The Haunted Life

by Jack Kerouac

  The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. Where do you put the tombstone for Meyerhoff or Tukhachevsky? Only music can do that for them. I’m willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that’s impossible, and that’s why I dedicate my music to them all. I think constantly of these people, and in almost every major work I try to remind others of them.

  Particularly striking about Shostakovich’s statement is his accompanying confession that the commemoration of those lost is ultimately “impossible.” Nor have his symphonic efforts freed the composer from the burden of memory, as he acknowledges thinking “constantly” of those who have perished. Such disclosures rub powerfully against the grain of our conventional understanding of memorialization and monument building. That is to say, we have long supposed that the purpose of constructing monuments and memorials is to relegate individual or cultural loss respectfully to the past—an idea whose roots in Western consciousness might be traced to Pericles’s Funeral Oration in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Accordingly, acts of memorialization are to serve as mechanisms of dissociation even as they foreground commemoration—they are markers of the past that allow the living to move on.

  Nevertheless, much of Kerouac’s work continues to revolve around its originating sense of loss, as if the act of recalling or commemorating can never fully liberate him from the things being recalled. Like Shostakovich, Kerouac remains haunted and seems unable to resist the impulse to “remind others.” This impulse is plainly evident in works such as 1967’s Vanity of Duluoz, in which he circles back through many of the events that originally served as the basis of The Town and the City. This quality of Kerouac’s oeuvre makes it the improbable prose counterpart of Shostakovich’s symphonic work—an epic literary cycle of memorialization—and the affinities between these two artists do not stop there. Like many intellectuals and artists who lived through World War II, Shostakovich emerged from the experience politically ambivalent and deeply suspicious of collective life—as did Kerouac, despite his inclination to engage the social and political debates of his times in early works such as The Haunted Life. In compositions such as the Eleventh Symphony, Shostakovich gave musical expression to this ambivalence—heightened as it was by the composer’s need to survive as an artist amidst the censorious and stifling atmosphere of postwar Soviet society (which exposed his work to tremendous pressures and contributed to a long history of critical misunderstandings). Although the Eleventh Symphony commemorates the Soviet Revolution of 1905 with much bombast, it also expresses (in subtle fashion) its composer’s doubts about the eventual direction of the Communist movement; indeed, later musicologists have connected its pessimistic passages to Shostakovich’s misgivings regarding the Soviet Union’s military response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Despite the well-documented demands of the Soviet authorities, Shostakovich made every attempt to resist clear-cut ideologies and party platforms in his music, as he hoped instead to memorialize all those whose lives and freedom had fallen victim to modern warfare and bureaucracy—something he did quite stirringly in his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. For much of the Cold War era, Kerouac also refused to endorse cut-and-dry political ideologies, often to the consternation of cultural commentators and his literary colleagues. He tended to view such ideologies as forms of deferential obedience, capable of giving rise to fanaticism and mass destruction. As a result, Kerouac never once voted in an American election, nor did he ever claim a political affiliation or embrace any sort of conventionally identifiable politics. The roots of this ambivalence are perhaps to be found in his long-held attitudes toward war and death, as captured in the pages that follow.

  Todd F. Tietchen

  University of Massachusetts–Lowell

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Vintage, 1983.

  Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2011.

  Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

  Johnson, Joyce. The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. New York: Viking, 2012.

  Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: The Original Scroll. New York: Penguin, 2008.

  ———. Selected Letters, Volume 1: 1940–1956. Edited by Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1996.

  ———. The Sea Is My Brother. Edited by Dawn Ward. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2012.

  ———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.

  ———. Vanity of Duluoz. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968.

  McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2003.

  Shostakovich, Dmitri. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. As related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. New York: Limelight Editions, 2006.

  Notes on the Text

  The following selections represent a significant addition to the public corpus of Kerouac’s work. As Kerouac remains widely known for his playfulness with language—as well as his fondness for neologisms—I have made every attempt to transcribe the texts as they were originally written. I did make some minor grammatical adjustments, mostly for consistency of spelling and tense. Additionally, I removed a number of semicolons from the dialogue in The Haunted Life and replaced them with commas and periods as I saw fit. I viewed those semicolons as an early stylistic quirk that, given his own ear for spoken English, Kerouac would have later removed.

  At times, portions of the material were not completely legible. When I felt confident enough in my guesswork, I placed the text in brackets [as such]. Those portions of text that I simply could not decipher have been indicated as such: [?]. Seeing as this is not a critical edition, I have resisted footnoting except in a few instances within Leo Kerouac’s letters where it seemed unavoidable.

  T.F.T.

  PART I

  THE HAUNTED LIFE

  “But, O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

  Now thou art gone, and never must return!”

  —Milton, “Lycidas”

  “And in myself too many things have perished which, I imagined, would last forever, and new structures have arisen, given birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.”

  —Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

  “N’ous-je pas une fois une jeunesse amiable, héroïque, fabuleuse, à écrire sur des feuilles d’or, trop de chance! par quel crime, par quelle erreur, aije mérité ma faiblesse actuelle?”

  —Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer

  Part One

  Home

  1

  “America isn’t the same country anymore; it isn’t even America anymore.” Mr. Martin drew on his cigar with nodding and angry finality. “It’s become a goddamn pesthole for every crummy race from the other side. America isn’t America anymore. A white man can’t walk down the street, or go in a restaurant, or do business, or do anything for that matter without having to mix up with these goddamn greasers from the other side.”

  On the couch across the unlit room, Peter Martin grinned over his cigarette.

  “Crapule!” cried Mr. Martin, coughing smoke.

  The light from the kitchen, where Aunt Marie was washing the dishes, fell into the dim front room where Mr. Martin was still coughing when his sister called from her dishpan, “Are you starting again?”

  “You goddamn right I am!” he choked.

  Peter reached for the radio dial to turn up the volume of a Benny Goodman record which had just begun. He repressed the impulse to announce the title of the number to the room in general; in a juke joint he would have cried it out triumphantly, announcing his knowledge of jazz.

>   “Wops!” resumed Mr. Martin, his voice thick. “Jews! Greeks! Niggers! Armenians, Syrians, every scummy race in the world. They’ve all come here, and they’re still coming, and they’ll keep on coming by the boatloads. Mark my word, you’ll see the day when a real American won’t have a chance to work and live decently in his own country, a day when ruin and bankruptcy will fall on this nation because all these damned foreigners will have taken everything over and made a holy mess of it.”

  Mr. Martin paused to puff quickly on his cigar. Peter was half listening. Aunt Marie was singing an aria from Carmen over her dishes in a small sweet voice.

  “By God, that trip to New York opened my eyes plenty. I’d never dreamed things had reached this point . . . never! That city is crawling with dirty foreigners, and niggers! I’ve never seen so many niggers in all my life. A couple of days was all I needed to get the lay of the land. Black faces, greasy faces, all kinds of faces. I ask myself how can a white man live in that stinking town? What’s happened to this country? Who is the cause of all this?”

  “Roosevelt?” supplied Peter slyly.

  “You don’t need to mention it. You ought to know it as well as I do.”

  Peter leaned forward. “Oh I don’t know, Pop . . .”

  “Of course you don’t know. You’re only a kid. You haven’t lived sixty years in this country. You didn’t see America and work in America when it was really America . . .”

  Peter blanked his cigarette.

  “Now you take around here,” went on the father from the dark corner, the cigar glowing an orange arc, “as it was fifty years ago, right in little Galloway, Massachusetts. We were all white people, working together. Your grandfather was only a carpenter, but he was an honest man, a hardworking man. None of this grasping and foreign conning for him. He got up in the morning, went to work for eleven hours a day, came home, ate supper, sat in the kitchen for a few hours thinking, and then went to bed. Like that! No shrewdness to him, just a straightforward, honest old boy. Ah God, he was . . .”

  “What was Galloway like in those days?” prompted Peter.

  “Well, like I was saying, we were all white people . . . a sprinkling of Irishmen, French-Canadians like ourselves, old English families, and a few Germans. You would have to see it to understand what I’m trying to tell you. We were . . . well, we were honest, the community was honest. Of course, there were a few thieves and cardsharps and peanut politicians, like you’ll find anywhere in the world. But what I mean is, the general run of these people were on the up and up. Why, boy, it was a remarkable thing, now that I really look back on it. Life was a simple and quiet affair in those days; people were real and sincere and . . . friendly. They weren’t ready to trim you the moment you turned your back, like these New York Jews; in those days it wasn’t a matter of selling the cheapest goods for the highest price. It was, by God, a matter of selling the best possible. Look, you like those long-winded economic words, those they throw around at Boston College, well now, listen . . . competition in those days was based on who could put up the best goods for sale . . . the baker who made the best chocolate pie . . . and not on who could afford to undersell the others without regard to quality . . .”

  “Why blame New York Jews for this change?” frowned Peter, intent on creating logic.

  “You’re right, I guess. It’s not only the New York Jew. It’s Jews all over the country, the Wop and all the others who bring with them from the other side ideas which are not American, and with it all their filthy ways . . .”

  Aunt Marie had finished the dishes. She entered the front room, a statuesque lady with white hair braided close to her head, wearing a blue and white cotton housedress and a pair of worn house slippers. She sat in the chair by the window, where the last pink glow of dusk hovered behind the screen. June crickets were beginning their numberless chorale.

  “These foreigners don’t understand the real America . . . that’s why they’re so dangerous. They bring with them the old ways of Europe, the haggling cheesy manners, the crooked dealings, the damned smoke-screening . . .”

  “What do you mean by smoke-screening?” interposed Peter.

  “I mean just that! They say one thing, and they mean something else. They lie in your face. A man comes to a point where he can’t figure out what they’re after. If they want something, they don’t come right out with it! They throw up a damned smokescreen. They haven’t got the guts, nor the honesty, to come out with it straight . . .”

  Aunt Marie lit a Fatima and glazed placidly out the window. A commentator was speaking on the radio about the retreat of the Russians toward Moscow.

  “These foreigners know which side their bread is buttered on. Roosevelt! The more foreigners, the more votes for him; he plays up to them, and they think it’s wonderful. As for the rest of the American people, to hell with them! Roosevelt knows the real Americans won’t be the fall guys to finance and support his dreams of dictatorship, so he turns to these foreigners, and they fall for it blissfully because that’s all they knew back in the ‘old country’—inflated balloons like Roosevelt! I tell you, the country is going to pot, and we’re going to be dragged into the war by Roosevelt and the Jews and the British Empire! Mark my word! And someday, when people get a little more sense in their heads, they’re going to catch on to Roosevelt’s schemes.” Mr. Martin rose to his feet, a tall spare man of sixty, white-haired and bespectacled, and moved across the dark room. “And he will go down in history as the greatest enemy to mankind America ever had!”

  Mr. Martin was in the kitchen.

  “Mark my word!” he shouted back, and slammed the bathroom door shut.

  Aunt Marie sighed deeply. “He’s getting worse year by year,” she said, weighing her words with portent. “Worse and worse, year by year.”

  Peter got up and went over to the piano stool, grinning.

  “Your poor mother was frightened to death of him, Petey. Even when he was a boy, he would rage around the house like a lion. Even father couldn’t calm him down or tame him; he was always angry about something, always going around with a chip on his shoulder, always getting into trouble. I tell you, he’s getting worse and worse, year by year . . .”

  Peter struck a few keys on the old square back piano. He said, “Pop’s always been a man with opinions, and he voices them good and loud, that’s all.”

  “Well,” said Aunt Marie, “you can say what you want, but I know Joe Martin, he’s my brother, I’ve known him ever since he was so high, and I tell you he’s never been all there, and he’s getting worse year by year . . .”

  Peter giggled and spun around in the piano stool to face the keyboard. He began to play chords, striking them at random, a discordant cat-on-the-keys performance. Aunt Marie turned on the chair lamp and peered at the pile of newspapers and magazines in a rack beneath an arm of Mr. Martin’s easy chair. The announcer said it was eight-thirty.

  Peter went to the radio and dialed for the baseball scores. Mr. Martin returned munching a last season’s Mackintosh apple.

  “I’m listening to Fibber McGee and Molly at nine o’clock,” he told his son, grinning. “Until then, the radio is yours . . .”

  “Wow! Teddy Williams got three more hits today,” cried Peter.

  Searching around for his reading glasses, Mr. Martin said: “He’s a good one, that Williams.”

  Peter returned to the couch and lit another cigarette. Aunt Marie looked up from her Saturday Evening Post.

  “Petey, don’t smoke so much. You smoke almost as much as Wesley used to . . .”

  “Did he smoke a lot?”

  “My lord, yes. The doctor told him to stop smoking many times, but he never did. For all we know he may be consumptive by now . . .”

  Mr. Martin looked up, frowning. His eyes were dark. “Smoke? That fool kid drinks like ten men.”

  “That’s what they teach them at sea. There’s no harder life than the sailor’s . . .”

  Martin went on, ignoring his sister: “He was a hi
gh school punk when he started drinking. I remember one afternoon I stopped in at McTigue’s bar on Woolcott Street, and there was my own sixteen-year-old son sitting drunk at the bar, with a dozen empty shot glasses around him . . . smoking a cigarette. It didn’t faze him that I happened to catch him . . .” Mr. Martin’s voice was softened in recollection. “By God, Marie, he was a strange little tyke . . . a strange lad . . .”

  Peter listened with soft wonder. Whenever they spoke about Wesley he felt that way, sad and filled with mystery. He had a brother, surely, Wesley Martin; but Wesley Martin was a dark and haunting legend. Wesley had not been home for nine or ten years. He was a seaman. Occasionally, a letter would find its way to Galloway, always written in a strange yet simple script; always worded simply, yet strangely. Peter shook his head slowly, puzzled.

  “How old is he by now?” asked Mr. Martin, turning a suddenly drawn and helpless face on Aunt Marie.

  She knew it instantly, but performed a little ritual of recollection, counting on her fingers and mumbling. “He’ll be twenty-seven in December. He left home in the Spring of 1932, that will be ten years come next Spring . . .”

  “And you were just a little lad, Petey,” said Mr. Martin, gazing on his son blankly.

  “I was ten years old. Tell me, Pop, why did Wesley leave home? I mean, was there any particular reason, or was it just . . . that business about Helen Copley . . .”