Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

by Jack Kerouac

  Hartford after work is terrific. You go out on the street and head for the restaurant of your choice glancing at all the lights that flicker on Main Street, thinking about which place to eat. The Black & Silver, the Cardinal Grille, the Parkview, Friar’s, Juddy’s, John’s, the Brass Rail—all of these places where a man may eat in the midst of warm gushing humanity, men and women eating, drinking, shouting, Hartford after work is terrific. In the place right across from this cheap hole of a room there are checkered table cloths, and a telephone nickelodeon with a hostess at the other end who will play any number for you, and too there is a fine beefstew, some pinball machines, and ceiling fans. And suddenly you find that the people in these places are full of rhythm, that all of Hartford is full of rhythm, that it is rhythm, it is a Boomtown in rhythm.

  ... Legends and Legends . . . .

  Given the language, diction, and rhythm of this composition, it is likely that Kerouac translated into English the real or imagined voice of a Canadian French—speaking storyteller, perhaps his mother or a character standing in for her. Kerouac’s parents, Leo A. and Gabrielle (Levesque) Kerouac, both immigrants from Quebec, Canada, were raised among the Franco-Americans of Nashua, New Hampshire. Married in 1915, they settled in Lowell, where Leo worked for the French-language newspaper L’Étoile. Kerouac’s ancestors on his father’s side were Bretons from Brittany, France, and his mother’s people had Norman roots. The French Kerouacs once held two castles in Brittany; the one near the city of Brest is called Château de Kerouartz. He also claimed to have Native American bloodlines on both sides. The Kerouac family traced their Canadian roots to the community of Rivière du Loup in Quebec.

  “The Kerouacs have always been the same; get them in a one room, and they will gab and gab and gab, until there is such a noise that you can hear it up the street. Oh, they’re an awful bunch, your father’s people, Little Dear. They have always been; from the time way back in Canada, way way back in Canada, they’ve always been known to be the most foolish, the most stubborn, the most inhuman people around.”

  “Inhuman?”

  “Well, yes, in a different sort of a way. They will not be brutal, physically, they will not hurt a fly; but Son they have no feelings! no feelings! they will see the awful suffering of their own blood and will not bat an eyelash, will not raise a finger to help. Why your own father, Little Dear, has lived some five hundred yards or so away from his brother for years, and has never paid him a visit! Brothers! mind you, Brothers! Six years within a stone’s throw from each other, yet they never set eyes on each other. I tell you, the Kerouacs are and always were the most foolish and inhuman of all people I have ever known. You take your father’s mother; she was a fine old woman, working her finger to the bone trying to keep the family going, and yet she never got an ounce of help from any of her sons or daughters. Oh, let me tell you, your dear father is an angel compared to some of your uncles; your father, Little Dear, is absolutely an angel when compared to some of those brothers of his. Oh My, but they were a cruel lot, a stubborn lot, a foolish lot. Your father will admit it, you know he will, you’ve heard him say often that his family had been hard! hard! on his poor mother. And the old man! My Goodness, everyone in the town knew that your father’s father was crazy! Absolutely crazy! a nut! And cruel! Oh my but how could such a man exist! He drank and drank and drank, killed his wife and himself with his drinking, leaving behind a snarling pack of cubs that were Kerouacs. Oh, your father’s father! My how such a man could exist! Here! Let me tell you . . . . he used to stand on the porch of his home in the midst of thunderstorms and shout up to the heavens, to God, daring him to strike! Daring God to kill him, and there’s your father’s poor old mother kneeling in the kitchen and praying while her husband stands there bareheaded in the rain, howling and roaring up to the heavens, drunk as a dog. And he used to almost drive her to her grave by juggling oil lamps—you know the big tall oil lamps we had in those old days . . . . . and daring God to blow himself and his home right up to hell and heaven. My Goodness, Little Dear, if ever the kerosene should have touched the flame there would have been a horrible explosion, and you wouldn’t be here, nor would your father. My Goodness, he used to stand there in the kitchen, tossing the oil-lamp up and down, daring God to strike! and his family all coiled up together in a corner, whimpering like dogs. Crazy! I tell you, the man was crazy! And your father’s brother who stole all that money from his own brothers and sisters, took your grandfather’s insurance after death and kept it for himself, all of it, every cent for himself. Oh, let me tell you, your father is awful, but he is an angel compared to the rest of those Kerouacs. Ah! the Kerouacs. Don’t talk to me about them . . . . it was my family, the Levesques, that was the family. Kind, quiet, generous people; simple people. Look at your Aunt Alice, a woman in her fifties, and she has the most beautiful white hair in the whole world, . . . why, up there in Montreal today, men still turn when she passes along the street, a beautiful stately woman with white hair, white white flaxen hair. She was my father’s sister . . . my father. Oh Little Dear if you had only known my father. He was the kindest man that ever lived. He was a tall handsome man with white hair; he was very handsome, and so loving, so understanding. He had unhappy marriages; his first wife died, that was my mother, and his second wife left him, that’s your Step-grandmother in Brooklyn. Oh Little Dear, what you don’t know about my family, my own people, and about your father’s awful race of madmen . . . what you don’t know won’t hurt you . . . . Oh Little Dear, those Kerouacs .... of course mine was a simple folk, we had no booklearning, no culture as they call it, but we were the fine people, the gentle people; your father’s people were devils, they were wolves, they were a mad mad lot . . . . a mad mad lot, your father’s people . . . .”

  . . . A Kerouac That Turned Out Sublime . . . .

  A lot has been said about my father and his people, a lot has been said about them and they have said quite a bit themselves about others. Look at me, shooting off my mouth with a typewriter, writing the sort of prose that scholars would not even consider spitting upon. Ah, the scholars . . . . essays on the sociological significance of the New Order in Europe; essays on the psychological basis of Hitler; essays on the Lost Generation and its influence on the new generation; essays on Bolshevism and its effects on World Peace . . . . all those things that have no relation whatsoever with life, here in this world, life from day to day, the struggle to exist, the problems which arise from family living, community living; no treatment of these things with any ounce of sense, only with a lot of scholastic conceit, academic egotism, something to make you want to give up reading for good. If a scholar will give you an exhaustive theory on the Lost Generation, I would prefer Thomas Wolfe’s remark that there is no such thing; or Will Durant’s theory that the most important thing about the world is the family, that progress comes from the family itself; and my own inexhaustive theory that the Lost Generation is nothing but a body of men who were born during a certain World Crisis (superficially speaking), and who grew up reading books, calling themselves the Lost Generation, not knowing that there have been and will be millions of Generations and that all there is to this word Generation is that it implies the force, the impulse of life, and that with each succeeding Generation, there is that little bit of progress added on, so little that it takes centuries for Generations to differ from one another. In other words, or from another corner of the gallery, I would say that the family is the thing, that all the families of one generation make up the personality of that particular generation, and not the children themselves. For I know that to be a man is one thing, and to be the member of a family is a man plus responsibilities, which implies that there is more to life than theories on the lunacy of Hitler and his New Order, or essays on the Modern Trend to romantic realism in literature, etc.

  But I have been neglecting my story. What I have just said is the result of an hour spent in the Public Library, poring over current periodicals, finding no spark of human worth in any of
them, only a lot of oratory about the American Dream, freedom for all peoples at all places at all times, (let me tell you, Sir, freedom is an inner thing, and do not underestimate that remark, by all means); a lot of Rooseveltian (excuse me) blarney about the immense ideal of freedom which the world seeks today, the great shadow of death floating in the heavens, and movies in which you see the heroine looking up to heaven as the picture nears a close, looking up to heaven as the light gets brighter and the oratory is poured on, or ladled on, in great eloquent quantities, and the music mounts in fury, until you begin to imagine that there will be such a burst of light in the heavens, such a tremendous quantity of Utopian nectar, so many Gods floating around, so much oratorical heaven that you will die from the shock of it. (To think that they want to convert my beloved back-alleys, garbage pail and old redbrick wall and empty whiskey bottle, into a cloud, pink color, with oratorical angels basking in it, flapping their wings of empty eloquence.)

  Well, again I have deviated. It is a tough time, folks, believe me; it is a time when a young writer knows he is wasting his time, for people have become insane, blind, foolish, they have gone off in a foolish tangent, you lose faith in them, you realize that the world of letters is no more, you wish you were an Athenian Greek, or something, so that your life’s passion would not go in vain, in vain . . . but you remember Wolfe, Saroyan, and Halper, and you figure what the hell nothing is going to stop you if nothing stopped them . . .

  This Kerouac I speak of who became sublime was my father’s sister. Folks, she became a nun, and let me tell you that when she writes letters to my father, writes to him from the serene gloom of her religion, there is warmth! human warmth! there is no empty eloquence, there is only the kind of love that I know must still reside in the hearts of men, the kind of love that we are losing, the kind of love that I am trying to cling to, and let me tell you that my father’s sister is a sublime and a great woman.

  The Father of My Father

  In her Lowell-based study Franco-American Folk Traditions and Popular Culture in a Former Milltown, Brigitte Lane discusses the “languagey language” used by the Kerouacs and others in Lowell and New England: “Franco-American French is indeed a language of its own: an incredibly direct, concrete and flexible language whose linguistic features are frequently discussed with passion by the more educated Franco-Americans. [...] Derived from joual (French-Canadian French), it is definitely a dialect of its own.” Lane explains that the regional French features “extreme modernisms (acquired through the borrowing and reshaping of American linguistic forms)” and “ancient” terms. In naming the language of his household, Kerouac used the terms Canadian French, New England French-Canadian, patois, and even “Canuckian Child Patois Probably Medieval” (from the note to his poem “On Waking from a Dream of Robert Fournier”).

  This is a very important story because it deals with a man who was also named Jack Kerouac, and who was the father of my father. This strong personage died when my father was fifteen years old, and in a very tragic manner. He died melodramatically, indicating perhaps that someday a poet would stem from his blood. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen that way.

  This is a very important story. I must treat it carefully, reverently, and tragically.

  Honest Jack, they called him in his home town, which was a small New Hampshire city on the banks of the Merrimac River. Honest Jack, the best carpenter in town, and the father of eight children; Honest Jack, who like the poet of his posterity, stood about five feet ten inches tall and was built like an oak, and whose footsteps my father can still hear, coming down the streets of Nashua, echoing through the lanes of sleeping houses, a firm powerful step of a firm powerful man.

  Honest Jack was a staunch Catholic, and one night a whore accosted him as he was crossing the railroad tracks.

  “Ma putain!” he roared in French. “Go home and go to your father and allow him to spank you. You whore! You should be ashamed of yourself. Go home!” He roared and roared, and the whore ran home.

  Honest Jack was a Breton. He had the blue eyes and black hair which predominates these hardy Channel fishermen. Brittany on the Northwestern coast of France. The hardy Celts of France, blue eyes and black hair, the sea, women standing on the shore waving at departing ships, like “Riders to the Sea,” the Celts of the Sea. Honest Jack stemmed from this people. Somewhere in his blood was the aristocratic blood of a woman who had married one of his seaman ancestors, and then the Revolution, and the flight to Canada; the land grant in Quebec, and the loss of it through English scheming, and again the Kerouacs are of the land, and still are today. Honest Jack the carpenter in Nashua, N.H., in 1895. This amazes me no end.

  Honest Jack was fearless. He dared God to strike him with a thunderbolt. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, he would stand on the large porch of his home and roar at the heavens, waving his bony fist at the lashing tempest.

  “Frappes!” he would cry. “Varges! Varges, si tu est pour! Varges!”

  He would use this enormous language against the storm. It meant this: “Strike me! Blast me, if you will! Blast me!” The language called Canadian French is the strongest in the world when it comes to words of power, such as blast and strike, and others. It is too bad that one cannot study it in college, for it is one of the most languagey languages in the world. It is unwritten; it is the language of the tongue, and not of the pen. It grew from the lives of French people come to America. It is a terrific, a huge language.

  At other times, Honest and Fearless Jack would take an oil lamp and juggle it, all the time daring God to blow him up right then and there. His wife (and my father’s dear mother), who was named Clementine, used to stand by with fear in her heart, watching her magnificent husband do the strong things that he did, wondering why he wasn’t weak like other men, not knowing that only real men are considered mentally amiss. My father’s father was a magnificent man.

  One day, he suddenly grew tired of life. He began to drink each night, rising early in the morning to go to his work, always on time, but every night he would get drunk again, and come back home early in the morning, muttering. On Sundays, he would not drink, but would stalk around the kitchen humming church hymns. After a year of this, his son (my father’s brother) denounced him for his actions, and he died that night. My father’s brother is brooding over it today. It was tragic.

  Credo

  In “Credo,” the closing chapter of You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe writes, in part, “No man that I have known was ever more deeply rooted in the soil of Time and Memory, the weather of his individual universe, than was I. [...] I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.”

  Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not

  difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you

  with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no

  time, that when you are sincere about it, that when

  you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult,

  not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth

  power, as if you were a writing machine with a store

  of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless,

  and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget

  it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm,

  drive it home American-wise, don’t mind critics, don’t

  mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they

  don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re way

  off the track, they’re cold; you’re warm, you’re

  redhot, you can write all day, you know what you

  know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when

  you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no

  use, as if life is no good, read this over and

  realize that you can do a lot of good in this

  world by tu
rning out truths like these, by spreading

  warmth, by trying to preach living for life’s sake,

  not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way

  of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you

  with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you

  my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of

  rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the

  grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember

  it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget,

  do not forsake, do not neglect. It is there, the

  order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in

  you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos,

  only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness . . . . . Kid,

  you can whip a little tale, a little truth, you can

  mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is

  a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power,

  you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean

  stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it