The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  So as we started down Lakeview Avenue towards the heart of Centreville (the part of Lowell where we’d both been born) we left behind us our fields, our gray woods, the vision of which had been instilled in our hearts by so many old movies, cowboy serials that used to run at the Royal Theater for 15 weeks in a row with all the kids screaming for the conclusion. Continued Next Week and you’d see great soft gray wagons tumbling down dusty gorges, the heroine in calico dress gasping, great spiders of film-defect across the general snowy mystery & electricity of the old films in the texture of which Mike and I had discovered the sense of rain in the woods out by Dracut. The old dream . . . And when you saw the hero cowboy riding away at the end, waving his white hat, you went with him into the old American dream of space and plains and deserts, which to Mike was embodied by playing Buck Jones and to me too but also my games, my gray rainy games in my room. Now we were back in town heading down Lakeview Avenue along by the street where I was born, Lupine Road, I never even knew which house it was, every time I passed there I’d look and wonder and remember the pine trees on the hill above the house as my first memory. At the heart of Centreville were all the stores and old gray wood tenements around where our fathers had played cards and had clubs before we were born and so there was always a mysterious soft sadness somewhere around there. Now our fathers were centering their activities in Pawtucketville across the river. To the French Canadian kids of Lowell Centreville must seem almost as ancient as its namesake in the Medieval pope capital of France. The church there was St Louis de France where I’d been baptized (Mike too) and where my brother’d had his funeral. I was always afraid to go in there . . . Our pride and delight this Saturday morning was in revisiting our old farmer field in back of the parochial school where we’d played our first games as little chums of seven and eight years old. There we had a tree we’d named The Fresh Air Taxicab, we used to climb it, sit in it and play that we were Amos and Andy. There were little thickets and hills all around too, great for all kinds of games including sliding in the winter. But as we revisited our tree now we saw that it was dead, there was a gaping hole in it and the limbs looked done. “Well, I reckon our old fresh air taxicab aint gonna last much longer, Jackie. Boy did we sure have fun here. Remember that morning you stept right in a cowflap. Hyoohyoo hyoo! I chipped off a little piece of the tree and put it my pocket as a keepsake. A few years later the tree disappeared, too. We ambled on down to Bunker Hill St. where Mike was born and where he lived when I first met him, in those first days when he’d come to my house Sunday mornings in his white knickers, to come and get me for church, and for my mother he’d dutifully go down the cellar and haul up a bucket of coal. We also passed my own old house on West St., a little white cottage with creeping roses and a big lawn and a back shed where we’d put on plays and hammered at the organ. Mike with his loyal arm around me pointed out the holes in the fence: “Things keep a creeping along dont they?” We went up West Sixth Street, past the old waterworks the sight of which, in its redbrick and huge windows with inside huge pumps, is as sad as time. We hit Bridge Street and remembered the time we’d gone up to the reservoir on top of Christian Hill up there on a long afternoon of eternal sun and shadow, the windy light. “Yessir, we shore did have our times, Jackie.” We went down Bridge Street with its stores and tenements and came to the bridge, which crossed the river where it foamed again over scummy rocks and then went up to Lawrence and out. Across the bridge immediately you saw the narrow walls of factories and warehouses and pinpointing down the middle to the Square at the end where the stores and multitudes were. As a little child I had always been taken across this bridge to come to Lowell center and at night, with those red neons shining among the factory redbricks, the gay lights, the drear wind, the spindle footed men with derbies hurrying nowhere it had always represented to me the heart of Cityness. Especially and saddest of all because my father’s printing shop was right in back there, behind the canal, a great dreary plant with dusty windows and huge presses roaring and my father always in his printer’s apron walking around scowling. The Merrimack Square Theater was just opening as we arrived, the last of the line of waiting kids was being fed in. We got in just in time for the beginning of Monkey Business and suddenly when we saw Harpo peeking up out of a stowaway barrel and taking the barrel cover as though it was a boudoir mirror and pretending to powder himself we laughed and laughed. Then in the later parts of the movie when all the children were entranced by Harpo with his angel face plucking beautifully, sometimes showering fingertips over the harp’s chords, we all felt like crying and we all knew Harpo was an angel from heaven come to make little children laugh and cry. It was only years later I discovered there is a famous harpist in India who has also taken a vow of silence and plays the harp to multitudes of children as he roams across from Bombay to Calcutta and up the Ganges to Benares. Of course our great madhatter Groucho was gliding around importuning widows with warts on their chins, and finally we saw Harpo again on a bicycle chasing a blonde but he has a fishingpole with bait at the end of it and he’s chasing that too, as tho giving himself motive power. Then there’s Chico looking and fishing around a haystack and when Groucho says what’re you looking for? he says “A needle.” O Harpo Marx! playing his gray harp of gold for all the quiet children in the balcony as adults yawn in the orchestra! Stealing silverware, bug spraying the guests, powderpuffing his white fair face with fishbarrel cover. Harpo! who was that Lion I saw you with? Always chiding with his horn in the cane of his golden belt. Always emerging from his pockets another Harpo hand for the harp, screwing it on to his wrists! Was his vow of silence an Indian Harp? All those other movies we didnt care about, the 1930’s southern accents of Una Merkel, evil old slick crooks with gray lapels never winning out they had big hands and ghosts in the diary room. All of us eager eyed watching for the black spots in white snow, insects in heaven. The rainy first Rintintin movies of our hearts! Lon Chaney leaving a puff of smoke and a spot of blood on the gray brain rug. And always late in the afternoon when the show was almost over and we saw the heroes eating off trays in beds we all grew hungry and wanted to go home and eat. Feeling dopey we were always herded out in toto by the ushers, so other lines of kids could come in, and outside the street was real and we didnt know it any more. We went home with our Harpo in our hearts.

  DOING LITERARY WORK: AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK KEROUAC

  Doing Literary Work: An Interview with Jack Kerouac

  This conversation between Kerouac and his longtime friend, the writer John Clellon Holmes, was forwarded to Stella Kerouac via the Sterling Lord Agency in February 1985. Holmes explains in his accompanying letter to Kerouac’s widow that he had conducted this interview by mail in June 1963, as part of his research for his book Nothing More to Declare (1967). In 1985, Holmes was moved to revisit the exchange as a result of what he considered to be continuing and damaging public misperceptions “about Jack’s dedicated and responsible life as an artist,” which most of Kerouac’s biographers had done little to quell or correct. Holmes hoped to publish the interview but was unable to do so prior to his death in 1988.

  Holmes was one of Kerouac’s most loyal friends and ardent supporters, and their ease and familiarity with each other is evident throughout the exchange. Holmes presents Kerouac with a deft series of questions regarding his life, his process, and the evolution of his stylistic and conceptual concerns in a fashion rarely matched in other interviews.

  IN the early summer of 1963, I was writing a series of essays on the Beat Years to be called Nothing More to Declare, and I asked Jack Kerouac if he would help me with the one on his work. We had known one another for fifteen years, and had talked life & literature & truth for a hundred nights or so (as young novelists tend to do), and he readily agreed to my request. His public notoriety as a sort of literary Marlon Brando was at low ebb that year, and scholarly attention to the scope of his work had yet to begin. He was feeling peevish and neglected by the world, and I (being four years younger) was
still laboring under the illusion that critics could be educated, and that my book would do it. Though he was living in Northport, Long Island, and I was just across the Sound in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, he had been so grossly misquoted in the press by then that I suggested that we do our interview through the mails so that his answers to my questions would be absolutely accurate to his special way with language. He thought that was a good idea, and only stipulated that his replies be used in “their entirety” so as to reflect the way his mind went on as well.

  The exchange took place in mid-June, and it consisted of two letters—my questions in the first (June 12, 1963), his answers in the second (dated only June). I have intermixed the letters here to join each query with its reply, but I have amended or excised nothing, except for a closing paragraph in my letter that would have confused the sequence. The exchange proved to be too long to work into the narrative essay that I eventually wrote, and it has remained in my files until now—an oddly formal, earnest, sometimes evasive Alphonse & Gaston routine between two friends, doing literary work, aware they are speaking for the record, but occasionally lapsing into the impatient shorthand of long acquaintance anyway.

  When my book was published, with nothing of the interview included, he wrote to say that he felt “redeemed” by what I had written about him, and the two letters were never mentioned between us again. After he died in 1969, the tide of books about him began to rise, but good or bad (it seemed to me) few of them did proper justice to Kerouac’s essential gravity and dedication as a writer. In any case it is the novelist rather than the “King of the Beats” who is reflected here. We were writing to each other as craftsmen in the same vocation, brothers in a common endeavor, and I offer this exchange now as evidence of the stubborn fidelity to his own purchase on the truth that motivates any writer serious enough to be taken seriously. I have retained Kerouac’s original spelling and punctuation as well as my own. —JOHN CLELLON HOLMES

  HOLMES: Nagging needle-nose notions first: Do you still see yourself as a shambler after people who interest you? Was it a mystery in those people that interested you? Something you couldn’t immediately understand?

  KEROUAC: When you’re young and enthusiastic, and you’re a writer, you should follow what it pleases your heart to follow and not what writing-coaches or even parents tell you to follow. My young friends were charming and charm is a mystery. Nowadays I wouldnt even shamble after the Aga Khan and his entire hareem.

  HOLMES: On the Road— “He had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties.” Did this happen to you? Why? For instance, I knew you then: what moulting occurs at that period? A last weaning? What? What in your case?

  KEROUAC: Death of my father, hardship of my mother, myself ill, poor, working without hope of help or being published, meanwhile grubby jobs and the essential shame of hitch hiking.

  HOLMES: In On the Road, you still see things in terms of superlatives, exuberance, “the most beautiful girl,” “the greatest smile in all the world” etc.: after this book this kind of superlative begins to fade, you become more precise and yet sadder too. Was this simply a stylistic honing? A surer grip on your mind and meanings? Or a disapointment, a reconciliation?

  KEROUAC: A disappointment. I was an imbecilically joyous healthy lad bent on thinking only “glad” thoughts but for deliberate philosophical reasons, in fact as a deliberate counter argument to Oswald Spengler and all his Late Civilization Skepsis. Finally the world creeped up on me (especially after the publication of my books) and drove in the lesson. I get the message. I have a message I’ll send back.

  HOLMES: What does October mean to you? Time of work? Return to toil? End of seasons and irresponsibilities? October: a sobering time, the twilight of the year; metaphysical, waning, serious reds invest the world.

  KEROUAC: October is when cold winds rattle your windowpane and you can wrap up in blankets and sleep again like a man of the North. October sweeps away the cobwebs of summer’s essential cancerous fungoid diseasedness. I love the cold. My ancestors are from the North. Nietzsche said: “It is late October, the grapes are turning brown.”

  HOLMES: On the Road— “I want to marry a girl, so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time—all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.” I remember the country-family-farm end of Town and City, and it was your aim then, and re-echoed here: what happened? Why is Duluoz caught in the franticness? What immured him in franticness? What deluge of reality drowned his mind and its dream? There’s a loss here somewhere, and it starts with the uprooting from Lowell, plunge into the ugliness of the World City, attraction to that against the will, though still hankering, and then (sometime in the early 50’s—why do I feel it was Mexico-time 1952?) there is a subtle, somehow final shift. You attain yourself, your finest work is done during that time, but you are changed afterwards, and that particular hope (girl-home-god) wanes.

  KEROUAC: “Girl-home-God” waned when a girl doubly betrayed me in the most horribly dishonest way imaginable. I hit the road and discovered I’d never really known how to “rest my soul” anyway, which is, by cultivating my own heart in solitude. “Be ye lamps unto thyselves,” were Buddha’s last reported words. Millions of silent hermits know this and need no “help” from anyone, thank you.

  HOLMES: In On the Road, page 124— “. . . longing for death, the womb, the lost bliss . . .” Tell me about this longing, coming at the bottom of reality. And was it this, foreshadowed in you so long, that opened you to Buddhism when the time came?

  KEROUAC: Everybody longs to have not been born at all whether they admit it or not. They remember the bliss of before they were born. S’why infants cry when they come outa the womb. You have to drag em screaming into our miserably “swell” party.

  HOLMES: What does Dean-Neal-Cody’s recurrent WE KNOW TIME signify? (I think I know, but tell me?)

  KEROUAC: “We know time” applies to the beat of the clock, a jazz beat drumming the tune along to its end, the beat of the tires on the road getting us there, the beat of the heart, of the hammer, of events, appointments, getting things done, going on to new things, seasons, bing, bang, the beat in fact of an ordinary housewife’s day or of a crazy crosscountry hipster’s day, who cares? To question “WE KNOW TIME” is non-sequitur, everybody’s running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off anyway and enjoying it. When the freeway is wide open and everybody’s rolling playing different radio stations and the announcers themselves are beating out commercials and tunes in a beat of their own, it’s like a scene in Hell, which is what Time is.

  HOLMES: Visions of Cody— “. . . as if Cody and I were construction workers not dissipates who dissipate so much it becomes a principle and finally a philosophy and finally a revelation.” Do you see dissipation as an attaining-to-something, or as a relaxation-from-it? And even though of course BOTH, how do you view all our vast dissipations in light of our intentions and our basic seriousness? Are we irrevocably of two minds? I feel this break in you, this unceasing sense of division, even down to the fact that finally Duluoz is not Kerouac. Kerouac includes Duluoz but is very much more, Duluoz often does not understand but Kerouac, at the very moment of speaking in Duluoz’ voice, does always see around him, and beyond. Can we, in our widest consciousness, only remain in life via the bridges and abysses of dissipation? Or what?