by Jack Kerouac
FEB. 15—In fact this man will not be a father at all, but just a resolute & mature young man looking for a girl who loved him in childhood and wrote letters thereafter. It is all the same thing. The point is—“His love is somewhere in America.”
And he is “on the road” to it—the raw, harsh road of poverty & troubles, too . . . but he is no Red Moultrie (who, I realized at dawn, is only Al Hinkle my old easy-going Denver friend). This is closer to Bill Clancy, the football-hero-hobo I wrote at sixteen; also closer to Wesley Martin of The Sea is My Brother; and closer to a more resolute Peter Martin, even Joe Martin (and Michael Breton, Pete Gaos, all the others).
There will be families in Calif. and Colo. I’ll make preparatory plot-notes in a more convenient place, however.—Just ate molasses sandwich & potato chips. Death is when you don’t eat molasses & chips any more. Today wrote to Alan Harrington about his possible acceptance at Harcourt. Walked 2½ miles in sleet storm for ice cream tonight. Where my grandfather’s from, Riviere du Loup, properly St. Hubert, near the Gaspé Peninsula, and all my folks there since 1770’s, and previously icy Brittany coasts, explains why I love the cold & storm so much and can’t stand summers. Some undiscoverable Louis Alexandre le Bris de Kérouac (or Keroac’h) must have left me his hot guts, wherewith I need no coat half the winter in tropical America.
FEB. 17—The hero of On the Road is Chad Gavin. I made out a dramatis personae and it has marvelous depth and range. I pray to God that this is finally the discovery of my work, after years of meditating it (from the early Oct. 1948 idea of Ray Smith and Warren Beauchamp). This will be a great T & C of the nation itself. The only book I foresee beyond it is an “American War & Peace”—The Sorrows of War, which I will write after Sax & Simpleton probably.
Last Page of a Notebook Bought in Colorado
May 1949
FEB. 18—In twelve days my Town & City will be published and the reviews will appear. Will I be rich or poor? Will I be famous or forgotten? Am ready for this with my “philosophy of simplicity” (something which ties in a philosophy of poverty with inward joy, as I was in 1947 & 1948).
The magazines will soon want short stories. List of possibles.
1. Sea-story of old Andy remembering in tempest at sea
2. Ling’s Woe fable?
3. Story of freight elevator worker who is present at moment Angel of Death appears on sidewalk to hero. Dream.
4. Sports story of high school track relay team in Boston
5. Preview story of Tony the Imbecile—books incident
6. Preview story of Moon-man & Doctor Sax (sand pits.)
7. Preview story of wild tenorman (On the Road).
8. Preview story of Ghost of the Susquehanna
9. Suicide of blind man; (girl) & Reichian giggler; “Palmyran” Chicago
10. Story of Tom’s “death” & the priest
*Typical will-lessness!!!
THE NIGHT IS MY WOMAN
OR,
THE LABORS OF MICHEL BRETAGNE
The Night Is My Woman
On November 17, 1950, after a torrid two-week courtship, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, and in January 1951 they moved into a studio apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. It was there that Kerouac wrote La nuit est ma femme, a fifty-seven-page manuscript composed in the patois that Kerouac had grown up speaking in the French Canadian neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac’s first-person narrator, the aspiring French Canadian writer Michel Bretagne, ruminates gloomily, but not without humor, on the compromises he has been forced to make in his young life—just as Kerouac himself was attempting to balance his artistic aspirations with the financial pressures of a new marriage.
The events depicted in La nuit est ma femme, such as the Bretagne family’s move to New Haven, Connecticut, in search of work, are based largely on events that transpired in Kerouac’s life during the summer of 1941. (In terms of the chronology of the Duluoz Legend, the action is subsequent to Maggie Cassidy, which depicts Kerouac’s experiences as a student at Lowell High School.) Shortly after completing La nuit est ma femme, Kerouac would in the same Chelsea apartment type out the legendary On the Road scroll manuscript, leading Joyce Johnson to conclude that returning to the French of his formative years in Lowell helped him discover the voice of Sal Paradise, the narrator of Kerouac’s breakthrough novel.
The translation is by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and incorporates some passages translated by Kerouac, as explained further in the notes to this volume.
FEB. ’51
I HAVE NOT LIKED MY LIFE. It’s nobody’s fault, just me. I see only sadness everywhere. Often when a lot of people laugh I don’t see anything funny. It’s a lot funnier when they’re all sad together. I look at their hypocritical faces and I know they don’t trouble themselves with sadness. They can’t use it. They all know what is said in the Bible: “You do not even know that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.” What can they do with that? I use my sadness to spend my time thinking. That’s how I understand existing. It’s my way. I am tired. I can’t even explain myself without lying a little. But I would never write if I did not believe in the idea of living.
My mother told me that the day I was brought into the world at 5 o’clock in the afternoon of the month of March, there was a light like red blood in the air and the snow was melting everywhere. Seems to me I remember that particular day. Every time I see the red sun on a late afternoon it’s as if I see my whole life.
I am French Canadian, born in New England. When I am angry I often curse in French. When I dream I often dream in French. When I cry I always cry in French, and I say: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it!” It’s my life in the world that I don’t want. But I have it. I am still curious, I am still hungry, my health is excellent, I love my little woman, I am not afraid to walk far, I am not even afraid to work hard as long as I don’t need to work 60 hours a week. I can’t get up in the morning but when I have to I get up. I can work 40 hours a week if I like the job. If I don’t like it, I quit.
My family and my women have always helped me. Without them, I think I may well have died in the snow somewhere—mayhap yes, mayhap no. I never lived alone for long. I dream. One day I will be a man like other men. Today I am a child and I know it and I spend my time thinking. I am supposed to be a writer. I published a book, I received $1900.00 for 4 years of work on that book. Before that I spent 10 years writing other things that I was never able to sell. It’s possible that one day, once I have gone over to the other side of the darkness to dream eternally, these things, stories, scenes, notes, a dozen impossible novels, half finished, will be published and someone will collect the money that was supposed to come to me. But that’s if I am a great writer before I die.
I dreamed for too long that I was a great writer. I picked that up in books. There was a time when I thought that every word I wrote was immortal. I embarked upon this with a big romantic heart. This is possible in the young. At first I used big “fancy” words, big forms, “styles” that had nothing to do with me. When I was a child in New England I ate my supper at the table and wiped my mouth with the dishrag—done, and gone. Why the big words, the grand lyrics, to express life?
Yes, I have slept around apple trees same as Shakespeare.
I never had a language of my own. French patois until 6 years old, and after that the English of the guys on the corner. And after that—the big forms, the lofty expressions, of poets, philosophers, prophets. With all that today I’m all mixed up in my noggin.
I use the word “labors” to express the jobs and the travels that were necessary to undertake whenever I wasn’t at home sitting on my behind thinking about the sadness of life.
I begin my work this evening across the street from a Protestant seminary. I open the shutters of my old window and I see the big dark yard. There’s ice on the ground. In some windows there are lamps but I don’t know if these are the rooms of young students.
I’d like to think that while they study theology I study the sad labors of life, and one is just as important as the other.—It’s like all things, we don’t know everything, only the little we can see with our eyes. There! now I saw two students in two different rooms get up from under the lamps in their shirttails! There, we are all students.
We need but go down the street and we get to New York’s waterfront. I am interested in the sea and in boats. Pretty soon when spring comes and we open our windows we’ll hear the big boats come and go. To see the water you have to walk in front of the big facades of marine companies as long as eight blocks. After that you go behind a fence and lo, frozen water full of snow, oil, and flotsam. On the other side of the big Hudson are the lights of New Jersey. There’s all sorts of debris—wood, barrels, and all sorts of rags in the burlap night. On the other side of the street two old Negroes are burning big boards in front of barrels they arrange to close out the wind. They are shroudy strangers, oldtimers of darkness. They’re wearing hats I bet they picked up on the side of the tracks in North Dakota in nineteen-thirty.
I walk all over. I pass by the wholesale meat warehouses. The streets are dark and dirty, the sidewalks are covered in meat juice and filth. In the cold winter wind all alone in the middle of the night some burly boys dressed in bloodied whites bring big sides of beef out of the trucks and hang them with hooks onto contraptions that go down into the basement. The meat goes down, fast. There are men below who unhook it. I can’t go in the basement to see what they do after that. I am told that they cut some nice pieces of steak for themselves when they’re hungry and then cook them on stoves themselves. I’d like to see those old stoves! It makes me hungry. When they’re finished working, that’s it, they drink, they play cards, they smoke cigars and one of the guys cooks the steaks. They laugh, they eat well. Morning comes, the buyers come, the street is full of traffic—the men of the night go to bed. This is what life is for me; this isn’t so sad. But I am not a wholesale butcher, I am a poor writer with a little piece of steak wrapped in paper on the windowsill.
Later in the night the seminary students sleep, the lamps turn off. I am still up, I am sitting at my desk. My radio is low, it brings me the music of the night; my woman sleeps.
Eh well, there’s some peace at least.
I have not liked my life but I have always liked the heart of the world.
So, my first labor.
* * *
When I was a child I often worked in my father’s printshop folding papers. It was real work; in other words, you could never stop and they gave me a little pay in pennies. But I did it with my sister and my mother, so it was a fun-filled affair, only to help out whenever there was a rush and after that we all ate in the Chinese restaurant. I have always liked Chinese restaurants for this reason. I still see my father happy sitting at the beautiful table filled with covered dishes; he lifts the top, we see the fried rice, the chop suey, the chow mein. He says “Ah! Look how gorgeous!” The owner personally brings us some candied lichi nuts. On my mother’s face I see a blush of happiness. Why does a man get married and build his life with his little family, only to die and leave his children sad for eternity?
Yes, the little labors with the ruler to fold the paper, and the gorgeous Chinese dinner and sometimes a show the whole gang, at home in the town of my birth; this wasn’t a preparation for the horrible labors that befell me later. Oh life is a dolorous pilgrimage. Where we going? where? Death is nothing; it’s the sadness in life that kills me.
When I was a small child, and my father called me Ti-Michel, Ti-Pousse, Tourlipi, Ti-Pette, and my mother called me Ti-Choux, I think I knew what was coming. In my room at night sitting at my little green desk with my little childhood games, I looked out the window with the fear of being alone someday in this abominable universe. I prayed the Good Lord every night, and in church on Sunday I prayed officially in His house. He listened to me: my father died when I was only 25 years old. It would have killed me at 12, 15, 18 years old. It almost killed me at 25. My mother lives, she’s an angel of goodness; she’s with my married sister. But the abominable universe swallowed me up in any case; I’m a little used to it, that’s all. I saw the days of darkness prophetically long ago. Yes, they tell us to get used to life, the psychiatrists have these big words, the words “adjusted” and “mature,” and the perverts don’t care, the mad laugh. But it’s the heart we lose when we win some tricks. Me I can’t live without heart.
For all that, we have to work. This is not to say that I have labored like the other men in the world—I’ve labored rather with my interminable writings in the infantile night—but I have labored enough to be “hung-up” and tired.
My first real job was when I was 18 years old. My father thought it would do me some good. I sold subscriptions to the paper in my town, in the summer of 1940. That very year, also, I began writing with a literary style; before that, from 11 on, I wrote to amuse my private childhood ideas, little stories about the guys, horses, sports. But by now, I had discovered Saroyan and Hemingway. So, I wrote about my job, selling subscriptions door to door, with the tone of a big American writer.
Voilà:—“It was like a stage in the circulation room. I could see the windows of the business establishments across the street and I could see the man who was our boss sitting there with the white shoes. And they came in one after the other, just like in a play. The first one had on a sports shirt under his coat and he walked in with his hat brim turned up and he smiled and said Good Morning to the boss. The boss in his white shoes and the salesman of the smile and then in came the third. He was tall and angular and he walked bent over and I liked him. Blue eyes & a bent walk and this morning he told me that the cops in this town should tie buttons over their holsters because anyone could reach out & kill them with their own gun. A face like a horse trainer or a newspaper man or a Havre de Grace tout or even a trotting horse driver. Mr. Miller, said the fourth man who limped as he walked in. How many did you sell yesterday and Mr. Miller leaned over even more and smoked his cigarette and said, A few.”
I had to take a bus at the Square then ride to the other side of the river into the part of town where I was born. It’s because I spoke French and it was a Canadian neighborhood, and also most of the Canadians read the other paper in town. Voilà, that first morning I found myself at the end of the street of my birth. I asked myself “Oh come on, what am I doing here, it’s the last place in the world I’d have thought to come to on my own.”
A man’s work is like that. There was a time when a man went hunting wherever he pleased. I saw little spots where I used to play as a child and it angered me, it made me sad & lost. I didn’t like knocking on people’s doors and bothering them in their homes. I said this to my father that evening. He was an insurance man in his youth; he knocked on doors everywhere. He found it funny my sniveling sadness.
It’s at that point that I began to understand that I was not like my father and my relatives in the family. I was lazy, I wanted to be by myself. I didn’t like the business that men did. In the morning in my bed, I heard the mill-whistle that sounded everywhere across the sky above town; I looked outside; the men, the women, the young, they were all going to the factory in the cold with their poor lunches. Ah, it made me nauseous to think that some day, one fine morning of the Good Lord, I’d have to go with them into these big dirty places full of din and work that never ends.
All my life I got up after everyone else in the family, once they were all gone to work, and I wrote & wrote so I wouldn’t need to work. They left me be: I had scholarships to college and the thing they wanted for me was a career. There are families in Quebec who take one of their sons and put him in a seminary to become a priest, so that the whole family can go to heaven. I wouldn’t have hated that. But I would have always climbed the fence at night to go see some girls. I would have been a pretty mixed up priest.
With my first week’s pay, $16.83, I went and got myself drunk for the first time in my life. In
a saloon on the big street behind the mills they sold jumbo glasses of beer for 10¢. Me and my friends, 2 Canadians Roland and Henri, and one Greek, our famous G.J., we drank us a good dozen glasses each. We thought we had discovered the Good Lord. We took all the old drunkards by the collar and we told them that they were the Good Lord. We sang this in the pissers, in the streets. “All men are the Good Lord!” we hollered at the top of our lungs. Later, in the tree near the river behind a low stonewall, everyone who was going home from the bars watched us wrestle. I puked on my knees and then went backwards on my hands so I wouldn’t get dirty. We thought it was funny.
Monday morning I didn’t return to the circulation office. I told my parents that I wanted to study in the fall. My father raised his hands in the manner of a Canadian.
We liked it so much getting drunk, the guys, that we prepared to go on a big trip to Vermont. Henri had an old jalopy. I knew some nurses over there. We brought a bottle. Henri had his new tweed suit in green and he’d just had a golden tooth put in. We called him “Kid Faro.” It was marvelous. I had taken some trips with my parents to Canada, with a friend to Boston, with another to N.Y. to put my college papers in order, and one time, when I was seven years old, I had walked ten miles in the country with my old childhood chum Jack to go live on a farm. But the trip with the guys to Vermont was more of a real trip than the others. It was funny, it was “Crazy as a Broom.” The morning was cool, the sky blue, the country like on the first day of the world. We yakked, we thought ourselves important.
In Vermont we spoke to the nurses at the hospital, they told us to wait until nine o’clock in the evening when they’ll be done working. To pass the time we bought a bottle of whiskey with a name we’ve never seen again since. It was made in the Green Mountains. We drank that in under 15 minutes. We went to swim in a quarry. I made believe that I was drowned, I stayed under water a long time. G.J. was scared. He almost jumped in the water in his clothes. The others danced. I tried to rip out a small tree from the ground, I twisted it around my back and stood with it and it tore a little at the root. It was beginning to get dark. We were drunk. We got into the car & we returned to the hospital. I was getting out of the back seat to acquaint myself with the young ladies, I missed the runningboard and fell flat on my face in the driveway. I stayed there. I liked it. All the others left to go dancing save for me and G.J. He sat me down in a beach chair and lo, there we were in the beautiful summer night in Vermont, in front of a summer resort near the hospital, me asleep, he awake. Two old ladies were sitting near us. Every time I made to puke G.J. would take off the hat he’d bought for the trip and said, “Yes, it is a fine evening, dear Mr. Bretagne, you are correct.”