Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac (/ˈkɛruˌæk/ or /ˈkɛrəˌwæk/,[2][3] born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet.

(1895-1973).[7] There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac’s own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac’s baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, and this is the most common spelling of the name in Quebec.[8] Research has shown that Kerouac’s roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middleclass merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.[9][10] Kerouac’s father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivièredu-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek) and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany.[11] Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant “language of the house”.[12] In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for “language of the water” and related to Kerwick.[13] Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.[9]

He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[4] Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.[5][6] In 1969, aged 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-term alcohol abuse. Since his death, Kerouac’s literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, including The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, and Big Sur.

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Biography

1.1 Early life and adolescence

His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell Jack Kerouac’s birthplace, 9 Lupine Road, 2nd floor, in the West Centralville section of Lowell, Massachusetts

Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as “sad Beaulieu”. The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack’s older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who would later say that Gerard followed him in life as a

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1899-1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque 1

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BIOGRAPHY

guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac’s novel joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.[22][23] He also Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sis- studied at The New School.[24] ter named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.[8] Kerouac spoke French until he learned English at age six; he did not speak English confidently until his late teens.[14] He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons.[15] Kerouac would later say that his mother was the only woman he ever loved.[16] After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.[15]

1.2

Early adulthood

Some of Kerouac’s poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his parents’ native tongue again. Recently, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage, edited by Professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier.[17] On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac had his first Confession.[18] For penance he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.[18] This experience, along with his dying brother’s vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which would inform Kerouac’s work.[18] There were few black people in Lowell,[19] so the young Kerouac did not encounter the sort of racism that was common in other parts of the United States. Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled “a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter.”[20][21] Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.[15]

Kerouac’s Naval Reserve Enlistment photograph, 1943

When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York’s Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the Beat Generation people—now famous— with whom he would always be associated, and who as characters formed the basis of many of his novels, including: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but served only eight days of active duty before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac Kerouac’s athletic skills as a running back in football said he “asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here.” The from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia Uni- medical examiner reported that Kerouac’s military adversity. He entered Columbia University after spending justment was poor, quoting Kerouac: “I just can't stand it; a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the req- I like to be by myself.” Two days later he was honorably uisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a discharged on psychiatric grounds (he was of “indifferent leg playing football during his freshman season, and dur- character” with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality").[25] ing an abbreviated sophomore year he argued constantly While serving in the United States Merchant Marine, with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. Alat Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for though written in 1942, the book was not published until the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and 2011, some 42 years after Kerouac’s death and 70 years

1.3

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Early career: 1950–1957

after it was written. Kerouac described the work as being about “man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies.” He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a “crock as literature”, and he never actively sought to publish it.[26] In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. According to Carr, Kammerer’s homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death. Carr turned to Kerouac for help, and together they dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, encouraged by Burroughs, they turned themselves in to the police. Kerouac’s father refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. (Their marriage was annulled in 1948.)[27] Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the above a corner novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later Jack Kerouac lived with his parents for a time[30] drug store in Ozone Park (now this flower shop), while writing wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz. some of his earliest work.

Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began the famous On the Road around 1949 while living there.[28] His friends jokingly called him “The Wizard of Ozone Park”, alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, “the Wizard of Menlo Park”, and to the film The Wizard of Oz.[29]

1.3 Early career: 1950–1957 The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name “John Kerouac” and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac’s reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out. For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled “The Beat Generation” and “Gone on the Road,” Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.[31] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac’s roadtrip adventures across the United States and Mexico with 454 West 20th Street Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. He completed the first version of the novel during a three-

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BIOGRAPHY

week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup and mugs of coffee to keep him going.[32] Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper[33] into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which would eventually be published. Though “spontaneous,” Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.[34] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.

birth to Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his daughter until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.[38] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what would become ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.

Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a “railroad brakeman and fire lookout” (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of America to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers. During this period of travel, Kerouac wrote what he considered to be “his life’s work": "Vanity of Duluoz".[35]

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993– 95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.[39]

In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with an African-American woman. This woman was the basis for the character named “Mardou” in the novel The Subterraneans. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.

Publishers rejected On the Road because of its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained what were, for the era, graphic descriptions of drug use and homosexual behavior—a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Ginsberg’s Howl. According to Kerouac, On the Road “was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about.”[15] According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.[36] In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac.[37] In February 1952, she gave

House in College Park in Orlando, Florida where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums

Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy.[15] In Desolation Angels he wrote, “when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared” (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).[40] In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication.[34] Many

1.4

Later career: 1957–1969

of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book’s “characters”. These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac’s style.[33]

1.4 Later career: 1957–1969 In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation.[41] Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term “beat” to describe a person with little money and few prospects. “I'm beat to my socks”, he had said. Kerouac’s fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

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to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more.”[48] In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green’s cafe recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul: “A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light.” Many consider that this clearly indicated Kerouac’s journey on an emotional roller coaster of unprecedented adulation and spiritual demoralization. Kerouac also wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, musician David Amram and painter Larry Rivers among others.[49] Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 that sensationalized beatnik culture.

The CBS Television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men “on the road” in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled stories, gave the impression of Kerouac’s novel is often described as the defining work being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerof the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac ouac’s story model for On the Road. Even the leads, came to be called “the king of the beat generation,”[42] Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. observed, “I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic”, showing Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, “You 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, know who painted that? Me.”[43] the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceedfame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring un- ing with what looked like a very potent cause of action. wanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before John Antonelli’s 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie its publication.[16] After nine months, he no longer felt begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Plymouth the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York Show in November 1959. Kerouac appears intelligent but City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his shy. “Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. “Naw,” says new notoriety as the central character of the book, was Kerouac, sweating and fidgeting.[50] set up and arrested for selling marijuana.[44][45] In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experi- Breton American like him in New York, and they became ence with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures friends. Gwernig used to translate his Breton language with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, poems in English in order to make Kerouac read and unin The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington derstand them : “Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando be- instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak tween November 26[46] and December 7, 1957.[47] To be- Breton he asked me : 'Would you not write some of your gin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot poems in English? I'd really like to read them !...' So I length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him, and kept on for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for doing so. That’s why I often write my poems in Breton, On the Road.[46] French and English.”[51] Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums In the following years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his from such respected figures in the American field of Bud- older sister to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother sufdhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. fered a paralyzing stroke in 1966. In 1968, Neal Cassady He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. also died while in Mexico.[52] Suzuki, that “even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter.” He Also in 1968, he appeared on the television show passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in Cali- Firing Line produced and hosted by William F. Buckfornia, and explained to Philip Whalen, “I'd be ashamed ley, Jr.. The visibly drunk Kerouac talked about the

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counterculture of the 1960s in what would be his last appearance on television.[53]

1.5 Death

2

STYLE

Although Kerouac’s prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or Roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted.

In St. Petersburg, Florida on October 20, 1969, at eleven in the morning, Kerouac was sitting in his favorite chair drinking whiskey and malt liquor, working on a book about his father’s print shop in Lowell, Massachusetts. He suddenly felt nauseous and walked to his bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to a nearby hospital, where he underwent several blood transfusions and subsequent surgery, but his damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He died at 5:15 the following morning at St. Anthony’s Hospital, not having regained consciousness from the operation. His death was determined to be due to an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse, along with complications from an untreated hernia from a bar fight he had been involved in On the Road excerpt in the center of Jack Kerouac Alley several weeks prior to his death.[54][55][56] He is buried at Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous apEdson Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts.[57] proach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who edited some of Ginsberg’s work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated. Grave in Edson Cemetery, Lowell

Kerouac greatly admired Snyder, many of whose ideas influenced him. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife, a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and Stella Sampas Kerouac, and his mother Gabrielle. Keralso whole paragraphs from letters Snyder had written to ouac’s mother inherited most of his estate. Kerouac.[60] While living with Snyder outside Mill ValHe was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters ley, California in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about degree from his hometown University of Massachusetts him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary.[61] Lowell, on 2 June 2007.[58] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as “mostly about [Snyder].”)[62] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Sny2 Style der’s and Whalen’s accounts of their own lookout stints. Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Angels. Kerouac’s method was heavily influenced by the prolific He would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, unimpressed, would later be one of its great proponents, and others. Later, Kerouac included ideas he developed and indeed, he was apparently influenced by Kerouac’s from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. free-flowing prose method of writing in the composition He often referred to his style as “spontaneous prose”.[59] of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that

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2.1 Influences

Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate his style. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 “essentials”. ...and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!" “ ”

tion of his French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work shares the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is rather the original French version of an incomplete translation that would later become Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America).[64] The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier’s translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Yannis Livadas[65] have pointed out.

2.1 Influences

Kerouac’s early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Some believed that at times Kerouac’s writing technique Kerouac developed that later made him famous was did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, famously said about Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, Buddhism, as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter it’s typing”.[63] According to Carolyn Cassady, and other written by Neal Cassady.[66] The Diamond Sutra was the people who knew him, he rewrote and rewrote. most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and “probably Although the body of Kerouac’s work has been pub- one of the three or four most influential things he ever lished in English, recent research by multiple scholars read”.[67] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sufrom around the world has shown that, aside from al- tra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each ready known poetry and letters written to friends and fam- of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding ily, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on DesoAll these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le lation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.[68] written in French, have now been published in a volHowever, often overlooked[69] but perhaps his greatest litume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited erary influence may be that of James Joyce whose work he by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe alludes to, by far, more than any other author.[70] Kerouac Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française had alhad the highest esteem for Joyce, emulated and expanded ready published excerpts and an article on “La nuit est ma [70][71] Regarding On the Road, he wrote femme”, and scholars such Paul Maher Jr., in his biogra- on his techniques. in a letter to Ginsberg, “I can tell you now as I look back phy Kerouac: His Life and Work', had discussed Sur le on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be chemin’s plot and characters. The novella, completed in [72] Additionally, Kerouac treated with the same gravity.” five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling admired Joyce’s experimental use of language, as seen in example of Kerouac’s attempts at writing in his mother his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional tongue, a language he often called Canuck French. Ker[73] ouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices. Neal Cassady (who is commonly known as his inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty) written on January 10, 1953, as Ann Charters and many other biogra- 3 Legacy phers had underscored. The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct Jack Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists includin 1935, mostly on the American east coast, it explores ing the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, the some of the recurring themes of Kerouac’s literature by Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a sigway of a narrative very close to, if not identical to, the nificant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is spoken word. Here, as with most of his avant-guardist especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim French writings, Kerouac’s French is written in a form Morrison and Ray Manzarek who quote Jack Kerouac which has little regard for grammar or spelling, relying ofand his novel On the Road as one of the band’s greatest ten on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproducinfluences.[74] In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The On the Road

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Doors, Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote “I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed.” In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.[75] From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.

4 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WORKS

ered for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by journalist Oscar J. Corral that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac’s family and the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac’s estate, Gerald Nicosia. The article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac’s estate, worth only $91 at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998. In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.[78] In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac’s Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac’s life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, “One Fast Move or I'm Gone”, features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac’s Big Sur. In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac” was held in Kerouac’s birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac’s work and that of the Beat Generation. In the 2010s, there has been a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.[79][80]

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Bibliography and works

Jack Kerouac Alley in Chinatown, San Francisco

Main article: Jack Kerouac bibliography Kerouac’s French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama Jack Kerouac’s Road: A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson.[76] A street, rue de Jack Kérouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010.[77] In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.

4.1 Poetry

While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac is also noted for his poetry. Kerouac said that he wanted “to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.”.[81] Many of Kerouac’s poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism. In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The “Mexico City Blues,” a collection of poems published in Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly 1959, is made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in of jazz. In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house period. Several examples of this can be seen in “Mexico in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board cov- City Blues":

5.1

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Studio albums

Everything Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— Anger Doesnt like to be reminded of fits— (fragment from 113th Chorus)[1]

5.1 Studio albums • Poetry for the Beat Generation (with Steve Allen) (1959) • Blues and Haikus (with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims) (1959)

1. ^ Kerouac, Jack (1959). Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses). Grove Press. p. 113. Other well-known poems by Kerouac, such as “Bowery Blues,” incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind.[82] Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac’s poetry features repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in life.

• Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)

5.2 Compilation albums • The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD collection of three studio albums) • Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road (1999)

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See also

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References

4.2 Posthumous editions In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.[83][84] By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac’s friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title. The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008 by Grove Press.[85] Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.[86] Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house, obtained rights from Kerouac’s estate to publish a collection of works titled La vie est d’hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of America in The Unknown Kerouac.[87][88]

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Discography

7.1 Notes [1] McGrath, Charles. “Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut,” The New York Times (May 15, 2009). Accessed May 16, 2009. [2] “Kerouac”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. [3] “Kerouac”. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House. [4] Swartz, Omar (1999). The view from On the road: the rhetorical vision of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8093-2384-5. Retrieved 2010-01-29. [5] Dean, Robert (2012-09-07). “The Conservative Kerouac”. The American Conservative. Retrieved 2013-1121. [6] Martinez, Manuel Luis (2003), Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 26, ISBN 978-0-299-19284-6, Kerouac appeared to have done an about-face, becoming extraordinarily reactionary and staunchly anticommunist, vocalizing his intense hatred of the 1960s counterculture...; id. at p. 29 (“Kerouac realized where his basic allegiance lay and vehemently disassociated himself from hippies and revolutionaries and deemed them unpatriotic subversives.”); id. at p. 30 (“Kerouac['s]...attempt to play down any perceived responsibility on his part for the hippie generation, whose dangerous activism he found repellent and “delinquent.”); id. at p. 111 (“Kerouac saw the hippies as mindless, communistic, rude, unpatriotic and soulless.”); Maher, Paul; Amram, David (2007), Kerouac: His Life and Work, Taylor Trade Publications, p. 469, ISBN 9781589793668, In the current political climate, Kerouac wrote, he had nowhere to turn, as he liked neither the hippies...nor the upper-echelon...

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JACK KEROUAC: October in the Railroad Earth

THERE WAS A LITTLE ALLEY IN SAN FRANCISCO back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they'll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of Walkup ?? truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of re- sponsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neatnecktied producers and com- muters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains-it's all in California, it's all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my jeans with head on handker- chief on brakeman's lantern or

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(if not working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and have insane conversations with Negroes in several-story windows above and every- thing is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains. BUT IT WAS THAT BEAUTIFUL CUT OF CLOUDS I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin' to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness-the people- the alley full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America. Now it's night in Third Street the keen little neons and also yellow bulblights of impossible-to-believe flops with dark ruined shadows moving back of tom yellow shades like a degenerate China with no money- the cats in Annie's Alley, the flop comes on, moans, rolls, the street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of in- terior, the grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth, the reading rooms tick tock bigclock with creak chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liver- pool England pawnshop long before I was born

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and across rains they've come to the end of the land sadness end of the world gladness all you San Franciscos will have to fall eventu- ally and burn again. But I'm walking and one night a bum fell into the hole of the construction job where they're tearing a sewer by day the husky Pacific & Electric youths in torn jeans who work there often I think of going up to some of 'em like say blond ones with wild hair and torn shirts and say "You oughta apply for the railroad it's much easier work you don't stand around the street all day and you get much more pay" but this bum fell in the hole you saw his foot stick out, a British MG also driven by some eccentric once backed into the hole and as I came home from a long Saturday after- noon local to Hollister out of San Jose miles away across verdurous fields of prune and juice joy here's this British MG backed and legs up wheels up into a pit and bums and cops standing around right outside the coffee shop- it was the way they fenced it but he never had the nerve to do it due to the fact that he had no money and nowhere to go and 0 his father was dead and O his mother was dead and O his sister was dead and O his whereabout was dead was dead- but and then at that time also I lay in my room on long Saturday afternoons listening to Jumpin' George with my fifth of tokay no tea and just under the sheets laughed to hear the crazy music "i\1ama, he treats your daughter mean," Mama, Papa, and don't you come in here I'll kill you etc. getting high by myself in room glooms and all wondrous knowing about the Negro the essential American out there always finding his solace his meaning in the fellaheen street and not in abstract morality and even when he has a church you see the

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pastor out front bowing to the ladies on the make you hear his great vibrant voice on the sunny Sunday after- noon sidewalk full of sexual vibratos saying "Why yes Mam but de gospel do say that man was born of woman's womb- " and no and so by that time I come crawling out of my warmsack and hit the street when I see the railroad ain't gonna call me till 5 AM Sunday mom probably for a local out of Bay Shore in fact always for a local out of Bay Shore and I go to the wailbar of all the wildbars in the world the one and only Third-and-Howard and there I go in and drink with the madmen and if I get drunk I git. The whore who come up to me in there the night I was there with Al Buckle and said to me "You wanta play with me tonight Jim, and?" and I didn't think I had enough money and later told this to Charley Low and he laughed and said "How do you know she wanted money always take the chance that she might be out just for love or just out for love you know what I mean man don't be a sucker." She was a goodlooking doll and said "How would you like to oolyakoo with me mon?" and I stood there like a jerk and in fact bought drink got drink drunk that night and in the 299 Club I was hit by the proprietor the band breaking up the fight before I had a chance to decide to hit him back which I didn't do and out on the street I tried to rush back in but they had locked the door and were looking at me thru the forbidden glass in the door with faces like undersea-I should have played with her shurrouruuruuruuruuruuruurkdiei. DESPITE THE FACT I wAS A BRAKE MAN making 600

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a month I kept going to the Public restaurant on Howard Street which was three eggs for 26 cents 2 eggs for 21 this with toast (hardly no butter) coffee (hardly no coffee and sugar ra- tioned) oatmeal with dash of milk and sugar the smell of soured old shirts lingering above the cookpot steams as if they were making skidrow lumbe1jack stews out of San Francisco ancient Chinese mildewed laundries with poker games in the back among the barrels and the rats of the earthquake days, but actually the food somewhat on the level of an old- time 1890 or 1910 section-gang cook of lumber camps far in the North with an oldtime pigtail Chinaman cooking it and cussing out those who didn't like it. The prices were incredible but one time I had the beefstew and it was ab- solutely the worst beefstew I ever et, it was incredible I tell you-and as they often did that to me it was with the most intensest regret that I tried to convey to the geek back of counter what I wanted but he was a tough sonofabitch, ech, ti-ti, I thought the counterman was kind of queer especially he handled gruffly the hopeless drooldrunks, "What now you doing you think you can come in here and cut like that for God's sake act like a man won't you and eat or get out-t-t-t-" - I always did wonder what a guy like that was doing work- ing in a place like that because, but why some sympathy in his horny heart for the busted wrecks, all up and down the street were restaurants like the Public catering exclusively to bums of the black, winos with no money, who found 21 cents left over from wine panhandlings and so stumbled in for their

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third or fourth touch of food in a week, as sometimes they didn't eat at all and so you'd see them in the corner puking white liquid which was a couple quarts of rancid sauteme rotgut or sweet white sherry and they had nothing on their stomachs, most of them had one leg or were on crutches and had bandages around their feet, from nicotine and alcohol poisoning together, and one time finally on my way up Third near Market across the street from Breens, when in early 1952 I lived on Russian Hill and didn't quite dig the complete horror and humor of railroad's Third Street, a bum a thin sickly littlebum like Anton Abraham lay face down on the pavement with crutch aside and some old remnant news- paper sticking out and it seemed to me he was dead. I looked closely to see if he was breathing and he was not, another man with me was looking down and we agreed he was dead, and soon a cop came over and took and agreed and called the wagon, the little wretch weighed about 50 pounds in his bleeding count and was stone mackerel snotnose cold dead as a bleeding doornail- ah I tell you- and who could notice but other half dead deadbums bums bums bums dead dead times X times X times all dead bums forever dead with nothing and all finished and out- there- and this was the clientele in the Public Hair restaurant where I ate many's the mom a 3-egg breakfast with almost dry toast and oatmeal a little saucer of, and thin sickly dishwater coffee, all to save 14 cents so in my little book proudly I could make a nota- tion and of the day and prove that I could live comfortably in America while working seven days a week and earning 600 a month I could live on less that 17 a week which with my rent of 4.20 was okay as I had also to spend money to eat

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and sleep sometimes on the other end of my Watsonville chaingang run but preferred most times to sleep free of charge and uncomfortable in cabooses of the crummy rack- my 26-cent breakfast, my prideand that incredible semiqueer counterman who dished out the food, threw it at you,

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slammed it, had a languid frank expression straight in your eyes like a 1930's lunchcart heroine in Steinbeck and at the steamtable itself labored coolly a junkeylooking Chinese with an actual stocking in his hair as if they'd just Shanghai'd him off the foot of Commercial Street before the Ferry Building was up but forgot it was 1952, dreamed it was 1860 gold- rush Friscoand on rainy days you felt they had ships in the back room. I'D TAKE WALKS UP HARRISON and the boomcrash of truck traffic towards the glorious girders of the Oakland Bay Bridge that you could see after climbing Han-ison Hill a little like radar machine of eternity in the sky, huge, in the blue, by pure clouds crossed, gulls, idiot cars streaking to destina- tions on its undinal boom across shmoshwaters flocked up by winds and news of San Rafael storms and flash boats- there 0 I always came and walked and negotiated whole Friscos in one afternoon from the overlooking hills of the high Fill- more where Orient-bound vessels you can see on drowsy Sunday mornings of poolhall goof like after a whole night playing drums in a jam session and a morn in the hall of cuesticks I went by the rich homes of old ladies supp011ed by daughters or female secretaries with immense ugly gar- goyle Frisco millions fronts of other days and way below is the blue passage of the Gate, the Alcatraz mad rock, the mouths of Tamalpais, San Pablo Bay, Sausalito sleepy hem- ming the rock and bush over yonder, and the sweet white ships cleanly cutting a path to Sasebo.Over Harrison and down to the Embarcadero and

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around Telegraph Hill and up the back of Russian Hill and down to the play streets of Chinatown and down Kearney back across :Market to Third and my wildnight neon twinkle fate there, ah, and then finally at dawn of a Sunday and they did call me, the im- mense girders of Oakland Bay still haunting me and all that eternity too much to swallow and not knowing who I am at

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all but like a big plump longhaired baby worwalking up in the dark trying to wonder who I am the door knocks and it's the desk keeper of the flop hotel with silver rims and white hair and clean clothes and sickly potbelly said he was from Rocky Mount and looked like yes, he had been desk clerk of the Nash Buncome Association hotel down there in 50 successive heatwave summers without the sun and only palmos of the lobby with cigar crutches in the albums of the South and him with his dear mother waiting in a buried log cabin of graves with all that mashed past historied under- ground afoot with the stain of the bear the blood of the tree and cornfields long plowed under and Negroes whose voices long faded from the middle of the wood and the dog barked his last, this man had voyageured to the West Coast too like all the other loose American elements and was pale and sixty and complaining of sickness, might at one time been a handsome squire to women with money but now a forgotten clerk and maybe spent a little time in jail for a few forgeries or harmless cons and might also have been a railroad clerk and might have wept and might have never made it, and that day I'd say he saw the bridgegirders up over the hill of traffic of Harrison like me and woke up mornings with same lost, is now beckoning on my door and breaking in the world on me and he is standing on the frayed carpet of the hall all worn down by black steps of sunken old men for last 40 years since earthquake and the toilet stained, beyond the last toilet bowl and the last stink and stain I guess yes is the end of the world the bloody end of the world, so now knocks on my door and I wake up, saying "How what howp howelk howel of the knavery

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they'v e meaking, ek and won't let me slepit? Whey they dool? Whand out wisis thing that comes fla1minging around my dooring in the mouth of the night and there everything knows that I have no mother, and no sister, and no father and no bot sosstle, but not crib" I get up and sit up and says "Howowow?" and he says "Tele-

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phone?" and I have to put on my jeans heavy with knife, wallet, I look closely at my railroad watch hanging on little door flicker of closet door face to me ticking silent the time, it says 4:30 AM of a Sunday morn, I go down the carpet of the skid.row hall in jeans and with no shirt and yes with shirt tails hanging gray workshirt and pick up phone and ticky sleepy night desk with cage and spittoons and keys hanging and old towels piled clean ones but frayed at edges and bearing names of every hotel of the moving prime, on the phone is the Crew Clerk, "Kerroway?" "Yeah." "Kerroway it's gonna be the Sheman Local at 7 AM this morning." "Sherman Local right." "Out of Bay Shore, you know the way?" "Yeah." "You had that same job last Sunday-Okay Ke1rnway-y-y-y-y." And we mutually hang up and I say to myself okay it's the Bay Shore bloody old dirty hagglous old coveted old madman Shetman who hates me so much es- pecially when we were at Redwood Junction kicking boxcars and he always insists I work the rear end tho as one-year man it would be easier for me to follow pot but I work rear and he wants me to be right there with a block of wood when a car or cut of cars kicked stops, so they won't roll down that incline and start catastrophes, 0 well anyway I'll be learning eventually to like the railroad and Sherman will like me some day, and anyway another day another dollar. And there's my room, small, gray in the Sunday morning, now all the franticness of the street and night before is done with, bums sleep, maybe one or two sprawled on sidewalk with empty poorboy on a sillmy mind whirls with life.

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So THEREIAMINDAWN in my dim cell- 2½ hours to go till the time I have to stick my railroad watch in my jean watchpocket and cut out allowing myself exactly 8 minutes to the station and the 7:15 train No. 112 I have to catch for the ride five miles to Bay Shore through four tunnels, emerging from the sad Rath scene of Frisco gloom gleak in the rainymouth fogmoming to a sudden valley with grim

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hills rising to the sea, bay on left, the fog rolling in like demented in the draws that have little white cottages dis- posed real-estatically for come-Christmas blue sad lights- my whole soul and concomitant eyes looking out on this reality of living and working in San Francisco with that pleased semi-loin-located shudder, energy for sex changing to pain at the portals of work and culture and natural foggy fear.There I am in my little room wondering how I'll really manage to fool myself into feeling that these next 2½ hours will be well filled, fed, with work and pleasure thoughts.- It's so thrilling to feel the coldness of the morning wrap around my thickquilt blankets as I lay there, watch facing and ticking me, legs spread in comf y skidrow soft sheets with soft tears or sew lines in 'em, huddled in my own skin and rich and not spending a cent on- I look at my little- book- and I stare at the words of the Bible.- On the floor I find last red afternoon Saturd ay's Chronicle sports page with news of football games in Great America the end of which I bleakl y see in the gray light entering- the fact that Frisco is built of wood satisfies me in my peace, I know nobody'll disturb me for 2½ hours and all bums are asleep in their own bed of eternity awake or not, bottle or not- it's the joy I feel that counts for me.- On the floor's my shoes, big lumberboot flopjack workshoes to colomp over rockbed with and not turn the ankle- solidity shoes that when you put them on, yoke wise, you know you're working now and so for same reason shoes not be worn for any reason like joys of restaurant and shows.- Night-before shoes are on the floor beside the

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Clunkershoes a pair of blue canvas shoes a la 1952 style, in them I'd trod soft as ghost the indented hill sidewalks of Ah Me Frisco all in the glitter night, from the top of Russian Hill I'd looked down at one point on all roofs of North Beach and the Mexican night- club neons, I'd descended to them on the old steps of Broad- way under which they were newly laboring a mountain

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tunnel- shoes fit for watersides, embarcaderos, hill and plot lawns of park and tiptop vista.- Workshoes covered with dust and some oil of engines- the crumpled jeans nearby, belt, blue railroad hank, knife, comb, keys, switch keys and caboose coach key, the knees white from Pajaro Riverbot- tom finedusts, the ass black from slick sandboxes in yard- goat after yardgoat- the gray workshorts, the dirty undershirt, sad shorts, tortured socks of my life.- And the Bible on my desk next to the peanut butter, the lettuce , the raisin bread, the crack in the plaster, the stiff-withold-dust lace drape now no longer laceable but hard as- after all those years of hard dust eternity in that Cameo skid inn with red eyes of rheumy oldmen dying there staring without hope out on the dead wall you can hardly see thru windowdusts and all you heard lately in the shaft of the rooftop middle way was the cries of a Chinese child whose father and mother were always telling him to shush and then screaming at him, he was a pest and his tears from China were most persistent and worldwide and represented all our feelings in broken- down Cameo tho this was not admitted by bum one except for an occasional harsh clearing of throat in the halls or moan of nightmarer by things like this and neglect of a hard-eyed alcoholic oldtime chorusgirl maid the curtains had now absorbed all the iron they could take and hung stiff and even the dust in them was iron, if you shook them they'd crack and fall in tatters to the floor and spatter like wings of iron on the bong and the dust would fly into your nose like filings of steel and choke you to death, so I never touched them. My little room at 6 in the comfy dawn (at 4:30) and before

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me all that time, that fresh-eyed time for a little coffee to boil water on my hot plate, throw some coffee in, stir it, French style, slowly carefully pour it in my white tin cup, throw sugar in (not California beet sugar like I should have been using but New Orleans cane sugar, because beet racks I carried from Oakland out to Watsonville many's the time,

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a 80-car freight train with nothing but gondolas loaded with sad beets looking like the heads of decapitated women)- ah me how but it was a hell and now I had the whole thing to myself, and make my raisin toast by sitting it on a little wire I'd especially bent to place over the hotplate, the toast crack- led up, there, I spread the margarine on the still red hot toast and it too would crackle and sink in golden, among burnt raisins and this was my toast-then two eggs gently slowly fried in soft margarine in my little skidrow frying pan about half as thick as a dime in fact less a little piece of tiny tin you could bring on a camp trip-the eggs slowly fluffled in there and swelled from butter steams and I threw garlic salt on them, and when they were ready the yellow of them had been slightly filmed with a cooked white at the top from the tin cover I'd put over the frying pan, so now they were ready, and out they came, I spread them out on top of my already prepared potatoes which had been boiled in small pieces and then mixed with the bacon I'd already fried in small pieces, kind of raggely mashed bacon potatoes, with eggs on top steaming, and on the side lettuce, with pea- nut butter dab nearby on side.-I had heard that peanut butter and lettuce contained all the vitamins you should want, this after I had originally started to eat this combination because of the deliciousness and nostalgia of the taste-my breakfast ready at about 6:45 and as I eat already I'm dress- ing to go piece by piece and by the time the last dish is washed in the little sink at the

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boiling hotwater tap and I'm taking my lastquick slug of coffee and quickly rinsing the cup in the hot water spout and rushing to dry it and plop it in its place by the hot plate and the brown carton in which all the groceries sit tightly wrapped in brown paper, I'm already picking up my brakeman's lantern from where it's been hanging on the door handle and my tattered timetable's long been in my backpocket folded and ready to go, every- thing tight, keys, timetable, lantern, knife, handkerchief, wallet, comb, railroad keys, change and myself. I put the light out on the sad dab mad grnb little diving room and hustle out into the fog of the flow, descending the creak hall steps where the old men are not yet sitting with Sunday mom papers because still asleep or some of them I can now as I leave hear beginning to disfawdle to wake in their rooms with their moans and yorks and scrapings and horror sounds, I'm going down the steps to work, glance to check time of watch with clerk cage clock- a hardy two or three oldtimers sitting already in the dark brown lobby under the tockboom clock, toothless, or grim, or elegantly mustached - what thought in the world swirling in them as they see the young eager brake- man bum hurrying to his thirty dollars of the Sunday- what memories of old homesteads, built without sympathy, horny- handed fate dealt them the loss of wives, childs, moons- libraries collapsed in their time---oldtimers of the telegraph wired wood Frisco in the fog gray top time sitting in their brown sunk sea and will be there when this afternoon my face flushed from the sun, which at eight'll flame out and make sunbaths for us at Redwood, they'll still be here the color of paste in the green underworld and still reading the

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same editorial over again and won't understand where I've been or what for or what- I have to get out of there or suffocate, out of Third Street or become a worm, it's alright to live and bed-wine in and play the radio and cook little breakfasts and rest in but O my I've got to tog now to work, I hurry down Third to Townsend for my 7:15 train- it's 3 minutes to go, I start in a panic to jog, goddam it I didn't give myself enough time this morning, I hurry down under the Harrison ramp to the Oakland-Bay Bridge, down past Schweibacker- Frey the great dim red neon printshop always spectrally my father the dead executive I see there, I rnn and hurry past the beat Negro grocery stores where I buy all my peanut butter and raisin bread, past the redbrick railroad alley now mist and wet, across Townsend, the train is leaving! FATUOUS RAILROAD MEN, the conductor old John J. Coppertwang 35 years pure senrice on ye olde S.P. is there in the gray Sunday morning with his gold watch out peering at it, he's standing by the engine yelling up pleasantries at old boghead Jones and young fireman Smith with the baseball cap is at the fireman's seat munching sandwich- "We'll how'd ye like old Johnny O yestiddy, I guess he didn't score so many touchdowns like we thought." "Smith bet six dollars on the pool down in Watsonville and said he's rakin' in thirty four." "I've been in that Watsonville pool- ." They've been in the pool of life fleartiming with one another, all the long pokerplaying nights in brownwood railroad places, you can smell the mashed cigar in the wood, the spittoon's been there for more than 750,099 yars and the dog's been in and out and these old boys by old shaded brown light have bent and muttered and young boys too with their new brakeman passenger uni- form the tie undone the coat thrown back the flashing youth smile of happy fatuous well-fed goodjobbed careered futured pensioned

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hospitalized taken-care-of railroad men- 35, 40 years of it and then they get to be conductors and in the middle of the night they've been for years called by the Crew Clerk yelling "Cassady? It's the Maximush localized week do you for the right lead" but now as old men all they have is a regular job, a regular train, conductor of the 112 with gold- watch is helling up his pleasantries at all fire dog crazy Satan hoghead Willis why the wildest man this side of France and Frankincense, he was known once to take his engine up that steep grade- 7:15, time to pull, as I'm running thru the station hearing the bell jangling and the steam chuff they're pulling out, 0 I come flying out on the platform and forget momentarily or that is never did know what track it was and whirl in confusion a while wondering what track and can't see no train and this is the time I lose there, 5, 6, 7 seconds when the train tho underway is only slowly upchugging to go and a man a fat executive could easily run up and grab it but when I yell to Assistant Stationmaster "Where's 112?" and he tells me the last track which is the track I never dreamed I run to it fast as I can go and dodge people a la Columbia halfback and cut into track fast as off-tackle where you carry the ball with you to the left and feint with neck and head and push of ball as tho you're gonna throw yourself all out to fly around that left end and everybody psychologically chuffs with you that way and suddenly you contract and you like whiff of smoke are buried in the hole in tackle, cutback play, you're flying into the hole almost before you yourself know it, flying into the track I am and there's the train about 30 yards away even as I look picking up tremendously mo- mentum the kind of momentum I would have been able to catch if I'd a looked a second earlier- but I run, I know I can catch it. Standing on the back platform are the rear

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brakeman and an old deadheading conductor ole Charley W. Jones, why he had seven wives and six kids and one time out at Lick not I guess it was Coyote he couldn't seen on account of the steam and out he come and found his lantem in the igloo regular anglecock of my herald and they gave him fif- teen benefits so now there he is in the Sunday har har owlala moming and he and young rear man watch incredulously this student brakeman running like a crazy trackman after their departing train. I feel like yelling "Make your airtest now make your airtest now!" knowing that when a passenger pulls out just about at the first crossing east of the station they pull the air a little bit to test the brakes, on signal from the engine, and this momentarily slows up the train and I could manage it, and could catch it, but they're not making no airtest the bastards, and I hek knowing I'm going to have to run like a sonofabitch. But suddenly I get embarrassed think- ing what are all the people of the world gonna say to see a man mnning so devilishly fast with all his might sprinting thm life like Jesse Owens just to catch a goddam train and all of them with their hysteria wondering if I'll get killed

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when I catch the back platfo1m and blam, I fall down and go boom and lay supine across the crossing, so the old flag- man when the train has flowed by will see that everything lies on the ea1th in the same stew, all of us angels will die and we don't ever know how or our own diamond, 0 heaven will enlighten us and open your youeeeeeoueee----open our eyes, open our eyes- I know I won't get hurt, I trust my shoes, hand grip, feet, solidity of yipe and cripe of gripe and grip and strength and need no mystic strength to measure the musculature in my rib rack- but damn it all it's a social em- barrassment to be caught sprinting like a maniac after a train especially with two men gaping at me from rear of train and shaking their heads and yelling I can't make it even as I halfheartedly sprint after them with open eyes trying to com- municate that I can and not for them to get hysterical or laugh, but I realize it's all too much for me, not the run, not the speed of the train which anyway two seconds after I gave up the complicated chase did indeed slow down at the crossing in the aittest before chugging up again for good and Bay Shore. So I was late for work, and old She1man hated me and was about to hate me more. THE GROUND I WOULD HAVE EATEN IN SOLITUDE , cronchthe railroad earth, the flat stretches of long Bay Shore that I have to negotiate to get to Sherman's bloody caboose on track 17 ready to go with pot pointed to Redwood and the morning's 3-hour work- I get off the bus at Bay Shore High- way and rush down the little street and turn in- boys riding the pot of a

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switcheroo in the yardgoat day come yelling by at me from the headboards and footboards "Come on down ride with us" otherwise I would have been about 3 minutes even later to my work but now I hop on the little engine that momentarily slows up to pick me up and it's alone not pulling anything but tender, the guys have been up to the other end of the yard to get back on some track of necessitythat boy will have to learn to flag himself without nobody helping him as many's the time I've seen some of these young goats think they have everything but the plan is late, the word will have to wait, the massive arboreal thief with the crime of the kind, and air and all kinds of ghoulsZONKed! made tremendous by the flare of the whole prime and encru- dalatures of all kinds- San Franciscos and shroudband Bay Shores the last and the last furbelow of the eek plot pall prime tit top work oil twicks and wouldn't you?- the railroad earth I would have eaten alone, cronch, on foot head bent to get to Sherman who ticking watch obseives with finicky eyes the time to go to give the hiball sign get on going it's Sunday no time to waste the only day of his long seven-day-a-week work- life he gets a chance to rest a little bit at home when ''Eee Christ" when "Tell that sonofabitch student this is no party picnic damn this shit and throb tit you tell them something and how do you what the hell expect to underdries out tit all you bright tremendous trouble anyway, we's LAIB" and this is the way I come rushing up late. Old Sherman is sitting in the crummy over his switch lists, when he sees me with cold blue eyes he says "You know you're supposed to be here 7:30 don't you so what the hell you doing gettin' in here at 7:50 you're twenty goddam minutes late, what the fuck you think this your birthday?" and he gets up and leans off the rear bleak platform and gives the high sign to the enginemen up front we have a cut of about 12 cars and

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they say it easy and off we go slowly at first, picking up momentum to the work, "Light that goddam fire" says Sherman he's wearing brand- new workshoes just about bought yestiddy and I notice his clean covei·alls that his wife washed and set on his chair just that morning probably and I rush up and throw coal in the potbelly flop and take a fusee and two fusees and light them crack em Ah fourth of the July when the angels would smile on the horizon and all the racks where the mad are lost are returned to us forever from Lowell of my soul prime and single meditatee longsong hope to heaven of prayers and angels and of course the sleep and interested eye of images and but now we detect the missing buffoon there's the poor goodman rear man ain't even on the train yet and Sherman looks out sulkily the back door and sees his rear man waving from fifteen yards aways to stop and wait for him and being an old railroad man he certainly isn't going to run or even walk fast, it's well understood, conductor Sherman's got to get up off his switchlist desk chair and pull the air and stop the goddam train for rear man Arkansaw Charley, who sees this done and just come up lopin' in his flop overalls without no care, so he was late too, or at least had gone gossipping in the yard office while waiting for the stupid head brakeman, the tagman's up in front on the presumably pot. "First thing we do is pick up a car in front at Redwood so all's you do get off at the crossing and stand back to flag, not too far." "Don't I work the head end?" "You work the hind end we got not much to do and I wanta get it done fast," snarls the conductor. "Just take it easy and do what we say and watch and flag." So it's peaceful

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Sunday morning in California and off we go, tack-atick, lao-tichi-couch, out of the Bay Shore yards, pause momentarily at the main line for the green, ole 71 or ole whatever been by and now we get out and go swamming up the tree valleys and town vale hollows and main street crossing parking-lot last-night attendant plots and Stan- ford lots of the world- to our destination in the Poo which I can see, and, so to while the time I'm up in the cupolo and with my newspaper dig the latest news on the front page and also consider and make notations of the money I spent already for this day Sunday absolutely not jot spent a nothing- Cali- fornia rushes by and with sad eyes we watch it reel the whole bay and the discourse falling off to gradual gils that ease and graduate to Santa Clara Valley then and the fig and behind is the fog immemoriates while the mist closes and we come running out to the bright sun of the Sabbath CaliforniayAt Redwood I get off and standing on sad oily ties of the brakie railroad ea1th with red flag and torpedoes attached and fusees in backpocket with timetable crushed against and I leave my hot jacket in crummy standing there then with sleeves rolled up and there's the porch of a Negro home, the brothers are sitting in shirtsleeves talking with cigarettes and laughing and little daughter standing amongst the weeds of the garden with her playpail and pigtails and we the railroad men with soft signs and no sound pick up our flower, accord- ing to same goodman train order that for the last entire

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life- time of attentions ole conductor industrial worker harlotized She1man has been reading carefully son so's not to make a mistake: "Sunday morning October 15 pick up flower car at Redwood, Dispatcher M.M.S."

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