by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s admiration for Wolfe, meanwhile, remains undeniable. The lyrical regionalism of Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which fictionalized the author’s coming-of-age in Asheville, North Carolina, undoubtedly colored Kerouac’s own account of his upbringing in Lowell. Indeed, the gushing exuberance of Wolfean prose can be seen quite vividly in the impressionistic portrayal of Galloway that appears near the end of The Haunted Life’s opening chapter (beginning with the phrase “Here in Galloway—”). However, this poetic description of small-town life emerges in stark contrast to the stripped-down, realist prose animating the text up until that point—a style more in keeping with the labor-focused realism of writers such as Saroyan and Halper. Saroyan’s 1939 play, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Time of your Life, vaulted the California writer to the heights of the nation’s literary culture. Focused predominantly on the denizens of a San Francisco saloon, the play thoughtfully renders each character’s hopes and aspirations for the future. In the bulk of his work, however, Saroyan gravitated toward the portrayal of Armenian American agricultural workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley, especially in his hometown of Fresno. In the Fresno writings—of which the short-story collection My Name is Aram (1940) is particularly representative—Saroyan depicted agricultural workers and their families with a high degree of realism and grit, a quality that must have spoken to the young Kerouac, who always possessed an instinctive empathy for Lowell’s working people and the communities they inhabited (though not necessarily for the mills in which they labored). In a sense, certain of Kerouac’s later works, such as Doctor Sax and Visions of Gerard, attempt to replicate Saroyan’s feat in relation to Lowell’s Franco-American community. Kerouac’s background in Lowell also goes a long way toward explaining his fascination with Albert Halper, whose reputation has seriously declined since the days when Kerouac included him in his trinity of influences. Halper was more pronouncedly involved in proletarian aesthetics than Saroyan, and in naturalistic works such as The Foundry (1934) he offered a convincing portrayal of Chicago factory workers that obviously struck a chord with Kerouac, reminding him of his experience growing up in a New England mill town.
In keeping with the “laboring” of culture discussed above, many American writers in the 1930s and early 1940s directed their creative attention toward the “common people,” as much of the population struggled to survive the challenging economic circumstances of the time. On account of that artistic focus, Depression Era writing became newly imbued with the concerns of literary realism and naturalism, and these concerns are evident throughout The Haunted Life. Moreover, the political idealism driving the era’s aesthetic transformations is manifested in the figure of Garabed, whose philosophy is clearly modeled after the leftist and humanist exuberance of Sebastian Sampas. In a sense, the political enthusiasms of Kerouac’s youth died with Sampas at Anzio. Nevertheless, in works such as The Haunted Life and The Town and the City, we find Sampas encased in the amber of his unabashed ideals. The war in which Sebastian lost his life effectively ended the Depression, and the onset of the Cold War positioned the United States against the Soviet Union in a geopolitical contest for the world’s hearts and minds (despite the nations’ recent wartime alliance against fascism). These postwar developments tarnished socialist principles for many American thinkers—as did the critiques of Soviet totalitarianism contained in works such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), both of which served as fictional precursors to Hannah Arendt’s influential The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The looming specter of the Soviet Union and the terrifying uncertainties of the nuclear arms race made the class-based concerns of prewar literary works such as John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy seem suddenly antiquated, and the reputation of proletarian writers such as Halper evaporated within the pressures of the new political climate. Furthermore, as Morris Dickstein has pointed out, the political agitator who featured so prominently in 1930s proletarian literature was replaced in the 1950s by “prickly nonconformists” such as Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, whose actions are geared toward escape rather than revolutionary social transformation; Paradise and Caulfield seek out new forms of freedom and vitality on the margins of mainstream Cold War culture in ways that ultimately have very little to do with political doctrines on either end of the spectrum. As Dickstein goes on to explain, postwar rebellion located its nemesis in an American mindset suddenly “more devoted to organizational values and social conformity, more homogenous in its stated ideals,” a phenomenon amply explored in several major sociological works of the period, including The Lonely Crowd (1950) and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951). It is quite possible that if Sampas had survived the war, he would have found his own views dramatically refashioned by these Cold War intellectual trends—as Kerouac and many others did. As things stand, however, Sampas inhabits Kerouac’s work as an emblem of the leftist idealism and utopian aspirations that infused so many young lives in the years just prior to World War II.
As we’ve seen, in the decade leading up to that war, American political and artistic culture came to be animated by a pronounced rhetoric of the people. Some of this rhetoric was markedly leftist and utopian—as in the case of Kerouac’s letter to Sampas—while some of it tended toward divisiveness and xenophobia, as in the case of Father Charles Coughlin, who garners an explicit reference in The Haunted Life. This reference appears in the midst of a conversation with Garabed regarding Joe Martin’s bigoted worldview, in which Peter declares his father a “Coughlinite.” As Alan Brinkley has observed, by the late 1930s Coughlin had become “one of the nation’s most notorious extremists: an outspoken anti-Semite, a rabid anticommunist, a strident isolationist, and, increasingly, a cautious admirer of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.” The New Deal, however, was the chief target of his vitriol, and he viewed the era’s reforms as an aggressive expansion of industrialized bureaucracy, presided over by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Coughlin frequently dismissed as a “tyrant.” This intense disdain for Roosevelt is evident in Joe Martin’s worldview—as it is in Leo Kerouac’s letters, collected in the third section of this volume. (In the letters, Leo refers to the president derisively as “Roosie” and to the first lady as “Eleanoah.”)
Coughlin had entered the priesthood through the Basilian order, known for its devotion to Catholic forms of social activism. These forms had first taken hold amidst the industrial upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe and would prove in Coughlin’s early oratory to appeal to large segments of the Depression Era working class, whose ranks had been greatly augmented by the rise in European Catholic immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century. Generally speaking, Roosevelt possessed sizable appeal among this working-class population; in fact, Coughlin originally entered public life as a supporter of Roosevelt, drawn to the president’s critique of bankers and the moral shortcomings of modern capitalism. Coughlin’s break with Roosevelt occurred in the mid-1930s over what he viewed as the tyrannical and communistic aspects of the Second New Deal—at which point he began to refer to the president regularly as a “dictator.” By 1938, Coughlin’s rhetoric had taken a detour into the ugliest precincts of populism and xenophobia, devolving ultimately into the overt anti-Semitism expressed in The Haunted Life by Joe Martin.
For Joe, like so many of his time, radio represents a lifeline to the larger world; not coincidentally, it was also Coughlin’s preferred medium. He began delivering radio sermons in 1926, and at the peak of his popularity his listenership surpassed the 30 million mark. In a sense, Coughlin served as the forerunner of a postwar evangelical culture that found ways to disseminate its politicized brand of conservative Christianity through the newest and most popular media channels (and continues to do so today). In his own time—as Brinkley has documented—Coughlin’s rhetoric proved extremely attractive to those portions of the population experiencing apprehension over what proved to be a sign
ificant renovation of the nation’s life patterns and institutional structures. As Brinkley explains, “the United States in the 1930s was in the late stages of a great transformation already many decades old: a change from a largely rural, provincial, fragmented society to a highly urban, industrial one linked together by a network of large institutions.” This transformation—as Charles and Mary Beard had foreseen in The Rise of American Civilization (1927)—was chiefly facilitated by radio and the automobile, both of which unified American culture to an unprecedented degree. Lingering islands of provincialism could delay their contact with the conditions of modern life no longer, and the tensions arising from this contact are a central theme of both The Haunted Life and The Town and the City.
In The Haunted Life, Kerouac frames these historical tensions within the family drama of the Martins. The narrative opens with Joe Martin engaged in an openly racist and xenophobic diatribe, as jarring as the invective of Pap in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Joe blows cigar smoke like a dragon and bemoans the collapse of his beloved country instigated by foreigners and people of color, Peter drifts toward the radio and turns up an unnamed recording by Benny Goodman. Peter’s actions instantly transform the radio into a site of profound cultural conflict, as Goodman’s music represents a signal from the modern world that Joe’s provincialism can no longer ignore. In addition to being hailed as the “King of Swing,” Goodman emerged as a hero of the 1930s American left on account of his contributions to racial causes. After hiring pianist Teddy Wilson as part of his trio in 1935, Goodman created the first racially integrated music recordings in American history. Moreover, Wilson himself was known as a tireless supporter of the left-wing causes so dear to Garabed (and Sampas), and had served as the featured performer at benefit concerts for New Masses magazine. Rounding out the Goodman trio was drummer Gene Krupa, himself the son of a Polish immigrant. Goodman’s trio, in other words, provides a vivid sonic analogue of the cultural transformations lambasted by Joe—a fact Kerouac deftly reinforces as the elder Martin continues to curse Jewish and black Americans over the backdrop of Goodman’s music.
In this brief opening episode, the novel effectively foreshadows its concerns with social, political, and cultural history, demonstrating that Kerouac was already developing a sound understanding of the elements of fiction. Indeed, the book ushers us immediately into the political divisions of the time, as Garabed’s left-leaning optimism soon provides a counterweight to the right-wing vituperations of Joe. Over the course of what follows, however, Joe Martin’s insular thinking is also countered in Peter’s mind by the promise of flight, as represented by the wanderlust of Dick Sheffield. It is Dick, after all, who interrupts Peter’s opening reverie (in Chapter Four) regarding the intrinsic decency of the American suburbs. Unlike the daydreaming Peter—who is enraptured at times by the pastoral elements of his hometown—Dick is always harboring a new plan of escape from what he views as a bucolic and undesirable existence in provincial Galloway. In the words of the narrator, Dick “never made himself too comfortable, he was always ready to resume his energies.” Through the figure of Dick, then, Kerouac evokes the restive American spirit long embodied in the national iconography of the West—an iconography that has persistently wedded the promise of escape from ossified civilization (represented in this text by the reactionary rhetoric of Joe Martin) to fantasies of liberation and self-reliance. Moreover, Dick has a deep faith in the superiority of firsthand experience, a belief Kerouac himself (who always remained an urban transcendentalist of sorts) shared with the New England romantics who preceded him. At heart, Dick’s romanticism seems quite at home within the early work of an author whose most renowned novel—On the Road—would unabashedly celebrate the expansion of American experiential capacities as enabled by automobile culture, while providing the perfect literary accompaniment to the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
The conflicting attitudes and concerns of The Haunted Life’s characters permeate much of Kerouac’s work, reflecting the early influence of friends such as Sampas and Chandler. As prototypes, these figures provide the Kerouacian protagonist with two possible alternatives to the allure of domestic life and the hearth in midcentury America, one cerebral and one romantic. Moreover, while it is undeniable that Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg served as the respective inspirations for the neo-romantic Dean Moriarty and the poetic idealist Carlo Marx of On the Road, we might locate the embryonic vestiges of these character types in the fictional specters of Dick and Garabed. That is to say, while much has been made of the influence of New York bohemia on Kerouac’s aesthetic evolution—and rightly so—early works such as The Haunted Life compel us to consider the extent to which many of the author’s primary tropes and concerns originated in his upbringing in Lowell. The recent publication of The Sea Is My Brother, written in 1942 and unpublished during Kerouac’s lifetime, provides further justification for such considerations, as the book’s two male protagonists at one point embark on a road trip from New York to Boston (the geographical stretch of America most familiar to the twenty-year-old Kerouac), presaging the epic road journeys of his most famous work.
Sampas and Chandler remain spectrally preserved in the protracted act of memorialization that is Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, the title given by the author to his full output of semiautobiographical works. Evidently, however, the act of remembering never fully released him from bereavement, or from his personal hauntings. Thus, Kerouac’s fiction wrestles with the fact that our ghosts often return, despite their ceremonial burials; we carry them, impressed upon our memory, across the arc of our own brief encounter with time, until we can no longer speak or write their names. Early in 1944, Kerouac composed another novella, Galloway, which he identified as a revised version of a 1942 work titled The Vanity of Duluoz (not to be confused with 1967’s Vanity of Duluoz). In Galloway, Kerouac cast himself as Michael Daoulas and Sampas as Christopher Santos, and made some rudimentary attempts at stream of consciousness and at constructing multiple, concurrent narrative lines (an element of storytelling he would largely abandon following The Town and the City). As Joyce Johnson explains, Kerouac soon transposed the concerns of Galloway into the pages of The Haunted Life—though it should be pointed out that these two early works are drastically different novels at the level of voice and style, as Galloway attempts to mimic the high-modernist experimentation of writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Kerouac’s beloved Marcel Proust, while The Haunted Life remains more clearly under the influence of Kerouac’s “trinity.” Perhaps the most striking moments in the Galloway draft occur on its final page, where we encounter a set of spontaneous reflections extraneous to the concerns of the narrative proper. A handwritten inscription in the upper right-hand margin of the concluding page suggests that Galloway was completed “while listening to Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ Easter, 1944.” At the bottom of that same page—separated from the concluding lines of the narrative by a string of asterisks—is a prayer of sorts, suggesting that Kerouac finished the piece while in mourning over the news of Sebastian Sampas’s death (which had occurred on March 2). That section reads as follows:
I wish to be devout, but not on my knees in the church of the Lord. Oh where can I be devout, and to what great power, and for what end? Here in the pine wood, where the arch is Gothic, and the light rays earthward, where the trunks are buttressed, and the sighing wind is an organ sound, to what end and wherefore devout? Oh Splendid watcher . . . my brother . . . supreme soul of the earth, are you with me now? Were I to pray, would you hear? Were I to sing, would you hear? Were I, yes, to weep, would you hear? Your form, your shadow I seek, and almost find, and then lose, and sense again.
Shortly after composing these lines, Kerouac would begin work on The Haunted Life. One of the epigraphs chosen for that work was an excerpt from Milton’s pastoral elegy “Lycidas,” making it abundantly clear that The Haunted Life was to serve as a literary requiem for Sampas and Chandler—and perhaps a host of oth
ers.
Chandler had lost his life earlier in the war on the Bataan Peninsula. Moreover, in February 1943, the Dorchester—on which Kerouac had previously shipped out as a merchant seaman—was sunk by a German submarine, an incident in which many of Kerouac’s former shipmates lost their lives. Such losses made Kerouac particularly sensitive about the male relationships in his life, as they compounded a deeply rooted insecurity traceable to the death of his brother, Gerard, when Jack was only four years old. At several points in The Town and the City, Kerouac writes poignantly of male loneliness, observing that “men are always lonely” and that “each one of them burned and raged with a particular loneliness, a special desolate anger and longing.” In such moments, he seems in part to be engaging with sentiments forged within the tenuous male bonds of the wartime years. Indeed, Kerouac’s losses during those years go a long way toward explaining his particular fascination with male friendship or male bonding in virtually all of his books.
The impulse to record—to submit memory to print—is another of the animating features of those books. Throughout The Duluoz Legend, Kerouac goes to great lengths to detail the transformative events of his own life while simultaneously chronicling the lives of so many he met along the way. At its core, this compulsion seems driven by the author’s keen awareness of the transience of existence, a lesson from the wartime years that Kerouac carried through the remainder of his days. While Kerouac discovered much of the inspiration for his prose style in the improvisatory nature of jazz, this longing to memorialize bears a notable resemblance to the artistic motivations of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In reflecting on his own experiences of World War II, Shostakovich makes a startling admission: