Although “The Town and the City”—a lengthy novel about growing up in New England—brought Kerouac moderate notice, it was not until the publication of “On the Road,” in 1957, after six years of rejection by publishers, that he achieved celebrity. But he was resentful of the late recognition, and of critics who dismissed his work as part of the Beat “fad.” In fact, Kerouac, who was an American romantic at heart—he thought of himself as a “lumberjack bard”—had grown increasingly skeptical of his fellow Beat authors Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and in his journals he frequently criticized the two writers for their cynicism and lack of patriotism.
Kerouac wrote twelve more novels, but he never again received the level of acclaim he achieved with “On the Road.” He died of alcohol-related causes, in 1969, in a hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. Kerouac’s journals which number more than two hundred volumes—were kept in a vault in Lowell, Massachusetts, and, under instructions from his widow, were not to be released until her death. She died in 1990.
JANUARY 1, 1948. QUEENS, NEW YORK.
Today, read my novel [“The Town and the City”] in its entirety. I see
that it’s almost finished. What is my opinion? It is the sum of myself,
as far as the written word can go, and my opinion of it is like my
opinion of myself!—gleeful and affectionate one day, black with disgust
the next.
Wrote 2500 words, until interrupted by a visit from Allen Ginsberg,
who came at four o’clock in the morning to tell me that he is going mad,
but once and if cured he will communicate with other human beings as no
one ever has—completely, sweetly, naturally. He described his terror
and seemed on the verge of throwing a fit in my house. When he calmed
down I read him parts of my novel and he leeringly announced that it was
“greater than Melville, in a sense—the great American novel.” I did not
believe a word he said. Someday I will take off my own mask and tell all about Allen Ginsberg and what he is in the “real” flesh. It seems to me that he is just like any other human being and that this drives him to wit’s ends. How can I help a man who wants to be a monster one minute and a god the next?
· APRIL 17, 1948. Went to N.Y., argued with a girl all night. Also, Ginsberg went mad and begged me to hit him—which spells the end as far as I’m concerned, since it’s hard enough to keep sane without visiting the asylum every week. He wanted to know “what else” I had to do in the world that didn’t include him. I told him I did have an unconscious desire to hit him but he would be glad later on that I did not.
I have been through with all that foolishness since the days I fought with Edie [Edith Parker, Kerouac’s first wife] and climbed trees with Lucien [Carr], but these Ginsbergs assume that no one else has seen their visions of cataclysmic emotion, and try to foist them on others. I have been a liar and a shifty weakling by pretending that I was the friend of these people—Ginsberg, Joan [Burroughs], Carr, Burroughs, [David] Kammerer even—when all the time I must have known that we disliked each other and were just grimacing incessantly in a comedy of malice. A man must recognize his limits or never be true.
· JUNE 2, 1948. After supper Allen Ginsberg dropped in, bringing the remainder of the manuscript which, he said, ended so “big and profound.” He thinks I’m going to be a rich man now, but worries about what I’ll do with money; that is, he can’t picture me with money (nor can I). He thinks I’m a true Myshkin, bless his soul. . . . The madness has left Allen now and I like him as much as ever.
· JUNE 3, 1948. I worked out an intricate mathematical thing which determines how assiduously I’m getting my novel typed and revised day after day. It’s too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say that yesterday I was batting .246, and after today’s work my “batting average” rose to .306. The point is, I’ve got to hit like a champion, I’ve got to catch up and stay with Ted Williams (currently hitting .392 in baseball). If I can catch him, June will be the final month of work on “Town & City.”
· JUNE 17, 1948. Madly, painfully lonesome for a woman these evenings . . . and on I work. I see them walking outside and I go crazy. Why is it that a man trying to do big work, alone and poor, cannot find one woman who will give him her love and time? Someone like me, healthy, sexual, riven with desire for any pretty girl I see, yet unable to make love now, in youth, as they parade indifferently by my window—well, goddamit, it isn’t right! This experience is going to make me bitter, by God!
Went to bed with a .350 average.
· JULY 3, 1948. Big party in Harlem, at Allen’s and Russell Durgin’s. I spent another three days without eating or sleeping to speak of, just drinking and squinting and sweating. There was a vivacious girl straight out of the twenties, red-haired, distraught, sexually frigid (I learned). I walked 3½ miles in a Second Avenue heat wave to her “streamlined Italian apartment,” where I lay on the floor looking up out of a dream. Seems like I had sensed it all before. There was misery, and the beautiful ugliness of people, and there was [Herbert] Huncke telling me that he had seen Edie in Detroit and told her that I still loved her. Do I love Edie still? The wife of my youth? Tonight I think so. In my phantasy of glee there is no sea-light and no beatness, just the wind blowing through the kitchen window on an October morning.
· AUGUST 17, 1948. Babe Ruth died yesterday, and I ask myself, “Where is Babe Ruth’s father?” Who spawned this Bunyan? What man, where, what thoughts did he have? Nobody knows. This is an American mystery.
· AUGUST 23, 1948. Told my mother she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending all her time slaving in shoe factories. In Russia they slave for the State, here they slave for Expenses. People rush off to meaningless jobs day after day, you see them coughing in the subways at dawn. They squander their souls on things like “rent,” “decent clothes,” “gas and electricity,” “insurance,” behaving like peasants who have just come out of the fields and are so dreadful tickled because they can buy baubles and doodads in stores.
My life is going to be a farm where I’ll grow my food. I won’t do nothing but sit under a tree while my crops are growing, drink homemade wine, write novels to edify my soul, play with my kids, and thumb my nose at the coughing wretches. The next thing you know, they’ll all be marching off to some annihilating war which their leaders will start to keep up appearances. Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, shit on them all.
I have another novel in mind—“On the Road”—which I keep thinking about: two guys hitchhiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, coming all the way back hopeful of something else.
· SEPTEMBER 9, 1948. Got form-rejection card from Macmillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know “The Town and the City” is a great book in its own awkward way. And I’m going to sell it. I’m ready for any battle there is. Even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down. It is they who are my enemies, not “obscurity” or “poverty.”
· JANUARY 3, 1949. SAN FRANCISCO. The Saga of the Mist (New York to New Orleans). N.Y. across the tunnel to New Jersey—the “Jersey night” of Allen Ginsberg. We in the car jubilant, beating on the dashboard of the ’49 Hudson coupe . . . headed West. Haunted by something I have yet to remember. Neal [Cassady] and I and Louanne [Henderson] talking of the value of life as we speed along: “Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night?” Seldom had I been so glad. It was sweet to sit near Louanne. In the back seat Al and Rhoda made love. And Neal drove with the bebop music playing on the radio, huzzaing.
Neal got lost outside of Baltimore and wound up on a ridiculously narrow little tar road in the woods (he was trying to find a shortcut). “Doesn’t look like Route One,” he said ruefully. It seemed a very funny remark. Near Emporia, Va., we picked up a mad hitchhiker who said he was Jewish (Herbert Diamond) and made his living knocking at the doors of Jewish homes all over the country, demanding money. “I am a Jew!—give me money.” “What kicks!” cried Neal.
I drove in South Carolina, which was flat and dark in the night (with star-shiny roads, and Southern dullness somewhere around). Outside Mobile, Ala., we began to hear rumors of New Orleans and “chicken, jazz ’n’ gumbo,” bebop shows on the radio, and wild back-alley jazz; so we yelled happily in the car.
“Smell the people!” said Neal at a filling station in Algiers, before going to Bill Burroughs’ house. I’ll never forget the wild expectancy of that moment—the rickety streets, the palms, the great late-afternoon clouds over the Mississippi, the girls going by, the children, the soft bandannas of air coming like odor, the smell of people and rivers.
God is what I love.
· FEBRUARY 1, 1949. CALIFORNIA, RICHMOND TO FRISCO. (Riding to Frisco from Richmond on a rainy night, in Hudson, sulking in back seat.)
Oh, the pangs of travel! The spirituality of hashish!
I saw that Neal—well, I saw Neal at the wheel of the car, a wild machinery of kicks and sniffs and maniacal laughter, a kind of human dog; and then I saw Allen Ginsberg as a seventeenth-century poet in dark vestments standing in a sky of Rembrandt darkness; then I myself, like Slim Gaillard, stuck my head out of the window with Billie Holiday eyes and offered my soul to the whole world—big sad eyes, like the whores in the Richmond mud-shack saloon. Saw how much genius I had, too. Saw how sullen, blank Louanne hated me. Saw how unimportant I was to them; and the stupidity of my designs on her, and my betrayal of all male friends.
· FEBRUARY 6, 1949. SPOKANE. Portland to Butte. Two hobo panhandlers in back of bus on way out at midnight said they were bound for The Dalles—a small farming and lumber town—to beat a dollar or two. Drunk—“Goddamit, don’t get us thrown off at Hood River!”
“Beat the bus driver for a couple!”
We rolled in the big darkness of the Columbia River Valley, in a blizzard. I woke up after a nap and had a chat with one of the hoboes. (Said he would be an old-time outlaw if J. Edgar Hoover had not made it against the law to steal. I lied and said I had driven a stolen car from N.Y. to Frisco.)
I woke up at Tonompah Falls: hundreds of feet high, a hooded phantom dropped water from his huge, icy forehead. I was scared because I could not see what was in the darkness up beyond the hood of the ice—what hairy horrors, what night?
The bus driver plunged along over mad ridges. Then northeast through Connell, Sprague, Cheney (wheat and cattle lands like East Wyoming), in a gale of blizzards, to Spokane.
· FEBRUARY 7, 1949. MILES CITY. Visions of Montana. Coeur d’Alene to Miles City. We came along the waterbed of the Coeur d’Alene river, to Cataldo. I saw clusters of houses homesteading in the wild mountain holes. We rose to the heights in the snowy gray; below in the gulch one single shack light burned. Two boys in a car almost went off the ridge avoiding our bus.
In Butte I stored my bag in a locker. A drunken Indian wanted me to go drinking with him, but I cautiously declined. A short walk around the sloping streets (in below-zero weather at night) showed that everybody in Butte was drunk. This was a Sunday night—I hoped the saloons would stay open until I had seen my fill. They close at dawn, if at all. I walked into one great old-time saloon and had a giant beer. Another gambling saloon was indescribable: groups of sullen Indians (Blackfeet) drinking red whiskey in the john; hundreds of men of all kinds playing cards; and one old professional house gambler who tore my heart out because he reminded me so much of my father—big; green eyeshade; handkerchief protruding from back pocket; great rugged, pockmarked angelic face (unlike Pop’s)—and the asthmatic, laborious sadness of such men. I could not take my eyes off him. My whole concept of “On the Road” changed as I watched.
An old man with slitted eyes, called “John” by respectful men, coolly played cards till dawn; he has been playing cards in the Montana saloon-night of spittoons, smoke, and whiskey since 1880 (days of the winter cattle drive to Texas, and of Sitting Bull). Ah, dear Father.
BIGTIMBER. I saw old-timers sitting around in an old ramshackle inn (in the middle of the snowy prairie)—playing cards by old stoves, at noon. A boy of twenty, with one arm missing, sat in the middle of them. How sad!—and how beautiful he was because he was unable to work, and must sit forever with old-timers, and worry about his buddies punching cows and roistering outside. But how protected he is by Montana. Nowhere else in the world would I say it were at all beautiful for a young man to have but one arm. I shall never forget that boy, who seemed to realize that he was home.
In Billings I saw three of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in all my life, eating in a sort of high-school lunchroom with their grave boyfriends. You can have your Utopian orgies: I should prefer an orgy with the Montanans.
