Atop an Underwood

by Jack Kerouac

  Then back to the room, slowly it begins to befriend me, too slowly, but slowly by all means; the silent eloquence of its objects and a lonely young man sits and thinks and smokes, and then turns to read Tolstoi and Halper and Lin Yutang and Wolfe and Saroyan, and then turns to his typewriter and goes on, the locomotive in his chest chugging faster and faster and getting heavier and heavier every moment.

  Today

  Today is November 12th, 1941. It is my last day with this typewriter, and tomorrow I shall have to return it to the agency, because I have no money with which to renew the rental of the machine for another month.

  Hell, they’re taking away everything. Even myself.

  You see, first I go hungry, and I am writing this at nine o’clock in the evening without having had any supper except some old bread and cheese. Secondly, I have no cigarettes, and my lungs are crying out for the strong body of smoke. (Will one or two of you readers slip me a spare butt on the sly?) Thirdly, they’re going to take away the typewriter, and then I will be left alone in this room with nothing. You see, my heart resides in a typewriter, and I don’t have a heart unless there’s a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in front of it and some blank sheets of paper.

  They took my food, my drug, and my heart away. There is no man left to speak of except 180 pounds of bone and flesh. But I’ll manage. Now this here is a simple story. This morning, I had four cents in my pocket, and was walking around South Hartford, freezing; and not having had any breakfast, I decided to chisel a penny from someone. I saw some workmen digging a ditch, but I kept on walking, ignoring them. I went into a drugstore, thinking up a clever sentence: “How about a four cent cup of coffee?” I knew what the reaction would be to that—the counterman would laugh heartily at the predicament of being one cent shy, and proceed to draw me a cup of steaming hot java. A good joke, this guy happened to be just one cent shy, but he had his wits about him. Ho ho.

  Ha ha ha, I said to myself. This will work.

  But all I did was stand around and stare idiotically at the magazine display. Then I walked out into the cold again. I went up along the street, and being alone, I began to talk to myself, jangling my last four pennies in my pockets. “Food!” I said, “Food!” I began to imagine myself sitting in an old English tavern, back in 1669, in November, with a huge tankard of brown ale on my right and a tremendous meat-covered bone in my left hand, ripping off prodigious stringing slabs of juicy beef with my enraged teeth, letting the savory drip of blood play around my palate, make it water painfully for many more, many more great attacks on the food! food! food! “Scrouch,” I said, imagining myself ripping off another big piece of viand. “Scludge ... squidge ... munch ... emgupp .. gulp.” What a feast! I walked along the road like a madman, striding hugely.

  Well, in this way, I managed to hold on for a while. This was today. In the evening, my comrade came up to my room to visit me. He sat on the bed, offered me a cigarette, and started to read some of my work. I hovered about eagerly, feeding him manuscript upon manuscript. I talked excitedly, stumbled over my words, grew hoarse and passionate in voice as I always do when I get strong, good and strong. He read on, and then offered me another cigarette. It was fine, very fine. Then he left; we made plans for a trip. He and I are going to sit in a car and drive right out to California, in about three weeks. We mapped out the journey, figuring on going through the south where it is warm and where there are weeping willow trees with moss and old houses with ground level porches. I told him I wanted to spend a whole hot sunny afternoon lying beside the Mississippi River, in New Orleans, sunning, yawning, slapping off the flies, dozing, yawning some more. Okay, he said. He and I are going to sit down in his car and drive right out to California, in about three weeks.

  Well, that’s the story. I told you it would be simple. It was today. Now, as I write, it is night and tomorrow they are going to take away my typewriter and my heart. So I just thought I’d write a few words down on paper, just for the hell of it. It was nothing much, just a little legend about myself and my hunger and my heart and the trip to California and the loneliness of this small room in Hartford.

  This I Do Know—

  That I shall be influenced by

  Wolfe, Saroyan, Halper, Whitman,

  and Joyce in my writings.

  That Keats was right: It is

  not Life that counts, but

  the courage that you bring to it.

  (2) That the earth is groaning

  with plenty—enough to

  kill any young Faustian.

  (3) That utter sincerity & honesty

  is all my writings need

  in credo—such as: I do

  not despise riches, I see that

  they enable a man to sit

  aloof, content, missing the

  filth & untruth, in part.

  (4) That life is good, moment

  to moment, & bad, on

  the whole, for lack of

  design. We must make

  (always have) our own design—

  relate ourselves with ourselves,

  each other, society, & universe.

  Love only is design (only is consistent)

  Search by Night

  Set on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, this is Kerouac’s first extended use of Canadian French dialogue and his most raw, naturalistic presentation of ethnic characters to date. In later books, such as Doctor Sax and Visions of Gerard, he used this language to great effect as he rendered the speech of Duluoz family members.

  After hurtling through the city on a quick visit in September 1962, Kerouac sent a letter full of Lowell memories to Lowell Sun reporter Mary Sampas, wife of the Lowell newspaperman Charles G. Sampas. She quoted from the letter in one of her columns. He wrote: “[...] on the night of Pearl Harbor, after I had seen Citizen Kane, I walked home from the movies watching the wash stiffly waving in the cold moonlight snow wash lines of Moody and Cheever and cried [...]” In Book Six of Vanity of Duluoz (1968), Kerouac also revisits this Pearl Harbor Day episode.

  From the low-lit fastnesses of my study I looked solemnly at the newspaper headlines. On my work desk, its brown pigeon-holes stuffed with ledger, manuscript, sheet, inkwell, sentimental token .... on this old desk of mine I lay the screaming visage of a Hearst tabloid—it said: JAPAN DECLARES WAR ON U.S.A.; PEARL HARBOR BOMBED!

  Outside the window, in the yard between my house and my neighbors, there glowed the cold crater silver of a December moon in New England .... and there was silence as of death, upon the cold hard ground. Frost decorated the window, Dickens-like. I looked out upon the winter night, was silent in the presence of a stupendous hush, listening for the sigh of our slumbering hearts.

  “Poet,” said the cradled moon, “go to sleep with your brothers. Go to sleep, for it is night in Massachusetts, and our brothers are reposing in stillness.”

  I sat there, unstunned, mildly thrilled by the great tidings of War—for in all of us, hidden, lies the glory and folly of the Achaean heart, the Trojan breast, the clangorous song and shout of Homer.

  “War!”

  Deep mumbling movements in the foundations of the chest, stirrings in the belly, the eye is kindled.

  “War!”

  I rose from my chair and stared at the headlines on the paper, standing and smoking a cigarette. Surely this was not the night for slumber!

  In a silent and fiendish glee, I stole illicitly from the warmth of my home, clad in the American garb of topcoat, scarf, trousers, clicking-heel shoes, sweatshirt with Prep School insignia, and white woolen socks. In the clear deadcold of New England winter, I stood bare-headed in the night, listening to the immense soundlessness of my slumbering city. Cold crater moon, how you glared in deathly silver! How you were luminous, how you splashed your icy lead-white upon crude New England! How you screamed noiselessly in your high piercing solitary gleam!

  I went through the streets of the city, making the dry sound of footsteps, creating a rhythmic click of the shorn
foot, advancing in strides among sleeping homes.

  It was wonderful! And I was not alone; and too my mind was not content. For it was a search, and though it really was fruitless, almost boundless in its stupid aspiration, yet it was a search—by night.

  I was not alone. Walking down the street, seeing barren crater-glow along the shabby length of its bedded route, I suddenly perceive the bobbing figure of another human being. Another footstep, quicker than mine, most fretful. It is a millworker returning from the “night-shift.” We pass each other in the night, moving along gracefully in opposite directions. My brother, yet I do not know him, I do not speak to him. We only exchange quick suspicious glances, mine is almost belligerent in its nocturnal frown and scowl. (Ah yes, I am a fool!)

  Now my search is resumed. I stride on along the silence of the street, looking for the War.

  But in New England, when the rapier-keen air pings your ears, when the dry razored blue of December night advances to freeze your thighs, to numb your toes and soles of your feet; when the keen point of Winter, the bluecold blade begins to tingle your skin, there is little of the War to be seen. (Oh I am not being silly here, I know what my words say.) When you hear brown husked leaves crackle among the frozen boughs, when you watch the stars tremble coldly in their virginal altitudes, when you see how shadows between houses and tenements and blocks can be so black! so black!—and when, standing near a canal running through a tenemented slum district, you see how street lamps throw gold on the water, how the moon throws cold cold silver on the water, how the ripple-visaged water lies in a silent and slumbering world—in New England, when you are witness of all this, there is little of the War to be seen.

  But the War is there, raging in remote distances, the thunder yet unheard, the fire yet unspread. You know that the War is there and that your search is really fruitful.

  I entered a lunch-cart, rubbing my pinged and pinched eartips with warm palms. The overwhelming odor of greasy hamburg was everywhere in the warm little confines of the place. Several men sat hunched on stools, munching. I moved along, toward the great sleek “nickelodeon,” a beautiful and large music-box, which for the cost of a nickel, could fill the little restaurant with the soothing thrum of American dance music—or, if you preferred, with the precise and lifting beat! beat! beat! beat! and accompanying brass blare of American “swing” music. I chose a tender love ballad—sat before the lovely colored music-case and listened to a baritone croon loving phrases, accompanied by the dreamy spiral and spin of reeds, the deep and steady resonance of a rhythm section subdued. The mood was created. The whole bawdy structure and atmosphere of the tiny “hamburg” emporium changed instantly as the music started—from ordinary clock-ticked, arm-scratching moments to lovely and glorious moments of female Love, romance, and strength, sudden added strength!

  And as always, the balladry affected me, the incredibly tender caress of the saxophone section affected me, and tears strained at my dried, restrained ducts. In a rush of tenderness, I was transplanted. The music had created the mood, had created a new “myself” for the instant—I was sentimental, full of love—a grand vision of America swept in triumph before me, and an imaginary girl, with dark meditative eyes and frowning brow seemed to be stroking my face with tender searching fingertips .... I sat moodily, overcome with nostalgia for everything I’d ever hoped & wished for yet hardly knowing the sum of these aspirations, hardly understanding the fundamental construction of these dreams, hardly touching them, suddenly clutching them all in one huge & exciting second, only to lose them, to rise and fall in foolish meditation, and to emerge, as the music ceased, smiling grimly and for the moment understanding Faust, for the moment having seen the shape of the War, for a moment having succeeded in my search. But so brief! so brief! so very brief! ....

  “Here’s your hamburger!” barks the counter man, his gray greasy face glistening at you in the buttery light. “Coffee wid’ it?”

  “No, thank you.”

  In America, you sink your teeth into the lovely confusion of meat, soft white bread, onion, butter, grease, and ketchup called the “hamburger,” and in so doing, satisfy a hunger in yourself which is exclusively and completely American. I did so, greedily letting the juicy mess lavish in my palate, feeling the cordy body of raw onion, smelling and relishing the sandwich, the smell of the place, the smoke and the talk. The great window at the end of the counter was frosted, looking out upon a clear cold cratered night. Men came in, banged the door, lusty with the vigor of our grand & glorious weathers. Men with pinged ears and cold thighs, and eyes that have seen New England wooden tenements, crude and new and of raw outline in the bleak black night and silver-strewn mooncold, with noses that have frozen drily in the sworded blue-black of New England December, in the cold night, in the clear cold silver night. And men, too, who know of the War, who hear its remote rumble.

  “Ernest, Calvert, ‘tara pas chris’ de chance—! Ha ha ha!” ... lustily they greet each other in a vulgar & ugly jargon called New England French-Canadian. “Heh Batege!”—“Ha! ha ha ha!” In great bursts of tormented, twisted, severed French, they pick and puckle each other, prattling incoherently, half of the time in coarse & obscene N.E. French-Canadian, half of the time in rowdy, faulty English.

  This, Gentlemen, is the language of the New England French-Canadian, who is the rarest animal in the various N.E. mill cities, who is the bawdy, rowdy, gustful, and obscene inhabitor of crude wooden tenements, infestor of smelly barrooms along infamous slum streets, crude-handed laborer of factory, ditch, and field.

  “Tu connas-tu Georges Rousseau?”

  “Oua, oua ...” hastily, hurrying the other along.

  “Eh ben, Calvert ..... y‘ava une bonne job .... (changing quickly, effortlessly) ... in the local Silk Mills ... you know, de fella wid de new Cad’lac . : . (spoken in Brutal Canuck, heavily, ponderously accented, almost idiotic) ... well, he’ll ‘ave to be goin’ back to Devens now .... Ha ha ha—(harsh & brutish laughter) ... his ‘e sore!! his ’e sore! six dam’ years in de army, already to get marry ... an’ den, back in de dam’ army .... ha ha ha ...”

  “Well,” observes the dour-colored counterman, his Canadian blue eyes steady and persevering. “Hi guess we’re all goin’ to expect’tings like dat from now on ...”

  “Yah—pretty serious ...”

  “Pas mal, pas mal, Calvert ...”

  “Ha ha ha—...” nervously harsh, almost animal-like in its crudeness and lack of genuine humor.

  And so these men know of the war and its far-away flames. They know, and the search is not entirely in vain. Now back into the cold hard whitened street. Now resume the crunchy beat of footsteps, advance through the sleeping city, search on for the form, the character, the body, the eye of the War.

  At the bridge, a tall red-nosed policeman stands in the deadcold of night, a cigarette butt hanging from his grim and lonely mouth—he is guarding the bridge. (You have learned about this previously—an officer of the law has been placed at each of the four bridges of the river city; to guard, day and night, from possible Axis sabotage—rather remote possibility, we all realize, but still a good idea, a safe and sound move.) This, then, the eye of the War? This, then, the reward of a nocturnal search through frozen sleeping streets?

  No! The policeman ignores you, he seems to be infuriated at the prospect of standing all night in the cold—(as I sit now in my warm study, writing with quiet pen, he still stands there alone in the cold night, alone, alone)—No! That is not the eye of the War. That has something to do with it, but your hunger is far from appeased. Your hunger is more searching, of larger and deeper scope. The eye of the War is something else, somewhere else—somehow different from the ordinary.

  Search on!

  You walk alone through the streets, feeling the cold of the stones & cement, and begin to wonder ...

  Presently, I approached another lunch-cart, another typical New England milltown hamburger house. Again the smell of frying beef, of butter .... a l
arge pan with pats of ground red meat drowned in a puddle of boiling grease.

  I sat down to eat, searching for the eye of the War, eating and smoking and searching. A whore came in from the cold, her very French features blue from the icy air. Hawk-faced, with long-lashed and coquettish brown eyes, heavy-breasted, she went up to the counter & spoke confidentially with the short order cook.

  “Did you ever‘ear such a ’ting, Hah?”

  “You mean Pearl Harbor—... ?”

  “Oua, oua!” she affirmed, sternly.

  “Ah oua!” said the counterman with a sad Gallic wistfulness. “Ah oua!”

  They both ruminated slowly with genuine sadness & compassion.

  She shrugged her fine shoulders.

  “Ah ben, quesqu’on peut faire!”

  “Oua ...” he echoed. “Oua ...”

  “Deux hamburgers, héh Joe?” she finally asked, addressing him familiarly.

  He prepared them sadly, still thinking about Pearl Harbor. It was very casual, as persons would be with a lively and vital topic which had no personal color in it. And I suddenly began to see something, but before I could formulate anything, a shabby person stamped in from the cold and gave the woman a meaningful look. Obviously, she knew him slightly .... invited him to sit with her—and in a flash, the thing was accomplished, the thing was arranged & ready, here within the flimsy wooden walls of a little New England milltown eatery on a cold dark slum street. (I tried to contrast this with the way it might have been done in New York City perhaps in one of those orange-juice, white-tiled, brightly lit sandwich counters where sallow, sagging-jowled New Yorkers gobble up hamburgers in resentful, scowling silence, and exit without a word—in such a place, the acquisition of a street-walker would have been a long and foolish thing, first the secret, stolen stares of black glut, then the casual and ratlike character of the approach, which would be unsuccessful in the lunch-cart because of New York’s lack of human warmth; and thirdly the savage, prowling and lustful pursuit into the streets, terminating successfully in some illicit doorway away from the empty red & blue glow of street lights, and even in the success of the acquisition there would be nothing but filthy sneakiness, false casualness, and a shaming feeling of naked fear, dark-eyed, winking terror and lust.) Ah not so in my home-town not so! There, an acquisition is a quick, warm, human thing. There is no lustful string, no prowling pursuit, no shame-faced hinting. That is one large difference between New York City & my home-town ..... and thus, I might have begun to draw contrasts on the preceding illustrations, at that moment, had I not suddenly realized that the eye of the War was not there, that I had gone out into the streets at 2 A.M. in the morning to search for something that did not exist.