by Jack Kerouac
War is the wild excitement of making the earth shudder with panic and joy—war is the parent of man.
Then this afternoon I realized that it’s not so much that I’m a multimillionaire but have to stay in this hospital the rest of my life, couldn’t spend it anyway and have nothing to prove to the world which comes beating a path to my bed-tag I’m so rich and tragic: so what do I do with this lifetime of solitude & meditation in a cell? Why, amuse myself; and since it is my amusement to create character (and test it on the rigors of fate), create character it is. But since I am now to be engaged in the production of character I must, I will do it right, find channels for its outflow (bookforms). And since I’m making books, and the nature, or function, of a book, Platonically speaking, is that it be read, then suitable for reading by others they must be, the function not being merely the writing of it. And since I produce books, I must market them, or have them consumed, else why else produce them, so I make them consumable, or readable, which is more than you can say for Lowry, Goodrich, Buechner (very good) et al. Since I’m weak and need iron bound discipline, there’s none better than that imposed by pure fate—just as the histories of my boyhood marbles were determined by the pure race down the incline (and duly, seriously recorded). They were marbles and their function was to roll, in my case, to roll in races; now the marbles will be characters, their function “becoming the sum of their misfortunes,” the sum of which I will have to determine by pure chance, the shuffling of the deck of fate. Just as a marble looks. Just so, and has doom of its own all ingrained even before it races (like old humpbacked Don Pablo, potent Repulsion, impenetrably beautiful silent Ebony Hill), so a character comes laden with a FATE-NATURE even before she, Fate, has a crack at it. All this under the one vast heading of The Chart of Supreme Reality, containing Properties and Categories of Man together with the Irretrievable Types of Happenstance contained in Fate—either a deck, like my baseball deck, or a roulette wheel. No more me, (not too much)—no more friends—just iron-bound hand-downs from God & Fate to my work deck which sits on the lip of destiny, since, incidentally, it is necessary for me to prove that I am a great writer, I want immortal fame.
Supper was 700 c.—2500 for the day, over again.
FRIDAY AUGUST 31, 1951—Hot, humid day. Started again with big breakfast—800 c. And after all that I wrote yesterday my thoughts are entirely different today—bending to Victor Duchamp again, my self-legend. But really and truly it’s time Now to decide what to do with already-written On the Road—Dean Pomeray and Sal Paradise . . . or perhaps Peter Martin. Yes, yes, yes, Peter—or better, a complete third-person Duchamp type of another order?—or Duchamp himself! Or better—ANYTHING!
A new type—for the study of those who are ignorant of good and evil—Dean Pomeray?—Jack Kerouac: he who knows good and evil and has yet to say a word about it.
Lost some more money at the races. The malleability of “imaginative creation” is finally driving me mad. What I need is to become an immovable fixed saint.
But Dean is an interesting new type. (L: 800 c.) Wrote a crazy letter to Livornese that I probably won’t mail, asking to borrow wire recorder. What on earth is ucla, that which made me think of palic yesterday? (I almost understood in a dream.) I’m really crazy now—I talk to myself in public lately.
Slave on one miserable unit in the showering universe of reality that’s driving me gorgeously insane—that’s what it will have to be like to rewrite Dean On the Road!—a paltry, incomplete, unsuggestive pindrop in a circanum of roaring joys. But didn’t Shakespeare confine himself to Hamlet for the month?—a drab ragtag at the hem of eternal robes of purple and gold? What’s Hamlet to Shakespeare?—an apple he ate one morning.
“High blood pressure, low blood pressure, arthur-itis—no sir, nothin’ wrong with him!” (Pic Jackson in here.) (No better humor than that, the American spade’s.) (S: 500 c. together with soda 200 c. makes 2500 for day, over again. Weighed myself this afternoon, 169¼ lbs., gained 4¼.) Slob of fat.
There’s the reason for being oneself—for the sake of the complete truth. T & C is a myth—the language is a camp—Peter is (as Lucien knows) an obfuscation, a lie, and an exculpation. I have a thousand hip reasons for discarding incipient fascisms like the theories of decay, decadence, joy, health—the whole thing a hincty dualism to show off, to blow up, with. No—I’m not going to owe allegiance to those I love (who are a part of me but not my masters, i.e., my brother Tom, Mike, my mother), I’m going to have to tell the complete truth. If this is the decay of a great civilization then I’m part of it; at least I tell the complete truth, and change the horror of trying to lie all the time, for the horror of hell’s bright glow. Whatever, in God’s name whatever—I SHALL BE MYSELF and write that way, without fear, without shame, in the dignity of my experience, language and knowledge. (I have it!) To hell with the lot!—I don’t belong to anybody but myself. (SN: 150 c., 2650 for day, fatso.)
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 1, 1951—Started with 550 c. breakfast for a change. Show bankroll is $332; place bankroll is 335 dollars in the hole (no good). Show-roll is four days’ work, $8 a day (!) (no good). Yesterday’s decision will never be surpassed as a manifesto of personal belief:—to be like Duluoz in the morning again!! (and as I dug in Liverpool, my Liverpool Testament, which I’ve got to find). HERE WE GO, WORLD! (at 29). Now my show bankroll is $394, or that much in 5 days, about $19 a day (very good!). [Place bankroll is now only $41 in hole.] (Ice cream: 100 c.) Yesterday received great letters (2) from Ed White, whose coming to N.Y. this Fall will enrich my life. Wrote to him & told him; he’s 29, going to be an architect, doing just the right thing; his kind of nature needs to be occupied at something solid.—The whole world needs Ed White.—I’m willing to work at anything to make a living while I pursue my ideals . . . I’m even ready for the new kind of Spanish Loyalist Army, whatever it is, as long as I’m fed and given a “gun”—my ideal is the new type of American democrat who has come to solve all the social problems of the world. (L: 800 c.) Who is he?—let me delineate him. He is hip to things.—Because after all I’m NOT a multimillionaire and NOT doomed to stay in this hospital for the rest of my life: I am among the striving, the living;—I must do not what “amuses” me but what is CRUCIAL, at once, continually! (if not eagerly, anxiously). I AM LIKE DULUOZ IN THE MORNING AGAIN! (800 c. S—2350 c. for day.) Weighed 168½ today, lost ¾ pound.)
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 1951—A date that will never come back. A cold gray Atlantic seaboard day, great for thoughts. 650 c. B. Read paper all morning.
In notes written earlier in this hospital, for the “legend” type plan of my lifework, I said: “What happened? (in last 10 years of my life). Lived & furied & lost.” Typical of the “reactionary” plan, the Wolfean-Nietzschean-Aryan structure, to imply loss; and typical of the other end of the duality, the “Duluoz-complete-truth-no-legend” plan, the reality structure, or what-happens-exactly structure (connected with Joyce and yet curiously with Wolfe influences, for to me Wolfe means non-metaphorical, exact, complete description as opposed to sometimes-Proustian metaphor & cover-up)—is anyone willing to understand this?—typical of this second type of plan to rescue the past, not from loss, but from mere desuetude as writing-material, and typical of it to be more involved & interested in reality itself than in theories and legends of philosophic or psychoemotional loss. That’s said. I’m in complete agreement with myself to be wary of another wave of “legend” emotion which can cancel out all this and present plans; connected with the possible return of this wave (which is like a dark storm) is my feeling for blood relationship, especially if a non-relative should soon doublecross me, my consequent “pouting, brooding” return to my “own kind” (the legend of that, the T & C universe of that). In complete rational accord with the “non-relative world,” however (this means everybody except my mother & possibly my sister now), I seem to tend to non-legend plans, the legend of my blood becomes a remote rumour, a romantic abstraction in the real world, understanding of which,
after all, I only accomplished in moods far removed from blood-moods, as, for instance, with Neal.
Here’s a chart to illustrate:—(the Duality & its properties)
If I hadn’t been split in the cradle I wouldn’t know half as much. The only criteria to use for fiction is natural interest . . . how much to talk about gray days in the beginning is how much it interests you, and the intervening events till Frisco likewise and as rememberable. Everything belongs to you because you are poor. (L: 800 c., S: 800, Pop: 100 Total:—1700, 2350 for day.) The strange adventures of—Oh loneliness, it’s you will be my auditor—of myself.—To tell a story with all your heart, is that grammar?—to explain yourself completely, in full truth, is that grammar? I should therefore make it a rule to compose willy nilly, swift, ungrammatical, like a dazed man writing down the dream from which he just woke, and as I did with the Ozone Park dream, instead of getting hung up on sentence structure before the baby’s even born.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 3, 1951—Started, wisely, with 450 c. breakfast. Had the vision of Neal in the Hudson—it, the car, the very shape of it, and Neal in it, was the perfect metaphysical representation of our time: it was Neal’s way of clarifying all our issues, putting them together and on the road, holding us close, making himself right captain, and on; so that even when we gave Professor Lenrow a ride and chatted about the last time he saw Tom Wolfe as we drove up Fifth Avenue, it must have all been justified at last for Western Neal, all tied-in, and just because he thought of that Hudson All Boat—started writing today, never to stop again—(explains wild print here). Neal in the Hudson is even more than this—it was the deliverance of our freedom, the chariot of our meanings, the justification of our rebellions, the boat of sorrows as well as the car of kicks, the expression in shapely steel of our swift thoughts, our traveling sex-room, a “bull session” capable of flying any-old-where and seventy miles an hour, the slave of our eager sometimes meaningless wild irrational needs. The machine-fruition of our nameless yearnings to fly through lyrical space, the reacher of coasts, the hinter of death at any moment, a dashboard-drum, a wild radio, a crosser of the Texases of reality, and with Neal in it suddenly coming around the corner to get us for a trip to the other side of the world it was the climax of youth, freedom, the joy of Western Civilization, spiritual progress, and the triumph of love and friendship over fear and gloom. Wheee!
It’s a camp to fake stories—that’s what I think about so-called fiction-plots, all that crap.
(Sn: 100 c., Lunch: 650 c. Leaves 1000 c. for ice cream party today.) Thought while dozing, hearing radio: the music between the singer’s choruses abstractedly masturbates his accomplishment, like a bemused woman on a cock.—Won about $10 worth of “prizes” at VA carnival in yard here; including dark glasses, lighter, and a cane that I went and lost . . . good wooden cane with a rubber tip. Ate 600 c. of hotdogs etc., to make it 1800 c. for day. Met a girl I wanted to hug and squeeze and then fuck on the spot but couldn’t in the crowd in broad day. In photo taken of me this afternoon my skeleton’s starting to show. For supper ate 400 c. plus 100 c. miscellaneous, for a 2300 c. total. Weighed myself in the morning at 168 even; have to drop to 165 or 163. (My skull’s starting to show.) Bankroll is $394.00, broke even yesterday.—The show system; place is in the hole 241 bucks.
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 4, 1951—Bankroll is $419.00—the 6-day-week average earning is at $102. Place bankroll back in black, at $112, but still a loser. (B: 550 c.) (L: 850 c.) The horses of dawn, the grays racing for the ghost, followed by flaming palominos two by two, have passed the meadows of loss.
Ice Cream: 100 c.; S: 850 c.—2350 for day.—The Capitalists are offering shiny materialistic slavery, the Communists are offering drab dark slavery: A big ad today said: “The tycoon is dead”—this is so only because he is organized now in an unspoken Union the purpose of which is to promote and “assist in the responsibilities” of the “free world” (the Western Imperialist world). The tycoon was not a philosopher, he was a rugged individualist—the union of tycoon-types adds hypocrisy to selfish evil. But all this is better than the fat Commissar, for everybody, though the battle or even “peace” between two evils won’t make a good. Sat in the sunyard writing all afternoon . . . a few miles from a similar rocky-cliff yard at Horace Mann school where I sat out the 1940 graduation exercises in Whitmanesque loll because I had no white pants.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 5, 1951—And I’ve finally realized my life is so complicated, full, interesting & rich that I don’t have to go anywhere else for all the plots of my writing-lifetime:—Hudson River. . . . Dave haunts it; Baker Field; Warren Hall . . . Sebastian haunts it—and the same all over America. Detroit, Frisco, Denver, No. Carolina—haunted all over. My first section of confession and storytelling covers Aug. 12 to Sept. 1, 1949, with Neal across the USA—my first slab of hauntedness, of awesome event, of wonder, of the perpetual but ever-changing agony of life. I also thought: why not write account of circumstances under which fiction is written daily, for a complete record & evocation of American Mood.
At first, during Vets’ carnival last Monday, the realization that I couldn’t lose took away from me a strange feeling of piety that I suddenly realized harsh life had been giving me for 29 or at least 25 years:—and I sheepishly accepted my first prize with the hurt feeling of an angel placed in an evil heaven for the purposes of temptation. The other fellows felt the same—AT FIRST. I wanted Lucien to be there to determine, with his great comprehension of good and evil, how far God had gone, after all, in making life an agony, an uncertainty, a final dark loss for men and women and all the children & monsters of the earth. For if God had made it impossible to lose, everyone, as we became, would have become real robots, dolts, desouled idiots sweating to grab more prizes that already there’s no room for and no reason for—as it is, most people are like that anyway, and the only redemption open to the materialist, the greedy opportunist, is that he’s going to lose. Hosannahs to Heaven on High that we’ve been born to lose! Don’t you see that? After awhile, in fact, I began to get sore when I didn’t win what I wanted, and finally I was brought back to my senses by losing the cane, going back to the empty carnival in the drizzling rain, remembering the dream of the Marin City carnival and the stale sandwich prize (1947), remembering that loss is my Shadow . . . remembering . . . & realizing:—he who loses shall gain Eternal Life. This is the Agony—you can’t win, you can’t lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt. (I had a vision of Tom Wolfe clutching at his throat!) And now that I understand agony and loss I shall never write anything but the truth.
B: 600 c. Bankroll: $407.00—batting 12.60, 75-60 weekly (show). Beginning of Doctor Sax: “And now I will tell you about the snake that lies coiled beneath the dreaming fields of afternoon.” Me, the teller of the strange adventures of myself, temporarily telling a tale (!). Everything has to obtain from the bottom of the source, which is my mind. Here I am this afternoon laid out like a Frans Hals in the great dreaming hillside grasses of the hospital estate, beneath great trees—a hill like the great hump-meadows of the Merrimack, a grounds like that of a castle, a haunted house, or the modern castle, the Hospital; drowsy clouds of immortality fixed upon the slope-top grass, upon the cornices of Building B, upon the mind forever—this is the estate of a mysterious multibillionaire, myself, a lonely eccentric wandering bemused with a twig as red sunset lights the slopes, sunset from the river, the clean bridge, from that other dreaming field to the left of the apartment buildings that can be seen in that 1942 football photo of me (elbows on knees) taken in Baker Field practice field, in Columbia uniform, field to the left of this whereon, as in my most spectral dreams of New York, sit several wooden cottages as in Galloway Lowell, all of this in full view from this castle grounds of mine & including Baker Field, even this year’s football schedule, and the El that travels on to Horace Mann & further Manhattan fields I found in life; sunset with a twig; and by mid-afternoon golden lulls and lamby sleeps, the multibillionaire, reft of the desires of the world, knowing onl
y sweet agony & the desire of time, lies composing with a hillock for a back rest—silent, dark-glassed, all-microcosmic-and-macrocosmic, doomed, beautiful, meek, languid, unapproachable, looking, listening, still, sweet, agonized in peace.