The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  The playoff: in the dark of the afternoon, tragic Maglie ran off across a littered field—all was lost, the great effort to catch the Dodgers a cruel joke now, a thing in the iron breast of laughing time; the field littered with paper because the Giant fans were disconsolate & disgusted enough to throw it all over. The Dodgers win the pennant!—but they only win a ghost; for not only baseball, but victory is an illusion, a flame, illusion in man’s soul beneath the bleak skies, so who cares? The field is dark, the sky is dimming, October again and another year and anyway the players are going home to rest . . . and Maglie ran for his shower, disappeared in the gloom in a storm of confetti thrown with painful tenderness & hatred of life. Suddenly Thomson hit a miraculous homerun—and wild drunkenness possessed the Giant fans—more anon. (Illusion!—but sweet joy of life!)—etc. There was the sudden realization that winning is possible on earth.

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 4, 1951—Wrote all day—all about Old Bull Lewis, Dean & Tom Watson. So imaginatively tired that I couldn’t continue my baseball description in yesterday’s slot, as I wanted, to do it justice. At night came to N.Y. and got oldfashioned high . . . meaning the wild smoke. A wild smoke, but dulls the sympathy and then dulls the mind . . . a wild smoke, but leaves no man. Leaves the echo in the well, Saturday morning Lowell Massachusetts hurrying downtown to see Snow White & the 7 Dwarfs in the holy dark of the Keith theater Lord bless us all. Holmes & I had biggest talk of all—we dealt with American things exactly as we’d seen them.

  FRIDAY OCTOBER 5, 1951—Got up at Holmes’—went for scripts and down to waterfront for my seaman’s papers. Now I can ship out any time I want and I’m mightily tempted:—the thought of having friends, great voyages, food, money, girls in ports . . . and if I could only get a job as yeoman typist I’d have a desk, a gimmick for solitary writing at sea. (Reading this journal last night, high, I was struck by its tone of pompousness and selfishness—the mere fact of recording calories, losses, gains of all kinds, a business yet.) But I’m going to write the poem of things. . . . The drowsy gulls, on midafternoon piers . . . But this is pompous. Then I be pompous. My seaman photo reveals a tragic almost Frank Sinatra-like face of a desperate fugitive manner . . . but unlike all other seaman pictures before, old Keroach looks like he might be part of the crew. Came home stoned—rested—in the evening after supper, began again the reverie & the writing. Loneliness forever and the earth again, and I know that I’ll never love or be loved again—on this pompous globe—this gnashing balloon—this what-have-you—my soul is now like a streetcorner in Chicago in January, north side— If there’s a girl left who could absorb my bull—but there isn’t . . . I’m not sad about being alone or loveless, only about growing older to die: I never dreamed it would happen to me, and it did while I wasn’t thinking, and now I face eternity with bleak eyes and nobody knows it. I mean, imagine, Maman starting to be disgusted with my presence in the house. I grow evil, malign, suspicious, gloomy, indescribably annoyed, envious of the joys of others— Goal is finish On the Road by Xmas. Here’s another typed-up spate: 2500-words tonight. And Lord, Lord I have such a time not being literary—I don’t want to be literary, I want to say exactly what I fuckingwell mean. Keroach! Keroach! The salt shroud of the sea is after you—

  SATURDAY OCTOBER 6, 1951—One of those days when it almost tears my head off to write . . . It’s so hard and I’m so dense and want so much. Tried writing in the park, everywhere—but I think I did well with those “hints of heartbreaking loss filtering into the dark poolhall with chinks of October light” or maybe I didn’t. Of course I did—(doubts, thinking of Giroux saying. “But your best writing is when you don’t know it, your narrative . . .). I’m going to do what I want whether it’s good or not. At night did a $5 script . . . took several walks. Isn’t it funny for a guy like me to know that there’s nothing in the world to want and only loneliness & death to expect out of all want, endeavor, or non-want, whatever your illusion is—and yet be glad! and yet be glad! Tonight: 800-words . . . good ones.

  SUNDAY OCTOBER 7, 1951—Good old October . . . this morning cold rain, wet leaves, hissing radiators. I took a pre-breakfast walk. What about the little girls you always see in America on a gray Sunday morning—coming back from church—the 12-year-old in a pink coat with white shoes, the 8-year-old one in a robin’s egg blue coat and white shoes—holding hands; and after noon you always see them going to the poor corner B-movie with their pesty little brother between them; and they sit in the brawling seats waiting for the lights to go out, (angels painted on the ceiling dome of the Royal Theater, Lowell, Mass. 1928) for the show to start; the serial, the cartoon, the short subject, the coming attractions, the news, the ads, another cartoon, and finally two horrible B movies, the first one cowboy, the second horror “Monster Meets Wolf Man”; with melodramas roaring on the gray screen, the kids chattering, fidgeting, changing seats, screaming, wrestling, the smell of peanuts and chocolate, the presence of lonely Sunday afternoon adults somewhere in the gloom (“I’ll never come here again on Sunday goddamit!”); the gray screen, the sadness of the heroics, of the mounting music, the scratch of the soundtrack,—hell I don’t know—and here come our little girls in late Sunday afternoon, the sun’s come out, throws their shadows hugely on the sidewalk, they’ve had their big Sunday, they go home, they hate to take off their little pink coats & white shoes, they hate to think that Sunday’s now behind them instead of in front of them (as it has been ever since Friday afternoon), they don’t dare think that as a particular Sunday. This Sunday will never return to the face of the earth—and I think they know they will die. Oh Lord protect these little ones and love them.

  And I accomplished nothing today except these words. Wrote in vain.

  MONDAY OCTOBER 8, 1951—Did scripts—thought of going to sea—fiddled—faddled—Yanks beating Giants— it started off as a beat day but ended up with a great discovery of my life . . . (for now they’re coming left and right in an Autumn of crisis). The discovery occurred to me while listening to a fellow who’s doing exactly what I am . . . but on alto, Lee Konitz . . . how can I even begin to describe it. It was at Birdland. Lee was playing “I Remember April” as I’ve never heard it conceived and as he never played again last night: he stood with the alto on his gut, leaning to it slightly like Charlie Parker the Master but more tense and his ideas more white . . . more metaphysical . . . in fact he looks exactly like a 12th century monk, some Buxtehudian scholar of the dank gloomy cathedrals practising and practising endlessly in the bosom of the great formal school in which he is not only an apprentice but a startling innovator in the first flush of his wild, undisciplined, crazily creative artistic youth (with admiring old organ monks watching from the background)—but specifically:—like you take “I Remember April,” and as big beefy intelligent Negro Cecil Payne watched in amazement (the baritone sax), he foresaw the tune straight through, took complete command of it, let measures of it carry it along on its own impetus while he busied himself within it with his own conception of it—a conception so profoundly interior that only the keenest ear could tell what he was doing and this didn’t mean David Diamond, it meant Cecil Payne (and me) (and others in the club)—beautiful, sad, long phrases, in fact long sentences that leave you hanging in wonder what’s going on and suddenly he reveals the solution and when he does, with the same vast foresight that he brings to a tune. You now understand it with vast hindsight—a hindsight you wouldn’t have gotten without his foresight, and a hindsight that at last gives you the complete university education in the harmonic structure of “I Remember April,” a beautiful and American structure to boot. And at a moment of his saddest, seemingly lost note which became found in the conclusion of the “sentence” I suddenly realized “he is doing exactly what I’m doing with a sentence like ‘hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chinks of October daylight from the street’ and here I’ve been worried all along that people wouldn’t understand this new work of mine because next to Daphne du Maurier it is almost completely
unintelligible (for instance)!—does LEE KONITZ worry about VAUGHAN MONROE? Let the dead and the dumb bury the dead and the dumb!

  Do musicians and hip people and intelligent people run to hear Vaughan Monroe when they want to find out what’s the latest development in American jazz or American music?—No, they run to hear Lee Konitz. Does Lee Konitz make a living playing these loomings of the monastic school for his peers and confrères?—no, he makes his living some other way (I believe as a teacher in the Tristano music school on 34th St.). Would Vaughan Monroe know who Lee Konitz is?—he would probably have heard of him from one of his sidemen, just as probably some pompous 16th century Peer who wrote poetry might have heard from one of his clerks about another poem-writer in government . . . Edmund Spenser; but would have no interest in knowing him or meeting him because his interest is social (Vaughan or the Peer, Vaughan in terms of MCA money, the Peer writes poetry to impress the ladies in his circle) and Konitz’ (or Spenser’s) interest is artistic or shall we say laborious, workaday, genuinely hung-up in the art, the craft, the agony of the thing, and probably would pay no attention to the imposing figure of Vaughan (or the Peer). Does Konitz try to tone down his imagination to make his music more understandable to the masses?—he’s not playing for the masses, he’s playing for musicians and listeners in the great up-going formal school, and he knows, as much as Bach or Beethoven knew, that the masses or at least masses of listeners would catch up and listen in the future and find their souls transformed, as his is, thereby; just as James Joyce knew that his Ulysses was but a prophetic image of styles of the soul to come, not a puzzle or any of that nonsense. Does Lee Konitz listen to the advice of well-meaning friends who say “It’s all in the heart, play with your heart, when you do that you can even play with—well not Vaughan Monroe but say Woody Herman—and it’ll be great, great!”—No, Lee Konitz prefers to play alone, which is the same thing as playing with Tristano, that is, interior music, the unspeakable visions of the individual (again) rather than tone down his mad vision in the name of “heart” or “great” or whatever shibboleths his well-meaning friends have; or like John Holmes & Giroux telling me where my greatest power lies, whether they say “heart” or “simple” (dig that?—a simple heart!) when all the time I have an unspeakable, mad & beauteous vision for which I need mind more than heart (but not much more) to bring it out and nothing “simple” about it at all; like people in Ireland telling James Joyce to concentrate on Irish Naturalism, or in America telling Wolfe to concentrate on the “really fine & worthwhile stories like you see in Good Housekeeping,” or so on endlessly and now, talking about myself, the point half disappears— In any case my great decision I noted down in pencil in the gloom of Birdland at 2 A.M.—“Now—BLOW AS DEEP AS YOU WANT TO BLOW.” Because I saw then, watching Konitz, master of all the musicians except Charlie Parker & mad Miles Davis, the interior laws of art . . . that it develops constantly and anybody who holds himself back, tones himself down, for reasons of success or even just popularity or love of his circle (my reason?) is simply backing away from the forefront of what everybody will be doing years from now and will thereby lose his power as prophet and saviour of an art, or, simply, as great unprecedented genius in his field setting the example for the others; in any case, toning down is, in the end, proof of mediocrity & insincerity—but worst of all, toning down, backing down from what you know, is waste, shame, stagnation & death. Therefore I’ve decided to make On the Road and all my other forthcoming books exactly what I want without regard for commercial or even LITERARY or personal or whatever consequences; my only human aim left, to gain the admiration of those who know the present day problems of consciousness as expressed in writing and not only those who practice it but those who (like myself and jazz) observe it from their own field. Naturally, no more than Lee Konitz, I mustn’t expect to get rich off prophetic arts, deep & beautiful as they are and as they will be recognized when masses of observers catch up; not even expect to make a living; so must find some other way which dovetails into my work. And this way is going to sea!! (And further, I saw that it would be December 1st before I could even begin on the “underwriting” of parts of Road from last Spring’s ms., in other words, I couldn’t possibly finish my On the Road by Xmas as I try to delude myself; no, my lifework is found; I must make a living like a man now; the sea is healthy, solitary, it moves; I can save money (!) (which I never do)—and so on. It ought to be clear now (?) to reader.

  TUESDAY OCTOBER 9, 1951—Wrote all that Lee Konitz stuff today. Today, at home, took walks and wrote; the decisions arrived yesterday or as I say, written up today, made me lyrically happy just around sundown: October fires filled the westward huge sky as I walked in the wind and wondered where all the ghosts are who’ve flown the coop . . . and black locomotives upchugging smoke . . . and my sense of smell so sharp (no smoking) that by it alone my whole boyhood and life reeled through my brain . . . like in the bakery, like by the gas station (October 1941, Atlantic White Flash, Hartford), like Jamaica Avenue traffic, like cheeses in old dark Italian groceries, and that wondrous dry weedy pollinated dust of empty lots and city fields in October.—Those wonderful guys, five Italians of about 40, in Luigino’s on 48th St. last night:—they were so hungry that when the preliminary pizza came and the head bozo began cutting it they looked at it with real mouth-watering furtive looks; once they had taken several succulent bites and got the gnaw-hole out of their stomachs they immediately began arguing, politics or gossip, with heated gestures; then the waiter brought glass mugs of the richest beer I’ve tasted in years, and they drank this to lubricate the forum; and in the five the types of men were discernable (just as in Mexico I used to dig groups of men in all night marimba cafeterias as gangs just like my old G.J.-Salvey-Scotty-Freddy-Sammy-Dasloff gang, the dour one, the calm one, the noisy one, the braggart one, the hero-punk one, the beloved one & leader, with always a tremendous face as evidence of his typehood [Lord, yes!])—in the five Italians, obviously recent immigrants with good jobs (it takes Latin faces incidentally for the study of man and “gangs of chums”) were as follows:—an argumentative one, with gestures, quite mystifying me in the midst of what seem’d a tirade by pulling out a picture of a baby, then subsiding when the others paid no real attention; then a quiet one, who began speaking and drew the respect of all except Loudy who was jealous or just plain miffed anyhow, the quiet one smiling & explaining; an even quieter, graver one listening & nodding (and all the time I knew they had families and dense histories and throat-clutching lifetime agonies just like me and you, and they were FAMOUS among themselves, like you and me, O rich and unbelievable life!) (Think of it!—a poor Negro entertainer who just died was called ADONAIS BERRY); and others in the gang afraid to speak, not commanding enough to nod gravely, younger, waiting for seniorities, satisfied. And then I ate my riti and my home-made apple pie and just-roasted coffee which was superb and went to Birdland and waited (for the show to start) an hour with my million images.

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 10, 1951—Well, and I keep changing—all I did was get drunk in local bar (Clancy’s), for no reason, and late at night cried . . . apparently for something I’ve abandoned—I don’t know what. The loneliness of my mother—my foolishness—

  SATURDAY OCTOBER 13, 1951—Got drunk, I guess—and with Jerry Newman in the San Remo Thursday night yelling . . . next day driving all over (to College Point for instance) getting out his new record release (Schoenberg & Satie album) . . . visiting little dark Balzacian businesses on 10th Avenue (distributors) . . . Every conceivable kick; in fact I saw Allen & only yell’d at him . . . a binge all out of proportion. Jerry Newman said I would be great if I wrote like I talked—now what am I going to do about that Lee Konitz business! (not only Jerry but Carl Sandburg said that to me—in effect, that is, for Sandburg said “Sometimes you get literary, otherwise you’re all right, just don’t be literary, there’s no need for it, don’t worry about it, ha ha ha hee hee hee! and he laughed and put his arm around me, real eccentrically (
!))—s’fact. . . . So now, today, a beautiful day, I took a 4-mile walk round by the colored section of Jamaica (Jelly Roll Morton used to drive there in one of his two Cadillacs on Sundays with his wife to visit friends, I can just picture some bleak Sunday afternoon in the winter and him in his gray fedora standing by his car getting photographed by a big fat cousin)—walked around there thinking: “I must finish On the Road—I must concentrate on my career—no farting around and going to sea—this is a waste, a waste—a guy with a successful first novel practically REFUSING to write a second one & make himself an honest dollar & establish his name in the field & stop being a bum”—and the way to do it, I thought & thought . . . start in 1935 with Jack St. Louis and his father Emil St. Louis driving from (1934 Plymouth) Narragansett (letting Emil’s partner Dastou go back to Lowell by train) on a whim to see N.Y. but also to meet Old Bull Lewis a distant cousin of Emil’s who’d written he was in N.Y. and gave his address (in the Bowery Chinatown), and they go there & find old Bull with old Dean Pomeray—the 9-year-old Dean, the three of them having just driven all the way from Colorado selling flyswatters door to door. . . . so that On the Road is divided into 2 main adventures, 1935 and then the contemporary one with the boys grown up & together on the road understanding the mystery of change, death (Emil having died), time, whatnot, everything. See?