o_190rdoloef55ab3f4r60s1n5fa.pdf

Jack Kerouac
The Haunted Life and
Other Writings
(De Capo Press)
After years of the Kerouac vaults being locked
we have been treated to a string of freshly published
works, many dating from the younger Kerouac. Some
observers are wary of this release of material, often
billed as ‘lost,’ fearing it will not match the later
period Kerouac, that it will damage his reputation
even. Other critics simply opine that it isn’t up to
scratch and should have been left alone. There are
other camps, trains of thought. The fans, they come
in ever fresh faced waves through the decades, drawn
by his outsider appeal in the main, want to read
everything he ever wrote. They dread the day the well
runs dry.
The Haunted Life and Other Stories was
allegedly ‘lost’ in the back of a taxi cab in the 1940s
in New York City. It makes you smile. The thought
of Jack Kerouac, known for his frugality, catching a
taxi cab makes me wonder. If he could save a few
cents he would. And there was always the subway. Or
maybe Allen Ginsberg or Stanley Gould, or John
Clellon Holmes were picking up the fare? Did he
know Stanley Gould then? But you see what I mean.
Kerouac was like Dickens, he liked to walk. Shanks
pony.
The story goes that the lost manuscript was
rediscovered in a cupboard in a room at Columbia
university. It makes sense of course. Kerouac
famously didn’t graduate from there but hung around
to stop over with Ginsberg from time to time. And he
frequented the bars around the university campus.
The manuscript was eventually sold at auction at
Sotheby’s in New York for in excess of $95,000 some
years ago. Just imagine, ponder on it. What would
that kind of money have meant to a largely down on
his heels forty seven year old Kerouac in 1969? Even
a tenth of that sum. He was basically writing begging
letters to his agent Sterling Lord. The sad irony of it
all.
And so to the book. Me? I’m in the can’t get
enough of Jack Kerouac camp. Never grown out of
that stage. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that his
early work quite naturally doesn’t have that apparent
free flowing style that he so perfected as the 1950s
broke and he listened to Ed White on sketching
theory, that first thought best thought coffee and
Benzedrine rush of writing that he would explode
through and then revise later on. Of course he pushed
the idea that he never revised and for a time we
believed him, some with a raised questioning
eyebrow. Until the academics got to his archives and
made some discoveries. It was still spontaneous prose
but he checked it out later on also.
We’re talking mid 1940s here. Kerouac is what,
twenty two? The Town and the City is years away from
publication in 1950. An epic family saga of a book
that was his first calling card but largely sank without
a trace. Dismissed in the few reviews as heavily in
debt to Kerouac’s hero Thomas Wolfe. It is pleasing
to read in Todd Tietchen’s substantial and thoughtful
introduction that he considers Kerouac’s first novel to
have been unfairly relegated. To be honest my take on
it was I wished he had written more in that vein. It is
a substantial work that sorely needs reassessment.
And mention of Thomas Wolfe, he of the soaring
waves of words, never use ten words when you can
employ a hundred approach, which is his way and has
given us rapturous passages rarely equalled in
American letters – brings in a mention by Tietchen of
William Saroyan – that daring young writer and
indeed playwright and another of Kerouac’s literary
look to guys. Now Saroyan needs no introduction
even today at a time when his books are mostly
absent from bookstore shelves, he’s out of fashion no
mistake – but another left leaning writer that Tietchen
55