Page 14 of Orpheus Emerged

[Anthony]; Marie’s ennui emphasized; a call from Michael;

  she half-heartedly repels him; his offer; meets Dmitri

  [Anthony] coming in

  III. Party scene, where Paul’s mention of Helen and

  Michael’s rage, Michael’s growing desire for Marie, are

  shown, etc. etc.

  IV. A week later. Paul has been away "sleeping in grass LiveREADS

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  and eating fruit for breakfast." He returns – it is a cloudy, ominous day – he meets Leo in park, they call on Michael.

  Maureen tells them that M. has been gone several days on

  a trip. P. picks up some of M.’s poetry and mockingly

  reads it to Leo. They meet Claude [Arthur], who tells

  them that M. and Marie have been living together in

  Bohemian Quarter. At this, Paul rushes to Dmitri’s

  [Anthony’s] , where Marie has already returned. Dmitri

  [Anthony] is a wreck; Marie ministers him. Michael and

  Claude [Arthur] arrive; scene between M. and Marie. It

  begins to rain. M. goes to bar, Paul to his hovel – he feels he must, there he finds Helen waiting, etc.

  Symbolized Idea – M. trying to transcend human emo-

  tions to those of God – emotions of creation, or of Eternity, etc. Thus he abandons his human self, Paul, and strikes

  off for the High Regions. But there he finds himself lost,

  lonely, and out of his element: his species-self, biologi-

  cally speaking, holds him back. A fish trying to live out of water, on air alone, M. finds that his life exists unquestionably on human terms: he cannot be God, or be like

  him, because he is human. This makes him see that the

  highest state he can attain is that of the "Lyre of God," and in a contemporaneous sense, that of God’s representative

  to man. "A high meeting…" As Orpheus, the artist-man, rather than merely man, or merely Prometheus (the

  artist), he achieves his great goal of wholeness. This is a LiveREADS

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  "new vision" – possible only after the cold windy darknesses of the High Regions have been explored. The

  "Impulse of God" poem key to M.’s whole success – but he transcends, yet maintains, this success to that of wholeness plus vision.

  Book of Symbols 1944

  The modern artist must discover new forms or he will per-

  ish by the hand of action.

  --Narrative

  --Poetic prose

  --Facts

  Time Factor – 3 prongs

  (1) Sunset at six – Saroyan period (in Hartford)

  (2) Galloway – Joycean period

  (3) The Haunted Life – Wolfean period

  (4) I Bid You Lose Me – Nietzschean period (Neo-

  Rimbaudian)

  (5) Orpheus Emerged – post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period)

  (6) Phillip Tourian Novel – Spenglerian period

  (2 1/2) The Sea is My Brother – American period (Dos

  Passos)

  (3 1/2) Supreme Reality – post-neurotic period

  Dos Passos’s new form (U.S.A.) severely misused. A truly creative artist hampered by excessive naturalism.

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  On this page, you see, I take up the thread of my creative

  life and play with it awhile. I don’t live by the calendar of personal events, but by the almanac of artistic directions.

  January 1945 – Edie all right. Returned to N.Y. to try and make good so we can live together in N.Y. Wrote essay,

  story, poem – all determined by new ideas. Cont’d work

  on novel with Burroughs.

  Feb. – Complete novel with Burroughs. Crucial sense of

  "end" and "beginning." Also completed essay on

  Nietzsche, Blake, and Yeats; short novel, "Orpheus Emerged"; story, "God’s Daughter."

  March – Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He is responsible for the education of Lucien, whom I had found, in lieu of his

  anarchy (rather than in spite of it), an extremely impor-

  tant person. "I lean with fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies

  atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality" –

  and – "The bastard alone has the right to be natural."

  (Gide)

  These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs

  thought. However, the psychoanalytical probing has

  upset me prodigiously.

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  Brief

  Biography

  Jack Kerouac was born in working-class Lowell,

  Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in

  a Franco-American family. He spoke a dialect of French

  before he learned English. His older brother Gerard

  died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.

  Kerouac attended local Catholic and public

  schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia

  University in New York City in 1939. After dropping out

  of college in the fall of 1941, he tried unsuccessfully to fit in with the military, worked as a deck hand in the

  Merchant Marines, and returned to New York. There he

  met Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr,

  their strange downtown friend William Burroughs, and

  the joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal

  Cassady.

  His first novel, The Town and the City, an account

  of his youth in Lowell and New York City, appeared in

  1950, and was well received. But it was not until the pub-

  lication of On the Road that he became the rebel/cult hero who epitomized the style of living and writing associated with the Beat movement. Narrated by Sal

  Paradise (Kerouac), On the Road is a picaresque chroni-cle of hitchhiking trips across America with Dean

  Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), and

  others. The novel was originally written as one para-

  graph on a long roll of paper. Only after six years of revi-

  sion and rejection did it find a publisher, but when On the Road finally appeared, Kerouac’s place as one of the best-known and most controversial writers of his time

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  was secured. With his coffesional approach, long stream-

  of-consciousness sentences and page-long paragraphs,

  he revolutionized American prose.

  During the period before On the Road came out,

  Kerouac criss-crossed the country, following Ginsberg

  and Cassady to California, where he befriended the Zen

  poet Gary Snyder, and embraced Buddhism. But the

  phenomenal success of On the Road made Kerouac an

  icon. In the long run he did not thrive in the spotlight and

  literary critics, dismayed by the “Beatnik fad,” refused to

  take Kerouac seriously as a writer.

  Publication of his many other books followed, among

  them the novels The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur, as well a several volumes of poetry and other writings. Kerouac considered all of his "true story novels" to be parts of one vast book, the story of his life-time. The Duluoz Legend consists, in chronological

  order, of Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Maggy Cassidy, Vanity of Duluoz, On the Road, Vision of Cody, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, Book of Dreams, Big Sur, and Satori in Paris.

  Kerouac’s fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, is an

  alienated, restless, passionate seeker of dharma (the Zen

  concept of "truth") through new experiences, human

  adventuring – and drugs, sex, and music along the way.


  Toward the end of his life Kerouac, suffering from

  his celebrity status and relentless critical beating, drank

  heavily. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and

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  reconnect with his creative spirit by attempting a solitary

  retreat in a mid-coastal California cabin, a painful effort

  chronicaled in Big Sur.

  Kerouac married Stella Sampas, a childhood

  friend with whom he had stayed in touch over the years.

  Kerouac, Stella, and Jack’s mother Gabrielle lived

  together until Jack’s death at the age of 47 in St.

  Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.

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  Autobiography

  KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION TO

  Lonesome Traveler

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  NAME Jack Kerouac

  NATIONALITY Franco-American

  PLACE OF BIRTH Lowell, Massachusetts

  DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1922

  EDUCATION (schools attended, special courses of study,

  degrees and years)

  Lowell (Mass.) High School; Horace Mann School for Boys;

  Columbia College (1940-42); New School for Social Research

  (1948-49). Liberal arts, no degrees (1936-1949). Got an A from Mark Van Doren in English at Columbia (Shakespeare course).

  –Flunked chemistry at Columbia.–Had a 92 average at Horace

  Mann School (1939-40). Played football on varsities. Also track, baseball, chess teams….

  SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL OCCCUPATIONS

  AND/OR JOBS

  Everything: Let’s elucidate: scullion on ships, gas station

  attendant, deckhand on ships, newspaper sportswriter

  (Lowell Sun), railroad brakeman, script synopsizer for 20th

  Century Fox in N.Y., soda jerk, railroad yardclerk, also railroad baggagehandler, cottonpicker, assistant furniture

  mover, sheet metal apprentice on the Pentagon in 1942, for-

  est service fire lookout 1956, construction laborer (1941).

  INTERESTS

  HOBBIES I invented my own baseball game, on cards,

  extremely complicated, and am in the process of playing a

  whole 154-game season among eight clubs, with all the

  works, batting averages, E.R.A. averages, etc.

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  SPORTS Played all of them except tennis and lacrosse and skull.

  SPECIAL Girls

  PLEASE GIVE A BRIEF RESUME OF YOUR LIFE

  Had beautiful childhood, my father a printer in Lowell, Mass., roamed fields and riverbanks day and night, wrote little novels in my room, first novel written at age 11, also kept extensive diaries and "newspapers" covering my own-invented horse-racing and baseball and football worlds (as recorded in novel Doctor Sax).—Had good early education from Jesuit brothers at St. Joseph's Parochial School in Lowell making me jump sixth grade in public school later on; as child traveled to Montreal, Quebec, with family; was given a horse at age 11 by mayor of Lawrence (Mass.), Billy White, gave rides to all kids in neighborhood; horse ran away. Took long walks under old

  trees of New England at night with my mother and aunt.

  Listened to their gossip attentively. Decided to become a

  writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local

  young poet who later died on Anzio beach head; read the life

  of Jack London at age 18 and decided to also be an adventur-

  er, a lonesome traveler; early literary influences Saroyan and Hemingway; later Wolfe (after I had broken leg in Freshman

  football at Columbia read Tom [Thomas] Wolfe and roamed

  his New York on crutches). —Influenced by older brother

  Gerard Kerouac who died at age 9 in 1925 when I was 4, was

  great painter and drawer in childhood (he was)—(also said to

  be a saint by the nuns)—(recorded in novel Visions of

  Gerard).—My father was completely honest man full of gai-ety; soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II and died of cancer of the spleen. —Mother still living, I live with her a kind of monastic life that has enabled me to write as

  much as I did.—But also wrote on the road, as hobo, railroad-

  er, Mexican exile, Europe travel…One sister, Caroline, now

  married to Paul E. Blake Jr. of Henderson N.C., a government

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  antimissile technician—she has one son, Paul Jr., my nephew,

  who calls me Uncle Jack and loves me.—My mother’s name

  Gabrielle, learned all about natural story-telling from her

  long stories about Montreal and New Hampshire.—My peo-

  ple go back to Breton France, first North American ancestor

  Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac of Cornwall,

  Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Riviere du

  Loup after victory of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendents

  married Indians (Mohawk and Caughnawaga) and became

  potato farmers; first United States descendant my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac, carpenter, Nashua N.H.—My father’s

  mother a Bernier related to explorer Bernier—all Bretons on

  father’s side—My mother has a Norman name, L’Evesque.—

  First formal novel The Town and the City written in

  tradition of long work and revision, from 1946 to 1948, three years, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950.—Then discovered "spontaneous" prose and wrote, say, The Subterraneans in 3 nights—wrote On the Road in 3 weeks—

  Read and studied alone all my life.—Set a record at

  Columbia College cutting classes in order to stay in dormito-

  ry room to write a daily play and read, say, Louis Ferdinand

  Celine, instead of "classics" of the course.—

  Had own mind.—Am known as "madman bum and

  angel" with "naked endless head" of "prose."—Also a verse poet, Mexico City Blues (Grove, 1959).—Always considered writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal

  kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice

  beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the

  "beat" generation.—Am actually not "beat" but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic…

  Final plans: hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of

  old age, mellow hopes of Paradise (which comes to every-

  body anyway)…. © Jack Kerouac, 1960

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  Jack Kerouac

  Timeline

  (click on dates for text)

  1922

  1923

  1926

  1933

  1938

  1939

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  1939- 1940- 1942- 1944

  1945

  1946

  1940

  1941

  1943

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  Jack Kerouac

  Timeline

  (click on dates for text)

  1947

  1948

  1949

  1950

  1951

  1952

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  1953

  1954

  1955

  1956

  1957

  1958

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  Jack Kerouac

  Timeline

  (click on dates for text)

  1959

  1960

  1961

  1962

  1963

  1964

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US EMERGED 264

  1965

  1966

  1967

  1968

  1969

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  Books by

  Jack Kerouac

  (click on titles to purchase)

  The Town and the City

  The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

  Some of the Dharma

  Old Angel Midnight

  Good Blonde and Others

  Pull My Daisy

  Trip Trap*

  Pic*

  The Portable Jack Kerouac

  Selected Letters: 1940-1956

  Selected Letters: 1957-1969

  Atop an Underwood: Early Stories

  and Other Writings

  Poetry

  Mexico City Blues

  Scattered Poems

  Poms All Sizes

  Heaven and Other Poems

  Book of Blues

  The Duluoz Legend

  Visions of Gerard

  Doctor Sax

  Maggie Cassidy

  Vanity of Duluoz

  On the Road

  Visions of Cody

  The Subterraneans

  Tristessa

  Lonesome Traveler

  Desolation Angels

  The Dharma Bums

  Book of Dreams

  Big Sur

  Satori in Paris

  * currently not available online.

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  The Beat Movement

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  In the 1950s, a group of writers and artists began to

  respond to a growing sense of alienation and psychic

  emptiness in postwar America. They felt the culture was

  restrictive, hypocritical, repressed, and they were espe-

  cially appalled by the virulent racism that continued to

  poison the soul of the country. Their general idea was to

  open things up. They derived their energy from an

  expansive belief in the American traditions of freedom

  and adventure, of infinite invention and possibility. They

  found spiritual renewal through a connection with sub-

  merged black culture. They sought to break free from

  the Puritan denial of sex and presaged the "sexual rev-

  olution" by freely expressing desire and openly extolling pleasure. Their message to a generation that felt boxed-in, shut-down, and spiritually lost: Get out onto the open