Jack Kerouac began keeping journals as a fourteen-year-old boy, in
1936, and continued to do so—somewhat obsessively—until his death, at
age forty-seven. The following entries span the years from 1948, when
the twenty-five-year-old Kerouac had recently returned to New York from a
cross-country trip, to 1950, when his first book, “The Town and the
City,” was published.
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.
