchforks. I had a Aunt Mandy that lived in Keota Ioway, one in Poplar Bluffs had cans of pork and beans by the cases.” They talked full of lies all night.

  The little boy never let his head fall, he looked directly ahead of him with his eyes fallen, understanding what was going to happen, once in a while he’d look at his foot and fix a tape bandage inside his shoe, no socks and the foot all black and dirty; a shirt under a little black sweater full of holes; a tennis ball in his hand. It was little Dean Pomeray, they called him “Dopey” now in the gangs of little Negroes and Indians who played in the street at Welton and 27th near the gas tank of Denver, “Dopey” because he thought his thoughts way behind their fires, they could see his eyes brillianting in the darkness, a little boy frightening and frightened by the Phantom of the Opera of our childhood, the big ghosts of wind that hid near the redbrick warehouses of Market Street back of Wazee and stole with black rags for gloves the little winds that came out of the boxcars so lonely. “Damn it was dirty!”—you’d think the foreman of the first floor would show up in a minute with his pocketbook broken in a can if you should ever ask him to stay for the night. Little Dean and his father had found the key to the joy of innocence, they thought, in this trip. The poor blah blahs of cold corners . . . It had been decided; the little son let the old man be, he wasn’t going to say anything; but he had his own ideas—but the thing that ran his father was God. He was a Catholic, from his mother, he sang little altar boy songs, little heart-boy songs, in the haystacks dirtied by the horses of Nebraska; he waited in the wind praying for the toot toot of the engineer of the chain gang freight before rising from the barrels of the tracks to climb a gondola. He saw the mountain stars in the sky; trees yelled at him and his father near creeks; malignantly crashing from every leaf; the great wheels rolled underneath them like gigantic beasts haggard with fright walking arm-to-mouth pushing in the whitenesses of the fog the empowdering monstrous weights of steel that screamed on the track with a “squee squee”—it was the dog of their try-sleep in coats in the night, heads on iron.

  In New York they were met by Uncle Bull. In the letter, the second letter, explaining, he had said to come on to an 18 Pott Street address. When they entered New York the cowboy and Pomeray and little Dean began to ask for 18 Pott Street. It was gray and dirty, little Dean was scared. He—for a little reason like the boy who’s too small for the bed and the bed doesn’t belong to him—got scared when they passed dirty garbage cans leaning one against the other in front of a theater show, and Negroes with big hats passed who spat early in the morning. It wasn’t glad like he’d imagined. Dean thought to see big black buildings undersupported by golden light, like windows cut in cardboard, with the little smoke that comes out of hidden pots and the big marble floor with potted plants inside the windows, women in gold printed on the windows like plaques of golden banks, like on restaurant menus of old newspapers found on the ground. Rolfe and Pomeray were impossibly lost in the city. Fifth Avenue. “Eighteen Pott Street. You got me, mister!” said the New Yorkers hearing it.

  “Go down this way,” said Pomeray. Rolfe looked the other. They turned the car in the middle of traffic, Lord and Taylor’s at high noon, to think, to turn. Sixth Avenue. They found their way to Pott Street only by the grace of God . . . There were policemen who tried to explain to them how to get just to Chinatown, and they didn’t understand. Aw mystery.

  They found the way only when an old bum in Lafayette Street told them with motions and actions, how—an old clown in rags, a sick devil agitating himself in the dirty winds of the street late in the afternoon his big sunken teeth enduring life hard in the redness of seven o’clock autumn and the other boys all lined up behind him like murders with hands in their pockets. “Not when you get to the corner of the two hockshops,” the bum was yelling earnestly, “the corner of the three!” It was red and sad to see him disappear around a platform of old wood and iron. Like that, the instructions anxious and direct showing them exactly how to find the corner he meant, they didn’t have to read the signs, just look, but they asked themselves if the bum wanted to play the fool and yakked about it, and they found 18 Pott Street. Old Bull was there on the sidewalk, cigar in mouth, with a gray fedora hat and a dark gray overcoat that flapped in the wind; he was yakking with his big toothless mouth, with a Chinaman. The boys in the car gaped; it was something new.

 
The Chinese was dressed in an old gray sweater, and old pants, no hat, gray hair—he owned the queer loft upstairs, second story, with big curtains in the show windows. It was a place for cards, on old boxes from his store, where he lit an old bulb once in a while and played cards. There were bags of rice, boxes of dried fish and noodles in the black corners. On the floor he had put old blankets on cardboard, and that was for the convenience of Uncle Bull when he got drunk and couldn’t make it to his room at the Roxy Hotel on 42nd Street while waiting for his relatives from Denver. It had been a wild week between these two but there was no more time to talk about it, the others had arrived.