The Haunted Life Page 9

  “Yes, yes,” Peter was saying as he retreated to the front room. “Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.”

  He sat in the chair and scowled toward the kitchen.

  “I know what I’m doing.” Then, in a low mutter: “No need to talk to me as if I were a child. Leave me be!”

  Aunt Marie was still talking about it in the kitchen, but Peter shut off his hearing and concentrated on the newspaper. “Do you hear me?” he mimicked savagely. “I’ve got judgment of my own,” he announced beneath his breath, hissing huffily. “Doesn’t anyone around here respect my judgment? Goddamnit, I’m no kid anymore. If I want to talk to Dick Sheffield, I’ll talk with him all week. That’s all! Even if I should want to join the Army with him, by Christ I would! Now then!”

  He returned his attention to the newspaper and read the Galloway Star’s editorial on the Russo-German front: “. . . the monsters have turned on each other. Within three weeks, it is highly probable that the monster of the Wehrmacht shall have consumed the monster of the Red Army. Moscow is expected to fall in a week, Smolensk is besieged on all sides. When this short but terrible war is over, what will the world be faced with? With the collapse of Russia, Germany will hold Europe in its grasp, marking England’s gravest hour since Dunkerque. America across the waters can only hope for the best. The world is waiting in suspense . . .”

  Joe Martin walked into the front room and threw his coat and tie on the sofa. He tuned feverishly on the radio for the race results.

  “Got a couple o’ bets at Narragansett,” he mumbled.

  Diane had finished an interminable phone call with one of her school friends. Supper was ready.

  “Joe, Peter,” called Aunt Marie from the kitchen. As usual, with supper ready, Martin was scribbling with a pencil, his ear cocked to the radio; and Peter read avidly news about Broadway’s latest plays in a syndicated column.

  As was the custom, Aunt Marie called a second time, adding “your food’ll get cold!” to which father and son grunted in reply, but did not budge an inch. The final act came: Aunt Marie stood in the doorway and yelled. Father and son looked up with stupefaction and finally roused themselves.

  5

  “This Beaverbrook, Lord Beaverbrook!” growled Martin over his supper. “Who the hell does he think he is, coming around here and trying to get this country in the war! What goddamned nerve!”

  “Oh eat your supper and shut up,” Aunt Marie said.

  Martin pointed his fork at Peter: “Now you listen to this. The last time England asked us to pull them out of one of their European messes, we were suckers enough to fall for it—not, mind you, that America isn’t the kind of country that will begrudge a favor. But listen! England is a bully, the sun never sets on what she’s stolen. When she bullies some other country and this country strikes back, England turns and runs to us for help. But does she ask for our help? Does she do it humbly? No, she insults us, tells us it’s a privilege to help her, sends men like Beaverbrook to sneer and snicker in our midst, make insulting speeches. Look at his picture in the paper! Did you ever see such a goddamned smugfaced Johnny Bull in your life?”

  Diane, gravely listening to her father up to this point, now remarked, “Miss Walton told us today in Modern History class that England attacked the Boers because they wouldn’t give up their independence . . . from 1899 to 1901 it was.”

  Martin laid his glass of lemonade down with a bang.

  “You’re telling me?!” he cried. “My own poor father used to talk about nothing else all day long. I was about Peter’s age myself, but I had no education and spent all of my time working twelve hours a day in the cotton mills . . .”

  Peter was annoyed. “Stick to your point.”

  “My father knew what was going on there in South Africa . . . maybe the only man in Galloway in 1899 who had his eye and his mind on world events. And he knew what the English were about, he knew them for what they were. He was a young man when the English slaughtered all those poor Egyptian niggers in the Sudan. My father hated the English! And I don’t blame him one bit!”

  “Imperialism will go out soon, so don’t worry about it,” said Peter, grinning into his glass.

  “Oh you think so! The British Empire is still there, isn’t it? They have their greedy fingers in India, in our own poor Canada, in the East in China and Singapore, all over to hell and gone, in Africa, everywhere! Now they’re in trouble again—naturally—so they throw up a smokescreen and come over here smelling around. They’ll get us in trouble before they’re finished . . .” Martin sighed at the inevitable. “And then we’ll have war again. It’s always the people, the masses who get it in the neck in the long run.”

  “Well, don’t you think ever of the English people, the English masses?”

  “They get it in the neck too.”

  The argument was ended. Martin and his son always agreed when politics, affairs of state, and the “pith and moment” of great world events were boiled down to the suffering, the dogged stage-building of the masses of the world, the father with sadness, the son knowingly.

  “Le pauvre peuple,” sighed Martin, relapsing into the French of his father. “C’est toujours le pauvre peuple à la fin du compte, et puis ça cera toujours la même pauvre vielle histoire . . . toujours le peuple. Ah misère . . .”

  And here, oddly enough, Aunt Marie nodded in abeyance with her brother. Some old kinship between them emerged, as always on the occasion of Martin’s return to his family’s tongue, a kinship lost and strange in the world of the present. This scene had the same effect on Peter, each time it was re-enacted by his parents, as that when word of Wesley, his own brother, was spoken . . . a strange mystical feeling that returned like the memory of old, old songs, or the sight of an ancient family photograph cast in the old brown daguerreotyped world of the past.

  Peter left the supper table and went up to his room in a semi-trance.

  “Le pauvre people,” he mumbled, shaking his head in imitation of his father. “Ah misère . . .”

  He sat in his easy chair and for the first time in months lit his old pipe. Twisting around, he gazed out the window at the neighborhood. The trees rippled quietly as the sun ebbed, spreading a redder glow; a regiment of clouds, colored blue, orange, and white, migrated slowly toward the sun. Far off, on the river, a motorboat growled placidly.

  “Ah misère . . .” Peter sighed. His father, perhaps, was nobody’s fool. Politically misinformed, yes . . . but that was the lot of the workingman in this or any preceding age, to be wrong about politics. The workingman produced; the politician did something else . . . he was a tyrant, or else he spent his time enjoying the fruits of his office. But the workingman just produced. And then wars came, the politicians declared them and the workingmen fought them. Why? “La même pauvre vielle histoire . . .”

  There was a wisdom to all this, its deep sense of irony exclusively his father’s, perhaps unmistakably Gallic altogether. The shaking of the head. What a subject for a painting! . . . a workingman shaking his head, or better, an old French peasant with the years seamed on his face, shaking his head, and adding to this a gesture Martin often used, holding the shoulders up in a lethargic shrug, all of this indicating a deep old knowledge preserved in the French race—the knowledge of Voltaire, of Molière and Balzac, the joyous reveling in this knowledge, of Rabelais—that the people, always the poor masses, lose out in the end.

  Here was a lesson for Garabed, by God. But Garabed would have his answer ready. The Gallic shrug? The irony of the French? What of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune? What of this and what of that? The Great Liberal Movement moves on! Even the French know that! Why, Pete, the French are the most democratic and vital people in the world! Fall of France be damned! Look at Leclerc’s fighting French Army, mustering together in Africa. De Gaulle’s in London. Look at the French underground! What of all that? . . .

  No room here, in the scheme of Garabed’s logic, his and the whole contemporary world’s logi
c, so vital and energetic, so progressive and aggressive, for the old French peasant with the seamed face shaking his head and shrugging, and saying: “C’est toujours le pauvre peuple à la fin du compte . . .” Always, when all is said and done, it is the people.

  Peter got up and leaned against the wall, and looked at the quiet street below. His room had darkened. The sun had grown huge and bleary red, a breeze touched off the shaking of tree leaves, and soon it would be summertime dusk. Voices below rose softly in the air as soft. A tender shroud was being lowered on this life. With the darkness, and with the smell and feel of it, would come the old sounds of the suburban American summer’s night—the tinkle of soft drinks, the squeaking of hammocks, the screened-in voices on dark porches, the radio’s staccato enthusiasm, a dog barking, a boy’s special nighttime cry, and the cool swishing song of the trees: a music sweeter than anything else in the world, a music that can be seen—profusely green, leaf on leaf atremble—and a music that can be smelled, clover fresh, somehow sharp, and supremely rich.

  PART II

  SKETCHES AND REFLECTIONS

  While sailing to Liverpool as a merchant sailor in 1943, Kerouac consumed John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, which stimulated his own interest in composing a multivolume saga of novels. Impelled by Galsworthy’s achievement, Kerouac returned to New York committed to plotting the events and characters of an always-evolving literary universe across a sequence or series of books. As is clear from planning documents such as “For The Haunted Life: The Odyssey of Peter Martin” and “For The Haunted Life,” Kerouac was intent on expanding his tale of the Martin family, as first set down in 1942’s The Sea Is My Brother, into such a multivolume saga. The following selection of sketches and reflections document his early efforts at the saga model as they unfolded across the decade—efforts that culminated in the composition of the initial draft of The Town and the City, completed in 1948.

  Kerouac’s planning documents for The Haunted Life identify war as a primary catalyst of sociohistorical change. In the case of World War II, Kerouac attributed the inevitability of such change to the “great cross-migration” of an entire generation into the theaters of war, onto military bases, and into the centers of wartime production. A case can certainly be made that Kerouac’s interest in nomadic activity as a powerful agent of personal transformation was rooted in these reflections on the migrations of the war years. Moreover, his understanding of the war as a catalyst of modernity may partially explain his abandonment of literary realism and naturalism upon his completion of The Town and the City. In the closing pages of that novel, Kerouac portrays Peter hitchhiking the nation’s highways in a black leather jacket, gesturing toward a new aesthetics of mobility and speed that would be more fully realized in On the Road.

  The surviving planning documents for The Haunted Life are followed in this section by “Post-Fatalism,” an early metaphysical and cosmological tract in which the young Kerouac valorizes individual determination against the overwhelming will of the universe and human civilization. In that document’s final sentence, he imagines Wesley Martin as romantically embroiled within these timeless human struggles. “Typing Exercise” finds Kerouac brooding over his intentions for Galloway, another early entry in the Martin family saga—a saga the aspiring writer has come to see as a test of his creative will. As such, this document provides a glimpse into the young author’s insecurities, as he expresses his doubts as to whether the subject he has chosen—life in Lowell, Massachusetts—will be too “provincial” to interest his fellow Americans. In this same document, Kerouac makes a passing but significant reference to Allen Ginsberg, and it is during this very same period that Kerouac’s work first brings the coalescing world of the New York Beat writers into literary focus. That world serves as the basis for “The Dream, The Conversation, and the Deed” (with Lucien Carr cast as Kenneth) and “There’s No Use Denying It” (with Ginsberg and William Burroughs cast as Bleistein and Dennison), as Kerouac begins sketching the urban milieu that features so prominently in The Town and the City. Both sketches display the influence of Kaf ka and Céline, and stand in stark contrast to the drowsy Galloway depicted in The Haunted Life.

  “There’s No Use Denying It” features an antiliberal rant of sorts, foreshadowing the animus toward city life that Kerouac further expounds upon within the Town and the City documents that round out this section. Despite his qualms regarding provincial Lowell as spelled out in “Typing Exercise,” Kerouac evidently finished The Town and the City highly suspicious of the “intellectual decadence” he had encountered among his friends in the “City-Centers of America.” These early concerns anticipate Kerouac’s public dismissal of the New Left (including Ginsberg himself) years in advance of its actual emergence as a coherent political movement.

  T. F. T.

  For The Haunted Life: The Odyssey of Peter Martin (1943)

  War can make evident the phenomena of change more crushingly conclusive than can ordinary times. That is why war, in itself, offers the richest possibilities in any literature. Dostoevsky’s terrible and depressing novels have nothing to do with war, but one flinches at the thought of what he might have written had there been war in his novels: think of the ordeals of Raskolnikov, and add war to them.

  The novel need not be the unhappiest expression in art. I do not seek to achieve a consummation of sorrow—not deliberately, for the sake of eliciting a meretricious “power.” But whereas war trebles the sorrows of men, and whereas war is with us, the novel must move accordingly.

  Before the war, young Peter Martin was of course not conscious of great and sorrowful change. Perhaps because, primarily, he was too young and had not lived long enough to witness change. Had he lived through a time of peace, change would have stamped his heart with sorrow nonetheless; but because he lived through a time of war, the change crushed him completely. This is yet another facet of the haunted life. (The others thus far discussed: the wandering which war enforces, especially great global wars like World War I and World War II; the phenomena of human personalities first drifting then disappearing into the sprawling panorama of life (and war life); and the peculiarly haunted life of a personality like Peter Martin, who knows many people and journeys to many cities and lands, and wonders.) (To this one may add the loneliness of the sea, and of ports, which induces a sort of semitrance on the wandering seafarer.)

  Peter Martin is shown, at the beginning of the book, as an average American youth in an average and beautiful American town. There are the great trees of summer, the hot afternoons of baseball, the swimming, the thrilling Autumns with football and riotous October (melancholy old October). All this is of course taken for granted and thoroughly enjoyed. Peter’s uncle no less is of course taken for granted and thoroughly enjoyed. Peter’s uncle no less complains: things aren’t the way they were when he was young: this is Peter’s first contact with the fear-of-changing motif. He scoffs at the uncle, who launches off on lyrical reminiscences of the “old days”—the circus in 1898, the coming of the hated immigrants, and so forth. He scoffs, the youth, but it takes only three years of war and change to make of him a youthful carbon copy of the melancholy old man! The “old days,” indeed, becomes one of Peter’s phrases. He does not allow the egocentric change-sense his uncle indulges in to warp his thinking, however. He realizes as Wolfe did that you can’t go home again: he realizes that no one can, and that the famous phrase can be repeated forever, and could have been uttered by a Babylonian of the days of Cyrus. He realizes, from this cautious and intelligent conclusion, that the fires of new life spring from the ashes of the old: It means enough to him to induce efforts on his part to make a new life, of his own shaping. The world he was given (the summer trees, the high school, the sports, the lemonade on the circus grounds) was a good world, but it faded, as all worlds do, and faded rapidly, as they do in war: and now he must make one of his own.

  The Haunted Life will be a very sad book. It can’t be otherwise: youth is shocked by maturity, but war adds
to this shock enough to kill youth forever and create a generation of old young men, the sad young-old men of F. S. Fitzgerald and E. Hemingway. How war can kill more numbers than are found on the casualty lists! How terrible and sorrowful and great with emotions of breaking pain! Peter does not die a thousand deaths in his loneliness and wandering and battle with violent death and yearning for peace: he breaks! He breaks, as a voice will break, or as a heart will shatter, or as a brain may snap. He breaks apart, like a smashed old clock. He has not the will nor the life to gather up his broken remains. He verges on insanity, he is terribly sensitive to things of this sort. There is no hope for him. The death of his brother Wesley, though far and impersonal, provides enough loss and irony to assuage a Lear; the spectacle of his broken brother Slim, booming with pain on a waterfront street, asking [?] is enough to frighten [?] each ideal, each faith, and leave a black vacuum of despair. The woman he loves is not enough: it never seems to do for a man to base all his mind and spirit on the union with woman. Peter seeks more.

  The book is divided into three parts. The beginning is beautiful and Americanese, Peter is home, Peter is nonchalantly alive, an eager intelligent youth who reads and discusses, travels and laughs and dangles hearts with lasses. The war comes slowly, at first as a supreme adventure; then as a bore: and finally, as a terrible and lonely and desperate adventure; and the last part of the book is not yet formulated, or is so, only vaguely. It will come with the writing.

  The thread of the Odyssey runs back to the beginning and forward to the end, the end which is only a beginning and an interruption or activity presaging more activity, more life. I may safely predict the nature of the end of the book: Peter will be making concrete plans to build a new world of his own, knowing all the while that this will be the lot of his child, and of his children, and get [sic] thereafter that no one can keep the world he was given, but must make one of his own, and prepare others to make their own . . . for the fires of new life spring from the ashes of the old. Change is not a process of disintegration; it is the law of organic life, growing. (As for the personality of Peter and its denouement, more anon.)