Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings Read online

  I must quit, I say to myself. It becomes a chant. I must quit. I must quit. I quit. I quit. I quit. And the machines roar and roar and roar, all [to] the tune of a few gasping words from a dry, dying mouth: I quit. I quit. I quit. I quit. I quit. I quit.

  An hour has gone by, and I have swallowed my desire to vomit. My stomach is heavy and aching. My shirt is a soggy rag. My face is streaked with the filth of the capitalists. I am wallowing in the mire of other people.

  I, a human being, a young man, groveling through the mire and filth and dirt of others.

  Should I stand it?

  A tremendous laugh resounds through the factory. A huge, happy belly-laugh. The toilers stop for a moment, and stare at me with agony.

  HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO!!!!!!!!

  What a joke, I say to myself. If I should stay in here, I would just as soon get rid of my brains and transfer them to a plow-horse on the farm.

  HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO !!!!

  I go on working, because I realize that the fellows will call me a quitter. I will do anything in order not to be called a quitter. I will work till my fifteen minutes rest at 8 o’clock and then I’ll go home and go to bed and sleep.

  I dig into the tub, and my arm muscles contract painfully. My arm stiffens, but I loosen it and proceed to press into the dough. I form a square, bend toward it, my abdomen pressing against the high edge of the vat, and pull up the hot hunk. It weighs a lot, and my arms ache. But with a mighty grunt of sweat, I swing this armful of capitalist mire into the machine and gambol in it with my arms, spreading it out into small lumps.

  It seems to me that I have eaten every bite of this hot fudge—every ton of it. My stomach protests.

  I dig once more, without a rest. The machine goes on, and I must go on too. The machine is a machine, and so is Zagguth. Yes, Zagguth the human being is a machine. If you don’t believe it, you should have been there that day in June.

  Again my muscles stiffen. The one in my right arm stiffens swiftly, and my hand is drawn upwards in a curious, paralytic state of inactivity. I have to use my left hand to release my right hand from its prison of contracted muscles.

  I go back to work, dropping large beads of sweat into the dough. The people of America, I say to myself, will eat these cookies, and in them will be the sweat of Zagguth. That is the way America is supposed to be ... built on the sweat and blood of our people, and all that sort of stuff. All right then, if that is the case, have some more sweat. And two huge drops fall into the vat of fudge.

  HO HO HO HO HO HO!!!!. I laugh, and the agonized looks of the other dead men return to me. Such agony! Why the agony! Agony and sweat and heat. Blood and sweat of America?

  O, thou great propagandists, I have discovered thee!

  At eight o’clock, I am relieved. I go to the lockers and stretch out on a bench. The bench vibrates madly with the lunacy of our age. I start thinking about the way cookies used to be made.

  An old lady, kindly. She is whipping a batter of cookies in a clean little dish. She cuts the cookies delicately, and serves them proudly to her happy family—small, heart-woven little cookies for her loved ones.

  But today?

  Hundreds of unquestioning fools who get up at five in the morning and rush to a huge, vibrating asylum. In there, they toil in agony and they become old and calloused and unhappy with the era. The cookies are concocted in huge furnaces and tremendous, sickening tubs. They are carried to a young man with a shovel, who proceeds to feed the factory without rest. He dies all day, but the factory must go on. The cookies rush to the ovens by the billions, and rush out of the ovens into a million boxes. They are hurried out of the factory, into a hundred waiting trucks and rushed and scurried out upon a thousand roads.

  Jesus Christ, I say to myself as I figure those things out. It can’t be right. Somebody is deluding somebody, and by the Holy Cow, it won’t be me!!!

  I lay on the bench and it jumps and vibrates like mad.

  I start to laugh at the idiocy of it all. What else do you expect anybody with an ounce of intelligence in him to do? Do you expect him to take this all in with a moribund mug, a serious puff on the cigarette (like those others are doing right now as they listen to the little radio on the shelf), a quietly efficient word or two, [child’s] in the nuthouse and they don’t want to believe it, because THIS my friends is the ERA!!

  Again I laugh out loud, and they stare at me in agony.

  I can still see those agonized looks. What’s the matter with him, they say, is he crazy? What a nutty bastard! What the hell is he laughing at?

  Which makes me laugh even more, not with contempt, but with genuine compassion and pity. And so, goodbye my factory friends. I am leaving you forever, and I am sorry that George Bernard Shaw was never divulged to you. Nor Saroyan nor Joyce nor Walt Whitman nor O’Casey.

  Goodbye, boys.

  I walked out of there, after sticking it out for eight hours so that the mill wouldn’t be held up. I did it out of pure politeness, and a desire not to make any one inconvenienced. All throughout the day, I laughed and laughed at the silliness of it all. I wore a paper hat and the hot steaming dough got into my skin, and down into my tormented stomach. I worked and worked like a dog. Huge calluses came up, but the machine had to be fed. My arms contracted painfully, yet production had to keep up. A huge factory, operated by throbbing and terrible machinery, was depending on the weary muscles of one young writer.

  After the day was over, I took a shower and told one of the workers that I was quitting.

  Can’t take it? he asks, smiling.

  Perhaps I could if I had to, I replied. But I don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to have to. I’m a man—with brains—and not a dumb animal.

  To myself I concluded: It is not right for me to give eight hours of my precious life to anyone at such a gory task every day. I should rather keep those eight hours to myself, meditating in the grass, let’s say; or walking thru the woods.

  That afternoon, I went swimming. I brought a book of American poetry. I sat down on a rock in the cool water up to my neck, and I sat there reading William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” People stopped and laughed at me. But I was engrossed in the book, the water was cool, the sky was gorgeous, there was a caressing breeze, and the world was again fit for a man.

  I went to a show that night, saw how badly one picture was written, and decided that I would write scenario for a living rather than shovel dough in a blasting-furnace factory.

  No Connection: A Novel That I Don’t Intend to Finish

  Well, here I go, spouting off some dribbling words in saliva ribbons like the faces in the Book Review supplement of the Times or Tribune. It’s a curious thing, this writing business. This “No Connection” thing here is a novel. Why the hell am I writing a novel? Who’s going to read it? And why read it? Whatever I have to say will undoubtedly be of no use when a pair of stockinged limbs go clicking by on seductive heels. And when a guy finds himself in the path of an onrushing army of soldiers brandishing bayonets, what does all my writing or the writing of anybody else matter?

  One Goddamn thing is clear to me. We are all animals. Jack London’s “Gnat-swarm.” Tom Wolfe’s “Man-swarm.” A swarm of heaving, pulsating organisms; an ocean of sensateness, composed of pastel pink tissue and sickly gray entrails, swelling and breathing in one grand mass, making noise and erecting bridges, wearing clothing and exhuming odors of fresh blood, perspiration, and flesh. That’s the word: Flesh. That big word. It means a lot. It glows and ripples and stretches and bleeds and pierces. We are all animals, and we all cease pulsating and oscillating as soon as we are dead. After that, we rot and fall apart and absolve into dust.

  On one fine Spring morn in 2948, Teodor Alexandar, the erudite professor of Anthropology at Eunuch College, goes strutting along over my dust, singing the latest song-hit.

  Hell, my fine brothers, let’s see what this novel is about. A novel is usually written by novelists. I am a human being, with a soul, a
vanity, an ego, and a suitcase. I am a poet and a writer. I am not a novelist. I live on this earth, and if you don’t mind my saying so, the other man-creatures that exist with me are damned difficult to get along with. And I don’t doubt that they find me difficult also. I’m speaking in general terms.

  General terms. Words of man. “Words of ages.”

  Did you ever read Walt Whitman or Barbellion? They are two guys, both dead now, that I admire because of their keen sensitivity to life. They know they are made of flesh, they accept it, and die.

  That’s nice.

  It’s a short, short story: and it’s got a tremendous kick. Not a O. Henry kick at the end. A Thomas Wolfe kick. A Thomas Wolfe kick is like the kick of a mule. O. Henry kicks are like a scotch and soda with too much soda.

  Let’s get on the ball, as they say in America, a country with broad plains in the middle, flanked by mountains and wild sea-coasts. The man-swarm managed to dot the sea-coasts with resorts, etc. But when you get up high enough, you don’t see them anymore; just the jagged outlines of the continent, jutting into the sea and retreating into the land. Also, brothers under the skin, when you get high up there, you can’t see the universe of a rose anymore. So stick to your size.

  Like all other poets, I am kicking. I want to kick, you might say. You say, all poets like to kick. And this one here, Jack Kerouac, wants to kick in an original manner, but damned if he can find something original. He wants to be an original kicker, so that people will look at him and say: That fellow is a poet with an original bone to pick. They’ll bury his hatchet with him.

  The Question Before the House is this: Who is this poet Jack Kerouac, and what’s he kicking about, not that there isn’t anything to kick about . .

  Who?

  He’s a nineteen-year-old youngster made of painful sensateness that keeps aggravating the gray matter in his skull. Enough of this biology, you say, and who is he? I’m not a physiologist. I’m a working man, and I haven’t time to dub around. I’ve got to get back to work. Make it snappy. Who is he, and no funny stuff.

  (Listen to that Twentieth Century man-creature blow his lungs out: Ho, what a tragic little thing it is.)

  Jack Kerouac is a little man-creature, standing so high and weighing just about enough to crack some thin ice. He’s a hell of a punk, not because he wants to devote his life to talking to his fellow men and telling them some helpful things, but because he insists on being an unusual man-creature, rather than a mediocre man-creature.

  Unusual or mediocre, he is still a man-creature.

  Valuable untruth or invaluable untruth: still untruth, non?

  And this little bit of a punk wants to be looked up to, girls and all. He does things to enhance his man-swarm prestige, and then he basks in the warmth of it all. Sometimes, he pulls a beautiful boner. When that happens, he is angry as hell, but he is still proud. Next time, he says.

  Let me say something, little man-creature called Jack Kerouac: Don’t delude yourself. You’re just a little punk. When you pull a boner, you have all the right in the world to be sore at yourself. But don’t forget that boners are relative things, like everything else in society, or man-swarm. Gnat-swarm. Ha ha.

  Don’t kid yourself, you tiny globule of greasy lard. Drip down the basin, and run down the crapper, and keep your mouth shut. You were given sensateness to die, and reason to be fearful. Whoever gave it to you went fifty-fifty with you: It’s up to you to make the best of it. Some people have died happy, others haven’t. Fifty-fifty, you little piece of whipped cream. It’s up to you. Therefore, whoever gave it to you was not entirely a hell of a heel. He was the Compromiser.

  Don’t delude yourself, insignificant itch. Pin-point punk. Live and vegetate and run around on your little tentacles. Breathe thunder. Tell your fellow gnats to smarten up, and if they don’t tell them again. If you don’t smarten up yourself, hang up your spikes.

  American language. Smarten up, or hang up your spikes. One word for it: Beautiful.

  How to smarten up? That’s the point of poets and poetry. They keep dawdling about, trying to find the way. They never do, but they improve. Sometimes they come damned close to it. Some have hit it on the head.

  Be a proud man-creature. Dignity and pride and kindness. That’s why Jack Kerouac is a poet. He figures it’s the most man-like thing to do. If Kerouac were a pigeon, he would do the most pigeon-like thing. He is a man, so he does the most man-like thing and writes for his fellow men. He assumes from the beginning that most of them can read.

  This has been a hell of a novel.

  What is sex? Sex is rigid bone, covered with velvet skin, pounding and ripping into fleshy cavity with heart-pounding passion and blood-red lust. Sex is bang! Bang! That’s sex, brother, and don’t kid yourself. Bang! Pound! Bang! And them comes a rush of luscious fever, an ocean of pin-prick sensation, and a shuddering climax of gushing hot blood. Pow! And then to hell with sex. That’s sex, kid.

  A novel is a story of man’s development, I think. Development is the soul of Fate. My first novel will be a novel. Everything develops, and then dies. That’s a novel. This novel is now ended.

  On the Porch, Remembering

  If you’re on a porch in the middle of Summer, under a night-sky rich in stars and vague nebulae, and you have your head thrown back for a good view of everything up there, you are bound to remember a lot of things. There is all about you the sound of a Saturday night in a mill city of New England, and if you are on my street, you can hear the river whispering over to the left. You can hear music coming from open windows, and up the street there is the exciting light and music of a traffic intersection. People are wearing their best, men with straw hats and white shoes, women with light summer dresses, and wide-brimmed hats, young men on the store corner wearing new suits and smoking out of full cigarette packs and impatiently leaning against the wall as they try to decide what everything is all about.

  And oftentimes some little children go by underneath your piazza, and they are so innocently absorbed within their little ego-universes that you realize that they are safe for a while at least. And the sky! On the particular night that I remember, the sky was thick with huge chunkfuls of nodding light, and they were all packed together to form a beautiful spectacle of light and darkness. Right off at the start, if you have your chair tipped back against the railing of the porch and look in upwelling awe at the night-sky you will become a poet for a night at least. The stars seem to be close, just above you and watching you with intense patience. But, on that night when they seemed so, I wasn’t fooled one bit. I knew they were indifferent.

  And as I sat there, the mystery of the universe began to augment before me until after a while I had to tear my gaze away from the sky lest I should go mad with the eternal of it all. Instead, I fixed my eyes upon the Men’s Club across the street from my house, and inside I could see them shooting pool. Through the screened windows I could hear them talk and laugh, some of them rubbing blue chalk on the tip of their pool cues, some of them leaning over the tables intent on their play. I knew there were spittoons somewhere on the floor, because one man spat every half-minute. The roof of this club sagged, and the fire escape which led up to the screened door hung in its skeleton grating by the light of the moon.

  And then I began to remember.

  I remembered one day out of all the myriad thousands of my life, one day back in my childhood during the seemingly dull, dark, and dismal ‘20’s. I suppose the fact that I was a morbid child must account for my saying that the 1920–1930 era was a dismal one, but at least, to me the tone of that era will forever remain colorless and tasteless, for it was not until the ’30’s that I began to grow up and learn to appreciate the world about me.

  I remember myself seated in the parlor, on That Day. Outside there is one grand vision of Gray Time—a vast tedium that seemed to envelop and encompass every pore of the world. The sky is exceedingly tasteless, its pallid solemnity hanging over the roofs of the city with a heavy gloom. The parlor i
s dark and dull, and in the corner and behind the chairs and sofas broods a sombre black color. I am seated on the sofa, listening to the clock ticking in the kitchen, equally gray and listless, and to the sink with its song of the dripping faucet. I am all alone in the house (I suppose my mother had gone out to the store) and I stare languidly at the roofs of the city, disconsolately feeding upon the overwhelming drabness of the cloudy sky like vultures at lean fare.

  I am about six years old, and am dying a thousand prosaic deaths. What is there to life, little boy seated in the parlor? Whatever the future holds in store for you, will it not be rendered gray and barren and stupid by this enormous Gray Time? Does not life, at this moment, narrow down to one little gray ball of Time, stuffed down your throat and choking you? Is there nothing but death to assuage this?

  Here, then, is something that I cannot overcome: A cloudy day. Perhaps if I were to be distracted from these idle thoughts by some calamity, I wouldn’t give a cloudy day, the Great Gray Time a second thought. But yet I can still remember vividly myself at the age of six, sitting in a parlor, listening to the eternal sigh of the Gray Time, and wondering whether it wouldn’t have been better not [to] be born.

  The Sandbank Sage

  On the first page of this typescript Kerouac notes: “SOC = stream of consciousness. ” At the bottom of the second page he writes: “stream of consciousness is too intelligent to come from the mouths of children; I use it in elaborate English to imply their drifting thoughts.” He adds: “This is quite raw, my novel shall be more compact & smooth.” The sandbank in Kerouac’s area of Pawtucketville overlooked Riverside Street, just beyond the campus of what was then the Lowell Textile Institute and is now the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The former Kerouac family homes on Sarah and Phebe avenues are nearby.