A strange story, a true one, and one that never has been explained. What fate sent that man to our house. Who was he? I am now 53 years old, weigh 240 and am hale and hearty and that leg still serves very well, outside of a few twinges occasionally, when it has to stand too long on a hard floor. Explain that one, my fine atheist. Yes, I still believe in a short prayer every night—and in times of stress.
AND HERE’S another laugh! Was in Lowell in the ’11s. We were being examined, a physical examination at the YMCA. The doctor had me strip, and “Whew,” he exclaimed, “What a man! You are one of the finest specimens of young manhood I have ever had the pleasure to examine,” he told me. And I laughed and said “Baloney,” Where did he get that stuff! But one leg was much smaller than its mate. It never bothered me in them days, I was so radiantly alive and full of things to do, and—doing them. And now—well, you know what has become of all this. And I am afraid that life will beat you too Jack—and you think I’m jealous when I’m only skeptical. I’VE been through it—but you have to FACE it, and it’s not a picnic, now more than ever!
There’s the thought. Have we given you enough FIGHT to go through it? We gave you the body, you have the brains, have YOU got the fight? There it is in a nutshell!
You’re always saying: Why don’t you write.
Maybe I’m in the mood. Was sittin’ by the radio and strains of “I Love You Truly” just set my mind workin’—on a little episode in the good years so far back now. The scene is laid in a Montreal nightclub. Or was it a nightclub strictly speaking? Surely there were few people there that night, as I remember it. We were all sitting together around one long table.
It was a big family gathering of your mother’s folks. Doc, Carmen, Alice, your cousin Irene, and a raft of smaller cousins, their wives, and we were having a real good time, with Gilles Champeau as a self appointed master of behind-the-scenes ceremonies. Wine and beer, and good liquor flowed fast and frequent, everybody was in high spirits.
The real master of ceremonies was a youngster, a fine type of young Canadian, French speaking who has a beautiful singing voice, and your mother finally got him to sing “I Love You Truly”—and truly he sang it with such feeling and so beautifully did he render the enchanting old song, that every time I hear it, it brings back the pain and sweetness of these happy-go-lucky days—you know Jack, my Plymouth car, and the barging around we used to do with it.
These days are far, far behind. They’ll never be back I know that, but would you ask me that I had it differently, and I’d say “No, no.” The joy of sitting and basking in [a] friendly, enlivened family reunion, everybody smiling laughing, a little bit under the weather, but all supremely palpitating—full of the goodness of life, a moment to be cherished, never to be forgotten. Kin-ties that never, never can be equaled. All of them with their feebleness, their glory, their heart-wracking, pitiful small lives magically transformed for a few hours, into an hour of real communion, of real friendship, of real understanding. All their virtues shining, all their feeble vague small sins forgotten for one night, one wholesome moment, when everything seems enchanted, happy, gay—living and content.
“I Love You Truly,” your mother’s selection. A lonesome heart reaching out for understanding, for forgiveness perhaps. I never knew. Living a moment in the sweet rendition of a perfect song. But your mother was lonesome—I had been all my life, have been. No fault of ours, just things that are stranger than fiction. I always knew and understood her better than she did herself. She made much of this unknown young man, and he was a fine, pleasant young fellow, an understanding, kind-hearted chap, humoring her whim and her motherly advances with a frank grin, a twinkle in his eye, and oh so wise. I admired this young fellow greatly. I couldn’t help it. He seemed to know things—and we always cotton up to guys who know.
Why do I write this? It’s only a whim. I’m sorry for many things that have gone, and not at all at fault I think. It was just Old Devil Life having his little fun, laughing at us—he always did. We tried—and the cards were stacked as they are generally. But “I Love You Truly”—just what is love? Is it the passion of a minute, or the understanding that years thrust upon us? I do not know. And thank God, or the fates, that your mother has someone today, that “life without you” would mean a barren, mean life.
So you see Jack, we are all born for a purpose. Yours is destined—Love her, cherish her beyond all things, for from her you will get all that is good and sweet in life, years will make you realize this. All other loves in your life will seem drab in comparison, when the years have rolled by band memories only will remain. “I Love You Truly” in Montreal, on a summer night, with the family. Is this trash—maybe, I don’t know, but there’s a thought in it, carry on where I’ve failed, make life full and rich for her, and then only can I be or feel vindicated.
Diary Entry (1945)
JACK KEROUAC
(Some very convincing words I read today by Julian Green . . . admittedly, I am under the sway of such men. He said one should keep a perpetual diary. Now that I think of it, if I had kept a diary of the events of the summer of 1944 I should now have material for a fine book . . . love, murder, diabolical conversations, all. Now it’s too late of course to catch such full-blown living tragedies as they drop from the branch, it’s too late to catch that one. I begin this diary in the faith and certitude that other things equally dramatic will happen to me, one time or another. And Green says that what you put down in your diary, however dull, is always of extreme, almost excruciating interest later on. Yes, I see that . . . a few lines of conversation, a few scenes from the past: these I would eat hungrily. So I begin.)
August 21
TODAY I WAS AROUSED at ten o’clock from a deep sleep (sleeping off an intoxication with Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night”!) . . . it was the Red Cross calling. My sister, in an Army camp in Indiana, was arranging to come home on the strength of father’s imminent operation for tumor at the Brooklyn hospital. The Red Cross wanted my father’s doctor’s name and phone number. My sister’s losing no time. The war is over, she wants to come home, and wait for her husband, Paul, who is at present in Okinawa. Father’s illness presents her with a splendid opportunity. After the call, I took a cold shower and busied myself with a trip to Columbia University, where I must get transcripts of my Columbia marks sent on their way to the University of California. Trouble, however . . . with the Registrar there, who wants the $178 I owe the place. I went and surreptitiously arranged things with an employee. It may come off, qui sais? After that, I went to the Columbia libraries, several of them, and read. Julian Green; on the life of James Joyce; read Kenyon Review, Partisan Review . . . all the dull intellectualism getting nowhere at all, a chiaroscuro of chaos. I was mad to find out more about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but no one seems to bother about him. He is an alien, that madman. I think there are thousands of geniuses like him in Europe, one on every street corner, who never bother to write. The same cannot be said of America, I think, or perhaps I’m wrong. Céline has driven me into a new mad flight of thought . . . perhaps he has changed my life, as Thomas Wolfe did. I’m certain he has changed my life, at this minute. No Spengler, no Rilke, no Yeats, not even a Rimbaud has moved me quite as much, from top to bottom as it were.
I was planning to stay in town and see either Gilmore or Seymour, and then I decided to go and see my father after all (to prove that I was aloof from the tragedy of my own life, and able to transcend it and remain intact, in mind, and not in nature, for my writing). I went to the hospital. He was sitting on the verandah with mother. He is facing a very serious operation . . . he is of course, gloomy and a bit frightened. They are going to extract a tumor from him. We are all rotten inside, that’s what we are. Life is by nature rotten. All of nature is rotten. Conversely, all bacilli are rotten too, because they rot themselves when they cannot feed on rottable flesh . . . something to that effect. It was a great scene. I sat watching my father. His hair was awry, over a bald exposed dome
, like a corpse I’d once seen in the Bellevue morgue. We talked. My father is learning a lot in the hospital; all the racial nonsense is gone, he sees all men how they are, one by one . . . and all women, of course. A friendly attendant chatted with us, and explained the law of nature. It was amusing and terrifying. I realized then that I was all mind—that I was hardly aware of my own rotten body, ever. “A high meeting of nature and mind,” that’s man. My mother and I left after a while. I wanted to show my father that I felt terrible, by touching his hand as I left him. But I didn’t. Constraint. Constraint in the face of death. I only went through the normal channels of feeling such as kissing him. A touch of the hand, at parting, means much more. We all walk around, losing each other, thinking about it, getting lost ourselves, all vague, and then when the end comes, we are surprised and all tragic. Poo! We are all sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire. I shall never forget that scene on the verandah. It was because there was the knowledge that my father might die, but of course I don’t believe that he will at all. But the knowledge was there. A cool wind came across the trees in the street. There was a dusky calm. My father’s wispy hair moved in the wind. I watched my mother, and kept my thoughts to myself; and then I watched my father. We were all involved in a deep realization of what life really is like. It’s gradually losing your salt, is life. Tomorrow my father will lose so much more of his salt. As Gide puts it, where can he get back that salt again?
The attendant finished off the whole picture, telling how fish eats fish, and how animals ignore their infirm. You start a baby, presumably new and full of salt, and then you grow and gradually lose it all . . . not forgetting the fact that a baby is of course itself a little rotten piece of humanity. A dead baby stinks as much as a dead old man. The attendant gave off these impressions. He himself is bulging with a hernia, he is white and yellow with cirrhosis of the liver, and may even himself have a tumor or cancer. He handles the dead ones in the hospital. One man died while my father was being washed by this attendant, right in the next bed. The man jumped up and fell back sideways, bumping his head on the wall, and was dead. Someone yelled at the attendant, “He needs you!” The attendant left my father there and went to the dead man. Later he took him down to the refrigerated morgue in the cellar. My father says you get a little cooling before hell, in this day of marvels. Enough.
My mother and I came home. I went to bed, too tired to write anymore. (I’m composing a novel.) Things are as they are . . . and Job says “Things too wonderful for me.” Peut-entre, mon petit. I myself mistrust the lyric now more than ever.
August 22
AFTER I HAD DISPATCHED a little matter in the city concerning money-earning, I came home to learn from mother and sister . . . the very wretched worst about my father. He is dying of cancer of the spleen. Tonight, in the hospital, while I lie sleepless for him, for everything, for myself, here—does he not also lie sleepless? What is he thinking? I see him going down the street past that last streetlamp there; into the darkness . . . Are there fields there for him? He loves fields, goddammit. We sat around the house, my sister and mother and I, discussing the problem of money . . . hospitalization, all that. I had an urge to disappear, never to come back to sickness and death and the suffocation of my own life and blood. I took a three mile walk . . . the murderous summer, the murderous moon, the fratricidal madness in me, the patricidal insanity worst of all . . . Yes, he has lost his salt, all of it soon. MY FATHER IS DYING AND I CANNOT FIND THE LANGUAGE, and that is what is most damnable: Goodbye, sweet thoughts. How can I ever again face myself? Who on earth am I? How is it that he is my father, and that I am his son . . . Once when he was younger, he almost died: the doctor had pulled the sheet over his face: that frightened him! In a moment he was up, sitting in a chair. He should never, never have met my mother. Or had he died then, I should have become something other than what I am now, mooning in the night, by the full brooding moon of murderous August.
Alas, I tried to write tonight. I could not find the language. Already, Ferdinand Céline is slipping from me, and I myself am slipping back to myself, to myself which is not enough. But one must be oneself! . . . I was annoyed, thinking of Julian Green, and how he had written “The Closed Garden” . . . calmly, in the country, imagining the woman. Were his gifts abided before he received them? Did he not suffer? . . . and I thought of all the others, the immeasurable suffering everywhere. Pounded pillows! One is worsened each passing day . . . it is truly a stairway down to knowledge, a “journey down into the night.” I said to myself, my father dies but I shall not die with him. I said that because I thought I had artistry. Then I didn’t have it, all of a sudden, I’ve never had it.
Artistry!—no mere word any more, no metaphysical, methodological concept. It’s something now purely a personal matter. To hell with the rest of the world, and artistic theories, and art. Artistry is my life: it’s sunk down to that, to me alone, alone and dark me, and without it I won’t live . . . not for a jot. It’s down to this now: I am only interested in life and people insofar as it enters my mind to become art. Otherwise, I am aloof, disinterested, bored, and dying too. This is my “one superb idea.” To die with someday. And it hasn’t come! Meanwhile, he dies! What shall I say to him? He who will not die, dies . . . This is my entry for the day.
Une autre chause: my sister came home; he saw her, coming out of ether for a while, and kissed her hand. He was laughing, too, like Leon Robinson. Laughing! waving his hand at them out of the netherworld he was in, just before falling back into it, waving at them. I wasn’t there . . . I couldn’t have borne it, quickly like that to know. Tomorrow I go there to see him. He doesn’t know. Of course, he must never see this diary. I must hide it. I may be killing him writing all this, as he forages through my papers all the time. He won’t see this, however, if he ever comes home at all.
I lie at night staring at his empty bed nearby. He who snored so ponderously. Well, that is life and death. We all know it, yet none of us realize it. Even he, perhaps, does not realize it . . . throwing himself back to life in confusion. Yet I know he knows! and realizes! My father is a great man. That is borne by facts which I shall later bring out.
I am betraying my life, all that concerns my life, if I cannot find the language. That’s what it’s down to: something personal like that, with all the theories gone forever. I am betraying my life, my father, if I do not find the language.
August 23
BUT OF COURSE THERE WERE DISCREPANCIES in my mother’s gloomy prognostications. I went to the hospital myself, today with sister, and spoke to the doctor. He’s not sure it’s cancer . . . Just an oversized spleen, too big, too, to take out . . . Father’s tremendous anger with folly and injustice! It’s the spleen, you see! He will be home in ten days: we will see what happens. In the meantime we are all relieved. And there is an understanding now between my father and I that bids fair to be of an epic-heroic quality, yes! Never was Oedipus so reconciled with his father! . . . and on such grounds! I can resume my art without having to force my own life behind it, in the cruel lifeless fashion that is necessary in such matters. Practically speaking, I can go to college and have enough to eat. On to the nebulous future, then, in good cheer.
September 3
My father is quite well now . . . it was all a mix-up. Of course he’ll never be his old self again, but c’est la vie . . .
Today, Labor Day, a clear sunny day with the tender blue char in the sky hinting of October, I felt a resurgence of the old feeling, the old Faustian urge to understand the whole in one sweep, and to express it in one magnificent work—mainly, America and American life. Bunting, flying leaves, families drinking beer in their own backyards, cars filling the highways (the war being over officially now), children tanned and ready for school, the smell of roasts coming from the cottages on the leafy streets, the whole rich American life in one panorama. I had the feeling that I was alien to all this, as I walked ar
ound . . . that all this could never be mine to have, only mine to express. I felt like an exile. I told this to my mother, saying that perhaps we were too French to be American, with a little too much of the bleak severe Breton in our lives and not enough emphasis on its fire and Celtic passion . . . Everyone in America today, Sept. 3, 1945, is out rushing around in a car, on the highways, at beaches, celebrating Labor Day, the end of the war, celebrating life, anything . . . just so long as they can celebrate. All of this, the cottages with laughter and good food and wine, the cars on the highways, the radios blaring, the flags and bunting—all of this, not for my likes, never. It’s strange, since I’m aware that I understand all this far more completely than the people who do have the American richness in them . . . Perhaps I don’t want it, that may be so. Other things I do want. I was reminded today of a conversation in Greenwich Village last summer: Mimi West had asked me what I was looking for, in my writing that is, and I had told her, “A new method.” At this point, Lucien Carr had put in: “A new method! . . . and a new vision.” Well, he was wrong; the vision I do have, it’s the method I want . . . the vision cannot be expressed without the method. The vision is all there, it was painfully there for me to comprehend all day today, as I walked around . . . Someday I’ll express it. I’ve no doubt that I will.
Progress on the Phillip Tourian novel, the personal version of it sans collaboration, is good; 25,000 words in the past week. Céline has opened a gap in me, not the whole gap, but enough to release as much as there is allowed.
An Example of Non*Spontaneous Deliberated Prose (October 11, 1954)