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The Haunted Life
re-introduces and it made me smile, make that beam,
is Albert Halper. Now Halper possibly does need a
little introduction here. It’s as though he never
existed. Beat Scene, mostly through the efforts of Jim
Burns, has attempted to bring him back from the
dead – though it appears his works remain resolutely
out of print. He was a socialist writer, mentioned in
the same breath as Dos Passos. He wrote of the
workplace, the workers, the downtrodden, he wrote
of trade unions when America really had those
organisations on a par with Communism.
McCarthyism saw to that. He
was out on a limb. And Kerouac
loved his work, he and Sebastian
Sampas, his young Greek friend
in Lowell who was killed in the
Second World War, almost before
he needed to shave. They read
and digested his work as eagerly
as they did Saroyan and Wolfe
and others. Kerouac includes
some initial thoughts on Halper
in his book, “Peter read slowly,
admiring the young Halper’s tragic
sense of youth and lonesomeness.”
Kerouac, through Peter Martin,
imagines Albert Halper in
Manhattan, daydreams of one
day being like him. Discussing
Peter’s room and listing Halper
amongst the Russian novelists
and Sherwood Anderson’s and the
like, his favourite books. So it is gratifying that the
forgotten Halper is remembered and maybe, just
maybe, some enterprising publisher will resurrect him
and bring him to new readers.
The Haunted Life is very much a forerunner to
The Town and the City. Peter Martin is here in
embryonic shape alongside Garabed Tourian and
Dick Sheffield – characters based on Sebastian and
on another Lowell friend Billy Chandler. Sadly
Chandler was another World War Two casualty.
Imagine losing two of your best friends aged twenty
something? And Joe Martin is heavily based on
Kerouac’s father Leo, about whom Jack had mixed
feelings. They clashed, let’s put it like that. Like
Kerouac’s mother, his dad had some questionable
beliefs. In fact the book commences with Joe Martin
bemoaning the state of his America, it is a vicious
Archie Bunker or Alf Garnett tirade that is evidently a
regular feature in the Kerouac household – a what is
the country coming to soliloquy.
Handling his loss of Sebastian and Billy – they
are both dead as Kerouac begins to memorialise them
both - and faced with his father’s racist tirades
Kerouac captures the changing times, Benny
Goodman records over the radio heralding a new
mood, a new deal in Roosevelt’s USA. That sense of a
change is gonna come that Kerouac was so desperate
to capture in his work. The idea that the awesome
swathes of rural America were not immune to the
coming of the new highways, the radio, with
television just around the corner. Nowhere would
remain untouched and
this kid Kerouac is so
aware for his tender
years, in tune, listening
to the pounding drums,
the dustcloud in the
distance as modernity
approaches, he sees it all.
And he’s just this kid.
Can you believe it? And
there’s shades of his
beloved Dostoevsky and
of Proust. It is one of the
more successful early
Kerouac works. Present
are the vital excesses of
his prose, Peter Martin
listening to the sounds of
Galloway through his
open window in the cool
of the evening, “Again
the train…moving north to Montreal…howling long
and hoarse, a mournful night sound…
Silence now for a moment…and the river hush, and the
trembling of tree leaves. Far across the field, over the
tracks and over to the boulevard across the river, where
the cars move endlessly back and forth from the city to
the ice cream road stands, the fried clam restaurants, the
pink-lit roadhouses all crowded with shuffling dancers,
the faint beep of klaxons returns.” (page 42)
He’s already an incurable romantic about the
endless possibilities of America. Even at this tender
age. He can’t possibly see and hear all these things
lying on his bed in his room, can he, but he does. All
the portents are there. The signals that – okay he’s in
the full glare of Thomas Wolfe and overblown,
sometimes like a dazzled rabbit in the headlights, but
he’s on the verge of finding his voice. And you know
the story is a remembrance and tribute to his lost
friends Sebastian and Billy. Kerouac has an almost
camera like movement between Lowell houses as they
Jack Kerouac aged 20
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