The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Jean-Christophe Cloutier

  Written in Philadelphia,

  Shackamaxon, 2016

  Ancient Capital

  of the United States,

  sacred meeting place

  of the Lenape

  1 The American vernacular equivalent of what they’re saying would be something like “Ernest, dammit, you wouldn’t a had a goddam chance”; and the other man replies, “Well, shee-it!—Ha! Ha ha ha ha!”

  2 Jack Kerouac, “Search by Night.” Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Paul Marion (New York: Viking, 1999), 173–174.

  3 Ibid., 174.

  4 Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012), 22.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Henry James, “Quebec,” America: Early Writings, in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: The Library of America, 1993), 767–776.

  7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Trans. by Susan Bernofsky. The Translation Studies Reader, Second Edition. Ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 59.

  8 Jack Kerouac Archive, 14.2. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library (from now on, Kerouac Archive).

  9 The translation was done by Roger Brunelle. Shortly thereafter, a short excerpt from the French manuscript, along with a facsimile of a page, appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française (no. 521), Gallimard, 1996.

  10 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur. Ed. Todd Tietchen (New York: The Library of America, 2015), 124–125.

  11 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, 8 Sept. 1950, Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 228.

  12 Yvonne Le Maître, “The Town and the City,” Le Travailleur, March 23, 1950. My translation. Kerouac published his first novel under the name of John Kerouac.

  13 See Le Français au Québec: 400 ans d’histoire et de vie. Sous la direction de Michel Plourde et Pierre Georgeault (Montréal: Éditions Fides, 2008); and Edith Szlezák, Franco-Americans in Massachusetts: “No French no mo’ ’round here” (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2010).

  14 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur. Ed. Todd Tietchen (New York: The Library of America, 2015), 522.

  15 See Johnson, The Voice Is All, 22.

  16 Kerouac, Visions of Gerard, 513.

  17 “The Father of My Father,” Atop an Underwood, 151.

  18 Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956, 395.

  19 Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage, edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2016).

  20 The only modifications brought to the translation covered by Kerouac’s typescript have been made to ensure consistency of the text as a stand-alone piece and, as Kerouac puts it in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” to fix “obvious, rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting.”

  21 For more on this issue and what Hassan Melehy calls Kerouac’s “hybrid diction,” see Melehy’s “Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec,” American Literature (Vol. 84, No. 3, September 2012), 589–615.

  22 Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956, 228.

  23 Édouard Glissant, L’imaginaire des langues: entretiens avec Lise Gauvin (1991–2009) (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 23. My translation.

  24 The roots of bardasseux(ze) vary: aside from causing din, berdasser can also mean to keep busy without clear purpose; barda is an older French word meaning heavy and cumbersome equipment; it once referred to the clanging noise marching soldiers made while carrying all their gear. The Breton word berdadas means “great noise.”

  25 Kerouac Archive, 51.1. Kerouac’s various translations for the word hint that he was attempting to capture many of the Canuck word’s meanings in a single term (see previous note).

  26 Kerouac Archive, 51.1. This alternate holograph translation covers roughly the first 2,000 words of Sur le chemin.

  27 Kerouac Archive, 39.11.

  28 “I’ve kept the neatest records you ever saw,” Kerouac wrote to Ann Charters in 1966. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 424.

  29 Kerouac Archive, 39.11.

  ON FRANK SINATRA

  On Frank Sinatra

  In his 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac writes of stopping off in New York “just so I could hear Frank Sinatra, and see Frank Sinatra sing in the Paramount Theater, waiting there in line with two thousand screaming Brooklyn Jewish and Italian girls, I’m just about, in fact, AM the only guy in the line, and when we get in the theater and skinny old Frank comes out and grabs the mike, with glamorous rings on his fingers and wearing gray sports coat, black tie, gray shirt, sings ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ and ‘Without a song . . . the road would never end’ oww.” The Paramount Theater, a landmark venue of the old Times Square that closed its doors in 1966, was central to Sinatra’s rise to unparalleled stardom, from his legendary solo performance as a “special guest” of the Benny Goodman Orchestra on New Year’s Eve 1942 to the “bobbysoxer riot” of October 1944.

  Kerouac lived in New York throughout 1946 and this essay (from a handwritten journal dated May 6, 1946–July 21, 1946) celebrates the authenticity that Kerouac had come to associate with Sinatra’s voice, attesting to the crooner’s influence over Kerouac’s evolving conceptions of voice and style. Kerouac acknowledges Sinatra’s ability to vocalize the moods of melancholy and loneliness defining the World War II generation, a disposition that Kerouac would explore in his first published novel The Town and the City (1950) and in On the Road (1957).

  (Notes on a projected essay Sorelian in intent—)

  June 5, 1946.

  I BELIEVE THE THING that really assures Frank Sinatra’s success as a singer in this country is not so much his appeal to teen-age girls, but the fact that he always sings with profundity of feeling, and he himself being a young American from top to toe, the result is always a magnificent expression of young American loneliness and longing. (For male & female alike.)

  Other singers who attempt to imitate him are continually affecting technical vocal tricks that impede the natural expression of feeling in spite of their being designed towards that end. In their striving to enunciate musical phrases in the Sinatra manner, something of their own natural feeling is lost, and the result is of course mannered, artificial and hollow.

  Sinatra himself is gifted with the perfect average American voice. He was the first “crooner” to sing in his natural voice; his speaking voice and his singing voice are easily recognizable at once. (Minstrel style.)

  In many ways, Sinatra’s own musical tastes are the musical tastes of young America. He never sings maudlin or shopworn songs. His favorite songs—“Without a Song,” “You Go to My Head,” “Old Man River,” “Going Home,” “Stormy Weather,” “I Hear Music,” “Night and Day,” “These Foolish Things,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Ghost of a Chance,” “If You are But a Dream,” and others—represent a cross-section of the absolutely best in popular American songs. (He selects moods of songs.)

  Many young men appreciate Sinatra’s sense of loneliness and longing, a feeling which Sinatra sensitively assumes from the mood of the generation around him and expresses with a lyrical and sometimes poetical tenderness that has been mistaken by an older generation for “bawling and caterwauling.” To young America, serious, sad, and wistful, it is no caterwauling, it is the poetry of its time, and in it, in the longing of Sinatra’s soft tones and prayerful sustaining notes, is contained most of their own youthful melancholy.

  AMERICA IN WORLD HISTORY

  America in World History

  From a handwritten journal dated September 3–October 9, 1946, this essay, begun on September 23, echoes the theme of American national exceptionalism formulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as “The American Scholar
” (1837). Animated by the triumphalism of the immediate postwar period, Kerouac’s essay idealizes America as a virtuous alternative to European mores and traditions. At the center of “America in World History” is an enumerated list of singular American achievements, fueled by what Kerouac considers the “unconscious pulse of soul and destiny” propelling national life into the Cold War era. The discussion of jazz is especially notable in this regard, as the budding twenty-four-year-old writer celebrates the jazz idiom for its dynamism and extemporaneous inventiveness—qualities that would guide some of his most impressive writing.

  IT WOULD BE MUCH easier for me to assert that America is a separate culture-civilization from “West-Europe”—younger, with an unfulfilled destiny, not in the petrified decadent “late” civilization stage that Europe undoubtedly is in—because I myself do not feel “late” and “finished,” and because I feel young and unfulfilled. However, it would be infinitely harder NOT to separate America from West-European civilization because there happen to be innumerable facts that indicate there is actually a deep separation.

  Therefore, I hereby separate American culture from West-Europe, I do it as an American, and it is not because this is the easier choice: I am impelled by facts, the deepest and most powerful of which is my feeling that I am young and unfulfilled, like 90 percent of my American brothers, and I believe that in this decision beats the unconscious pulse of soul and destiny.

  This message will have most meaning to those who have felt what I write long before now, to many of those who, indeed, never read as a general rule. This message is directed to those Americans who feel the final culminating Alaska of American meanings beating in their blood.

  But before anything of American destiny can be worked out and hinted—before that Goethean task, it is necessary for me, as an American versed in world history, as a thinker and novelist, as an intellectual conversant with the summaries of West-Europe (lodged comfortably in all large American cities, but in not one Alaskan town), it is necessary for me for the first time in America to formally and consciously disengage my nation from West-European civilization, announcing that it is a young and separate culture, with its own separate age and destiny, and marshalling these facts to prove it to all doubtful Americans.

  A LIST OF THE FACTS——

  1. Native Americans themselves have always disclaimed any cultural ties with Europe, and ever certain of the immigrant populations of the 20th century, after they have dispersed among the native culture and civilization, are first to disclaim any such cultural ties with Europe, having experienced that indefinable “American Way” and the deep opposition of it to European ways. Hitherto, it has been only in the classroom of the academician or in the salon of the great intellectual that America has been identified as a transition, a growth of European civilization, in the most matter of fact taken-for-granted manner.

  2. Nothing has been accomplished in Europe with the industrial tool that Europe itself developed, to compare with what America accomplished with that borrowed tool—take American mass production of automobiles and planes, on a scale undreamed-of in Europe. The American soul, here, is incalculably new in its originality and impulsiveness. A European, Céline of France, was baffled and crushed by the sight of Ford’s assembly lines in Detroit, as though face-to-face with a Martian horror. It was only America.

  3. The deep persistence of capitalism in American ways, despite the socialization of England and Europe, and the Communizing of Eastern Europe and China, is a pure sign of irreversibility of soul, a pure sign of American selfhood—(“You can’t change the spots on a leopard”). The more America swings to the “right”—which is a European word for capitalism—the more America proves its spots. Free enterprise, the root of capitalism, developed in the American Summer of the late 19th century—it is the prime phenomenal direction of American society, the rugged individualism that can only be erased from the American’s soul when he is no longer his “own boss.” All “leftism” in America is European in origin and in purpose.

  4. America’s literature, from Emerson, Thoreau and Twain on down to Whitman and Wolfe, is one continuous assertion of American singularness. Of Wolfe it can be said that he devoted all of his energies in evoking the feeling of the “unuttered American tongue in the wilderness” in all of his huge novels. Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Whitman’s evocations of a fresh West wind blowing over a newly felt land, Emerson’s springtime testimonials to a “new man, a new freedom”—all these are self-evident. All American writers who were not Americana in sum, were, like Poe and Henry James, influenced by Europe by their own tacit admission.

  5. In passing—(If I myself, in this year 1946, were alive in Europe as a citizen of a European nation, I would have nothing left to write about, and I would not write. As an American, however, I see no end to my subject and to my task!)

  6. The “naiveté” of the American, a common complaint made by all Europeans and American Europa-intellectuals, is just one way of their admitting the American’s cultural youngness. (Adolescence is another charge leveled at the American.)* The peculiar American mother worship and Oedipal complex is responsible for this “adolescence” and for many other singular American traits, all of which is material to be examined in due time, which, I believe, will further substantiate the fact of America’s separate age and destiny from that of West-Europe.

  7. The “boom town” atmosphere in many American towns, especially during the war in towns where new war plants were springing up, a fact which is more of a reflection of the spirit of Americans than the mere presence of the new industries, is something quite different from the weary atmospheres of Europe and England.

  8. American music—Native, “unlearned” Americans persistently fail to appreciate “fine” music—which is just another word for European music, from Bach to Schoënberg—because, as it should have been evident long ago to our historians, Americans appreciate their own music only. This native American music is as yet unrecognized and uncatalogued. There are the fiddle reels of hillspeople, Negro and white jazz, folk music (“Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “On Top of Old Smoky”), “cowboy music,” and so forth. The prime phenomenal individualism of American culture is most vividly apparent in jazz music where each soloist extemporaneously creates new melodies in infinitely changing progression, so that all the composer supplies is the harmony line, the true composer remaining the jazz soloist himself. All formal American composers schooled in European music, are not the true American composers, of course, this including such as Sessions, Harris, et al.

  *Lions are big babies; intellectuals are mature.

  A COUPLE OF FACTS CONCERNING LAWS OF DECADENCE

  A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence

  Kerouac’s father, Leo Alcide Kerouac, died of stomach cancer in May 1946. The nostalgic tone of this essay (also from the September 3–October 9, 1946 journal) may reflect the weight of that loss, which also contributed to Kerouac’s idealized portrait of Leo (as George Martin) in The Town and the City. Kerouac’s perceptions of New York—where he lived fairly regularly during the 1940s—always remained complex, vacillating between moral disgust and voyeuristic fascination. In “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” Kerouac elaborates on his antipathy to “city civilization” in what becomes a condemnation of “city men of the higher cognitive order.” The nostalgic pessimism of “A Couple of Facts” stands in stark contrast to the optimism of “America in World History,” making plain Kerouac’s conflicted views regarding America’s future.

  HENRY MORGAN, the New York radio comedian, intellectual, sophisticate, “liberal” and whatnot, although being a very intelligent, clever and amusing person in himself, has more or less made his decadent views known on a variety of subjects through the medium of his radio work; and on the subject of family I gather this:

  A skit relates the horror of having to look through a family album of pictures, very well done, especially in delineating the horror which city men of the higher c
ognitive order have when they go through this routine. I have my sympathies with these high cognizers, but let us see how high it really is: I went through a family album tonight, with a magnifying glass, and heard my aunt relate histories, events, legends connected with the old forebears, and never before have I seen such glimpses into society, changing times, the law of families, lineal heritage and such; in no book have I ever seen so much, learned so much about human beings (if I may be permitted the phrase, Mr. Morgan and all ye sycophants). What does this mean, if it doesn’t mean that the so-called high consciousness, or complex understanding, or sensitive enlightenment, or whatnot of the city intellectual, is not high enough, or conscious enough, or complex enough, or understanding enough, or sensitive enough, or enlightened enough, or whatnot enough, if it is going to deny its vaunted intellectual powers a thorough and earnest study of the family album, with all the illuminative wonders and secrets therein, and all for the sake of fashionably shrinking back from the “Bourgeois horror” of such an album. Ah! you cliques of the city!—don’t you know you had forebears with handlebar mustaches, who came down to the river in the morning bearing masts and booms on their shoulders? who killed their own bulls with a mighty club? who made their own clothes and tilled their own earth? For a million of your clever fashionable phrases, would you exchange one single such accomplishment? I know I would—and Oh God but I’m just as futile as you are, you city vermin; I too am vermin, vermin trying to struggle back to manhood, with small success.