The Unknown Kerouac
Page 28
A big broken hole. The giant clouds glowed white in the night, the Plains grass was yellow, it roundifilated, it wrote huge windy words, softly, outside, across the fine crish-cracking of the struggling car in which the men kept their tongues stiff in their sorrow.
THE END
Brigash, cass mi gass
December 17, 1952
3 A.M.
Rooster
Fellaheen Rooster
Text reconstituted and edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Translated by Jack Kerouac and Jean-Christophe Cloutier
TICS
Tics
From 1952 through 1953, Kerouac was working across a number of notebooks on what would become Book of Sketches (published posthumously in 2006). The mode of automatic writing and deep description characterizing that book are quite similar in tone and content to Tics, a short open-ended typescript that he wrote casually between 1953 and 1956. It is clear from the opening passage that Kerouac originally intended to develop Tics into a full-length book, though his imaginative and thematic aspirations for that book seem to have gotten rechanneled into Memory Babe (begun in 1957; see page 249 in this volume) and Old Angel Midnight (composed between 1956 and 1959).
Tics is an exercise reminiscent of Proust’s exploration in Remembrance of Things Past and the concept of involuntary memory—the sudden welling up of vivid and powerful reminiscences. Just as the flavor of the madeleine in Swann’s Way transports Proust’s narrator back into detailed memories of his childhood home, Kerouac opens up channels of memory by recalling the experience of eating bread and butter dusted with sugar in his mother’s kitchen in Lowell. Each entry in Tics serves as a verbal snapshot taking its place in a literary photo album.
(Note:—Tics are involuntary shivers of memory) (these from 1953)
* * *
A BUNCH OF PEOPLE sitting on a screened porch in Rosemont on some cool golden afternoon & there’s a garden hose—children—I have a little girl friend—There is joy unrememberable, a dream of some kind of lost whatnot—What tic recalls it? I must find out what tics recall what visions, how, how many, where—This is the beginning of the book of Tics
* * *
INK DARK NIGHT in Sunnyvale, sitting on the ground waiting for the others to finish beans—Under pure profound California keen night stars—The lunchcart, the masht potatoes with gravy, the soup, meat, coffee—The smell of steam, water, coalsmoke—The smash-by of the Dark Zipper or the Lark—The emptiness of the track after the fleet—Dull brown light in the crummy where the conductor’s reading SF Call Bulletin & swigging by his oil lamp—
* * *
THE THRILL of the yellow pink NY Daily News on the back page on a summernight when you see the flash photo of the 2 boxers—Zulueta & Persley—the baldheaded white sportshirt photographer who took it at ringside, you see on the almond smelling subway of dust & city night sorrow the 2 black sad wet bodies, the leather gloves, the strain of hard jawbones, the teeth, the mouthpiece bulging lips, the African gloomy broken grick & grit of it in the great Rome Metropolitan night of it—the smell of cigar smoke, the TV of it in sour sud bars—the darting hook, the bobbed cottonhair head—the wrinkled worried boxer brow—Guys in hospitals watching it on TV in dark sweet ward all the city bejewelled Babylonian Outside—the voice of the TV announcer, the crash clang of the subway, great black hot winds of the tunnel blowing on the pink News fluttering the page as you look—Manny New York of handpainted ties, sports shirts, Broadway, Madison Square Garden & later the perfect littleprint serious boxscores—The poor invalid shivering with joy in the hospital bed for this is all he has—The tired weary face of the handler is like the face of Vaudeville, poolrooms, Times Square pineapple & papaya stands, Greenwich Village gangster bars, the compositor room of the gray great Morning Telegraph
* * *
BEFORE TELEVISION when the poor sick guy’d listen to the radio—I was at home, winter, the voice of the announcer so dear & human in the morning it made my chest shiver—The arrangements of their programs, leftover childhood dreams over the passage from one song to another the little sad subsidiary static ticking history of it in the tiny radio hole void,—the thought of the men of the radio shaving in the morning, the bowl of lather, the razor, the big gruff ignorance of it, a little dotter of the house weeping over this after they die—the clear blue bell trumpet of morning shivering in my chest all of it—The hundred thousand details of life once ungraspable now too-graspable & overwhelming in the Macrocosm, learned from T—
* * *
THAT GRAY WALL on the gray out-of-Lawrence Street thru which we always went Sundays driving to Salisbury beach, my first vision of city bleakness, inexplicable unexpected granite wall round & rolling with the outgoing road, you went thru the heart of a suburban area before the highway to Haverhill that followed the Merrimac—O, even, the spectral late afternoon gold on the low rocky Merrimac near Haverhill, lost Sundays
* * *
THE MONTREALISH REDMORNING ALLEY back of St Joseph’s parochial school when gritwinds blew on dirty snow dung of dump wagon horses, fences leaned, Brothers of the Order in black ravened cloaks florped in the keen—Come to order at 8 A.M. for lineup in the gravel, the kids—the rednose snufflebums high on rackety drivers’ seats with reins as old & gray & sad as Time—the barrels by the fence, the other alleys,—
* * *
WE’D BE SWIMMING up the track in dark Templeton, old Hoghead Charley HawHaw the loudmouth, he was the funniest old brushballoper in the world with red face, seegar, great thunderous vocal chords, Sammy White or Sammy Something, a maniac of excitement & he loved to push his Diesel thru the curves of the night out beyond Margarita towards Salinas & Watsonville, westbound now, this is all in the South 250 miles down of Frisco, the San Luis subdivision, pure stars & sorrow—
* * *
THE SMILE OF MY BROTHER GERARD is like the smile I saw in the helicopter in the sky when it flew with the mail which had been written by the smiling faces of the world bending with pens over desks—
* * *
TI NIN—she had a boyfriend on the corner in a house all somehow made of glass & davenports & sun streaming in hot choky—Brunelle, he played a saxophone, took lessons, his hair had a marcelle wave, he was pretty, his farts were interesting, they played tennis in the ground real gannahook cosh turm with stripe & pit pock wire net, smashing the little coo-cherd up & down the smoss & here I am 25 years later with Nin married & mother in the South & me & Mardou, my Negress, lie face down on the bed in the dark holding hands
walking down to
infinity
down a different
road no asphalt
no plot just
death just
tenderness & death
of death
* * *
OF THE JOY that I see whenever in reading my prose so blackly neatly typed on onionskin whitepaper & bound in my blackbinder book looks up at me in the bright little nightlamp down bending it within it I see my whole life has been preserved & been made into something more important than I myself, in other words an angel has made a record of it & in original language of the angels for the angels, pure, monophylactic private murmuring intonated long song of life I have here created—my shelf of prose—it looks up at me not only as I say sometimes with Gerard’s eyes popping up thru great images he made me see (as I said elsewhere) but I see in it another being than myself whirling with life in the anxious reality of himself & it’s like watching a great ballet of myself a drama of myself—with the background drapes not a stagehand’s work but the color of time & rain itself—Poetry
That’s what I was intended to be, a Poet
Poet on Earth
. . . in eternity there’s Great Neal being wild & silly in a parlor, high, with Golden Davenport colors in the air—he’s the Holy Goof on Earth—also a Poet, he has said: “Mind, Rise, Mind”
A GREAT MAD DRIVER IN THE NIGHT
* * *
A TALL MAN has come to me & advised me to write an elegy (on my own death) at once—Hee hou hea haaha
Doctor Sax
O ------------ O
We stare into each other’s eyes
in the gray light of
Paradise Alley
***Me’n Mardou***
We stare into each other’s eyes
in the gray light of
Paradise Alley at
5 o’clock in the
kid screaming
afternoon
cymbals
in
Egypt
I do see there
and castanets of eyes
Ovals of the Goddess Snake
* * *
EXECRABLE SPANISH AMERICA
AFTERNOON IN A WELL TO DO MIDDLECLASS HOUSE on the outskirts of a Mexican jungle town, with awnings even over the graveled drive, a tree, some pale shade, vista of long hot bare field to outside-of-town Indian dobes—The radio plays slow lazy mambos, there is static of an afternoon thundershower—The hero sits in his chair eyes closed in a dismality 100 times worse than that dismality of Julien Green Villages of Provincial France—he is an excited Spaniard part Indian businessman with little mustache, large worldwide ego, all the egomania of a French Canadian hero à la Charley Bissonette rushing eagerly to parties in Lil Canada & out at Long Pond—but this griffa Indian Cocksman taxi executive rushes on eager white shoes in the oppressive broiling humid heat of a jungle village, over stinking sidewalks to the heart the Europeanized heart of town where the radio station is & the announcer his buddy who goes cocking with him at night in their 52 Chevrolet neat & whitewall tired, the sad roadhouse outside town in the Linares Road or the Navajoa or Tampico Road—The clouds of southern America hang huge in the heat, it’s late afternoon turning red but no breeze, no coolness, José the hero is dozing in his father’s redbrick & glassbrick house at the outskirts of town among the few well to do Spanish families (their contempt of the sad stinky tortilla Indian, the long dust of filth afternoons, the coyote dogs snapping at flies in rotten meat noon drowse at the mercado, José’s whole being is pointed to disentangling himself from every possible contact with the Indian life which was the basis of his life white Spanish blood or no, glassbrick house or not, 52 Chevvy or not, privilege of hearing his own buddy’s voice announcing afternoon boleros on the station or not)—It’s in fact close to suppertime and so José’s mother will soon serve supper, porkchop, while Indian women in the wailing yards pound the mournful tortilla on the humble stone he will eat fancy at lace tablecloths no Carrie McNally of Peoria or Blackfoot North Dakota or St. Paul would be caught dead with even if you could get a sale at Russek’s, but tablecloth to the Manzanillos a sign of great privilege & advancement in the Cosmos of Mantes, of Navajoa, of Matamoros, of Guaymas—late, hot, red afternoon, the breeze ruffles up the driveway tree, the sun flashes white hot off the front porch stucco, the static cracks & crashes on the radio as a storm rumbles down the earth of the valley of the world, a fly jumps from the vase to the French blinds to the black mahogany chair—José is bored, but half asleep in his chair, waiting for tonight, for Carmenita’s kisses—O how he hates her guitarplaying Indian brother from the machete swamps down the Rio Road—how could one forget the brown meek humble sweaty background & think only of the—how could one get rid of tortilla yards, stone steps, beaten dirt of huts, fish heads outside stickhuts, grass roofs, stinking smokes, bawling dirtymouth brown babies, the shawls of jungle mothers, the cake of hard black footsole, the fine white dust on dark brown feet, the pain, smell, misery & Indianness of the New World Real—& think only of cars with whitewall tires & new horns that go TRA PA TA PA?—Suits of Palm Beach, dancing the rhumba, rum & coke at Chiquinilla’s, books in the library shelf, gravel driveways, frosty glassware, blinds in windows, potted flowers of white stucco porches, loneliness & dignity of long white walls of bighome gardens, dresses from Lima or Mexico City or even Panama City—mustaches, pomades, barbers, gloves in the jungle winter (yellow kid)—radio announcers, the South American time gong bell of radios, b-l-o-i-l, que hora es señor a la cuatro de la noche—Hoy! Solamente Hoy! Mas Grande Baile del Mundo!—”—
The little mustache, the impossible dismal bleakness and nowhere to go, really, even for rich, almost rich José, nothing to do—nothing to do & all that bare southern America, all that land, that jungle shooting out four sides under eternal afternoon world clouds motionless in the haze—all North & South America of the New World suspended for a minute in the hot afternoon’s most torpid moment in one inexpressibly dull gaspink yawk void gloom, in Lowell they’re frying hamburg as kitchen doors slam, it’s under the same clouds, on the same world shelf, nobody knows what to do there either, Irish of New England or Mestizo Middleclass of southern America it’s all one long hot waiting in the afternoon of boredom & the burden of time all colored by the same hopeless New World bleakbrush forever & for the poor ten times worse & ingrained in dust itself forever—wrangly sad Fellah mutts sprawled in yards, one covered with sores & flies—one shithouse in the entire village for visiting people who have to go and it’s a stone crap caked mess in a ruined courtyard of a poolhall with torn greens on rained on tabletops & the sodapop is warm—Radio crackles boleros, excited eager announcer yurbles—good God there is no hope at the end of the hot dry street & no hope beyond & no hope here & no hope anywhere! And especially no hope in those homes on the edge of town where hope is supposed to be, hope & middleclass solidity, quality, & kind—Bleak as an eye in heaven, as a formal mind struggling to free itself from these bonds of language to a pure sea of images—
* * *
THE WALLS OF THE LOWELL REDBRICK THEATER in the hot afternoon, the back of B. F. Keith’s, the fire escape, the puff clouds hanging in the blue day bowl & the way they march majestically past the high stump tower chimneys of the Silk & Cotton Mills—the reflection of Sad Lowell in the rolling river—the old rubber tires on drowsy afternoons drying off mud by the river bank, the slick on the rocks—Strange eternity in the Polish tenements of Lakeview & the corner of Bridge & Lakeview where old men were famed for cloudgazing in old Lowell histories unwritten—who’d seen bridge traffic change—from carriages to automobiles—Sad Sunday afternoon in Lowell when we’d been visiting relatives, very distant stranger like relatives—The sad 2nd story flats they live in, have white ceiling light casting a dimmer shadowy potted plant light into the Piano room—The alcove, the piano is gloomy as a casket, huge black unused—They sit blearing, saying “Well you know I havent seen him for two years now—he was working in Haverhill last time I heard of—” & I a little kid have to sit there & outside it’s bleak Sunday, people pass drowned in streets of purple red ray sun, cars black as coffins pass—Everything is unspeakably visiting in nature, as tho not alive in the world anymore (& not home in soft overalls & free in fields to roam & ragged wood of yard, personal dust)—now it’s the Visiting in the World so trapped & cant move & swallow the doom of Sunday whole—
Au typewriter
toujours!
* * *
MEMORY BABE
Memory Babe
Begun in November 1957, Memory Babe was one of the first major projects undertaken by Kerouac after the publication of On the Road. It took shape in a series of notebooks and diaries, its compositional history overlapping with that of The Dharma Bums. Kerouac initially hoped to place both manuscripts with Viking, but increasingly turned his attention to The Dharma Bums. While he became intermittently reinvested in Memory Babe at several points during 1958, he eventually let it drop once more to focus on a different project, Lonesome Traveler, published in 1960.
A letter Kerouac wrote in May 1961 to his agent Sterling Lord reasserts his commitment to completing Memory Babe, describing it as a bridge between Visions of Gerard and Doctor Sax in the overarching structure of The Duluoz Legend—though chronologically the events portrayed in Memory Babe occur closer to Doctor Sax than they do Visions of Gerard. Like those works, Memor
y Babe provides an intimate account of Lowell and its Franco-Canadian community through the lens of Kerouac’s childhood. Those books remain the most comprehensive literary ethnography of French Canadian life in 1920s and 1930s New England, mapping and preserving a lost world in a way consistent with Kerouac’s aesthetic of memory.
The text presented here is derived from two typescripts: a twenty-foot-long scroll dated June 1958, and a twenty-two-page typescript in which Kerouac revised the first third of that scroll for Sterling Lord. A note on the first page of the revised typescript identifies Memory Babe as “A Nostalgic Review of the Good Old Days meant to be read simply for the pleasure of reading.”
ON THE LAST NOONDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS VACATION I was coming home from Bartlett Junior High School in Lowell Massachusetts, not yet 14 years old, in the 1930’s, running ahead of all the other school children (having left my home room on the fly) so that I could have an extra five minutes to try to get home via my favorite shortcut, over the rocks of the Merrimac River just downriver from the White Bridge on School Street. It was surprisingly warm and drowsy for December 23, almost like an Indian summer lull in the air. Wannalancit Street is the steep hill street that leads down from the school, in the mornings it was always a great scene of slowly straggling children mounting to their classes, some of them on bikes, which they ambled from side to side, slowly, pumping hell out of their legs only because they were too proud to get off and push the bike, which would have been easier. Coming down the hill was always very easy, especially after the afternoon classes and you knew you were done with school for the night. But now we had another (shortened) afternoon to go to school, for silly (I thought) Christmas celebrations and paper-pastings in windows, I wished it was the end and we could start our Christmas vacation. I was wearing my usual baseball hat cocked slightly to the right, and a dumpy sweater over my shirt, with the collar opened wide, and the usual corduroy pants. I was gawky, beginning to grow, but still a child, still with a child’s blue liquid stare and a child’s chagrined look and smile. Wannalancit Street was a quiet old street with nice old New England homes where I always imagined little boys with glasses lived, who wore white sneakers and white duck trousers and never had to worry about enough money to buy a bike. It was always brown screened porches way at the back concealed by old trees, the actual New England everybody imagines, as apart from the New England of my own French Canadian experience, the New England of tenements (later) and of Canadian neighborhoods with closely huddled white cottages on cobbled streets or dirt roads like Sarah Avenue where I was living at this time. At the foot of Wannalancit I turned and looked back and saw the kids starting down after me. I hurried right, on Pawtucket Boulevard, then left on School Street and across the street to the iron pickets of the orphanage with its silvery windows behind pines where I always imagined a man knitting in the window seeing all. Then down further where the board fence began, hiding the orphanage where little boys in short black pants and little girls in black dresses trimmed in white lace played with balls or seesawed and there was one square little hole in the fence where you could stop and peek in at them or where they themselves could look out at free homecoming schoolchildren. Beyond them you always saw the supervisory nuns with their huge crucifixes hanging by their sensual Winged Victory black hip shrouds, like the forward motion world hips of the great Venus de Milos of antiquity. I hurried past there, taking one quick look at the sad children, and on the bridge. The White Bridge was made of white concrete and already had many cracks in it from swollen spring Merrimacs when the river, instead of as now, would come slurring over the Falls in a hungry slurge of brown dirty waters from New Hampshire in the North and would pound against the concrete bottoms of the bridge and boil brownly and lunge on, huge and snaky, over the rocks and down towards the Moody Street Bridge in so monstrous a watery mess that you never could quite believe your eyes when it got like that in March. Now, in December, with no recent heavy snows and no rain, the river was quiescent and only the day before I had managed to cross the river over the rocks. There were little wooden stairs near the railing of the bridge where the canal was (the canal ran parallel to the river behind its own higher protective granite wall) that you could use to go down to the concrete canal walk which in earlier days, before I was born, when my father was wooing my mother with his spindly pants and funny hat, used to be the loverslane walk of lovers. Now the police had put a stop to that, because of several suicides, so when I jumped over the rail and went down the steps I was always going against the law but I always did it so fast nobody in authority ever saw me. I went down the steps, hurried along the concrete walk, which had iron rails, and down to the part where it was not very high above the sands of the river shore and there I jumped down into the sand and hurried to the gurglings of the river where it wound and slithered among slatey antique rocks that were as sharp as razors sometimes altho some of them were just simply round and smooth like sea pebbles. Sometimes the river formed pools among slate castles, or sometimes it broke loose and flung itself (five feet wide at points) in a deep and dangerous run. Usually I could find convenient ways to jump the dangerous places but today I realized there must have been some snow melting in New Hampshire the day before, the river was a little bit higher. I hurried over the rocks following my usual route. I sat for awhile contemplating the dangerous looking midstream which had widened from five feet to about six overnight. It was hot and drowsy almost on the rocks, it brought back memories of the summers when we’d go down there with sticks and string and worms and fish for dirty old suckers that we never used. Actually I had never fished myself but watched the other boys. Further down, under the Moody Street Bridge, the rocks had formed pools that were so perfect they were used all summer as swimming holes by the boys of Gershon Avenue and of Little Canada across the river. I watched the children crossing the White Bridge now and felt strong and self sufficient to be a rock crosser. But I saw after awhile it wouldnt do, I’d drown, and had to turn back. I considered going further down the granite walks but realized the steps had been torn down at the Moody Street Bridge so there was no other alternative but to go back the way I came and get home later than anybody else. I went up the steps, vaulted back on the bridge with my famous two handed leap (hands on rail, feet over without touching) and suddenly decided to go home via Pawtucket Boulevard and not go to school that afternoon. But I knew my mother would make me go to school anyway. I was too young at this time to play voluntary hookie. “I’ll say I’m sick,” I thought, “and then I’ll stay in my room all afternoon and play races, and baseball too.” I had all my games in my room. I went by the orphanage again and went down Pawtucket Boulevard, past the orphanage grotto where on summer nights my mother and her cousin Bea would go do the Stations of the Cross, then suddenly I was passing my Uncle Joe’s gloomy brown house on Mt. Washington Street (Bea’s father) and I was very thirsty and decided to go in and ask him for a glass of water. Opening the kitchen door I realized there was no one awake or about. It was dead silent. The sun slanted into the old Canadian kitchen with its brown woodworks and religious calendars on doors and as always there was the faint aroma of Cu-Bab cigarettes which Uncle Joe had to smoke for his asthma. “Mon oncle Joe?” I went to the tap and poured a glass of water in a huge strange Uncle Joe glass and then walked into the livingroom where Bea’s piano was, and suddenly I heard a stirring in the bedroom and Aunt Leontine came out through the bead curtains with her glinting spectacles and thin New England righteous face and said in a voice as familiar as the voice of my dreams: