The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  HOLMES: Baldwin, and most other negroes, have complained about your “wishing to be a negro, etc.” Denver night in O.T.R. They accuse you of being Crow-Jim, romantic, adolescent, and dare you to read that paragraph in the Savoy. Answer them through me. Indeed, tell me about what negroes have meant to you, expatiate, and I don’t mean on any foolish social-cum-liberal level. Why are we all such unhappy white-men, and, searching something, enamored of the joy-without-cause we feel in negroes and others? Tell me off, Merlin.

  KEROUAC: I was romantic when I wrote that line and I meant it when I wrote it. I was a kid and I wanted to have more fun in Denver that night in 1949. James Baldwin wants to stir up as much interest in his Civil Rights fight as he can, get everybody involved, all the writers probably, but I have no time for politics, just Art.

  HOLMES: And now, Buddhism. (No snap-judgements here, please.) Where are you now? What lies ahead for us? (I often feel that some sort of Buddhism lies ahead for the West like a fatality.) What drives us to it? What moulting of the consciousness has carried us all beyond the either/or of the Faustian intelligence? What sustains you, now, through your day—you’ve always carried on a dialogue with the Unseen. What in God’s name orphaned you so from the silly involvements you describe some of your boyhood friends as growing into? It happened back there in the dark.

  KEROUAC: No Buddhism at all lies ahead for the “West,” but, just as you call it: the either-or of Faustianism. Space-exploration is pure Faust, the Gothic Spire has taken off from the gantry and is going where it was meant to go, into the heavens. The essential Faustian person is of course German—von Braun is Faust at work, his colleagues in Russia too. Buddhism (Chan, Zen) is of no concern whatever to anybody in the “West” but powerless scholars and solitaries. However, Buddhism will thus be carried to other planets eventually. Buddhism, is, in fact, all about endless chiliocosms. So maybe the Faustian West is the Vehicle itself in disguise. The Space Vehicle with the Bodhisattva inside etc. It’s just too huge a subject to fit into your book as an “answer,” Jesus God!

  HOLMES: Personal one-sentence (or more if you care to) takes on your mind: object—to triangulate you in the world:

  what do you think of:

  KEROUAC: I prefer not to. Beethoven, deaf, listened to the light.

  HOLMES: How do you place yourself (without secret pride or humility) in American literature? Whose son are you? What is your word to the world, in connection with such things as Cold War, Communism, Atom Bomb, twilight of Gods, human dilemmas of 20th century? You get the idea: what are we to do, Kerouac?

  KEROUAC: I cant rank myself till I see what more I write, if any.—What is the world to do? Individuals should sleep more, really, and be alone more.

  HOLMES: Place Neal, for once and all (and not just NOW, but what he meant to you once, how it changed), in YOUR vision. Neal, it seems, to me at least, was at once himself to you, but also he represented something, he embodied something, and it changed and deepened as you went along, but always it was essentially the SAME thing. What was it, as you look back? Was it Neal’s way with reality? The hope in that way? I’m not reducing you or your work to ONE thing, but Neal is the secret after which you ran so long, or he embodied it. What was it?

  KEROUAC: Neal hasnt changed, for me, any more than Dr. Samuel Johnson ever changed for James Boswell. We had a few tiffs over money just as Johnson and Boswell had a few tiffs over protocol but they never lasted as tiffs. The fact that Neal no longer writes letters or cards to anybody is perfectly alright with me and could’ve been foretold. I’m essentially his biographer for life. He reminds me of my lost brother who died when I was 4 and at the same time he reminds me of my father very much. Both Neal and I are Kelts. If Kelts was spelled with a “C” our names would be Serouac and Sassady. My name Kerouac is Cornish in origin, means “House in the Moor” in Brythonic Keltic. His name is Goidelic Keltic. He leaves me alone, like no one else does, by that I mean, when I’m with him there’s no need to talk or cater or pester. We just sorta suffer together in silence. Of course, when we talk there’ll be torrents. Another Kelt I know leaves me alone like that, I mean Lou. Neal has the biggest brain of us all, at least as high-perfect as Lou. And Neal’s “way with reality” is straight, busy, hilariously complicated, Chaplinesque, innocent, exasperated, hopeful, comically sneaky sometimes . . . like a caricature of mankind but without a trace of pride, fatuous “reserve” or any of the hypocritical snips of mankind I never could stand. He sees in me a dopey brother, almost like Laurel to his Hardy, but you’ll notice Hardy really loved Laurel above all men. So all’s always well in the end with “Dean and Sal.”

  HOLMES: Is Ginsberg the Wizard that cast a spell or dissolved it? Evil AND knowledge? Worldliness? What? Disentangling who influenced who most is all but impossible, but I see his figure in Columbia Halls, I see him throwing ponderous dark books at your head, pelting you with complexities and sniggering all the while, only to become grave (himself), sobered perhaps by you, until now you two run in separate grooves, but ominously side by side, though a world away. And yet it was YOU broke him out of the strangulations that followed his hospitalization. Or am I again over-simplifying? Women; tell me about women? Do you idealize them? Exclude them? Are you seasonal, for Christ’s sake? I remember in letters your celibacy of Mexico-Buddhism: did you see sex as distraction, evil, betrayal? Pardon the intimacies.

  KEROUAC: When I met Ginsberg I’d already “read everything,” but from the point of view of the heterosexual poet, say. He taught me the nether, or other side, anyway, of poetry (he and Burroughs and Herbert Huncke). One of the few “dark books” thrown at me by Allen was Genet. I could never have understod Genet without some kind of insight into the classical homosexual mentality, nor Gide and the others for that matter, nor Rimbaud above all. For instance I was now able to compare the relationship of Uncle Edouard and Bernard in The Counterfeiters, to the relationship of Prince Myshkin and Ippolit in The Idiot, and see something about the difference between lechery and compassion among men, or facsimiles thereof. It’s ridiculous of Colin Wilson to think that I ever had anything to do actively with a homosexual “camp.” I was an observer. Ginsberg did indeed “pelt” me with complexities not the least of which was the surrealistic liberation from literary armor, for which I am most grateful. So, and but, here he came with Rimbaud and Verlaine under one arm, Hart Crane and Genet under the other, and at his sublimest moments Blake and Dante, and he taught me the Metropolitan New York Poetry Underworld Crise: while with Whitman and Wolfe under one arm, and Joyce and Shakespeare under the other, I taught him the countryside glance.

  HOLMES: Finally, a superceded confession, me to you: for years I honestly (and with real pain) felt you could not live much beyond forty. It seemed to me that your brain and spirit would be pulverized with all they had to carry; that even your physical toughness would have to shrivel; and, frankly, I had years of premonition of your death. You’d just die one day, too soon, having simply USED everything up: it didn’t seem to me you could go on (because we all DO go on by the degree of consciousness-grip we have on hopes and possibilities) and you seemed to be exhausting them one by one, burning yourself up in your own mind; and I had actual moment-to-moment depression to think that you could not be saved (not FROM anything, but FOR yourself, some peace of achievement and satisfaction that you’d earned), and that (just privately) you’d vanish out of MY world—goad that you were, inconstant that you seemed, exemplar and buddy, the brother I’d never had whose role you filled for me to rage against, and brood on, and elevate and put down; all that, the honest picture of you I’ve carried in my head these years. But that you’d vanish, just die out of it all: I’ve had that clear certainty, hateful to me, for years; and yet, reading the books these past days, that TOO has fluttered away into a husk of black-birds, and I see it as only the dire, Germanic, Dostoyevskian, exacerbated drama of my OWN mind, and that you carry what you carry in your own gait, and I don’t (finally) know what you’ll do, or how you’ll
end, and that what prevented me from ever really understanding you was the very lust to understand which proved to be nothing but MY image of you, and not you at all. Now I don’t think you’ll die, or maybe you will but it won’t be any inky tragic collapse of any doomed hero-of-art, from which the world will recoil with tardy understanding. But you’ve been dead in my imagination, even in some dreams, and I thought I’d tell you . . . Something more may come of this.

  BEAT SPOTLIGHT

  Beat Spotlight

  Beat Spotlight (circa 1968) is the last of Kerouac’s scroll compositions, running to approximately three feet in length. An incomplete but fascinating fragment, Beat Spotlight juxtaposes the humble printing business of Kerouac’s father in Lowell, Massachusetts, with the media scrutiny experienced by Kerouac following the publication of On the Road, the glare of the “Beat spotlight.” It’s also a final statement of Kerouac’s aesthetic aims, as he compares his lifework as a literary artist to the aspirations embodied in the printer’s scrapbook of his father, described as a “a vast and memorable legend of early 20th century America.” Something quite similar can of course be said of the impressive and voluminous achievement of Kerouac’s own memory project. As he nears the end of his life, Kerouac counterpoises the ambitious scope of that achievement against persistent misrepresentations of his work, as instanced in a visit by “two flippant middleclass American journalists.”

  WHEN I WASNT EVEN BORN and no one knew what my face looked like, around 1921, my father Leo Kerouac used to publish and edit a weekly newspaper called The Spotlight in Lowell Massachusetts featuring ads of the latest movies (William S. Hart, Conway Tearle, Theda Bara) which he himself designed and sometimes he’d come home late at night riding on the side car of his linotypist’s motorcycle and show his four-year-old son Gerard how to draw the boxes and draw in the names of the actors and the movie titles, I know because he used to do that for me only a few years later. The Spotlight also included local business news, theatrical news, a funny column he himself composed in which he and “Tillie the Wife” would go out to movies every Friday night and what they said as they walked out at eleven under the darkening marquee. “Tillie” was supposed to be my mother in a sense but actually “Tillie” had a Brooklyn accent but the kind of Brooklyn accent only a French Canadian 1920 smalltown businessman could imagine. Around 1921 The Spotlight was doing so good my father was able to afford to put up a big poster sign over the Chinese Restaurant in the center of town, right on the roof, showing the shadow of a big fat man in a swivel chair smoking a cigar, and the words The Spotlight. The Chinese Restaurant was Chin Lee’s and Chin Lee himself was a good friend of my father’s who used to play cards with him till dawn and on every Christmas sent us either a Ming Vase, or boxes of strange lichee nuts and Chinese candy imported from Canton. I remember vaguely now, seeing that giant fat man shadow with the cigar in the swivel chair overlooking Kearney Square in Lowell in the old lights of that time’s city night. For many years as I moved from New England to New York to the South to the West and back again I kept possession of old editions of The Spotlight which my father’d pasted into a huge scrapbook 4 foot by 4 foot but it finally got lost somewhere in Carolina tho by that time the paper had turned crinkly brown. Somewhere in that vast and memorable legend of early 20th Century America was a small brown crinkly notice of my birth written like in the following terms by my father: “Had a new kid this weekend, called him Jean-Louis, gave Charley Connors a cigar.” The reason why I say no one knew what my face looked like before I was born is in reference to the famous Zen question “What did your face look like before you were born?” Recently in San Francisco I had a very interesting meeting with some Chinese gentlemen of the same family, father and son, and I can’t help thinking that there’s a connection between big Shadowy Leo the Spotlight with his Chinese friends, and myself with mine. But I shudder to think what Big Shadowy Leo My Pop would have said to see what the newspapers of America said about me when my books were published and I came into the glare of the “Beat Spotlight.” And that if I myself were publishing a weekly newspaper nowadays (and he could have left me all his printing presses but lost them all on the horses) I would only be able to call it the “Beat Spotlight.” It all started when I came to New York City on Sept. 3 1957 to see what had happened with the publication of one of my early books, Road, books I had written in poverty and some of them in self-imposed exile with no hope of ever seeing them published but only writing them because I thought it was my duty on earth to tell the story of what happened to some of the people I knew. Because of my early training in the Catholic Church, the extremely mystical experience of First Communion and First Confirmation, there was imbedded in my believing tho confused head a belief that life was holy, that I should write about it pointing out the holiness throughout the squalor and commonplaceness, that the very streets of life were holy, that somehow the eager faces and tortured mouths of my compatriots in the American Night of my experience meant much more than the “facts” adduced, that like Dostoevsky I was doomed to suffer out all my life to “draw breath in pain” and tell their stories, that in the idealism of this endeavor somehow I would be rewarded someday, that I would be justified and my people be justified (my heroes in the various stories, the road characters, the dharma bums, the subterraneans, the desolation angels, all the rest), that my father might gladly look back from his grave at what I had decided to do with his legacy, that my brother Gerard also would bless me, that there was nothing nobler in the world for me to do with my lifetime than to dedicate it to telling true stories about life as I had seen and lived it. And that anyway there was nothing else to do to believe in because I was so bloody bored in the oldest French sense meant by Baudelaire and called in French “ennui,” or “ennuyez.” Nothing in college had taught me any of this. After years of trying to invent a system of making up stories about American life I suddenly in 1951 in despair gripped my head, stared at the floor, ran to the typewriter, slipped a long roll of paper through and started to type out the true story of what actually happened, all fiction forgotten and all tricks of afterthought and revision forgotten so that when I told my true story it would be like telling it through an ordeal of fire, either get out of it right away for once and for all, or get burned. So I fought through the ordeal of fire to tell the Road story and simply presented it that way, as it was, to the publishers. For six years they shook their heads over the manuscript. Finally they went ahead and published it but first behind my back and without my knowledge they made a few “changes.” They took out some scenes they thought were irrelevant, such as love scenes between actual lovers, or “dirty words” here and there, and generally applied what they call their “house style” over the narrative rush of my story. But nevertheless the crazy true story shone through. But I didnt think it would make any difference anyway. At the time I was living in poverty with my mother on a back porch apartment in Orlando Florida which was blessed by a huge ancient tree that cast some shade but cursed by a tin roof that let all the late afternoon western sun heat sink into our kitchen and so when we ran our broken fan it only blew hot heat. But in those days we somehow enjoyed our pre-dinner cheap port wine and our hamburger suppers and our after-dinner pecan sandy cookies and the few blips of cool night air that came. It was Sept. 3rd when I was invaded by some reporters who said they were from Time magazine saying that my book was being published in New York and they wanted to take my picture. But I had just gotten back from a useless bus trip to Mexico City (more about that later in harkening back) and had somehow got sick down there on some kind of mumps, or dehydration, or something, so that I could hardly stand up my parts were so swollen. It was awful. In all the utter seriousness of my life suddenly walked in these two flippant middleclass American journalists wondering if the reason I looked so sick wasn’t because I was drunk, or a dope addict, or just naturally depraved. They took my picture sitting there weakly in a rocking chair. They went off and mailed the pictures to Time magazine in New York.
The literary editor on that end, not knowing that I am the son of a huge black shadow called The Spotlight, simply threw in his preconceived angry opinions about me, comparing me to a nonchalant gumchewing hood with a switchblade and a black leather motorcycle or a black leather road or something, and let it go at that. But at the time I still did not understand the significance of this journalistic nonchalance of theirs because I was still involved in the questions of my own work and its mainly “holy” impact on my own belief in myself. The night of Sept. 3 1957 before I was to take the train to New York, and after the photographers had left my mother’s little backporch flat, I was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy trying to figure out what he meant by the Leopard being the Incontinence of worldly pleasure, the Lion the violence of Ambition, the wolf the fraud of avarice, and Lucia being the patroness for the blind (she the illuminating grace). Or that Rachel was the “contemplative life,” or that St. Paul was the “chosen vessel,” or that Beatrice (whom I’d read about before in Vita Nuova) was Divine Wisdom itself saying with luminous eyes “I come from a place where I desire to return.” I thought that with the writing of my half dozen books, the acceptance of the first one now, to be published in the morrow, I had come to the highest point of mature human understanding of the world as it is. So I blithely continued with my studies and planned further books. Something disquieting about the questions of the newspaper people slipped back to my forgetful half of brain. I thought that my redeeming wit could measure against all the Ciacco hogs of Hell. A good wolf is better than a bad lamb. I’d come sooty off freight trains in California and run into jazz joints yelling for more music and nobody’d ever noticed. The only spotlight ever trained on me so far was by cops in the Arizona desert wondering where I was going with my full pack at 2 A.M. in the red moon, only a year ago. But these newspaper people had seemed strange, like members from the United Nations or something, with their elegant tones coupled irrationally with vulgar questions like “Do you believe in people being hurt?” “Did I ever say I wanted people to be hurt? in that book?” “Just asking” and down goes the note. Or: “What have you got against America?” “What have I got against America my God it’s the only thing I write about? What do you mean?” “Are you Slavic?” “I certainly am not, I’m a Celt.” “Doesnt sound like a Celtic name?” “It’s an old Breton name older than Ireland.” “Are you sure?” Then they’d ask: “What have you got against responsibility?” and so on until I really became confused wondering what they really meant. But I was about to find out as I came to New York and fell into the Beat Spotlight for three years.