Atop an Underwood (2 page)

Kerouac's proposed introduction for
Atop an Underwood
describes the book as a sixty-story collection. One handwritten table of contents for
Atop
includes twenty-five story titles, and another list has six. From the same period Kerouac left two other lists. “Stories for
Blame It on the Heart”
numbers forty-two titles, some of which overlap the original
Atop
contents, and “Stories” has forty-eight titles, repeating a few of those on the
Atop
list. An inspection of the author's papers showed that only fifteen of the stories exist; the surviving ones of that period would have made a short collection.

In an essay entitled “Au Revoir à l'Art,” written in November 1944, Kerouac assessed his writing output since 1939: “Poems, stories, essays, aphorisms, journals, and nine unfinished novels. That is the record—600,000 words, all in the service of art—in five years.” Interviewed by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee for
Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac,
writer William Burroughs recalled meeting Kerouac in mid-1944: “Jack was quite young at the time. He'd done an awful lot of writing. He'd written about a million words, he said.” About eighty thousand of those words are published here for the first time.

This book includes the Hartford stories and then some, looking backward to Kerouac's earliest efforts in Lowell, Massachusetts, and past the Hartford period to work he was doing through his twenty-first year—just before he encountered the writer friends with whom he was to make history. The writings include stories, excerpts from novels, poems, essays, sketches, plays, and other work from 1936 to 1943. The contents vary more than the other published collections of Kerouac writings,
Lonesome Traveler
and
Good Blonde & Others.

It is startling to see how early Kerouac began writing about America, adventurous travel, spiritual questing, work, family, and sports, to name a few subjects that occupied him. From the start Kerouac's writings usually centered on his experience. He wrote a novel when he was eleven, a lost manuscript he referred to in
Visions of Cody
as “Mike Explores the Merrimack.” Biographer Tom Clark comments on the early “Merrimack” novel: “The same basic story of a tantalizing power that removes one from humdrum existence and takes one on a remarkable voyage can be found underlying almost everything Kerouac wrote for the next 18 years, up to and including the best known of all these fantasies of life,
On the Road.”
An impressive work that survived is the football novella he wrote at sixteen, which opens with a wayward college athlete walking along a railroad track in the American heartland.

As self-deprecating as he was about some of his early writing (dismissing, for example, the stories written in the fall of 1941) Kerouac was proud enough to say the work was “a great little beginning effort.” From the résumélike autobiography that kicks off
Lonesome Traveler
to his memory-laden author's note in the anthology
The New American Poetry,
he recorded his first steps as a writer.

In 1943 Kerouac identified his major artistic project: “Long concentration on all the fundamental influences of your life will net a chronological series of events that will be open to use as a novel—for a novel should have a sort of developing continuity, if nothing else. [...] [Please see note on editor's ellipses on page xxi.] Your life and every other life is stuff for great novels, providing the treatment is good.” By 1951 he had refined the concept:
“On the Road
is the first, as the French Canadian novel will be the second in a series of connected novels revolving around a central plan that eventually will be my life work, a structure of types of people and destinies belonging to this generation and referable to one another in one immense circle of acquaintances.”

 

 

In a notebook kept when he was barely twelve, Kerouac lists writing as one of his talents, along with cartooning and billiards, and reading as his hobby. Whether handling metal type in his father's print-shop or soaking up stories told by his mother and aunt on long walks, he was hooked on words. On those walks he heard his family's Franco-American or “Canadian French” language, a malleable form of talk with creative blends, rapid musical sounds, and lively inventions. In his 1941 story “The Father of My Father,” Kerouac describes it as “one of the most languagey languages in the world. It is unwritten; it is the language of the tongue, and not of the pen. It grew from the lives of the French people come to America. It is a terrific, a huge language.”

Kerouac's friends describe him as an imaginative and restless kid, though quiet and mild-mannered too. He was a stand-out athlete on local fields and a talker on night porches. Kid Kerouac saw adventure everywhere. He was brave enough to scale Lowell's iron bridges. Jack entertained his friends with stories, mimicked radio characters, and improvised roles. He was as proud of his chess victories as he was of his sports heroics. He is also remembered as a keen observer and an intent listener.

By his early-teenage years Kerouac was writing and designing at-home sports newspapers. His reading expanded from French versions of the Catholic catechism and the Bible,
Rebecca of Sunny-brook Farm,
and serial magazines like
The Shadow
to, by the time he was seventeen, Jack London's adventure novels. He moved on to Walt Whitman's poems, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and stories by Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, and another 1930s luminary, Albert Halper of Chicago and New York City.

A prolific author of the Hemingway—Thomas Wolfe generation, Halper produced a dozen books about people of his day—urban, ethnic, working people. This book reveals for the first time the crucial impact of Halper's potent writing on Kerouac. In particular, Halper's story of a young writer who wants to write “a big raw slangy piece of work” and who feels “a locomotive in [his] chest” resonated deeply with Kerouac.

In a poem written when he was eighteen, Kerouac described how he would “nibble at some sweet Saroyan” for dessert when he fed his head with books. He and his friends were also impressed by the dramatic products of the polymath Orson Welles. Young Kerouac once listed Wolfe, James Joyce, and Welles as the “Greatest Modern Poets.” His writing voice gained definition when he absorbed the sounds, rhythms, and visions of Wolfe, Joyce, Herman Melville, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He praised Wolfe and Joyce for their “deeply religious feeling for beauty” expressed in artful writings that surpassed the makings of a poet. Together with a poetic prose, the hyperlocal detail, urban texture, self-focus, and “cosmic regionalism” (in the words of scholar Harry Levin) of Joyce excited young Kerouac. A 1942 novel set in Lowell (titled
The Vanity of Duluoz)
had the markings of Joyce's “Stephen Hero,” an early version of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Shakespeare, Homer, and Tolstoy ranked high on Kerouac's lengthy reading list. He made notes to “delve into Chinese and Hindu thought,” along with Celtic and Breton folklore. In his early twenties he veered toward Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and Goethe, going so far as to burn some pages of his writing to prove his artistic fire. He broke through to his own style in his late twenties, with a spontaneous prose form that flowed from jazz method, new ideas about word sketching, and creative interplay with friends like Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Burroughs.

Kerouac found creative people and the arts in Lowell, even as the Great Depression brought economic woe to the city; about 40 percent of Lowellians had accepted government assistance by the mid-1930s. His father had introduced him to the performance world with stories about entertainers on downtown stages. Jack attended meetings of the Scribblers' Club at Bartlett Junior High School. He and his friends were great movie fans, and Lowell had the Crown Theatre, the Royal, and others. His gang danced to big band music at the Rex and Commodore ballrooms. In 1940 he and others formed a dramatic group, the Variety Players, and produced a radio play. Friends like Bill Chandler, Bill Ryan, and John (“Ian”) MacDonald wrote, drew cartoons, and listened to Beethoven. In
Lonesome Traveler,
Kerouac writes, “Decided to become a writer at age 17 under influence of Sebastian Sampas, local young poet who later died on Anzio beach head.” Sebastian's older brother Charles, a journalist with the
Lowell Sun,
stoked the ambitions of Jack, Sebastian, and others. The elder Sampas was also mindful of Lowell's literary heritage. Nineteenth-century Lowell, the model textile mill city, had a cultural buzz for a long moment. Charles Dickens wrote about Lowell in his
American Notes for General Circulation,
Emerson delivered twenty-five lectures in the city, and Thoreau chronicled the region in A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
Kerouac's own Franco-Americans had distinguished themselves as journalists, publishers, and music composers.

Kerouac was friendly with Michael Largay and other writers associated with Alentour
: A National Magazine of Poetry,
a modern poetry journal published in Lowell from 1935 to 1943. In the unsigned 1940 essay “New England Thought” from
Alentour,
a writer describes the Concord River sliding past nineteenth-century houses of poets and philosophers in Concord, carrying “a twig Emerson may have once broken from a branch” toward the Merrimack River in Lowell. But the once-humming mills are closed when the twig at last drifts into sight: “[...] perhaps a boy playing barefooted by the edge of the river picked up the twig, long from Emerson's hand, and planted it that later it would grow into a tree, bringing life to the ruins. And then because workers were idle and had time to listen, perhaps the birds would come to the tree to sing.” Kerouac heard the song in the trees. He read Emerson's essay “The Poet” and Thoreau's
Walden
and later imagined living in a hut like Thoreau, high atop Christian Hill overlooking Lowell. Analyzing himself in 1941, Kerouac explained why he was a poet: “He is a man, so he does the most man-like thing and writes for his fellow men.”

Kerouac recoiled from what he viewed as spirit-killing millwork in his hometown, but he did not flee Lowell in 1939; he built on what he had accomplished there and stepped forward to pursue artistic and material success. Though he was awarded a “scholastic scholarship” to attend Columbia University, Kerouac was required to spend a year preparing for the rigors of the Ivy League. Accordingly he attended the Horace Mann School, a private school in New York City. While there in November 1939 Kerouac wrote to fellow Lowell High School football hero Ray Riddick, who had been graduated ahead of him and starred at Fordham University. Kerouac asked about free rides with Lowell truckers making the run from New York: “As I'm going to Columbia next year, and then for four more years, it would be convenient for me to start knowing my Lowell brethren truck drivers.” He planned to keep town and city linked.

At Horace Mann, Kerouac combined his interests in sports and writing and then moved to Columbia, where the American romance of Thomas Wolfe defeated football dreams. He had sought New York as the nation's cultural nucleus. Athletic recruiters from Boston College and Duke University could not compete with Manhattan's theater, jazz, and publishers. He mixed with the sharp upper-class students at Horace Mann, joined the drama club, and dug the city's music scene. With his friend Seymour Wyse, he heard jazz greats at the Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theatre. In prep school and college he composed themes on Dante, Virgil, Milton, and other giants. At Columbia he shared his writings with Eugene Sheffer, professor of French, and studied Shakespeare with Professor Mark Van Doren.

 

 

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
is arranged chronologically to chart Kerouac's artistic development. The time window closes in late 1943. Kerouac's girlfriend and soon-to-be wife Edith Parker introduced him to the Columbia University student Lucien Carr in 1944, and that led to meetings with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others in an alternative, avant-garde crowd on the fringe of the Columbia campus. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were to become the leading writers of the Beat Generation, a label Kerouac applied when asked in 1948 by his friend and fellow writer John Clellon Holmes to describe their contemporaries. He was referring to a generation of young people with no illusions about their identity and place in the world; these men and women expressed “a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world....” Later he associated
beat
and
beatific,
emphasizing the spiritual values he honored.
Atop an Underwood
is a roots document for the Beat Generation, whose beginning Kerouac sees in the family house parties and gleeful neighborhood life of the 1920s and 1930s. Kerouac's first published use of the word
beat
appears to be in a passage near the end of his first published novel,
The Town and the City
(1950), in which he describes Liz Martin, the “hip-chick” and part-time New York nightclub singer, “wandering ‘beat' around the city in search of some other job or benefactor or ‘loot' or ‘gold.' ”

The selections are weighted toward the period from 1941 through 1943, reflecting the contents of Kerouac's archive and the artistic complexity of the work. Part One covers the years 1936 to 1940, beginning with a feature from one of his handmade horse racing newspapers, and follows him through his first semester at Columbia University. Part Two includes work from 1941, a prolific year for Kerouac as the result of a productive summer in Lowell and a fantastic burst of writing in Hartford in the fall. In Part Three, covering 1942 and 1943, a maturing Kerouac pushes to create more complex works. This section has an extended excerpt from Kerouac's novel
The Sea Is My Brother,
a version of which was written in March 1943 and dually titled
Merchant Mariner.
The collection finishes with stories drawing on his merchant marine voyage to England later that year.