Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings Read online

  If I were wealthy, here’s what I’d do. Rather than to travel around the world having porters lug my enormous baggage, sit wearily in swaying rickshaws and look out with jaded senses at the Orient, drape myself tiredly in deck-chairs and gaze out somnolently at the surging surface of the sea . . . rather than that, I would work my way on tramp steamers, I would drink with the crew in every port, I would moil amid the reeking masses of the Orient, poking my nose into mysterious doorways and antique shops; I’d mush to the Arctic, I’d tramp through the jungles of Brazil and Africa, I’d have women in Capetown, in Singapore, in Port Said, in Istanbul, in St. Petersburg, in San Francisco, in Havana, in Liverpool, in Shanghai, in Morocco, in Sydney, in Sumatra . . . . I’d lope along on strawberry roans through the stifling dried wastes of Arizona, I’d stride along little roads in France, in England, and especially in Scotland (and I don’t know what the fascination of Scotland in me stems from, perhaps from Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” or the motion picture “39 Steps” or “The Lady of the Lake.”); I’d lie lolling among the green green hills of Ireland; I’d yawn whole afternoons away along the Mississippi, in New Orleans; I’d ... but Oh this could go on all night.

  The purpose of this story is not what I’ve already declared. The purpose was to indicate what I would do if I were wealthy, after all my years of traveling and living and being hungry, as regards to ending my days in peace. Here’s what I’d do.

  A little shack on the slope of a mountain in Colorado’s Rockies; a beach wagon with which to procure provisions; two fine dogs; a fireplace inside, to surprise any visitors who might imagine from the exterior appearance of my shack that it was impoverished. Impoverished! Hah! Of course not! A shack with dirty grey clapboards covering expensive building materials, a shack with a rickety stovepipe chimney leading smoke out and up from a beautiful fireplace set in fine deepred brick; a shack with a huge and heavy library, all very rare and fine editions of classics throughout the ages; a somber brown library with a fireplace and deep-dyed leather chairs, worn from much meditation with one of many mellow old pipes; a shack with a beautiful cocktail cabinet; a shack with a bedroom overlooking the great projecting earth’s grandest summits, snow-capped, sadly lost in clouds, towering mammoths of Colorado; a shack, gentlemen, in which I would end my days.

  In the morning, I would awake and go out into the yard, where a cool deep pailful of cold water would stand beside the well. Into this I would thrust my head, following that with a vigorous application of a big towel. Then I would go about chopping wood for the fire, after which I would go back into the shack and prepare breakfast: And, gentlemen, when I say breakfast, I definitely do not mean bacon and eggs and coffee and the New York Times . . . . no, I would have the following: A plate of steaming, sauced beans; some toast plastered with melting butter; three cups of strong, strong coffee; and for dessert, a huge foaming glass of milk and a piece of apple pie—all this to the casual perusal of some Homer, or some Shakespeare, or some Wolfe.

  Following this hearty breakfast, I would not pick up my guns and head out with the dogs . . . No gentlemen no! I cannot and will not kill animals. I would merely pick up a heavy staff and head out for a long walk with the dogs. In the afternoon I would study or write, or if I were tired of my loneliness, I would drive down to the airport nearby and fly to Los Angeles for a night at the Trocadero with the fashionable and lovely people of the time. But let me tell you that most of the time I would just sit outside of my shack and do things, build things with my hands, perhaps whittle sticks, or perhaps draw paintings, or perhaps describe the scene with pen, or read; or perhaps go in for a snifter of scotch and soda, or perhaps play my radio or phonograph or perhaps sleep underneath my big tree near the well.

  In the evening, with the mountains steeped in absolute silence and blackness, I would make my fire roar and would sit before it smoking, my hands on the two dogs’ noble and loyal heads, dreaming away the rest of my days.

  [One Sunday Afternoon in July]

  Until now perhaps the least-known influence on young Kerouac was Albert Halper, whose prose Kerouac was reading by early 1941. Halper (1904–84) was a short story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist whose work often dealt with the lives of working-class ethnic people in cities, especially his native Chicago and New York. Halper’s books include Union Square, On the Shore, and The Foundry. In a notebook from October 1942, Kerouac named “The Trinity” of Wolfe, Saroyan, and Halper as “3 Great American Writers” whose “words co-incide with deed.” He wrote that they (and Lin Yutang) “are concerned chiefly with the individual sensation of Life, with its every-day mysteries and astounding ‘commonplaces.’ They are the sensitive antennae who receive & impart Life from the earth, and not from man’s society alone.”

  In 1940 Halper wrote: “The first concern of a novelist is to see life clearly, and as whole as it may be, and then tell the truth about it.” In “Young Writer Remembering Chicago,” from his short story collection On the Shore, Halper says: “Folks, please listen. I would like to close this little piece with a grand flourish, with a blare of bugles, but I’ve got a locomotive in my chest, and that’s a fact . . . . When I was a kid, I went camping alone in the pine woods of upper Michigan. [...] When I reached the bottom of the hill, I struck an old railroad spur that curved away, then straightened out into a direct line. The shiny steel tracks, giving off a harsh glitter in the sun, grew small and taut, meeting at the horizon; and as I began walking over the wooden ties I heard the faint sound of a train. I didn’t see the locomotive for a long time, but heard it coming closer and closer. Finally it showed at the end of the tracks, a small black beetle against the horizon. I stepped off to one side to let it pass, hearing the sound increase, seeing the far-off smoke. It whirled past me, shot round the curve, and went out of sight, but I still heard it. I can hear it yet. Chug-chug-chug. Chug-chug-chug. Listen to it.” On the Shore (1934), subtitled Young Writer Remembering Chicago, may have given Kerouac the term young writer, which he uses to describe himself in several pieces written in the fall of 1941.

  One Sunday afternoon in July, I heard the music of a violin coming over the radio in the kitchen. At the time, I was sitting in my room staring at a window shade. The song was “To a Wild Rose,” and the moment I heard it, I knew where I was:

  I was standing on the corner of 44th Street and Broadway in New York on a Saturday afternoon, I should say, in the Spring. I was standing near the curb, and everybody was rushing past me, their eyes glued on themselves and not on life. My eyes were glued on life, at that particular moment, because an old man with white hair was standing on the sidewalk playing an old violin. It was “To a Wild Rose.” When he finished that, he played Brahms’ “Cradle Song.” When he had finished that, he started again on “To a Wild Rose,” perhaps because those were the only songs he knew, or perhaps the fact that he was blind and would never see a wild rose again accounted for it. At any rate, he played “To a Wild Rose,” actually and literally.

  My eyes were glued on life.

  And they were full of tears.

  I read something by Tess Slesinger, Albert Halper, and James T. Farrell these past few hours. I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man “with a locomotive in his chest, and that’s a fact,” not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. Out of this strange disease that made my brain reel with hope, and then despair, I thought I had something that would make me an original writer—something apart from the Saturday Evening Post stories and the clever New Yorker stories. But I find myself the brethren of many other poets—and I must confess, what is my next move?

  That, I believe, will work itself out in the same inextricably complicated and minute manner of Life itself.

  Some of these poets?: Halper, Farrell, Slesinger, Thomas Wolfe the King, Saroyan, Marcus Goodrich, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Whitman, Faulkner, and a million others in
cluding Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hardy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gide, Sandburg, and Kerouac. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

  The nice thing about Hollywood is its personalities, each one of which we can study at our own leisure and privacy in the movie houses: we sit there in the dark, while they cavort in the light of the silver screen—and we have ample opportunities to draw conclusions on them and perhaps dream up stories around them. I would like to write a story about a guy like Gary Cooper, and also Cary Grant, Charles Boyer, Joel McRea, Tyrone Power (he would be a dark brooding Romanoff), George Brent, Victor Mature, Melvyn Douglas, Burgess Meredith, and as for the women there are so many that I can’t name them, but preferably Margaret Sullavan, Kay Francis, Garbo (all these have husky voices) and Hedy Lamarr, etc.

  The Birth of a Socialist

  As a companion to this short story, see Chapter Ten of Kerouac’s novel Pic for the account of Slim working in the cookie factory. The real cookie and cracker factory in Lowell in the 1940s was the Megowen Educator Food Company at 27 Jackson Street.

  Like other young people who had come of age in the Great Depression and were facing involvement in a horrific world war, Kerouac was wrapped up in the political and economic issues of the late 1930s and early 1940s. He imagined social and economic systems that might accommodate his own interest in working as a writer, an artist. He even devised a plan called Kerouac’s Socialism in which he argued that shorter working hours would create more jobs. With a two- or three-hour limit per worker, there could be three working shifts in a day. He wrote, “Shorter hours will provide the laborer with a new desire to live, not to be a productive animal, but to have time to be a man, to have time to enjoy the rights of man in the use of his divine intellect, a gift of God that is overlooked by our overloads of the present Industrial Era.”

  [This story is an attempt to bring to the readers the true meaning of slavery for others, in its most despised form. A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of. I have experienced a day in a cookie factory, and in this story, I shall do my damnedest to show to the readers what it is like to do such a day’s work, what a man thinks about in so doing, and what his conclusions should be if he has an ounce of brains.

  Though this story may be brushed off as a piece of Communistic pamphleteering against the capitalists, I should like anyone inclined to do so to reflect for a moment. This story, I admit, and am proud to admit, is against the Capitalists. But it is also against the Communists. It is against any form of slavery, the Shavian concept of slavery. In a Communistic state, there can be slavery. The slavery of the masses . . . . better wages, shorter hours, more justified and more pleasant slavery—but still slavery.—Jack Kerouac, The Zagguth, The Zagg]

  Did you ever stand on a street corner in America at five o’clock in the morning?

  I did.

  The sun wasn’t even up yet, and the street was grey with the last sallow vestiges of brooding, disappearing night. I was standing on the corner smoking a cigarette. My eyes were still heavy, and in the cold morning air, my legs seemed to quiver with unnatural weakness.

  I wasn’t standing on this street corner in America at five o’clock in the morning because I wanted to see what it was like. No, I was waiting to be picked up by a car which was to take me to work in a factory. It was to be my first day of work in this factory, and for that matter, the first day of work in my whole life.

  And there I was, standing on that corner and shivering inside my leather jacket. And in the East, the sun was just poking its top over the trees. There was vapor coming from my mouth, even though it was June. But an early morning in New England, Northeasternmost part of America, is pretty chilly, even in June.

  While waiting, I lit up another cigarette.

  Holy suffering cows, I say to myself, I wish I could have stayed in bed. Why did I ever get myself into this!

  The street begins to assume a gilded glow, as the sun rises above the trees. The delicate little pipe of the birds rings through the dewy air. You feel immediately the hope of a new day, even though you are headed for a factory.

  Across the street walks a mill-worker. He has been doing this for years, I say to myself, while this is only my first day. Look at him. He is middle-aged, and his face is resolute and tired in the early morning mists. He carries the lunchbox under his arm and trudges onward. He is on his way to the mill for another day of roaring heat. He is not afraid. He has been told that man’s natural duty is work. So he is not afraid, and hasn’t been for fifteen years. But has he ever been uncertain? He turns around the corner and disappears from my gaze.

  His natural habitat, after fifteen years, is the mill. It is too late.

  The car arrives, and I jump in, slamming the door after me. The driver is a friend of mine. His eyes are puffed from the early hour, and he smokes a cigarette nervously as he wheels the car through the empty streets.

  Empty streets!

  Gentlemen, I retract that statement!

  Going up the main street, we skirt a stream of people—at five o’clock in the morning—all heading for the maw of the mills. The Maw! Young girls, tired mothers, old men, kids fresh from High School who should be reading Tolstoi or Whitman. All of them are walking to the mill, and there now! The mill-whistle shrieks across the slumbering rooftops of the city, beckoning the millworkers with a tinge of irascibility, and with just enough smug tyranny to make my blood boil.

  Yes, my blood boil.

  For years, at five o’clock in the morning, my blood had always been peacefully coursing through my slumbering body. But on this morning, riding up the street and seeing the faces of those poor people of my own beloved city, my blood boiled for them.

  And, gentlemen, my blood shall always boil for them . . . even though it may be too late for all of them.

  Leo wheels the car into the driveway of our factory.

  How the hell, he tells me, did you ever manage to get up at 4:30?

  I laugh.

  I did it for the sake of science, I tell him.

  We enter the factory. We leave the morning coolness and are suddenly hit full in the face by an unbearable, stuffy heat. This is a cracker factory—cookies, etc. The heat is saccharine, cloying, sweet. It is hot and specked with flour. The place vibrates madly with the machine lust of mighty motors.

  Holy Hell, I say to myself.

  We put on our white ducks and sweatshirts, in the locker rooms, and light up a cigarette.

  Leo says: You’ll get used to the smell in here after a while. I don’t smell anything myself after two years.

  I take a drag on the cigarette and say: Well, I won’t mind the smell. It’s pretty nice.

  I look around. The other employees are seated about, smoking and listening to the little radio that is propped up on a shelf. The announcer is telling us about a big German drive into vast, mysterious, Asiatic Russia.

  Napoleon—Borodino—Burnt Moscow: These words flash in my mind, but I’m not very aware of them. The thing at hand is this factory in America, for $20 a week. It is my first day.

  There is a whistle. They all get up and go to work.

  I walk toward my machine, and note its mad tangle of belts and screws and wheels and cranks and shafts and brakes and iron plates. There is a huge tubful of sticky substance waiting beside this machine.

  Shovel this dough, says the foreman, like this.

  He digs into the thick paste with a shovel, forming a square. He picks up this 70-pound lump of substance and puts it onto an apron on the machine. He spreads out this substance with his hands till it is now in small lumps, ready to go through the rollers and emerge on the other side a neatly cut ribbon of hot, steaming dough. With curiosity, I follow the machine and see what happens to the ribbon. It is a wide ribbon, and it reached a part of the machine where it is punctured by a down-coming cutter, forming small cookie shapes. The residue goes back above the machine, returning to my apron. The little ovals continue
along the machine into the terrific heat of a long oven. I imagine that it emerged at the other end of the factory a full-fledged cookie, where it was ready to be packed into boxes by a host of young ladies who should be home planting the beans in the garden.

  But what can I do about it? All I can do is pick up the shovel and proceed to feed this factory with dough. Otherwise, it will stop functioning.

  And so begins my day’s work.

  In fifteen minutes, I am exhausted. For fifteen straight minutes, I have been pressing down into the stubborn dough with all my strength; for fifteen minutes I have been pulling out these prodigious wads of stuff out of the hot tub and casting them into the maw of the machine with tired, greasy arms. My shirt is already soaked. My eyes are burning from the perspiration which runs down my brow. My hands look small and weak in the buttery light above the machine.

  And every time that I have fed the machine, I must return to the tub for more, because the machine is hungry, and the apron keeps turning and the factory is on full-time schedule, and we must hurry and produce for America. Whether or not my body is aching and crying for a short rest, whether or not my head reels from the awful reek of this hot paste which I have to hug to my breast and spread with my sticky hands on the apron, whether or not my stomach is on the point of upheaving all the guts in my system, whether or not my ears buzz from the painful machine inexhaustibility of this thing, whether or not my human mechanism is on the point of collapse in the roaring heat of this madman’s asylum for unquestioning fools—whether or not I can go on keeping up with this devouring machine, I must keep up my work. I must go on digging into the disgusting vatful of humid fudge, irregardless of my own feeling, because the machines must [be] fed, the factory must go on functioning, and any halt would mean a loss of profits for the gentlemen who are at present far away from the deafening racket of this fool’s paradise!