The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  The boy waved his baseball glove: “Hiya Al.”

  “Who’s the little Arab boy?” snapped Phillip, grinning slyly.

  “What’s this? What’s this?” cried the drunken Ryko, who understood nothing.

  Rather irrelevantly, they were suddenly passing through Washington Square, from where they could see the windows of Apartment 32.

  “Look! Do you remember that place?”

  “That’s where we’re going to be drawn and quartered when we return.”

  “Well boys,” said Al, “women are inconvenient anyway.”

  “Yeah,” said Phillip, “let’s do away with them altogether.”

  They hurried on towards some sort of terminal of the night they felt was coming rightfully to them . . . But always they ended up in a bar, or in someone’s apartment drinking, or on park benches. There was an exquisite sensitivity had come to their limbs now, after all the drinking and fatigue, which made mere contact with a park bench or with a chair some sort of sensual thrill. Every kind of thing that happened grated on their sensibilities like a great rasping abrasive.

  They were walking underneath the roaring Third Avenue elevated train, which made them shudder. Or they stood in the front train of the subway and watched themselves hurtle forward into the tunnel-ends . . . which made them swoon. Or they heard music, and were mad with it . . . Or a scrap of conversation, while wearying them, came clear and cold like ice water on their drowsy senses.

  Finally they found themselves in a theater watching a French movie. It was the Apollo theater, on 42nd Street, and they were sitting in the first row of the upper balcony watching The Port of Shadows. They puffed on their cigarettes and paid rapt attention to the film . . . Its quality of shadowy street-ends, the carnival in it, the fog over the bay, the old man who played Bach and spoke in a whining voice and was lecherous with his niece, the fatigued little Frenchmen who worked on the waterfront—all this marvellous welter of human activity and weariness and slow sweet delight had been filmed for them. No one in the theater that night understood the film so well as they . . . and none could project himself into it, but Ramsay Allen.

  The Port of Shadows was principally the story of a French army deserter, played by Jean Gabin, who comes to Le Havre to get a ship and leave the country; and while he is going about his business, he meets a girl who falls in love with him. There are scenes in the fog, on docks, in rainy streets, or in gloomy houses with rain beating on the window pane, and in taverns. The people are painfully real. Sadly, but with determination, the soldier decides to leave France in spite of his love for the girl . . . Their love is a kind of tragic binding in the darkness, they kiss in alleys, they are oppressed and weary from life, they are absurdly beautiful and full of agonizing dignity. The soldier gets his ship . . . But just before sailing time, he decides to see his girl for the last time, just for a moment . . . Can it be that he does not want to leave her? It turns out that such is the case, according to fate, for when he visits her, for the last time, a gangster shoots him in the back. The last scene shows the ship sailing out of Le Havre harbor in the gray dawn, without the soldier . . .

  When the picture faded from the screen, Ryko turned to Al and asked him what he had thought of it. Al had been watching the film part of the time, and part of the time he had been watching Phillip, who sat beside him broodingly absorbed. “It was the best picture I ever saw,” Al said, and he turned and looked at Ryko for the first time with any semblance of compassion. It was as though he wanted Ryko to see the tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything.

  So Ryko wrote this.

  Chronology

  1922

  Born Jean-Louis Kérouac on March 12 at the family home at 9 Lupine Road in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third child of Joseph Alcide Leon (Leo) Kerouac and Gabrielle Lévesque Kerouac, and is baptized at St. Louis-de-France Church on March 19. (Father, born 1889 in St. Hubert, Québec, immigrated with his family to Nashua, New Hampshire, where he learned printing. He later moved to Lowell, where he became the manager and printer of L’Étoile, a weekly French newspaper, and sold insurance. Mother, born 1895 in St. Pacôme, Québec, also immigrated as a child to Nashua. Orphaned at age 16, she was working in a shoe factory when she married Leo Kerouac on October 25, 1915. Their first son, Gerard, was born on August 23, 1916, and their daughter Caroline was born on October 25, 1918.) Family speaks French-Canadian at home.

  1923

  Father opens his own print shop in Lowell.

  1925

  Family moves to 35 Burnaby Street. Gerard becomes seriously ill with rheumatic fever.

  1926

  Family moves to 34 Beaulieu Street. Gerard dies on June 2, buried in Nashua, New Hampshire.

  1927

  Family moves to 320 Hildreth Street.

  1928

  Kerouac enters St. Louis-de-France parochial school, where classes are taught in both English and French. Family moves to 240 Hildreth Street.

  1930

  Family moves to 66 West Street.

  1932

  Family leaves Centralville section of Lowell and moves to Phebe Avenue in the Pawtucketville section, where father becomes the manager of a social club. Kerouac attends St. Joseph’s parochial school.

  1933–35

  Enters Bartlett Junior High School in 1933, where all classes are conducted in English. Begins keeping his first journals and records his achievements in sports. Develops a baseball game played with cards, marbles, and dice, and invents an imaginary league and fictitious players. Writes short stories, draws cartoons, and invents mysterious character “Dr. Sax.” Reads extensively in school and at the public library.

  1936

  Merrimack River floods in March, causing extensive damage to father’s print shop. Family moves to 35 Sarah Avenue. Kerouac enters Lowell High School in the tenth grade.

  1937–39

  Excels in sports, especially as a sprinter in track and a running back in football. Reads Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and others. Father sells his shop in 1937 and becomes a printer for hire while mother begins working in a shoe factory; financial strain is increased by father’s gambling and drinking. Family moves to tenement at 736 Moody Street. Kerouac becomes close friends with Sebastian Sampas and discusses literature, philosophy, and politics with him and a small group of friends (who for a time call themselves the Young Prometheans). On Thanksgiving 1938, scores winning touchdown for Lowell High School against local rival Lawrence.

  1939–40

  Graduates from Lowell High School on June 28, 1939. Receives football scholarship from Columbia University on condition that he attend Horace Mann, a preparatory school in the Bronx, for a year. Lives with his mother’s stepmother in Brooklyn and commutes to school by subway. Publishes his first fiction in the Horace Mann Quarterly and is introduced to live jazz in Harlem by classmate Seymour Wyse. Writes about jazz and sports for the school newspaper.

  1940

  Enters Columbia in September. Fractures tibia in his right leg during his second game with the freshman squad and spends months recuperating.

  1941

  Receives high grades in French and literature courses but fails chemistry. Spends summer in Lowell and in New Haven, Connecticut, where his parents move in August. Returns to Columbia in September. Quarrels with the coaching staff, quits the football team, and leaves school. Moves to Hartford, where he works as a gas station attendant and writes a short story collection, “Atop an Underwood” (some of the stories are posthumously published in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writing in 1999). Returns to Lowell when his parents move back to that city. Registers for naval aviation training after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Becomes a sports reporter for the Lowell Sun while waiting to be called up.

  1942

  Quits the Sun in March and goes to Washington, D.C., where he works on the construction of the Pentagon and as a short-order cook. Returns to Lowell, then joins the Merchant Marine and sails fro
m Boston in July as a scullion on the army transport ship Dorchester. Sails along the Greenland coast before returning to Boston in October. (The Dorchester is sunk by a German submarine on February 3, 1943, with the loss of 675 lives.) Accepts invitation to rejoin the Columbia football squad, but quits after he is benched during the Army game. Stays in New York during the fall and begins affair with Edie Parker (b. 1922), an art student from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Works on novel The Sea Is My Brother (published in 2011). Returns to Lowell in December.

  1943

  Fails examination for flight training and is sent in March to naval boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island, where he is committed to the base hospital for psychiatric observation after repeated acts of insubordination. Transferred to Bethesda, Maryland, where he is diagnosed as having “schizoid tendencies” and given a psychiatric discharge from military service. Joins his parents, who are now living at 94-10 Cross Bay Boulevard in Ozone Park, Queens, New York. Rejoins the Merchant Marine and sails from New York in September on the George Weems, a Liberty ship carrying bombs to Liverpool. Returns to New York in October. Divides his time between Ozone Park and apartment on West 118th Street that Edie Parker shares with Joan Vollmer Adams. Meets Columbia undergraduate Lucien Carr (b. 1925).

  1944

  Introduced by Carr to William S. Burroughs (b. 1917), Columbia undergraduate Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926), and David Kammerer (b. 1911), Carr’s former scoutmaster who had followed him to New York from St. Louis. Sebastian Sampas dies on March 2 after being wounded while serving as an army medic on the Anzio beachhead in Italy. Works on Galloway, novel that eventually becomes The Town and the City. Carr fatally stabs Kammerer in Riverside Park on August 14, then visits Kerouac, who helps Carr dispose of his knife and Kammerer’s glasses. Kerouac is arrested as a material witness after Carr turns himself in and is jailed when his father refuses to post bail. Marries Edie Parker in a civil ceremony on August 22 and is released after she obtains bail money from her family. They move to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where Kerouac works in a ball-bearing factory. (Carr pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves two years in prison.) Sails from New York in October on the Liberty ship Robert Treat Paine, but jumps ship in Norfolk, Virginia, and returns to New York. On November 16 Kerouac estimates that he has written 500,000 words since 1939, including “nine unfinished novels.” (One of these is published as The Haunted Life in 2014.) Edie returns to New York at Christmas and they move in with Joan Vollmer Adams in apartment on West 115th Street.

  1945

  Kerouac and Burroughs collaborate on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel based on the Kammerer-Carr case (published 2008). Explores the Times Square underworld with Burroughs and Herbert Huncke, a drug addict, petty thief, and street hustler. Completes novella Orpheus Emerged (published in 2002). Separates from Edie during the summer. Helps care for his father, who has stomach cancer. Hospitalized in December with thrombophlebitis, a debilitating circulatory condition in the legs possibly related to his 1940 football injury; Kerouac also attributes his illness to his heavy use of Benzedrine and marijuana.

  1946

  Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg are interviewed for the Alfred Kinsey study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (published in 1948). Father dies on May 17 and is buried with Gerard in Nashua. Kerouac continues work on The Town and the City. Agrees to Edie Parker’s request that their marriage be annulled. In December Kerouac is introduced by his friend Hal Chase to Neal Cassady (b. 1926), a self-educated car thief and hustler from Denver who is visiting New York with his wife, Luanne.

  1947

  Travels to North Carolina in June to visit his sister, Caroline, and her second husband, Paul Blake. Leaves New York in July to visit Cassady and Ginsberg in Denver, traveling by bus to Chicago and then hitchhiking the rest of the way. Meets Carolyn Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Denver (she and Cassady marry in April 1948). Travels by bus in August to San Francisco, where Henri Cru (a friend from Horace Mann) gets him a job as a security guard in Marin City. Travels through California before returning to New York in October.

  1948

  Completes first draft of The Town and the City in May. Begins writing an early version of On the Road. Visits sister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in June after the birth of his nephew Paul Blake Jr. Meets writer John Clellon Holmes in July. Takes literature courses taught by Elbert Lenrow and Alfred Kazin at the New School for Social Research in New York. Cassady arrives in Rocky Mount while Kerouac is visiting his sister at Christmas and drives with him back to New York.

  1949

  Leaves New York in January with Cassady, Luanne, and Al Hinkle and drives to Algiers, Louisiana, where they visit Burroughs and Joan Vollmer Adams, who have been living together for several years. Continues on to San Francisco with Cassady and Luanne, then returns to New York by bus in February. Columbia professor Mark Van Doren recommends The Town and the City to Robert Giroux at Harcourt, Brace, who offers Kerouac a $1,000 advance in late March. Kerouac and Giroux work on cutting and revising the manuscript. Moves to Denver in May and rents house at 61 West Center Street in Westwood. Continues working on On the Road. Travels to San Francisco in August, then drives back to New York with Cassady, visiting Edie in Grosse Pointe along the way. Moves in with his mother at 94-21 134th Street in Richmond Hill, Queens.

  1950

  The Town and the City is published on March 2; it receives mixed reviews and sells poorly. Travels to Denver in May, then drives with Cassady to Mexico City, where he visits Burroughs. Returns to New York in August. Meets Joan Haverty (b. 1931) on November 3 and marries her in a civil ceremony on November 17. They live in a loft on West 21st Street; then move in with Kerouac’s mother in Queens. Receives a long letter from Neal Cassady in December. (Kerouac will later say that Cassady’s “fast, mad, confessional” letters inspired “the spontaneous style of On the Road.”)

  1951

  Moves to a studio apartment at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with Joan, who is working in a department store. Writes story La nuit est ma femme (The Night Is My Woman) in French in February and March. Begins new version of On the Road on April 2 and types it in three weeks on a 120-foot-long paper scroll. Separates from Joan and moves in with Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg. Denies paternity when Joan tells him she is pregnant with his child. Robert Giroux rejects the scroll version of On the Road. Hires Rae Everitt of MCA as his literary agent. Suffers ­severe attack of thrombophlebitis while visiting his sister in North Carolina. Enters Kingsbridge VA Hospital in the Bronx in August. Burroughs accidentally kills Joan Vollmer Adams in Mexico City on September 7 after she drunkenly challenges him to shoot a glass off her head. Kerouac leaves the hospital in September and returns to Richmond Hill. Begins rewriting On the Road in an even more spontaneous form (reworked version is posthumously published as ­Visions of Cody in 1972). Moves to San Francisco in December to live with Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their children at 29 Russell Street.

  1952

  Works as baggage handler for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Receives $250 advance for On the Road from Ace Books. Daughter Janet Michelle Kerouac is born in Albany, New York, on February 16. Kerouac begins affair with Carolyn Cassady. Drives with the Cassadys to the Arizona-Mexico border, then takes bus to Mexico City, where he stays with Burroughs. Writes Doctor Sax, May–June. Joins his mother and sister in North Carolina in July, then moves in with the Cassadys in San Jose in September. Works as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific. Begins keeping dream journals later published as Book of Dreams. Lives in a skid row hotel in San Francisco for a month because of the tension caused by his affair with Carolyn Cassady, then returns to San Jose in November. John Clellon Holmes publishes novel Go, in which Kerouac is fictionalized as Gene Pasternak, and “This Is the Beat Generation,” an essay in the November 16 New York Times Magazine. Kerouac travels to Mexico City with Neal Cassady; writes novella Sur le chemin (Old Bull in the Bowery) in French; then returns to his mother in Queens.

  1953<
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  Writes Maggie Cassidy. Meets with Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press to discuss the possible publication of his work. Travels in April to San Luis Obispo, California, where he again works for the Southern Pacific. Leaves job in May and sails from San Francisco to New Orleans as a kitchen worker on the S.S. William Carruthers. Returns to Queens in June. Writes The Subterraneans, October 21–24. In response to questions about his composition methods from Ginsberg and Burroughs, writes “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.”

  1954

  Leaves New York in late January to live with the Cassadys in San Jose. Works as a parking-lot attendant and studies Buddhist texts. Returns to his mother in Queens in April. Hires Sterling Lord as his literary agent (Lord will represent him for the rest of Kerouac’s life). Works on Some of the Dharma (posthumously published in 1997). Malcolm Cowley publishes essay in The Saturday Review in August in which he credits Kerouac with inventing the phrase “beat generation” and writes: “his long unpublished narrative, On the Road, is the best record of their lives.” Kerouac visits Lowell in October.

  1955

  In January Alfred A. Knopf becomes the sixth publisher to reject On the Road. Joan Haverty takes Kerouac to court seeking child support, but his lawyer, Eugene Brooks (Allen Ginsberg’s brother), succeeds in having the case postponed because of Kerouac’s recurring phlebitis. Kerouac and his mother move to North Carolina, where he writes Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (published 2008). “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” excerpted from On the Road and Visions of Cody, appears in New World Writing in April. Travels to Mexico City in July. Begins Tristessa and Mexico City Blues before going to San Francisco in September. Meets the poets Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder. Attends poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7 where Allen Ginsberg reads from Howl for the first time. Visits the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho with Gary Snyder in October. Rides freight cars through California. The Paris Review publishes “The Mexican Girl,” another excerpt from On the Road. Kerouac returns to North Carolina and begins Visions of Gerard on December 27.