Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings Page 5
The city was all about me, and the electric lamp above me, and the house was there and my memories flashed through my head and the scene before me supplemented them. I, small and dreamy, dashing about—over that banister, up that old tree of mine, around the yard, through the back fences . . . . . and the shed with the old organ in it, and the sounds I used to hear and now they are dissolved, their scientific sound waves far away.
I saw a man walking toward his destination and I felt bad. He was hurrying, and I was sitting thinking about the past. The dream I used to have . . . . . snow, tinkling icicles, laughter, sunshine, sleighs . . . . . and the nightmares too. And the man was hurrying and I was sitting quietly, staring at my old home.
The old cat, I thought, a bundle of bones now, somewhere. The cat who used to sit right there on the porch, placidly enjoying his digestion.
Later on, I left and I went toward the house before that, where my brother had died. Here, the memories were now vague and childish. I was three and four there, three and four years old.
I remembered the high snow, my sandwich, calling for my mother, weeping, all. Myself . . . . . at the church . . . . . unabashed, they burying my brother. Why do you cry, I ask my mother and sister. Why do you cry? Why?
Now a man comes up the street and walks right into my old house.
Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are, brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.
Get out of my old house!
And then on the way home, I think about the fool and the other fools, and myself a fool. Hurrying away the past of tomorrow, like I had hurried away the past of today, in the past.
Fools, I think. Myself a fool. I must take it slow now and look at the present and say to myself: Look, John, hold the present now because someday it will be very precious. Hug it, and hold it.
And just yesterday I was sauntering home thinking about the future. The future! What a fool, I, myself, a fool, hurrying.
Nothing
I am going to write about nothing. Nothing at all. Did you ever think hard and say, what is nothing? Nothing is really nothing at all to try to figure out.
Look, a comet comes down from nothing crashes into the earth and the earth is scattered to the winds of nothing in little pieces and suppose I survive and you survive and we begin our journey through nothing.
How would you like that? I would like that if I could be conscious of it. It would be a great experience to travel up and down and to the left and the right through nothing at all and just keep traveling around and seeing nothing but distant stars and feeling nothing’neath my feet and just flying about through nothing.
If I could live through it I would enjoy it. But soon I would get hungry and I would want to eat something but there is nothing in the line of something in nothing, so that I would starve to death and then I would be traveling through nothing but then I myself would not know about it so that I would not enjoy it. Because enjoying is a sensation of living, as you know, and to enjoy you must live and all that, etc. And so it amounts to nothing, nothing, nothing. And soon I guess things would get at me and I would soon dissolve, and then absolve into nothing and become part of nothing.
I know some day I will be nothing. (Think hard I say to myself. Think very hard and consider yourself nothing.) I will be nothing someday because I will be part of the dust of the earth which will scatter to the winds of nothing (not the four winds of the earth, but the sextillion winds of nothing) and I will scatter and fly about through nothing and be nothing. Maybe—a million years from now. And I will be nothing. I try to think hard and imagine myself nothing, but I am too much alive to think myself nothing so that despite the fact that I know its inevitability, I feel as if I’ll always go on, but I know better.
And when the dust of the earth will scatter to the winds of nothing, then even the particles of dust themselves will begin to dissect themselves and they themselves will emulate the earth’s big act of dissolving and dissolve themselves. Then the particles of the dust particles will in turn dissolve, and this process will continue a million billion times over and over again until the particles will become so small that they will not be far from nothing. Then when eternity ends, the process of making all the particles of the earth into nothing will have been completed. And so I say eternity will never end, because that is what it means. So I look at it this way: When I look into the sky and see nothing (space is nothing) I should kneel down and weep with joy at the marvelousness of such perfect nothingness. Can you imagine how many billions of aeons nothing had to go through before it reached its stage of nothingness? I imagine it because I just found out that the earth will never quite completely be nothing.
A Play I Want to Write
Eighteen-year-old Kerouac wrote about the “spontaneous burst of passion” that would make him “rush to [his] type-writer” and the idea of writing about “life as life is.” In capsule form this essay describes the technique and vision that occupied him for the next thirty years.
This summer, I am going to write a play and I don’t quite know what it will be right now but I know it will be done at my very best, which I am afraid isn’t much. As far as I’m concerned it will be satisfactory to myself at least, and I shall have the pleasure of reading it in future years and think and say: I wrote that when I was 18 and when I wanted to become a playwright because it was the most interesting, fascinating, marvelous, romantic way of making money anybody could invent. So I will write this play.
My mother bought me a looseleaf book with a thick bunch of papers inside which I will be able to extract to type on as I evolve my play, and then put them back when the magic words of man will have been imprinted on them. On the outside of this unimportant looking little black book I will stick a paper on which I will write this: Kerouac’s Works, and above that I’ll have the name of the play, which I will try to make as vague as possible.
The setting for this play will soon hit me in the face. I am waiting for the moment this summer when I shall be sitting or walking, but all the same breathing, and suddenly I will start with a jump and say: What a setting for a play!
This play of mine will have to be a spontaneous burst of passion which I will develop all of a sudden, then I shall rush to my typewriter and begin to extract pages from the book and begin writing my full-length three act play. When I shall have had finished it, and have had smoked about two packs of cigarettes which I don’t inhale but just smoke because they help me write, then I shall read it to myself at night by the lamp and when I finish it I will say: Now I will let my father read it, and my better friends, and finally Pete Gordon of New York City and if he likes it, then I will send it to Mr. Golden or Mr. Harris or someone on Broadway and I will net a quarter million dollars and pull in the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Literature prize for $50,000.
$16.83 I collected today for my salary, selling subscriptions for the newspaper. I was sitting in the car with the check in my pocket and I was riding along with the fellow who takes care of the Sun insurance and a little child between us and I thought: I will write a play about life as life is and I will wait till it hits me in the face before I write it. Then I will rush to my typewriter and write it. So hold on to your seats. It will soon come and I feel terrifically exuberated right just now.
Concentration
One of the busier streets in 1940s Lowell, Moody Street began in the shadow of City Hall, ran past Little Canada, crossed the Merrimack River, and continued into Kerouac’s section of the Pawtucketville neighborhood. The street was named for Paul Moody, a master mechanic of nineteenth-century Lowell. Its bars and rowdy enticements made it a favorite destination of military personnel on leave during World War II. It was the model for Rooney Street in Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City. Kerouac renders the sensations of
Moody and finds earthy and other-world glory in the beer, steak, fiddles, and men. In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957), Kerouac writes: “Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion—[.]” In his essay “The Great Rememberer,” John Clellon Holmes says Kerouac wrote “astonishing sentences that were obsessed with simultaneously depicting the crumb on the plate, the plate on the table, the table in the house, and the house in the world [. . . .]”
In 1958, Kerouac wrote to Elbert Lenrow, his former teacher at the New School for Social Research in New York City, telling him about the recent appearance of his aesthetic statement “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”: “My new theory of writing, my old original one of boyhood actually, is contained in Black Mountain Review no. 7 just out [....]”
I shall now write about Moody Street.
Furthermore, I shall concentrate. Even further, I want to say right here and now that it will be a poor job because I haven’t my typewriter propped up on a little table on the pavement of Moody Street with the milling things and people all around me—and the smells of beer and beer and beer. But I will attempt. A little concentration may do the trick.
Beer and beer and beer and sizzling grease in a pan with a pat of steak and sizzling and sizzling and grease and beer and now and then, liquor. Noise and noise and cars, and gutters filled with cigar butts and matches and dusk and god’s earth and little children running about oblivious and men with white shoes with women without white shoes. And now music with fiddles and beer is acridly predominant and laughter laughter laughter only a little bit of weeping here and there, though hushed and under. Undermining filth. Undermining filth and undermining horror. Weeping—not of little children, only of old men and middle-aged women—oblivious of their weeping. Young men very young with life and being men and living and walking and breathing and most of all thinking and talking. Most of all, talking. And occasionally other young men, very rare young men, laughing with pure joy at the fiddle music and the beer and the middle-aged women and laughing with the little children. And then these young men weep, until the beer is inside them and then the beer is man and man becomes flush with joy and ambition and he talks—but now, most of all, he thinks.
And the cars and the music and the beer; the gutters, the little children, the old men, the middle-aged women, the fiddle music . . . . . and all sorts of things and sounds.
And these unusual young men. I remember one night when they were men with beer in them and they entered the gay barroom and they drank beer. Later, they told everybody that they were God.
Can’t you see, George was saying to the man in the lavatory who stood swaying with half-closed eyes. Can’t you understand that you are God. God! Do you hear, God!
And I espied another and I took him by the lapel and I say, And you too are God. All of you are, but you do not realize it. Laugh and smile, and close your eyes. But do not weep for your own sakes. You are all Gods.
On the way out, forcibly, a fat woman leaning against the car, alone, waiting—and George is saying, You are God’s receptacle. And I was dubious, for a woman is man, only a female. But George is stubborn and regards them as God’s (man’s) receptacle, and I don’t know, but I do know the sounds and smells and beer beer beer and little children joyful, oblivious, really weeping.
We Thronged
Kerouac noted that the following was a “story of the nights with Sebastian Sampas (Anzio) and Wm. Chandler (Bataan)” and was written in June 1940. William Chandler was a casualty in the battle for the Bataan Peninsula in the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1942, soon after the United States entered World War II. Sebastian Sampas died in March 1944, after being wounded in the Battle of Anzio on the western coast of Italy. Kerouac opens Chapter Three of The Town and the City with an extended description of the same episode described below: “‘We thronged!’ shouted Peter triumphantly.”
It was midnight and so we talked about eternity and infinity and the government and Reds and women and things and even plays. You won’t sleep out in that field with those two fellows, said my mother, so we had to take the blankets we had sneaked and pile them in a corner and sleep in the house and so we talked all night instead of sleeping, and then at 3:30 A.M. we set out.
The morning mist fascinates me, and once before I wrote about it. Now it was hanging around the woods, dripping its fingers about and hugging the ground, and making it wet. We walked through it and recited poetry and shouted. When we got to the stream, which was wide enough to swim in, the sun was just beginning to make the Eastern sky red. I ran up the hill like a deer and stood with arms folded and feet wide apart, like a Knight I thought, and waited for the sun. They stood on a hill which was lower than mine so that I was king of the world. I looked and waited.
Just before the sun came up, Sam began to sing The Road to Mandalay, and we were in the New England forest but he sang it well. And I thought of Mandalay, which I had never seen. Then I looked up and bent way back and saw the sky and said, spaceless. Then I felt how solid New England was under my feet and I jumped hard on it to make sure that it was solid—then I looked up at the sky and said, spaceless and unsolid.
The world is round, I said aloud and Sam sang, Come ye back to Mandalay. And I said, New England. Solid New England. Did you ever know how solid New England is, or even Arizona. Stand on the Arizona ground and look up and then bend back far and look up some more and you’ll realize. So I stood and listened to the song of Sam and the song of the birds, and Bill he sang too. I started to sing Mandalay too, but then I stopped singing and yelled out, Solidity. And Sam said, Solidity and Bill sang some more.
Oh, then the sun came up and it painted things red and the wet ground, solid under my feet, remained thus and the sky remained endless and even scattered—yes it was scattered all over the place. It was supposed to be endless, but it seemed to end where the sun came up, but I know better because I took Geography and I am 18 anyhow and so I knew and I thought about the solid ground and how we had thronged, the three of us, through the gorgeous woods to see the sunrise. On the way back, I paused to sit on a tree which hung out over the water and I looked into it and said, Lucidness. And when the sun filtered through some leaves Sam said, Chambers of beauty. We walked home and I picked flowers like a fool but I smelled the solidity of their odor so I picked them. Then we saw two women walking to church which was two miles away and I said, Fear.
[A Day in September]
This story prefigures Kerouac’s 1942 novel The Vanity of Duluoz, with Richard Vesque standing in for Robert Duluoz. Lowell is cast as Galloway, the name Kerouac maintained for his hometown when he wrote The Town and the City from 1946 to 1949. Vesque reappears as a character in the later story “Famine for the Heart.” The name is right out of Kerouac’s deck of character-name cards. In 1950 he wrote to Franco-American poet Rosaire Dion-Lévesque of Nashua, New Hampshire: “I’m very glad and honored that you wish to write an article about me for La Patrie, especially as it will be written by a man whose name is the same as my mother’s maiden name and who comes from the town of my ancestors.”
Vesque has William Saroyan’s short stories in his bedroom. Many of Saroyan’s early stories feature introspective but fired-up artistic characters and deal with city life and ethnic American families. In a winning letter written to Saroyan in 1942, Sebastian Sampas explained that he, Kerouac, and their friend Bill Chandler in 1939 had discovered Saroyan’s first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and asked Saroyan to write a note of encouragement to his admirer Kerouac: “God! If you could read his manuscripts to see the stuff he has got.”
In the preface to The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, Saroyan offered rules for writers: (1) “Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make [...]”; (2) [...] “write the kind of stories you feel like writing. Forget everybody who ever wrote anything
”; and (3) [...] “Learn to typewrite so you can turn out stories as fast as Zane Grey.” He added: “Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat it, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. ”
Writing in Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region, William Everson places Saroyan and Kerouac in the “school of naked experience,” an approach to writing that he links back to Jack London. Everson describes Saroyan as “a kind of precursor to the Beat Generation, advocating the ‘Go, go, go!’ philosophy. . . .”
You would hardly expect a day in September to be colorless, humid, and depressing. On the other hand, you would expect a day filled with the happy tang of the fall, the keen bite of the leaf-blown winds, and people wearing the dapper autumn clothes of the brown and green, and feathered felt hats, and well-cut topcoats blowing and whipping around your body in the wind. But, reflected Richard Vesque, what a man expects in life never seems to be what he is rewarded with. You might say, he thought, that anticipation is what makes you feel happy. But if anticipation is always to remain below the actual standards of realization, how can a man be happy in such a world?
And such was this day in September, a wet day with a long gray face. And, to make it worse, the wetness of this day was only a suggestion, a provoking dampness from yesterday’s rains; you might at least be assuaged by a neat downpour of rain, glistening streets, dripping eaves, gurgling gutters; a resolute water-shedding that made you feel like reading a book in the parlor, snugly content inside the heart-warming ramifications of man.