by Jack Kerouac
For the eye of the War had changed nothing, not even the people, and this brought me to the thrilling realization that the American people are really strong, that though we lack grace, we do possess certain unfinished grace; that though we are trying to cover up with false virility, false coarseness, underneath us there is a great current of courage, even daring, and a blessed love of casualness & calmness that shows itself only in times of great emergency.
Nothing was changed. There was the cold crater glow of moon, the crude upthrust of wooden tenement, the brutish French-Canadian gabble in greasy lunch-cart, the dream-giving American music, the graceful interplay of sex with social ease, the genuine American heart of Love which lay hidden beneath a false armor ..... all these remained, the war rumbled remote, and the eye of the War was not there. The American people had taken it in their stride, .. and it was, I tell you and always will, a huge, earth-devouring stride that could conquer the Universe.
And so it is.
My search by night for the eye of the War had been unsuccessful .... and yet, of course, it was so very successful.
Part Three
To Portray Life Accurately 1942–1943
from Background
[...] In December of 1941, I returned to Lowell and was hired by the Lowell Sun as a reporter. The Sports Editor said: “Now, Jack, you’ll have to start up from the bottom, writing small articles here and there, and keeping your eyes and ears open. The newspaper game is a tough game!” Three days later, I was writing 90% of the sports page while the Sports Editor and his two other “sports reporters” were down around the corner conducting a hot-stove league over a glass of beer.
The situation amused me one day, and angered me the other. I began to write a novel right in the City Room about Lowell and the three attendant ills of most middle-sized cities: provincialism, bigotry, and materialism. After hours were spent in the Library studying, where I learned more in three months than I could have learned in three years at college. I delved into everything: history, sociology, psychology, the classics, philosophy, evolution, and even psychoanalysis. Nights at home, I ate up Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Thoreau and Wolfe and Dostoevsky and a dozen other favorites. I still have the novel I spoke of, and intend to touch it up in a few years.
Spring returned again, and, armed with a letter of introduction to James Hogan of Republic from a Boston columnist, I started off on the road for California. I wound up in the South, working on construction jobs and lunchcarts, hopping freights from city to city, casually enjoying myself in the warm sun, a young and languorous tramp. After three months of that, I went back home and joined the Merchant Marine. We went to Arctic Greenland and Iceland, a torpedo missing our bow by ten yards on the way back to Boston. Arriving safely in October, with a wad of money in my wallet and an Eskimo harpoon under my arm, I was surprised and pleased to find a telegram from Lou Little waiting for me. He offered to make arrangements for my return to Columbia. Back I went, signing up in the Officers’ Training program and finding myself in a Baker Field scrimmage no less than 48 hours after debarking the S.S. Dorchester (sunk five months later off Iceland.)
That Saturday, I played a few minutes in the Army game and decided to drop the sport for good. After my stint at sea, I felt it was too much physically. I again turned my attention to my studies.
It was then I made fast friends with Prof. Mark van Doren, who encouraged me to keep on writing and particularly liked my interpretations of Shakespeare. I got an “A” in Advanced Composition from another encouraging and friendly instructor. I renewed my typing agency and tutored more French, wrote once more for the Columbia Spectator and Jester, and was enjoying myself thoroughly until I ran out of money in December. I transferred to Naval Flying, flunked out there, and went back to the Merchant Marine.
In the Merchant Marine, I began work on a novel entitled “The Sea is My Brother,” did informal research on the subconscious mind and dreams, and traveled to Casablanca, London, Liverpool, Belfast, and Glasgow. After writing 80,000 words on the novel, I decided to remake an entirely new version of it and title it “Two Worlds for a New One.” I am working on this at the present. As well, I have two stories pending at the New Yorker, [....] So much for the past and present.
Sadness at Six
Kerouac signed this piece “Jack Kerouac, CP,” meaning
“casual poet.” As for the special designation, consider
this: in the short story “The Three Swimmers and the Grocer
from Yale,” from his collection My Name Is Aram
(1940), William Saroyan writes: “He was sure some man.
Twenty years later, I decided he had been a poet and had
run that grocery store in that little run-down village just
for the casual poetry in it instead of the paltry cash.” In
Some of the Dharma, Kerouac writes from his perspective
in the early 1950s: “In 1941 when I was 19, two writers
pulled me out of my natural interest in the ‘Casual Poet of
Lin Yutang and Saroyan’ as I fancied myself then, purely
in fields idealizing nature and the blue sky. The two writ-
ers were nothing but Western Faustian Space-Time tension
writers—Joyce and Dostoevsky. ‘Much knowledge is a
curse.’ But Dostoevsky had the compassion of a great Or-
thodox Saint underneath his Western City Decadence.
Joyce is really trivial except for his involuntary unconscious
visions of the truth elicited through a style. And so
is the Jean-Louis of Modern Prose. ”
Centralville is an expansive, mostly residential section of Lowell on the north bank of the Merrimack River, opposite the “mile of mills,” where Kerouac lived until he was ten years old. Here he vividly recalls his second birth—an awakening to the universe. Writing to Neal Cassady on December 28, 1950, Kerouac explained that he remembered being born and added: “Six years later, on a similar red afternoon, but in dead of frozen winter, I discovered my soul; that is to say, I looked about for the first time and realized I was in a world and not just myself. ”
The day I was born, there was snow on the ground and the light from the descending sun made the windows in Centralville glow with strange and lovely melancholia.
I was six years old, walking home with my sled.
Suddenly, I was born: I began to wonder, genuine mature wondering. I was wondering about this: Why is everything sad now, as I go home to my supper. Why?
I was born, therefore, in 1929, about seven months before the great stock market crash in Wall St. In Centralville, I didn’t hear a damned thing, and for all that, I was busy wondering anyway. I had no time to dawdle with worldly affairs; in the newspaper, I looked at the big headlines telling of the stock market crash, but I didn’t care much, apparently, since today all I can remember is Popeye & the Thimble Theatre, by Segar, Co. 1929, King Features Syndicate, and so forth. Nothing about the stock market crash, only Popeye in the funny page.
The day I was born, on my way to supper with my sled, hands feeling red-hot with energy, myself steaming into the winter air from underneath the warm scarf, I stopped to look at the sad windows of the houses.
Why, why? I asked myself, aged six. Pourquoi, I might of said, because I was French. At any rate, I wanted to know, and I couldn’t quite make it out, and I still cannot make it out, which is in a nutshell the story of inward war, raging inside of me, Science vs. Poetry, Bazarov vs. Wolfe, and all that sort of thing. (Tennysonian sentimentality vs. the Gallup Poll, or better, Shelley vs. Eleanor Roosevelt.) It is an astounding question, and needs to be solved.
I came very close to solving it, the first day I was born. Since then, I have been getting further and further away from the answer, until today, I am ignorant. At six, I was wise. Even Oil-Coordinator Ickes was wise at six, and Walter Winchell also. We were all wise at the age of six.
But today, we are more or less insane. There are
exceptions, but I don’t want to start anything. Not at the moment. I am busy writing a story called “Sadness at Six.”
I was walking along, dead, and suddenly I saw the windows of Centralville gleaming redly, quietly; I heard a dog barking, and the children who were still coasting on the hill were making plenty of swell noise; it was February, I shall presume, and the sun was getting redder and redder all over the whole neighborhood there was a strange old color as of dream and I was born, amid radiant glowings, born into this world to get in line with the boys, the good boys or the bad boys, either which way, and with a sweep of wonderment, I began to live—a man on the earth, his relation to all things, to himself, to his fellow man, to his society, and to the universe. I was born in February 1929, which makes me 13 years old as I write. Not bad for a kid, hey? Yes, I was born, and the music began to filter into my being, and the colors accentuated deeply, and the weird flutings as of Joyce could be heard emanating from my lips, and I was a man on the earth at last, age two minutes five seconds. I went home and ate my first meal. That’s all I remember, and there is not much else to say. I was born suddenly, at the age of six, and I am thanking whoever did it for me—be it Bazarov’s God, or Wolfe’s, or Aquinas’.
The Joy of Duluoz
The following is an excerpt from an unfinished work that
was the third book in a trilogy of novels Kerouac imagined
writing contemporaneously with his experiences in
1942. He had already completed Part I of the trilogy, The
Vanity of Duluoz, which follows the adventures of a young
man and his friends in Galloway, a city like Kerouac’s
Lowell. After a stint as a reporter at the Galloway Star,
Robert Duluoz is ready to leave home, “anxiously seeking
to become a bitter and desperate exile.”
In Part II, The Vexation of Duluoz, Kerouac planned to treat Bob Duluoz’s travels and the intensifying war’s impact on him. Here is how Kerouac imagined the third book, to be called The Joy of Duluoz, which concludes with Duluoz fully engaged in the war: “[...] the Joy is not the crowning glory of the Duluozian saga. Your author is attempting to portray life accurately, and in so doing refuses to bring things to a definite terminus. Joy is more of a period of stolen happiness, happiness ripened by the fruit of Duluoz’s brooding, suffering, and wandering; it is a happiness that we shall realize, at the close of Joy, is only tentative. ”
Kerouac takes the titles of the books in the Duluoz cycle from Ecclesiastes; or, The Preacher, Chapter 1, the same section of the Bible that Ernest Hemingway mined for the title and epigraph of his novel The Sun Also Rises. Verse 14 relates to Kerouac’s vision: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Kerouac recycled his 1942 title, and Vanity of Duluoz came full circle in 1968, with art shadowing life, as the soured writer-narrator tells his wife at the close of the story: “[...] I did it all [....] But nothing ever came of it. No ‘generation’ is ‘new.’ There’s ‘nothing new under the sun.’ ‘All is vanity.’”
In Satori in Paris, published in 1966, Kerouac explains that “Duluoz” is “a variation on the Breton name Daoulas,” which he “invented just for fun in [his] writerly youth.... ” A Satori in Paris notebook entry reads: “Duluoz is fictitious, Daoulas true.” He had come across the name while working at the Lowell Sun. Daoulas was a recognized Greek family name in Greater Lowell; there also was a New England Franco-American poet named Charles-Roger Daoust. A careful listener can hear the Franco sounds of Kerouac’s middle name Louis, his boyhood parish, St. Louis, and his ancestral Canadian home of Rivière du Loup in the fictional name. Kerouac linked Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his Jack Duluoz as sound-alikes and related character types. As Kerouac worked on the Duluoz saga, starting in 1942, he tried various character names, including Michael Daoulas, Michael Dalouas, Jack St. Louis, and Jacques le brice de Daoulas de St. Louis.
1
Bob Duluoz stepped out of the sleek new car turning to make a pretense of politeness to Diana. She stepped out with her long legs and smiled with blank swiftness. They were parked at the front of the Iridium Room, West side, fashionable New York. Kenneth Barton-Bascome slammed shut the front door of his racy auto. His companion, Vera, stood impatiently preening with a preoccupied woman’s smile.
“I’ll park it across the street,” said the doorman in the golden light of the foyer front. Kenneth Barton-Bascome handed over the keys and then opened the door of the Iridium Room before the imperious footman had a chance to dart forward his eager services.
The four of them marched in. Vera turned fullbody toward a mirror and fawned approvingly, preoccupied. Diana strode loosely, chattering in her child’s voice:
“Oh I really adore this place, it’s so .. it’s so ... restrained!”
Sardonically, Duluoz tilted his head and said to himself: “Yes!”
Kenneth Barton-Bascome toddled along beside Vera, his blond hair waved and clean, his white collar prominently correct over the broad back of his fine gray topcoat. Kenneth never walked; he toddled. He was unofficious.
As they reached the well-lit entrance to the Iridium Room itself, Duluoz remembered the Frontiersman Club in Galloway, Mass.
“Bored! Bored! Bored!”
When they made their entrance, it was most likely Duluoz who attracted the larger portion of attention. Vera strode statuesquely with her high hair-do. Kenneth toddled unobtrusively. Diana floated and her eyes shone. Duluoz glided in, bored, wearing an expression of indulgence and indifference. He realized, halfway to their table, that he had walked into the fashionable Iridium Room with blase suaveness. With the worldliness of a John Milton!
Ha!
Restrained music bubbled about the room in burgundy measures. The electric organ soared about like falling veils of silk. Restrained faces glanced up from tables. What restraint! Hanging from the gold ceiling was an enormous chandelier of gold; the music was like gold; golden scotch and sodas sat before goldlit faces. A pair of golden shoes darted below the electric organ at the end of a pair of golden legs. It was a blonde with golden hair, playing. An eager-jawed Latin sang over the mike, saying: “Pichiketa-keta-pichiketa-keta!”
People glanced up and admired the suave, sleek-hair youth as he slid back Diana’s chair, a ring flashing on his playboy hand. Duluoz, the drunken writer with a thousand mistresses and an apartment on midtown Madison Avenue. Duluoz sat and surveyed the room disinterestedly.
Wow! What careless poise ...
“Isn’t it restful!” declared Diana turning to Duluoz with a theatrical amazement. She fluttered her hands like Davis. Duluoz nodded with restrained approval, then glanced away in utter boredom. My Gawd!
Nothing solid here.
“Diana,” said Duluoz. “There’s nothing solid here ... no foundation. No pyramid.”
“Oh” sang Diana, “but how do you mean?” She fixed her glittering eyes on Duluoz as though she were looking beyond him. Make no mistake! He noticed it! He was a sensitive artist, very sensitive! He was a bored Boyer, Duluoz!
“Here,” said Duluoz quietly, “there is nothing. No meaning. None of the real solid things in life. Empty! Empty!”
“Empty!” repeated Diana, glancing around to appraise the emptiness.
Famine for the Heart
Dense clouds of cigarette smoke had long ago driven away the pure ether, so that now even the air to be breathed was necessarily evil, furious, and passionate. The blanket of smoke obscured the three-piece band, which was perched on a platform in the corner. From its general direction came the solid bounce of a bass-pedal, the scratchy, hot flutings of a clarinet, and the terrific interplay of a pianist who knew what jazz was all about. On the floor, weird figures whirled, bounced, bowed, laughed, smoked. The music grew louder. There was a din, which, though muffled by the foggy effect of the smoke, was enough to create the need to shout. It was marvelous.
Pete, seated at the bar with a lon
g row of drinking gentlemen, produced another cigarette, lit it, and then thrust his obese, horn-rimmed face into the face of a fellow alemate.
“What do you think of the wound of living?” he asked, sheepishly drunk.
“The what? Get away, I’m not bothering you. I’ll have the bartender kick you out!”
The music stopped, only to start once more at a furious, almost insane, tempo. The dancing figures gyrated madly, smoothly negotiating the favorite American swing dance, the Jive. Tall girls were held off at arm’s length, scissoring their beautiful knees for an instant, and then were hurled back into male arms only to gyrate madly away once more. All the dancers bounced with the bass-pedal. Some screamed with delight.
Five soldiers from the nearby fort watched with bleary eyes. The bartender dashed about his bar, mixing drinks. Smoke clogged the low rafters. Madness ruled! Madly the dancers whirled, flinging themselves into the mist and abandon of the smoke, colliding viciously, laughing. The keen reek of beer clung everywhere. The clarinetist had picked up his tenor saxophone, hung his clarinet on a rack, and was twisting improvisations with a sweating, bursting face around the melody of “Lady Be Good.”