Book of Sketches Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN POETS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  FIRST BOOK

  PANORAMIC CATALOG SKETCH OF BIG EASONBURG

  SECOND BOOK

  PENGUIN POETS

  PENGUIN POETS

  BOOK OF SKETCHES

  JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac’s books of poetry include Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Pomes All Sizes, Heaven and Other Poems, Book of Blues, and Book of Haikus. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

  GEORGE CONDO is a painter and sculptor who has exhibited extensively in both the United States and Europe, with works in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other institutions. In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2005 he received the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York, Andrea Caratsch Galley in Zurich, and Sprüth Magers Lee in London.

  ALSO BY JACK KEROUAC

  THE DULUOZ LEGEND

  Visions of Gerard

  Doctor Sax

  Maggie Cassidy

  Vanity of Duluoz

  On the Road

  Visions of Cody

  The Subterraneans

  Tristessa

  Lonesome Traveller

  Desolation Angels

  The Dharma Bums

  Book of Dreams

  Big Sur

  Satori in Paris

  POETRY

  Mexico City Blues

  Scattered Poems

  Pomes All Sizes

  Heaven and Other Poems

  Book of Blues

  Book of Haikus

  OTHER WORK

  The Town and the City

  The Scripture of Golden

  Eternity

  Some of the Dharma

  Old Angel Midnight

  Good Blonde & Others

  Pull My Daisy

  Trip Trap

  Pic

  The Portable Jack Kerouac

  Selected Letters: 1940-1956

  Selected Letters: 1957-1969

  Atop an Underwood

  Door Wide Open

  Orpheus Emerged

  Departed Angels

  Windblown World

  Beat Generation

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © John Sampas, Literary Representative,

  the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac, 2006

  Introduction copyright © George Condo, 2006

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

  Book of sketches, 1952-53 / Jack Kerouac ; introduction by George Condo. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-142-00215-5

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Dedicated to the memory of

  Caroline Kerouac Blake

  INTRODUCTION

  Thoughts about Jack Kerouac

  Read this Book of Sketches and you’ll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was.

  These poems just breathe and flow, and when Jack plays the Blues, which he often does, his blues are truly sad — they are sadness without humor, without the joking and backslapping that come from good times. They are the real unfunny truth. Like when his older brother Gerard died. This is one of the saddest poems ever written.

  I learned a lot from Jack, and I can say all this not being a writer. At the age of fourteen he was the first radical I ever heard of. When I first became aware that he wrote his novel The Subterraneans in one long stretch, unrevised straight out of his head in three days, and that he had a “steel trap” memory — it was the combination of these two very important factors that inspired a new way of painting for me. From then on I combined memory, speed, and spontaneity to create most of my work. I relied on the Kerouacian notion of “the unrevised method of creation,” and it became the key to a pure uncontrollable mastery of chaos.

  As a reader, you would think Kerouac was talking, not writing. Yet it was precisely everyday speech that he was able to conjure up. He, like Jackson Pollock, found a way to take something all of us see and use every day and turn it into Art. This new language of Jack Kerouac was the one we had always been speaking. You just had to know what you were talking about before you spoke.

  Jack’s concept of writing was also very art-inspired — he drew on André Masson’s Automatic Painting and Charlie Parker’s informed improvisations to carve out his unique style and destination. He called upon Leonardo da Vinci’s method of observation in his studies of flowers, storms, anatomy, and physiognomy. Jack is to literature what Charlie Parker was to music or Jackson Pollock was to painting. It’s that simple. Proust should be invoked here, too. He must have been one of Kerouac’s favorite writers because he used him to describe Miles Davis’s phrasing in order to enhance a cultural value that had not yet been perceived — he spoke of Miles’s playing “eloquent phrases, just like Marcel Proust.”

  To look at Edward Hopper’s paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s is to see the destitute ambience of New York City and its existential paradox — it is a place at once industrious and at the same time empty, lonely, and unanswered. These qualities are found in some of Kerouac’s poetical sketches — gas stations, old barges, oil tankers, silhouettes of a positive industry set against dark empty exteriors that have been forgotten and misplaced: Indian land or an old gold mine, towns at one time prosperous now distinctly gone, reflecting an America that no one wanted to admit was still there.

  Jack himself had a cubist take on Hopper — not unlike Joseph Stella’s faceted Brooklyn Bridge — cubist in the sense that the fragmentation is not of imagery but of time and spac
e. The elements of chronology in these sketches are here of no importance. In fact, Jack has made a note, “Not Necessarily Chronological,” this being on his mind — in a larger sense referring to all the poems in the Book of Sketches, but also referring to the sequence of words within each poem. That’s what gives a “sketch” its edge, the fractured, almost “cut-up” feel that the descriptions carry. They seem to be running straight at you and then split up unexpectedly into multiple directions simultaneously, ending on a resolved note somehow related and yet striking out in a new direction.

  Unlike Hopper, though, Kerouac did not long for the past — he did not reminisce for the sake of nostalgia — or transpose the European masters’ sensibility. Rather, in the 1950s he broke free and prophetically dreamed a future world of young people wearing Levi’s and being cut loose from all the crumbling conventions. Jack saw into the future, he lived in the future. That is exactly what happened in the 1960s to society, but by then Jack was too old and self-abused to have any pleasure from the world he predicted.

  As the sketches tell us, anything that Jack saw was important. Anything that caught his eye and that he wrote about became priceless. Because in the way that an artist like Picasso could see with his brush, Jack could see with his pen. He was able to capture the spirit of his time without making anything up. And as it came to us from nowhere it certainly was astounding how concrete it all is now. It is as if the only true picture of humanity we will ever have was given to us by Jack Kerouac. All else is false and dressed up. Only Jack and Vincent van Gogh told the inner truth.

  — George Condo, November 2005

  BOOK OF SKETCHES

  JACK KEROUAC

  Printed Exactly As They Were Written On the Little Pages in the Notebooks I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952 Summer to 1954 December............

  (Not Necessarily Chronological)

  FIRST BOOK

  Rocky Mt Aug. 7 ’52

  Changed now to

  dungaree shorts, gaudy

  green sandals, blue vest

  with white borders & a

  little festive lovergirl ribbon

  in her hair Carolyn prepares

  the supper —

  “I better go over there &

  fix that lawnmower,” says

  Paul standing in the kitchen

  with LP at his thigh.

  “Supper’ll be ready at

  six.”

  Glancing at his watch

  Paul goes off - to his landlord

  Jack up the road — a man his

  age, of inherited wealth,

  who spends all day in big

  Easonburg walking around

  or sitting in his vast brick

  house (Jacky Lee’s father)

  or walking down the road

  to see his 2 new cows —

  On the kitchen floor is

  a pan of dog meal mixed

  with milk & water but the

  bird dog Bob isnt hungry,

  just let out of the pen

  he lays greedily sopping

  up happy in-house hours

  under the d.r. table — a

  big affectionate dopey

  beauty with great bony

  snakehead & big brown eyes

  & heartshaped mottled

  ears falling like the locks

  of a pretty girl do fall —

  in the Fall a gliding phantom

  in the pale fields.

  Carolyn takes a pile

  of dishes from the cupboard

  & silverware from the

  drawer & carries them

  into the diningroom. Out of

  the ref. she takes ready

  to bake biscuit doughs &

  unwraps them from their

  cellophane, stuffs waste paper

  in the corner bag that

  sits in a wastebasket

  out of sight — She

  prepares the aluminum

  silex for coffee — never

  puts an extra scoop for

  the pot — makes weak

  American housewife coffee

  — but who’s to

  notice, the Prez. of the

  Waldorf Astoria? — She

  slams a frying pan on a

  burner — singing “I hadnt

  anyone till you & with

  my lonely heart demanding

  it, f-a-i-t-h must

  have a hand in it — ”

  mistaking “fate” — Out

  comes the bacon & the

  yellow plastic

  basket of eggs — What’s

  she going to make? Under

  the faucet she cleans

  garden fresh tomatos

  from Mrs Harris’ —

  She’s boiling potatos in a

  pot — they’ve been there a

  half hour — Thru her

  little kitchen cupboard

  window, framed like a

  picture, see the old

  redroofed flu cure barn

  of the X farm — weary

  gray wood in the eternities

  of time — rickety poles

  around it — the tobacco,

  already picked from

  the bottom a foot up,

  pale & fieldsy before the

  solemn backdrop of

  that forest bush —

  One intervening sad English

  cone haystack — The

  little children of the

  Carolina suppertimes see

  this & think: “And does

  the forest need to eat?

  In the night that’s

  coming does the forest

  know? Why is that dish

  cloth hanging there so

  still — & like the

  forest — has no name

  I know of — gloop — ”

  Carolyn Blake is making

  bacon & eggs & boiled

  potatos for supper because

  lately the family’s been

  eating up breakfast

  foods — just cereal & toast —

  “Hm what pretty bacon,”

  she says out loud. On

  the radio now’s the

  Lone Ranger. Lingering

  statics clip & clop

  amongst its William

  Tell Overtures — a

  rooster foolish crows —

  Hand on hip, feet

  crossed, casually, a cig

  burning out in the ashtray,

  she picks the bacon over

  with a long cook fork.

  “Hum hum hum” she hums.

  Paul, having fixed the Jack

  lawn mower, is in the yard

  finishing the part of the lawn

  last overlooked. The

  deep rich fat grass lies in

  serried heaps along the

  trail of his machine

  with the ditch, the road,

  & the white road sign

  “Easonburg” & yellow

  “Stop” sign beyond — &

  signs on a post pointing in

  all the directions — ←

  Route 95 2 → US 64

  ↓ Rocky Mt 3 ↑Sandy

  Cross 4 — Paul, hat off,

  sleeves rolled, glumly &

  absentmindedly pushes at

  his work; the motor makes

  a drowsy suppertime growl

  like the sound of a motor-

  boat on some mystic lake

  — At the crossroads store

  groups of farmers have

  gathered & smoke & sit

  now. Heavenly mystical

  lights have meanwhile

  appeared in the sky as

  the great machinery

  continues in the High.

  Intense interest is being

  shown in the lawncutter —

  Jack himself has just driven

  over (on his way to town)

  & is parked on lawn�
�s edge

  discussing it with a young

  farmer in overalls & white &

  green baseball cap who app.

  w. to buy it — Little

  Paul runs to hear them

  talk — At the store

  five people are watching

  intently. Men are be-

  mused by machines. Americans,

  by new, efficient

  machines; Jack had the

  money to buy a deluxe

  cutter — 2 Negros

  & 2 white farmers stare

  intently at Paul in his

  lawn, from the store, as

  he backs up the car

  to get to the grass

  underneath it — Not once

  has he lookt up & acknowledged

  his watchers — works on.

  Jack has driven off proudly

  — Still another man

  joins the watchers — &

  now even George steps

  out to see — now that

  Jack’s driven off to whom

  he hasnt spoken in years —

  his twin brother. In Southern

  accents — “Thats whut

  ah think!” — they

  discuss that splendid

  grasscutter — Cars come

  & park, & go — Cars

  hurry on the hiway to

  home,

  “Wait till after

  supper,” says Carolyn to

  LP, “we’re ready to

  eat now — ” as

  he complains

  “Ah — nao!”

  but the complaint’s not

  serious & doesnt last

  long — And the air

  is fragrant from cut

  grass. “Come eat!”

  And suddenly not a

  soul’s at the store as

  for other & similar &

  just as blank reasons,

  they’ve gone to

  the silence

  the suppers of their own

  mystery.

  Why should a chair be far

  from a book case!

  P: “Well that confound

  yard is mowed.”

  C: “Fi-na-lee.”

  P: “Eat some supper

  boy.”

  C: — “What is it 27

  now? 28? It musta

  gone up, I thought