by Jack Kerouac
But the rest of the family, as by an inner necessity, clings unconsciously to the spiritual strength of American culture. Now that young Charley is dead, little Mickey—almost sixteen years old—begins to make a brilliant mark in school and prepares to enter a prep school on a scholastic and athletic scholarship, just as Peter had done years before. In the clamor of Brooklyn Mickey has grown into a quiet and resourceful lad nevertheless, almost as though Charley’s death had transferred his greatness to him, and we also see that unlike Peter, Mickey is never going to know excessive doubt and experiment because of this atmosphere he has chosen for himself—that domain of science and technique which continues to open up in America. Mickey is going to become an engineer. Meanwhile, the father’s health fails, largely due to his hatred of the city and his loneliness for the old way of life of New England—for to him, the whole country is falling to pieces as he sees some of his children go down under so tragically while the others have to struggle so gamely: little Charley’s death on Tarawa, Joe’s subsequent injuries in Europe, the havoc of war on his faith and soul, the wretched downfalls of Peter, Francis and Elizabeth in their real despair, and that phenomenal rise of “leftism” and Marxist sympathy in America during the war, especially in the pressure-group areas of the city all around him—all this convinces the angry sick old man of the fall of his beloved America. He sits alone at home in Brooklyn while Mickey is in school, the mother is working and Peter is wandering fruitlessly about the streets—and he weeps and mutters and prays and shouts out his anger. The doctor now gives Mr. Martin less than a year to live: he has a form of cancer . . . For Peter to witness the slow death of his once mighty father is the culmination of despair.
Meanwhile Ruth’s young Southern husband returns from Okinawa wounded, and they start their life together slowly (the war is over now), meeting all the heavy post-war problems with which all such young veteran couples were confronted in 1945. They can’t find a place to live, the boy is weary, prices are high and wages are low in the South and all those things. And Rose, meanwhile, is married and living in New England. This had reduced the size and strength of the Martin family, and the old man is dying . . .
But Joe Martin is coming home from overseas, and after a brief passionate re-courtship of his girl, during which he is torn with jealousy and wracked by all the confusions of the returning veteran, he marries the girl, brings her home with him to Brooklyn and sets out to hold the family together—for Joe unconsciously believes in the family and always will.
And this is when the father dies.
In BOOK SIX: “DEATH AND RESURRECTION” the focal scene, the climax of the story, is the funeral of the Martin father in his old hometown of Lacoshua in New Hampshire. Here all the members of the family are brought together again, the wandering sheep and the faithful and the black sheep too, the despairing and the courageous, to the scene of their original land . . . the land of the Town . . .
And in those scenes the whole mood and trend of the novel is seen in an illuminated flash. What do these kids think as they see their father in his coffin and remember the years of life in New England, the war, the City behind them? What is it that they feel? What do they say to each other? What occurs to their souls when they see the old man lowered back into the land in the old cemetery?
They find themselves again in the old landscape of the true American life, after wars and cities and confusions and madness, they see their father in the coffin and they remember everything—each in his own way . . . And it is Peter who is overcome with the greatest emotion of his young life, who sees everything at last in the purifying light of love and devotion, who realizes the deep meanings of life and love and courage and death. It seems to him as he sees his father laying there in the coffin with his ink-stained hands folded before his grave reposeful face of death that a great and gentle demonstration of life’s one supreme meaning is being made for him—for here is his father, surrounded by his sons and daughters and the wife of his life, and the beloved old friends and relatives of his New England land, in old New Hampshire, in the brooding hill night, all this after the bitter years of Brooklyn’s clangorous air, of illness and anger and longing—here is his father’s realization of an ambition, back home again and at last with his kind and kin and in his true land, but now he is dead, he is dead, after so many years of suffering and loneliness and longing, and it seems suddenly to Peter as he stands before the coffin weeping, that all the richness to which his father’s longing soul had been dedicated, an American richness, now returned to him after he is dead, when he can no longer know it, is a richness of longing—that in the life of such a man, despair is cast aside because the heart wishes to love and to long for life—and Peter realizes that he too must become a patriarch in this life, he too must strive and be filled with longing and love, in the face of anything and everything. He sees now that life in the world of all his fathers, in America, is infinite longing and courage and simplicity—and he sees that he, Peter, must cast aside the doubts and pessimisms of the City, and return to his father’s land and life . . . Elizabeth Martin is also overwhelmed with repentance as she sees her old father in the coffin. She makes up her mind then and there to come home, and start her life over again . . . But Francis stands in gloomy silence in a dark corner and says nothing. The little widow, Mrs. Martin, is surrounded by three great sons now—Joe, Peter and Mickey. The family is going to come back to life—it is death and resurrection . . .
After the funeral, Peter slowly becomes a new person, returns to the old American self he had in the earlier part of the novel, but fortified now with a youthful kind of wisdom and strong friendships and new hope. He is fortified by the example of his great brother Joe and warned by the example of his brother Francis, and he, Peter, the Alyosha of the Brothers Martin, takes over the mood of the finale, for he’s the central figure in the whole unfolding meaning of the story, he is the uniter of all the varieties of human and American possibility in the family, and he goes forth at last a true and a believing American.
Here the essential awe and wonder and delight of American life reasserts itself in the last pages of the book, with all the overtones of glee and boyish gravity that exist in the culture, and in the resurrection that comes over a country after a war and over the lives of people after a death, we find Peter the uniter visiting all the scenes of this Resurrection—Joe’s new home and new family in New England, where the old brown and gold of American joy begins again; a football game in which Mickey Martin stars and is the toast of his comrades; he visits Ruth and her husband in the South, understanding their hopes and meanings and feeling again the mighty surge of American vitality running through his blood because of all these things; he plans for his life and career and future patriarchy; he travels West and sees the vista of America broadening before him . . . and he remembers, he remembers—his father, Alexander the lost boy, the girl he had loved in the city which had broken their love, his brother Charley, his dead comrades, he remembers everything and grows stronger within the surge of true American strength (which is not to be found in the City). For he has come to see that “hell is the inability to love”—that the joys and sorrows of life are the necessary shadings of a courageous soul—that man is a cultural animal capable of saintliness and character, and not a “brain” of over-consciousness—that there is no why—that there is always joy, there is always beauty, there is always life and its infinite things when man strives in his soul.
All the characters in the book are concluded according to their development, including the young murderer (who returns from jail repentant, almost saintly, and filled with new courage and ambition and love); none are left hanging in the early parts of the story. The vast number of such characters, acquaintances and friends of Peter, give the book a coverage of broad American types and destinies.
I write with gravity and gleefulness because I do not feel skeptical and clever about these things, and I believe that this is an American feeling. (No Joyce, no Auden, no Kaf ka
has anything to say to a true American.) If much of the writing seems to be over-explained, it’s only because I want the majority of readers to understand what goes on in the story, because I believe that the average American can understand anything and everything providing one does not address him in the foreign tongue of European culture-consciousness.
Some Town and City Conclusions (1948)
A form of masochism, (or love of helplessness,) and something that resembles impetuosity of a sort seems to make the most conclusive evidence connected with what I have been calling “intellectual decadence.” This, which occurs in modern City-Centers in America, along with the crowded, harried, unhealthy, brutal life of the City-Center in general, should be the main subject to be drawn and concluded in the City episode.
The masochism occurs in various forms but springs up from the same patterned depths, the same psychology, the same “character structure,” or if not that Reichian term, at least, the same character-dissolution. It concerns a real fall from manliness. I mean this in the most direct sense. And concurrently, in women, it concerns a real fall from womanliness, again in the most direct sense. It renders the man helpless in the real situations of real life, that is, a kind of primary life which is arbitrarily sluffed over by the convenient City-forms that can’t and never will last. I distinctly remember, in my Bohemian City days, having a horror of life outside the city, as though I were sheltered from it; actually having a horror of the very countryside itself. These feelings were real. A dream I had recently convinced me that this is true: that helplessness is the basis of all neurotic forms in the mind. It is a City Disbelief in the will. City Men like Kaf ka and Spengler* love nothing better than delineations of horrible destiny which a man is incapable of changing, by which a man is doomed. Since the American idea is a will-idea above all things, the mere fact that helplessness and will-lessness enters into our City-Centers is a dangerous fact indicating a decline of character and just guts in a generation. In these situations, the woman is rendered unwomanlike and hors de combat—real barrenness, disbelief in marriage, Lesbianism, Talking-Womanism, general frustrated, impetuous nastiness.
A lot of the magnanimity of our “Liberalism” is connected with masochism. The New York radical who rushes down South to “fight for the Negro” is only impetuously showing he is much better than we are: and at the same time, of course, revealing that he wants to be punished. This is Burroughs, except that he turns to a reversal of values, of Bourgeois values, instead of political reversals. All these radical departures are really poses intended to set up an invidious comparison, as malicious as the invidiousness of wealth and position and blood. Since none of these things concern the general run of American mankind (and around the world to boot), I conclude that the people are not mad, it is the intelligentsia which is mad. The people have patience, a sense of humor, sanity, occasional brutality and violence, but in the end, they are fair and square, and strong. Thus it is easy to see how an intelligentsia which bases itself in City-Centers and has the great modern tools of news-dissemination and communication at hand can in the end exert a blighting influence on the children of the people, and ruin future generations. My own motive for saying all these things is partly invidious, partly impetuous, mostly serious and concerned with the livelihood of people: if this were not so, I don’t think I’d say it, work so hard at saying it in a two-yeared siege (at the height of a sensual feeling for pleasure that most men have in their twenties).
George Martin is dying at the end of the story, but he hangs on to the bitter end with amazing endurance, humor, and courage (which actually happened to my father). And even as he dies, he rues the day he dropped his business in Galloway in a masochistic splurge, and would start all over again if he could. His excessive illness however makes him sensitive and childlike and almost saintly, and he can cry one minute and raise the roof the next, depending on the weather. There is a strong streak of Christian saintliness and Myshkin-idiocy running in men, especially in Martin père and son, but the very existence of this streak, which mars their strength, however heightens their sense of real immediate justice in life. This is the proper mixture I think.
*and Freud in a more insidious sense
PART III
JACK AND LEO KEROUAC
Leo Kerouac served as the prototype for Joe Martin in The Haunted Life. This section opens with a series of letters addressed by Leo to Jack and Jack’s older sister, Caroline (known affectionately as “Nin”), in which the political volatility of their father is on full display. The content of Leo’s letters, addressed to Jack during his brief 1942 stay in Washington, DC, runs the gamut from film and book criticism to the especial vitriol he harbors for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Writing in the wake of losing his printing business—largely through his own mismanagement and profligate behavior—Leo also expresses a great deal of contempt for Lowell (often referred to as “Stinktown”) and Jack’s Columbia University football coach Lou Little (referred to on one occasion as a “wop”). Troubling aspects aside, the letter dated “Saturday Eve ’42” contains a concluding section titled “AFTERMATH,” demonstrating a playfulness with form that his son would have no doubt appreciated.
Moreover, the two typed sketches authored by Leo (“A Sketch of Gerard” and “A Sketch of Nashua and Lowell”) suggest that the elder Kerouac may have wielded some early influence over the development of Jack’s literary interests and style. The vivid sentimentalism contained within Leo’s sketch of Gerard—Jack’s older brother who died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine—serves as a portent for Jack’s own descriptions of his brother in Visions of Gerard (1963). The accompanying sketch of Nashua and Lowell aims in part at criticizing the young Jack’s atheistic tendencies, as Leo goes on to openly question whether his son has the resolve to make it through the war years—or through life in general.
Leo—who had been born Joseph Alcide Leon Kerouac in 1889 in Saint-Hubert de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec—died from stomach cancer in May 1946. The remaining three documents in this section, penned by Jack, reveal the complexity of the son’s relationship to his volatile and bigoted, yet devoted father. The long diary entry from 1945 deals quite specifically with Leo’s illness, and declares at one point that sickness has jarred Leo out of his racial obsessions. It also captures Jack within the glow of his heady encounter with New York intellectualism, containing references to Céline, Partisan Review, and Lucien Carr’s “New Vision.” In stating his interest in writing an epic saga of American life, driven by an “urge to understand the whole in one sweep, and to express it in one magnificent work,” Jack also admits to feeling alienated by the nation’s evolving concerns and institutions—much as he did in the Town and the City documents included in the previous section.
“An Example of Non*Spontaneous Deliberated Prose,” composed in the jazzed-up style for which Kerouac is most renowned, evokes the author’s early memories of Lowell and Leo. Indeed, the nonspontaneous prose referred to in the title is soon revealed to be Leo’s, as Jack fondly recalls his father sitting at a typewriter and laboring over an editorial piece for his local tabloid, the Lowell Spotlight. Leo’s labors stand in contrast to the confident and spontaneous nature of Jack’s recollections, featuring a first sentence that runs to 316 words. The final document collected here, a ruminative fragment from 1963, was written in that same spontaneous vein. In it, Kerouac lauds his father for his sincerity, the quality toward which his own work would consistently aspire.
T. F. T.
Letters (1942–1943)
LEO KEROUAC
Friday ’42
Dear Jack,
Got your address from your mother. She told me about your trip to N.Y.—and I hope you’ll be good and give me firsthand news of what goes on.
Washington must be a madhouse and you are very lucky to be at the head of this hysteria. I rather think you’ll get invaluable experience which in years to come will be of great value. This country is going through a phase you’ll never face again. What
a weird future your generation is facing. I thought I had been through an amazing age, but I daresay that your generation will make history as never before in this world.
We made the groundwork, us oldsters, with our inventive and generally energetic years, and now for the jackpot! “Hold her boys, she’s going to be a whopper!” Oil. You’ve got a whale of a gusher. And I hope the operators know how to get her in hand. She’s raining now and whew! Will they ever cap and control it?
Dig in Jack! Get it all. Keep away from Lowell. Go and see things. Use your head and your heart. Remember your old folks. Your mom, she loves you, and Caroline and I will stand by and that’s all we can do.
Don’t get false ideas. Don’t think for instance that I’ve given you up. You’re a strange boy, but you’re still my very dear hustling, quizzling little kid with your old fringed hat, a brown healthy tan, a craving for ice cream, and your mom’s good cooking.
What did you do about Joe Doakes?* How did he finally pan out? You know, you have a real idea there. Sleep on it. And so after a while, say in about six months, put your teeth in it and give it all you got, and something will come of it, believe me.
You probably want some news about me. Jack, I’ve got the little job I’ve always dreamed about. Good bosses. Swell guys to work with—(I hope you’ll come and see me sometime. I’ll introduce you to my new gang)—and I’m beginning to call my soul my own again. Meriden is a small town. 2 movies, but I go to Hartford almost every week and have a show and dinner, and generally pass the time of day fairly well.