Orpheus Emerged Read online

  ja

  A N E W N O c

  V E L L A B Y

  k

  kerouac

  I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y

  R O B E R T C R E E L E Y

  ORPHEUS

  EMERGED

  LiveREADS

  Dear Reader,

  CONGRATULATIONS!!!

  You have successfully downloaded ORPHEUS EMERGED and now own

  the first LiveREAD ever published.

  Now please allow me to offer a few suggestions to help you navigate and truly enjoy this interactive reading experience. It'll just take a few moments.

  1. To page through the novella, just click on the arrows next to the "Page x of 398" on the panel on the bottom lefthand of your screen (should be right above the START button, if your using a PC).

  2. The design of ORPHEUS EMERGED is best viewed in a two-page spread.

  On the same panel at the bottom lefthand of your screen, you should see a button to the right of "6 x 9 in". Click this and a menu will appear offering "Single Page"; "Continuous"; or "Continuous Facing". Click

  "Continuous Facing"

  3. If you'd like to send an excerpt of this LiveREAD to a friend, go to the

  "Plug-ins" button in the upper left-hand menu and click on "Softlock", then "Send Document to". Then follow the directions.

  4. And finally, please review the link from the Table of Contents page that says "Using this LiveREAD" ORPHEUS EMERGED is interactive and highly functional. This page tells you how.

  5. Once you've finished ORPHEUS EMERGED, we'd love to hear from you about what kind of interactive reading experiences you'd like to see from us or even how you'd improve ORPHEUS EMERGED or what you liked/disliked the most. Not only do we appreciate your thoughts and input, but we also need your help in forging ahead in this new brave new world of reading. Who better to inform Live READS than the people actually read-

  ing its publications? Click here to send us word.

  And the beat goes on,

  Neal Bascomb

  CEO, LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS

  EMERGED

  A N O V E L L A B Y

  JOHN KEROUAC

  TM

  LiveREADS

  Published by

  Live READS

  1650 Broadway

  Suite 1011

  TM

  LiveREADS

  New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas,

  Literary Representative, 2000

  Introduction copyright © Robert Creeley, 2000

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 0-9706110-0-5

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or

  introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this

  work.

  Every effort has been made to secure rights to textual and

  graphical material contained herein. Please inform

  Live READS of any inadvertant failure to clear permission to reproduce copyrighted material.

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 4

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 5

  Contents

  © Allen Ginsberg Trust

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 6

  USING THIS LIVE READ

  8

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  10

  INTRODUCTION, “THINKING OF JACK,” BY

  ROBERT CREELEY

  ORPHEUS EMERGED

  16

  I

  44

  II

  72

  III

  122

  IV

  156

  V

  180

  VI

  196

  VII

  210

  VIII

  218

  IX

  236

  X

  246

  EXCERPTS FROM JACK KEROUAC’S JOURNALS

  252

  BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

  256

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY - KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION

  TO LONESOME TRAVELER

  260

  TIMELINE

  266

  BOOKS BY JACK KEROUAC

  268

  THE BEAT MOVEMENT

  273

  THE WORLD OF JACK KEROUAC

  274

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT

  JACK KEROUAC

  276

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT

  THE BEATS

  278

  MULTIMEDIA ELEMENTS (AUDIO & VIDEO)

  280

  CAPTIONS

  282

  ABOUT LIVE READS AND CREDITS

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 7

  About the Book

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 8

  After Jack Kerouac died in 1969, his widow Stella kept

  his extensive archive private. Since her death in 1990,

  executor John Sampas has worked with publishers and

  scholars to bring Kerouac's unpublished work to light.

  Viking Penguin has published The Portable Kerouac, two volumes of Selected Letters, Book of Blues, Some of the Dharma, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other

  Writings, and Joyce Johnson's correspondence with

  Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters

  1957-1958.

  The allegorical novella Orpheus Emerged, published for the first time by Live Reads, was completed in 1945 when the 23-year-old writer still signed his work “John Kerouac” and was

  deeply immersed in the process of finding the voice that came to express the spirit of a generation.

  Kerouac wrote the novella shortly after meeting Allen

  Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and others in and

  around Columbia University. These new friends would form

  the core of the group of writers know as the Beats, and they

  are reflected in the characters in Orpheus Emerged, a book filled with references to the books Kerouac was reading, the

  music and art he was discovering, and the concepts he was

  exploring.

  Set in and around an urban university, Orpheus Emerged

  follows the obsessions, passions, conflicts and dreams of a

  group of colorful, searching, bohemian intellectuals. At its

  core is a petit roman a clef, a portrait of an artist as a young man torn between art and life—formulating his ideas

  about love, work, art, suffering, and ecstasy.

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 9

  Thinking of Jack

  Introduction by Robert Creeley

  It was Allen Ginsberg who introduced us – if that’s the

  appropriate word for what happened that evening in spring,

  San Francisco, 1956. I’d come into the city for the first time a few weeks before and had met Allen through the fact that

  both he and poet friend Ed Dorn were working at the

  Greyhound Bus Station on Market Street. So Allen had

  come up to the Dorns’ apartment where I was staying –

  crashed is the better term – and we talked most of the night, remaining till Ed’s shift was done. Not very long after Allen told us that his friend Jack Kerouac would shortly be coming into town and that if we went the next night to The

  Place, a local bar in North Beach run by old Black

  Mountainee
rs, he’d be meeting Jack there after work. At

  that time just one of Jack’s novels had been published, The Town and the City, and that book by itself would probably have made little difference finally, either to us or the world.

  It was what hadn’t been published yet – the great unwind-

  ing string of narratives, the veritable river of “spontaneous prose” – we so respected. Few had read any of it but the

  word was out. He was the astounding writer who had man-

  aged to keep a thousand pages moving wherein the only

  external action was a neon light going off and on out the

  window, over a drugstore across the street. So we went,

  hoping to meet the young novelist, already legendary at

  least to such as ourselves.

  Memory recalls a young man sitting by himself at

  a far corner of the small space of the bar, just to the left

  of the turn for the toilets, where the sidewall met the

  back. There was no remarkable lighting focussed on

  him, but I do see him now as singular, isolated, quite still

  as he drinks. At some point he must have caught me

  looking at him, so he looks back – his eyes a striking

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 11

  blue, intense, very particular. I had no idea as yet this

  person was Jack but when Allen came in, seeing us, he

  asked if Jack had come, then saw the same fellow and

  said, “There he is!” Going over, we found his seeming

  quiet was a fact of his being altogether drunk, and I

  never did meet him that evening more than to help with

  getting him across the Bay and into bed in Berkeley.

  I knew that drinking, however. I’d grown up in a

  farm town in New England close to Lowell, Jack’s family

  home, some fifteen miles east. For us Lowell was the big

  city, along with places like Waltham. Boston itself was a

  glowing metropolis almost beyond imagination. My moth-

  er got my annual outfit for Easter in the Bon Marche in

  Lowell. Route 3 went through it on its way north to New

  Hampshire and the Boston and Maine Railroad took the

  same route as well along the Merrimac River. In the awk-

  wardness of that time, drinking, it appeared, eased the male

  confusion, made inarticulate feelings far simpler to accom-

  modate, and let one feel an unaccustomed comfort in the

  increasingly blurred surroundings. Whatever the fact,

  drinking was the way through, be it sexual delight –

  although how drunkenness helps such circumstance is hard

  to fathom – or rapport with a various social world not one’s

  own. Hale fellow, well met! might quickly turn to Throw that bum out! – but by then one heard nothing anyhow.

  So, in this poignantly fledgling novella what males

  do, along with write and talk, is drink – with women then as an ambience, even a resource and company, but always

  with a marked distance, made into objects as they are,

  from the real exchange apparent. If they do enter the

  action, it’s with a wry and dislocating sense of contest. For LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 12

  example, Marie is Anthony’s securing wife but then

  Anthony is given a determinedly vulnerable person. When

  Marie goes off with Michael to have an “affair,” she is the

  most substantial of all three. She also smokes!

  Michael followed her into the bedroom.

  Anthony was peacefully asleep, with just the

  hint of a smile on his lips.

  “What a big baby!” Michael exclaimed soft-

  ly. Marie turned to him and almost smiled. But

  solemnly she said, “And what do you think you

  are?”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “Hmm?”

  Marie lowered the window pane, arranged

  Anthony’s blankets, motioned Michael out of

  the room, and quietly closed the door. She

  went over to a desk drawer and took out a cig-

  arette and lit it.

  Jack’s journals provide an interesting reference to

  Orpheus Emerged – “The Half Jest” as he calls it then, dated

  “Jan. 1944.” As The Book of Symbols (February, 1945) otherwise makes clear, he is casting his thoughts and work

  into large, symbolizing patterns with the sense of heroic

  forbears writ large indeed: “Saroyan period,” “Joycean

  period,” “Wolfean period,” “Nietzschean period (Neo-

  Rimbaudian),” “post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period),”

  which is where he locates Orpheus Emerged, “Spenglerian period,” “American period (Dos Passos),” with the concluding one being the “post-neurotic period,” aptly

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 13

  enough. It does him no disservice, like they say, to note

  that he is still not twenty-two years old. (His birthday is

  March 12, 1922.) No one’s told him how to write other than

  what he’s got from books as best he can. There’s no defin-

  ing tradition for such as he is, no social habit sustaining

  him. He’s gloriously making it up as he goes along but try-

  ing with such moving determination to be a real writer, an

  encompassing writer, a great writer. When his lifelong

  friend and elder, William Burroughs, was asked to give his

  sense of Kerouac, he emphasized that, first and last, he was

  a writer.

  Here then he is at work, at the beginning of it all,

  and whatever one makes of the result, it’s fascinating to see his moves, call them, the interaction he manages between

  his characters, foretelling what will be the “story” of so

  much of his subsequent work. Allen Ginsberg is the char-

  acter “Leo,” for example, or so he seems to me. Who else

  would ask those charming questions? But it is the way the

  imagination of a life is conceived, that life and art must find a viable company; that the relations of men, among themselves and with that outer “other” of women, must be end-

  lessly rehearsed – all such matters are those of his own life as book after book records.

  “Art is the only true twin life has,” Charles Olson,

  fellow poet, wrote in these same years. He lived in

  Gloucester and was said to be the inventor of “Projective

  Verse,” just as Jack was credited with “Spontaneous

  Prose.” In fact, there was even an edge of contest between

  the two groups comprising their followers as to just who

  was first in authority. Despite Olsen’s having written him

  in September, 1957 to acknowledge his powers as a poet,

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 14

  Jack was not to meet Olson until well along in his life after he had come back to live in Lowell — as Olson had himself returned to Gloucester, to live on the upper floor of a

  fisherman’s family house. One Sunday two of Jack’s wife

  Stella Sampas’ brothers drove him the short distance from

  Lowell to Gloucester to meet Olson. They sat in the car

  while Jack went in. As it happened, the Boston Globe had reviewed a novel of Jack’s that day – which one I can’t now

  remember – and gave it solid approval. Olson had taken

  the pages of the paper and spread them on the wooden

  steps outside leading up to his place, so that Jack might

  walk up in regal manner.

  In America one has to find one’s own way, step
by dif-

  ficult step. At any time there is much to be learned, much to be discarded, much to be engaged and contested. To the

  young man or woman it must seem often that the world they

  try finally to enter, whatever their hopes, has locked its

  doors. Is this what it means to be taught? To be nurtured?

  To be recognized as existing? Why doesn’t Kerouac use the

  French he knows instead of those literary “Parisian” tags?

  Because he’s learning, because he’s young, because he

  wants to be let in. We know, of course, that a few years later it will be Kerouac who, as Allen Ginsberg usefully noted,

  makes the very transforming point, that one can write in the same manner as one would speak to friends. But now he is in New York, has dropped out of Columbia, is trying with all

  his powers simply to write.

  There will never be another moment like this one.

  — Buffalo, N.Y.

  October 28, 2000

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 15

  I

  Paulstood

  in the Book

  Shop facing

  a shelf of

  books. He came

  in every day

  at the same

  time, shuf-

  fling in his

  old shoes, and

  pored through

  the same score

  or so of books

  with his dirty

  fingers.

  LiveREADS

  ORPHEUS EMERGED 17

  And despite the complete disreputability of

  his appearance—the shabby clothing, the

  matted locks of dark hair protruding over the

  collar—and his constant smoking that filled

  the bright little Shop with smoke and its clean

  floors with cigarette ends, no one seemed to

  pay any attention to him. His daily visits had

  by now assumed the character of routine.

  One or two of the clerks, however, were wont

  to comment on his habit of looking at the same

  twenty or so books every day. Nietzsche’s com-

  plete works, a novel by Stendhal,

  Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Ulysses, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and many others of this

  kind, he peered at impatiently each and every

  day, and always walked away from them with a

  LiveREADS