Orpheus Emerged
Page 14
[Anthony]; Marie’s ennui emphasized; a call from Michael;
she half-heartedly repels him; his offer; meets Dmitri
[Anthony] coming in
III. Party scene, where Paul’s mention of Helen and
Michael’s rage, Michael’s growing desire for Marie, are
shown, etc. etc.
IV. A week later. Paul has been away "sleeping in grass LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 248
and eating fruit for breakfast." He returns – it is a cloudy, ominous day – he meets Leo in park, they call on Michael.
Maureen tells them that M. has been gone several days on
a trip. P. picks up some of M.’s poetry and mockingly
reads it to Leo. They meet Claude [Arthur], who tells
them that M. and Marie have been living together in
Bohemian Quarter. At this, Paul rushes to Dmitri’s
[Anthony’s] , where Marie has already returned. Dmitri
[Anthony] is a wreck; Marie ministers him. Michael and
Claude [Arthur] arrive; scene between M. and Marie. It
begins to rain. M. goes to bar, Paul to his hovel – he feels he must, there he finds Helen waiting, etc.
Symbolized Idea – M. trying to transcend human emo-
tions to those of God – emotions of creation, or of Eternity, etc. Thus he abandons his human self, Paul, and strikes
off for the High Regions. But there he finds himself lost,
lonely, and out of his element: his species-self, biologi-
cally speaking, holds him back. A fish trying to live out of water, on air alone, M. finds that his life exists unquestionably on human terms: he cannot be God, or be like
him, because he is human. This makes him see that the
highest state he can attain is that of the "Lyre of God," and in a contemporaneous sense, that of God’s representative
to man. "A high meeting…" As Orpheus, the artist-man, rather than merely man, or merely Prometheus (the
artist), he achieves his great goal of wholeness. This is a LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 249
"new vision" – possible only after the cold windy darknesses of the High Regions have been explored. The
"Impulse of God" poem key to M.’s whole success – but he transcends, yet maintains, this success to that of wholeness plus vision.
Book of Symbols 1944
The modern artist must discover new forms or he will per-
ish by the hand of action.
--Narrative
--Poetic prose
--Facts
Time Factor – 3 prongs
(1) Sunset at six – Saroyan period (in Hartford)
(2) Galloway – Joycean period
(3) The Haunted Life – Wolfean period
(4) I Bid You Lose Me – Nietzschean period (Neo-
Rimbaudian)
(5) Orpheus Emerged – post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period)
(6) Phillip Tourian Novel – Spenglerian period
(2 1/2) The Sea is My Brother – American period (Dos
Passos)
(3 1/2) Supreme Reality – post-neurotic period
Dos Passos’s new form (U.S.A.) severely misused. A truly creative artist hampered by excessive naturalism.
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 250
On this page, you see, I take up the thread of my creative
life and play with it awhile. I don’t live by the calendar of personal events, but by the almanac of artistic directions.
January 1945 – Edie all right. Returned to N.Y. to try and make good so we can live together in N.Y. Wrote essay,
story, poem – all determined by new ideas. Cont’d work
on novel with Burroughs.
Feb. – Complete novel with Burroughs. Crucial sense of
"end" and "beginning." Also completed essay on
Nietzsche, Blake, and Yeats; short novel, "Orpheus Emerged"; story, "God’s Daughter."
March – Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He is responsible for the education of Lucien, whom I had found, in lieu of his
anarchy (rather than in spite of it), an extremely impor-
tant person. "I lean with fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies
atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality" –
and – "The bastard alone has the right to be natural."
(Gide)
These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs
thought. However, the psychoanalytical probing has
upset me prodigiously.
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 251
Brief
Biography
Jack Kerouac was born in working-class Lowell,
Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in
a Franco-American family. He spoke a dialect of French
before he learned English. His older brother Gerard
died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.
Kerouac attended local Catholic and public
schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia
University in New York City in 1939. After dropping out
of college in the fall of 1941, he tried unsuccessfully to fit in with the military, worked as a deck hand in the
Merchant Marines, and returned to New York. There he
met Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr,
their strange downtown friend William Burroughs, and
the joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal
Cassady.
His first novel, The Town and the City, an account
of his youth in Lowell and New York City, appeared in
1950, and was well received. But it was not until the pub-
lication of On the Road that he became the rebel/cult hero who epitomized the style of living and writing associated with the Beat movement. Narrated by Sal
Paradise (Kerouac), On the Road is a picaresque chroni-cle of hitchhiking trips across America with Dean
Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), and
others. The novel was originally written as one para-
graph on a long roll of paper. Only after six years of revi-
sion and rejection did it find a publisher, but when On the Road finally appeared, Kerouac’s place as one of the best-known and most controversial writers of his time
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 253
was secured. With his coffesional approach, long stream-
of-consciousness sentences and page-long paragraphs,
he revolutionized American prose.
During the period before On the Road came out,
Kerouac criss-crossed the country, following Ginsberg
and Cassady to California, where he befriended the Zen
poet Gary Snyder, and embraced Buddhism. But the
phenomenal success of On the Road made Kerouac an
icon. In the long run he did not thrive in the spotlight and
literary critics, dismayed by the “Beatnik fad,” refused to
take Kerouac seriously as a writer.
Publication of his many other books followed, among
them the novels The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur, as well a several volumes of poetry and other writings. Kerouac considered all of his "true story novels" to be parts of one vast book, the story of his life-time. The Duluoz Legend consists, in chronological
order, of Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Maggy Cassidy, Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, Vision of Cody, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, Book of Dreams, Big Sur, and Satori in Paris.
Kerouac’s fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, is an
alienated, restless, passionate seeker of dharma (the Zen
concept of "truth") through new experiences, human
adventuring – and drugs, sex, and music along the way.
Toward the end of his life Kerouac, suffering from
his celebrity status and relentless critical beating, drank
heavily. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 254
reconnect with his creative spirit by attempting a solitary
retreat in a mid-coastal California cabin, a painful effort
chronicaled in Big Sur.
Kerouac married Stella Sampas, a childhood
friend with whom he had stayed in touch over the years.
Kerouac, Stella, and Jack’s mother Gabrielle lived
together until Jack’s death at the age of 47 in St.
Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 255
Autobiography
KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION TO
Lonesome Traveler
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 256
NAME Jack Kerouac
NATIONALITY Franco-American
PLACE OF BIRTH Lowell, Massachusetts
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1922
EDUCATION (schools attended, special courses of study,
degrees and years)
Lowell (Mass.) High School; Horace Mann School for Boys;
Columbia College (1940-42); New School for Social Research
(1948-49). Liberal arts, no degrees (1936-1949). Got an A from Mark Van Doren in English at Columbia (Shakespeare course).
–Flunked chemistry at Columbia.–Had a 92 average at Horace
Mann School (1939-40). Played football on varsities. Also track, baseball, chess teams….
SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL OCCCUPATIONS
AND/OR JOBS
Everything: Let’s elucidate: scullion on ships, gas station
attendant, deckhand on ships, newspaper sportswriter
(Lowell Sun), railroad brakeman, script synopsizer for 20th
Century Fox in N.Y., soda jerk, railroad yardclerk, also railroad baggagehandler, cottonpicker, assistant furniture
mover, sheet metal apprentice on the Pentagon in 1942, for-
est service fire lookout 1956, construction laborer (1941).
INTERESTS
HOBBIES I invented my own baseball game, on cards,
extremely complicated, and am in the process of playing a
whole 154-game season among eight clubs, with all the
works, batting averages, E.R.A. averages, etc.
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 257
SPORTS Played all of them except tennis and lacrosse and skull.
SPECIAL Girls
PLEASE GIVE A BRIEF RESUME OF YOUR LIFE
Had beautiful childhood, my father a printer in Lowell, Mass., roamed fields and riverbanks day and night, wrote little novels in my room, first novel written at age 11, also kept extensive diaries and "newspapers" covering my own-invented horse-racing and baseball and football worlds (as recorded in novel Doctor Sax).—Had good early education from Jesuit brothers at St. Joseph's Parochial School in Lowell making me jump sixth grade in public school later on; as child traveled to Montreal, Quebec, with family; was given a horse at age 11 by mayor of Lawrence (Mass.), Billy White, gave rides to all kids in neighborhood; horse ran away. Took long walks under old
trees of New England at night with my mother and aunt.
Listened to their gossip attentively. Decided to become a
writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local
young poet who later died on Anzio beach head; read the life
of Jack London at age 18 and decided to also be an adventur-
er, a lonesome traveler; early literary influences Saroyan and Hemingway; later Wolfe (after I had broken leg in Freshman
football at Columbia read Tom [Thomas] Wolfe and roamed
his New York on crutches). —Influenced by older brother
Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1925 when I was 4, was
great painter and drawer in childhood (he was)—(also said to
be a saint by the nuns)—(recorded in novel Visions of
Gerard).—My father was completely honest man full of gai-ety; soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II and died of cancer of the spleen. —Mother still living, I live with her a kind of monastic life that has enabled me to write as
much as I did.—But also wrote on the road, as hobo, railroad-
er, Mexican exile, Europe travel…One sister, Caroline, now
married to Paul E. Blake Jr. of Henderson N.C., a government
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 258
antimissile technician—she has one son, Paul Jr., my nephew,
who calls me Uncle Jack and loves me.—My mother’s name
Gabrielle, learned all about natural story-telling from her
long stories about Montreal and New Hampshire.—My peo-
ple go back to Breton France, first North American ancestor
Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac of Cornwall,
Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Riviere du
Loup after victory of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendents
married Indians (Mohawk and Caughnawaga) and became
potato farmers; first United States descendant my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac, carpenter, Nashua N.H.—My father’s
mother a Bernier related to explorer Bernier—all Bretons on
father’s side—My mother has a Norman name, L’Evesque.—
First formal novel The Town and the City written in
tradition of long work and revision, from 1946 to 1948, three years, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950.—Then discovered "spontaneous" prose and wrote, say, The Subterraneans in 3 nights—wrote On the Road in 3 weeks—
Read and studied alone all my life.—Set a record at
Columbia College cutting classes in order to stay in dormito-
ry room to write a daily play and read, say, Louis Ferdinand
Celine, instead of "classics" of the course.—
Had own mind.—Am known as "madman bum and
angel" with "naked endless head" of "prose."—Also a verse poet, Mexico City Blues (Grove, 1959).—Always considered writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal
kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice
beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the
"beat" generation.—Am actually not "beat" but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic…
Final plans: hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of
old age, mellow hopes of Paradise (which comes to every-
body anyway)…. © Jack Kerouac, 1960
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 259
Jack Kerouac
Timeline
(click on dates for text)
1922
1923
1926
1933
1938
1939
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 260
1939- 1940- 1942- 1944
1945
1946
1940
1941
1943
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 261
Jack Kerouac
Timeline
(click on dates for text)
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 262
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 263
Jack Kerouac
Timeline
(click on dates for text)
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
LiveREADS
ORPHE
US EMERGED 264
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 265
Books by
Jack Kerouac
(click on titles to purchase)
The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde and Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap*
Pic*
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940-1956
Selected Letters: 1957-1969
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories
and Other Writings
Poetry
Mexico City Blues
Scattered Poems
Poms All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
The Duluoz Legend
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveler
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris
* currently not available online.
LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 267
The Beat Movement
LiveREADS ORPHEUS EMERGED 268
In the 1950s, a group of writers and artists began to
respond to a growing sense of alienation and psychic
emptiness in postwar America. They felt the culture was
restrictive, hypocritical, repressed, and they were espe-
cially appalled by the virulent racism that continued to
poison the soul of the country. Their general idea was to
open things up. They derived their energy from an
expansive belief in the American traditions of freedom
and adventure, of infinite invention and possibility. They
found spiritual renewal through a connection with sub-
merged black culture. They sought to break free from
the Puritan denial of sex and presaged the "sexual rev-
olution" by freely expressing desire and openly extolling pleasure. Their message to a generation that felt boxed-in, shut-down, and spiritually lost: Get out onto the open