#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

I wish I could write about Jack Kerouac as lucidly as Jack Kerouac wrote about anything. He is both candid and artistic, striping himself of the literary norms as only one writer in hundred years can do, he captures the mind and voice of the human heart.

As most Kerouac pieces, this isn’t true short fiction, but there being no way, and myself having no desire to categorize it, here it is. It is the night of December 7^th, 1941. The paper’s boldface headlines announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and this young man walks the street of a Massachusetts milltown trying to find clarity.

“Outside the window, in the yard between my house and my neighbors, there glowed the cold crater silver of a December moon in New England…and there was silence as of death, upon the cold hard ground. Frost decorated the window, Dickens-like. I looked out upon the winter night, was silent in the presence of a stupendous hush, listening for the sigh of our slumbering hearts.”

Kerouac was famously French-Canadian, often writing about the FC community in Lowell Massachusetts. He loved the language, calling it more of a verbal language than a written one. However, this story was the first example of his using it in dialogue. The French-Canadian side of him, gave him a unique voice, and the language mixed with English gave his writing, already steeped in poetic phrasing and musical shape, a cadence not seen anywhere else.

Notable Passage: “I was not alone. Walking down the street, seeing barren crater glow along the shabby length of its bedded route, I suddenly perceive the bobbing figure of another human being. Another footstep, quicker than mine, most fretful. It is a millworker returning from the ‘night shift.’ We pass each other in the night, moving along gracefully in opposite directions. My brother, yet I do not know him, I do not speak to him. We only exchange quick suspicious glances, mine is almost belligerent in its nocturnal frown and scowl. (Ah yes, I am a fool!)”

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

For this New Year I begin with some Jack Kerouac. Who better? It’s filled with hope, adventure, and expectation. We start with a blank page: “This page is long blank and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”

A young writer talks with God, it’s not a prayer as much as a conversation.  He ruminates on life, survival, and his will to write original words. Not unlike many who have tried, he struggles with his voice, and sometimes must sell his talents for the mundane needs of life.

“Tonight, I wrote a short story for a fellow on this floor. I toiled with it for an hour and a half. I had to make it exciting, fill it with colorful and authentic descriptions, and pound it out into the conventional whole. That is, wholeness of what is called the common short story. Beginning, middle, end. It has to introduce, enlarge, burst, and die down. So I plunged into it and finished it. It would net me one dollar.”

This was fun to read and think about the art of short story telling, and very house of mirrors. I’m now writing about a writer writing about short story writing.

Notable Passage: “You can’ be an artist unless you’re a member of humanity. Hermits make awful poets, I think. You can’t ruminate peacefully by a little stream in the woods unless you’ve been liberated from the turmoil of civilization. Peace is a relative thing. And it always turns out to be short lived."

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total=35

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

Although Kerouac really didn’t write traditional short fiction, he was prolific in pouring his thoughts on paper. Besides his novels and books of poetry, recently published collections of his notes and jottings have uncovered a few great clippets of planned novellas. Go Back is one of these short pieces written before his first novel, The Town and the City, was published.  Go Back, written in 1940, shows even this early where Kerouac was to take the form. He had a keen sense of the ethereal nature in all of us, but only wrote for himself, of himself, and from his own eyes, wide open, and sensing emotion everywhere.

His language was always poetic and rhythmic like the jazz and bop he got inspiration from. It’s hard not to stand up and read this aloud to the people on the bus next to me with their face buried in their phones or being deafened by over-produced music coming through their ears plugs drowning out the sights and sounds of real life right in front of them.

“Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are., brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.”

“I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was weep, but I couldn’t do that either.”

Has any group of writers—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs—ever been so open, vulnerable, and emotive than these? It’s a shame that Kerouac remains misunderstood by so many, that in the eyes of too many, he seems more like a James Dean caricature of a rebel instead of what he was: a big ball of energy and wonder, gulping life by the ocean-full.  Even these tossed aside pages of his notebooks have genius not seen since.

Rating: 8-8-9-10 Total=35