Atop an Underwood (3 page)

By August 1943 Kerouac could articulate his goal: “My only ambition is to be free in art. This is a moral synthesis. To be free in art is like the refueled, repaired, reconditioned, and ‘fit' ship that I have signed on, and which is ready to sail in 4 hours from now. From there on, the ship is on its own, but it suffers from no drawbacks other than those in the essences of nature and supreme reality.”

Not yet “free in art,” he acknowledges that he has a responsibility to help with family living expenses and owes a debt to his generation: “I must take part in the sacrifice of my generation, otherwise I should not seek their love in the future. It is an ethical matter, of great importance, and of spiritual & social significance.” Wondering how to meet his goal of being “free” upon returning to America, Kerouac lists options for earning money: “(a) By finishing the [sea] novel, (b) Going to Hollywood to write, (c) Getting a newspaper job, (d) O.W.I. work overseas, (e) Continuance as seaman.”

This book should help answer how and why Kerouac became an artist. His ideas about love, work, and suffering can be traced back to his apprentice work. At nineteen years old he was already remembering his life—he had an acute sense of loss. The early writings help us understand a North American author who was a cultural free trader with Canada and Mexico long before a continental vision was called up on political screens in the United States. His roots in the industrial, multiethnic milieu of early-twentieth-century society connect him to millions of Americans. Taking his life as legend, he asserted his standing as a representative person of his time and revealed the passion, struggles, and dignity of one life. As improbable a candidate as he may have been, Kerouac achieved his goal of becoming an American author.

 

 

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
was shaped to meet the interest of readers new to Kerouac and those familiar with his writings. I took a documentary approach, piecing together an untold story. This collection represents only a portion of Kerouac's early papers, excluding letters and notebooks. For example, there are student essays that I set aside. Favoring examples of Kerouac's imaginative writing, I chose not to include school assignments, letters, notes, fragments of poetry and prose, and most of the commentaries on social, political, and economic issues. Although I was limited to excerpting the few longer works of the period, I used selections from two novellas and a novel as evidence of Kerouac's gift and ambition. Until now only a few examples of Kerouac's writing before 1944 have been published, most notably the letters in his
Selected Letters: 1940—1956,
edited by Ann Charters, and two short stories (“The Brothers” and “Une Veille de Noel”) reprinted from the Horace Mann literary magazine.

Some of Kerouac's stories went out under the names of classmates. In “Short Story,” from 1940, he boasted: “I've written plenty of short stories in my day, I would estimate a number of nearly 80 all of which were no good, and of which 60 of them sold for a buck apiece to my dauntless school chums in the private school. They used them under their own names and got better marks.” Photocopies of his miscellaneous writings for student newspapers and journals have been circulated over the years.

I had access to original holographs and typescripts in the Kerouac archive. These works were created before Kerouac adopted the technique of keeping breast pocket notebooks and larger student notebooks in which he wrote prose and poetry that he later typed and sometimes expanded upon. The manuscripts do not show extensive revision. It is possible that Kerouac discarded some of the first drafts, but unlikely given his pattern of saving papers. The manuscripts are not marked “1st draft,” “2nd draft,” etc. Not all manuscripts were dated, so at times I had to date works by relying upon details in the text, typewriter font, writing style, position in the author's files, writing tool, paper stock, and other factors. Further research may yield a finer-tuned chronology for the sequence of writings within the larger time periods presented here.

My comments are in italics preceding the selections. Within Kerouac's text editor's ellipses are shown within brackets: [...]; all other ellipses appear as they do in the original manuscripts, including those with multiple ellipsis dots. Dashes and quotation marks are standardized throughout. Kerouac's underscored words have been kept. Obvious misspellings were corrected, but unusual and perhaps intentional misspellings were kept. I maintained line breaks as they appear in Kerouac's texts for all poems, short sketches, notes, vignettes, and prose poems, whether the original was typed or handwritten. Novel excerpts, stories, plays, essays, and long sketches appear in standard lines. With untitled pieces, I assigned a title (shown in brackets) taken from the first line or two of the composition.

For the most part I let Kerouac speak for himself. Using source material from the author's archive and excerpts from his published works and other commentary on Kerouac's literature, I have tried to help the reader understand the origins and implications of the writings.

 

 

In the mid-1980s I worked with federal, state, and local officials; community leaders; and Stella Kerouac and her family on the planning and installation of the Jack Kerouac Commemorative, a sculptural tribute in Lowell with thousands of Kerouac's words blasted into reddish brown granite. The artwork by Ben Woitena stands in Kerouac Park, a downtown green designed by the landscape architecture firm Brown and Rowe. Lowell regularly recognizes Kerouac through scholarly and creative activities and the annual “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!” literary festival. There is a Kerouac Street in San Francisco. Kerouac conferences have been organized in the United States, Quebec, and Europe. Orlando made a writer's residence of an old Kerouac cottage. Naropa Institute in Boulder dedicated a writing school to his ideas.
Life
magazine and
The Times
of London named him one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. The result of all this activity is more people discovering Kerouac. I am elated every time I drive by the Kerouac Commemorative and see somebody reading one of the stone pages that will stand for centuries. May this book live as long.

 

Paul Marion
Lowell, Massachusetts
March 12, 1999

I was born in Lowell, Mass., in March of 1922. Shortly before my birth my father had begun a small theatrical publication known as the “Spotlight Print,” a unique weekly filled with news, comments, anecdotes, editorials, and advertisements dealing with the theatre and cinema of that time around Lowell and Boston. At the age of eleven, I spent most of my time after school in my father's printing and editorial offices, dashing off publications of my own on the antique typewriter, using the hand press for headlines and cuts. This early association with the printing and publishing business soon enough stained not only my blood but my hands and face with ink. My father's incessant stories about playing poker with George Arliss, with the Marx Brothers, with John Barrymore, and many other “troopers” during his days as an advertising man for the RKO Keith circuit in New England filled me with an early dream of the theatre.

At twelve, I printed a novel laboriously into a nickel notebook dealing with the adventures of a runaway orphan down the Merrimack River. At thirteen, I was busy turning out cartoon strips, handprinted racing form sheets, and a club newspaper. It was also at this time that the Lowell Sun published a “column” of mine written in father's office predicting the outcome of the Louis-Braddock fight to the round.

A year later, I was in High School trying out for the football team. A senior at sixteen, I had by that time so distinguished myself in athletics and studies to draw the attention of several colleges and football coaches for a scholarship, chief among them being Lou Little of Columbia and Frank Leahy, then Head Coach at Boston College. I chose Columbia, but since I needed more math before I could enroll there, Little arranged to send me to Horace Mann School here in New York, where, during the course of the year, Frank Leahy paid me a visit and tried to persuade me to go back to Boston College. He told me then, in 1940, that he might eventually leave B.C. for Notre Dame, but that he would take me to South Bend with him. “Now,” he said, “let's go out and dine and see a good show. What would you like to see?” “William Saroyan!” I cried.

We went to see “Love's Old Sweet Song,” and Frank seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. But, for my part, the performance was marred by the presence of a certain gentleman behind Leahy and me, and to this day I cannot tell whether or not it was a coincidence, or that the gentleman in the back row, the Freshman football coach at Columbia University, was surreptitiously tailing us.

At any rate, I stuck to Columbia: New York was too exciting to leave, and was too closely identified with boyhood dreams.

At Horace Mann, I was an out-and-out killer: star on the football, baseball, and chess teams, I earned money writing sports news for the New York World-Telegram (a job I got through Lou Miller, scholastic sports editor), turning out English papers for lazy but wealthy fellow students, and tutoring French. I wrote feature articles for the school weekly (mostly interviews, one with Glenn Miller), took an active part in the Dramatic Club, wrote several articles on jazz, which earned me the title of “jazz critic,” appeared each quarter in the Horace Mann Quarterly with a short story, and, although I played baseball and football on the teams, wrote up the games, and often my own successes, the following day. In general, I earned good enough marks and made a sufficient impression to rate the status of “good citizen” from the prim, severe Dean. (However, at graduation exercises, finding myself the only member of the class sans culottes blanches—the irony of economic determinism—I spent the afternoon reclining under a tree behind the school thinking about Whitman and Saroyan, whom I had just begun to admire.)

At home in Lowell that summer, two old pals and I made elaborate preparations to stage a three-act play in a small town in the outlying suburbs. I wrote the script, the other was to take the leading role, and the third undertook a producer's duties. In the end, our mutual money shortage made short shrift of our attempts, but we did manage to put on a 15-minute play over the local radio station. These pitiful efforts may sound ludicrous to an outsider, but I cannot forget the enthusiasm with which we pitched our projects; nor can I forget the morning we three went to the old swimming hole in the pine woods to see the sunrise, after a long night of discussion, planning, writing, and drinking of coffee. For, later on, the “producer” was at Bataan, the “actor” is at present in Italy with the Fifth Army, and the “writer” spent many long, cold months in the North Atlantic.

The following Fall, at Columbia, I returned a kickoff against Princeton Frosh 85 yards to the Princeton 5-yard line and was carried off the field with a broken leg. I was actually glad; now I would have all of my time to myself and for studies. I wrote movie reviews for the Columbia Spectator, covered the varsity track team in the winter; ran a one-man typing agency, did some more ghost-writing, was elected Vice-President of the class, tutored French, and worked as private secretary for Prof. Eugene Sheffer of the French department. I helped Prof. Sheffer edit and translate his French textbook, typed out the whole manuscript, and even ventured definitions for his daily Journal-American crossword puzzle. We became fast friends; I wrote voluminously and took all my plays and stories to him. At this time, I had begun to read Thomas Wolfe and would spend entire nights roaming New York until dawn. I wrote and wrote, sending stories to all the better magazines (New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, etc.), but without success [....]