Beauty as a Lasting Truth
When James Joyce wrote “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” he was asserting his belief in beauty, beauty as a lasting truth, beauty as a joy not transient but sustaining, a deeply religious feeling for beauty. In the “Portrait” he told of the beauty yet to come from Joyce; it came, in the ten-year labor, “Ulysses.”
Likewise, Tom Wolfe heralded beauty-to-come in his first novel “Look Homeward, Angel.” It came, in its fullest grandeur in “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
In both cases, the young men (Dedalus and Gant) were aliens in a world unmindful of beauty as a religion. They were, indeed, pitted full-force against the hard wall of the world’s will. Like two Messiahs, they were generally crucified, yet they survived to create the beauty they had heralded in their youths.
This is a strange truth. What is beauty, then, in the Gant-Dedalus sense?
In the first place, both attained the accumulated cultures of the world; they resembled Goethe in that they undertook huge labours during which they attempted to reach all of knowledge. These were heroic men, then. They were, in every sense, Promethean.
The beauty they saw is not the sparkle found in the romantic palaver, say, of revolutionists, or parvenus of the arts, or even Londonese super-seamen and prospectors. (This can be clarified for general understanding.) In other words, theirs was not the beauty of alluring things, say the fascinating junction of Moscow bells ringing on May Day; (this, indeed, is a type of beauty which makes for the religious life of many a youth); nor was their beauty something allied, or conjoined, with, let us say, the Left Bank, an oil still moist, Parisian breeze from the Seine, and candle guttering in the garret corner—this type of thing, I have found, is the religious ambition of many young people, as it was to me several years ago; nor was their sense of beauty completely fortified within the saloon scene, the broad, rugged America scene, the back-slapping, two-fisted, whiskey-guzzling beauty. It is quite safe to say that theirs was a beauty vast and deep enough to include all of these transient entities, but it went beyond & above these in a great circumveloping pall.
Their beauty was the poet’s beauty, yet I make a radical statement now when I say that their beauty went beyond the poet’s art, and in my opinion, I err not. It would be difficult to explain this without taking samples from the Beauty created of Joyce & Wolfe.
Let us take Paddy Dignan, whose funeral is depicted in Ulysses (by Joyce.) What poet ever saw beauty in the death of an ineffectual old Irishman who leaves behind him a brood of Dublin gamins and an old washtub wife? More, what proof have I that Joyce saw beauty in it? True, his compassionate treatment of the death, at once coldly objective, at once sympathetic through the mourners, is well-known .... but, though I could hardly produce points of evidence, I am intuitively convinced of Joyce’s attitude toward “poor Paddy’s” death. This I know, for there are unmistakable signs that Joyce loved old Dubliners with a deep and consuming fever. No one can write of old barflies, on a sunny afternoon, with as much clarity, force, and authority as Joyce.
In Joyce’s love, even for the “illgirt server” in the filthy tavern which Bloom quits with sensitive disgust, I have found love; and love dignifies, beautifies its object.
Thomas Wolfe’s Charlie Green, who jumped to his death from the Admiral Drake Hotel, is the most colorless individual (and type) ever projected in Art (at least in American Art). Yet wasn’t it love that drove Wolfe to his passionate contrasts with the 17th century Drake, Drake pounding his tankard in Plymouth, Charlie Green sipping his coffee in a Brooklyn cafeteria? Wasn’t it love that traced Green’s peregrinations through the “mobways” of New York, to the “sterile wink of Chop Suey joints” of a Sunday evening (a terrifying reality), to Brooklyn street corners on a Sunday afternoon in March (horrifying reality!) And, lastly, then, wasn’t it love that gave dignity and beauty, drama and meaning, to this poor American?
These beauties, which can only evidence themselves to men of heroic proportions (Thoreaus, Melvilles, Dostoevskys) are the great beauties. They sustain and make for life—without them, a man may never know that life is truly worthwhile (divested from the time-worn shibboleths and metaphysics, those superficial attempts to rationalize our stay on earth.)
I say, these are the true meanings, the true wealths.
For this reason, I am going to try to make these sadly-written beliefs comprehensible to the world, in a series of art works. It will mean years of study, observation, and analysis. This beauty-sense which has made my life rich, ripe with meaning must be developed. My immediate object, in this life task, is not fame (though fame I most certainly do demand): it is a desire to make a world see what I see, a very egotistical sense of “guiding” a stupid child to my way of seeing things. I think men, especially those dried-up moderns, have lost hope because they are blind to beauty, and I hasten to say, to its reward.
I may sum up, and cast off confusion, by saying I see something that the world doesn’t, that suggested itself to me; and was nourished by the Gants and Dedaluses of world culture when I realized I wasn’t alone in my vision. I say, I am no prophet, no moralist—I am one who will draw the drapes from the room where men sit and allow them the apprehension of Beauty-sense. Equipped thus, life is glorious! And Art, which espouses Beauty, is the ultimate in, and of, Freedom.
My Generation, My World
In the spring of 1943 Kerouac ran afoul of military authorities when he walked away from a marching exercise and went to the base library to read. After being interviewed by naval officials and psychiatrists and then transferred under guard to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland for more observation, he was handed an honorable discharge, with the qualification “indifferent character.” In June 1943 he joined his mother and father at their new apartment in New York. Writing to one of his friends from Lowell, Cornelius Murphy, he explains “the whole farce” in Newport: “... [I]t was clearly and simply a matter of maladjustment with military life. On this, the psychiatrist and I seemed to be agreed upon in silence [...] And, in view of my eagerness to get back to the merchant marine, I see no reason for being ashamed of my maladjustment.” The following three pieces relate to this tumultuous episode in Kerouac’s life.
He sat on the train, looking out the window, and thought of the sad young men who dream melancholy dreams of unfound love. He was not one of them, for his love was found: it was just outside the train window.
“Our generation,” he thought. “I shall pitch my heart & mind into our generation, our world. There is my love & my life.”
The train was passing a defense plant housing project in Maryland. The little houses were all alike, all instantly lonely, crowded together and brooding in the coming twilight.
“Will our generation nurture this new thing, or reject it?” he thought. A long string of freights passed in a blur, going in the opposite direction. He caught glimpses of coal, oil tanks, guns mounted on platforms.
“War,” he thought. “Our nation has plunged its mighty sinews into war.”
The trains passed. Now he saw a small town depot: crowds of soldiers in khaki lolled.
“My generation,” he whispered, “is making the sacrifice. It is suffering. Only through suffering does one learn love and fulfillment. I believe I am correct in saying so. My generation, my world is not lost.”
The train rolled on. A red sun hung over distant blast furnaces. The blast furnaces discharged their thrilling and mysterious vapors. “Sinews,” he whispered.
Then, green forests went by. In the clearing, a small house stood. A young man stooped tending his victory garden. A child by his side. In the train, the traveler nodded slowly.
The Wound of Living
Living necessarily presupposes and promises hurt, degeneration, and death. Living is death. Those who live must die. Yet, life is like a battlefield: often, I have seen someone, wounded by life, moving down the street much like a hero of war, limping, medalled, carrying a cane. And thus we live and are wounded, and to th
at one who is wounded most, perhaps because he is least impervious to the shots and shells of the world, I proffer an accolade for outstanding gallantry.
I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?
Let me tell you: In conjunction with an article which I read today, I was and am now inclined to defend Art. A certain writer, disparaging the Humanities in the American educational curriculum, wanted to provide for a more basic dependence on science. “The arts,” he minced with some deprecation (or so I trust), “are also necessary, since they have always been a source of relaxation and pleasure to man.”
Imagine: Relaxation and pleasure! The very fact that he terms Art with those unimaginably puny sounds “the arts” indicates his bias against it. He is a man of science. He will renounce Shelley’s world for a great test tube.
Here I will say the foundation of my knowledge of truth rests on science; but I am forced, and willing to add that my house of knowledge, its very foundation (which is science), is set in the soil of Art, or Belief, or Beauty (or religion of the spirit), and that furthermore, Art is also my roof and shields me from neurasthenic and impossible fears that assail the scientific and unhealthy psyched minds of some men.
Reading this might suggest to someone that I am a New Englander. I am a New Englander .... a New Englander removed. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, my real roots are not set in New England, though I was born there; my roots come from Brittany and my people were hardy fishermen, like those in Synge and Loti. But there is something about the landscape, the weather, the face of New England, where I was born, that has brought out the Transcendentalist in me through the earlier years of my life. For this reason, I call myself of the New England tradition, because my style is New England, my muse aims at simplicity and frankness, and I love pine forests and pure thought.
June 25, 1943 Washington, D.C. Naval Hospital
Wounded in Action
A hospital considered the young man is a good place to remember things. He lay on his back and pondered on his private observation. More, he went on, there are a lot of things one cannot tell a psychiatrist.
The old man on the next bed, a shock victim of the last war, lay propped up on his pillows playing a game with his hands, tapping the bed with them. He had been playing this game ever since the young man had entered the hospital, two weeks ago. The old man’s name was Oswald.
“How are you feeling, Oswald?” asked the young man.
“All right,” said Oswald, tapping as he turned his head.
The young man returned his gaze to the white ceiling. He yawned.
It was so white and wan in this hospital. It had not been so before, two summers ago, say, when he had that job down in Virginia. Then, he stood in the hot sun covered with dust, his eyes shaded by the visor of a baseball cap, holding a shovel. The ground was burning hot and his feet blistered; his bare torso was brown and shiny in the sun. He used to glance out of the corner of his eye at a round, glistening, dark shoulder, rippling as he worked the shovel.
Here, in the white beds, everything was pale. His shoulder was so white now he could see the freckles on it.
The young man pondered a while. Yes, the hospital was a good place to remember things. He would lie here for a few months, remembering, saving something for each day.
He would remember everything except that clanging in his head when a shell hit the deck. That was something not worth remembering, because it was mostly a void in his mind. There was no room there for quiet speculation. It did not interest him anyway. Where the papers at home in Alexandria had said he was “wounded in action,” to him it was not that at all .... it was something that had happened because that was the way it was. All the letters he received from people in Alexandria back there, people he hardly knew, puzzled him. One of them, especially, from his father’s friend, publisher of the Eagle, was filled with words that sounded moving when read aloud ... but when he would read the letter to himself, the patriotic words ended at the bottom of the page. Nothing, he thought, could explain what he knew about everything.
When the psychiatrist had asked him, upon being admitted to the hospital: “How do you feel today?” he had answered: “Fine.”
Then the psychiatrist had gone on.
“Have you had strange dreams since then? .... Do you hear voices?”
“I had dreams.”
“What kind?”
“Queer ones; I can’t figure out what’s going on, but I know it’s something important.”
“How do you mean—important?”
“Everybody is so serious,” he had told him.
Suddenly the psychiatrist had changed the subject: “What do you think about things? Do you like people?”
“Sure.”
“Life?”
“Sure.”
“Do you like to be by yourself, alone?”
“Sure.”
And then when the psychiatrist had asked why, he couldn’t explain himself. The psychiatrist had given him a blank look and written something down on his paper.
Could he have told him about that brown, bare shoulder in the sun, the sight of which, back there in that lost summer afternoon, had filled him with the desire to finish his work, go home to take a bath, eat a big supper, and go boozing with the boys at night in Steve’s convertible coupe?. Could he explain to the psychiatrist what he thought about this white, sick silence in the hospital? And finally, could he say why it was he liked to be by himself, as now, remembering, adding up, digesting what had happened, shaping experience into new molds as yet untried, smoothing new molds, laying plans to try them ....
He lay there, thinking of the white months ahead of him. He would return to the sun and grow brown again, grow eager again for gin and beautiful women. He would try to add all these things up— the curtains in his bedroom, the way the trees shushed outside in song, the sound of Steve’s horn calling him at dusk (where was Steve now? Hadn’t he joined the Army? Shouldn’t he have joined the Navy with him?), the green fresh foliage of Virginia in the morning on the way to work, midnight when sounds would come from everywhere, the banging freights, and the long “Krooooaahoo!” of the locomotive—he would add all this up and present the sum to the psychiatrist his day of discharge.
Then he would go back home. Other things were waiting to happen. He did not mind. He would always figure things out by himself.
Silently, the hospital lights were put out for the night.
The Romanticist
The following statement was typed on stationery with the letterhead “Moore-McCormack Lines, Inc./ Five Broadway, New York/ American Republics Line/ American Scantic Line/ Mooremack Gulf Lines.” Loaded with five-hundred pound bombs, the S.S. Weems had steamed out of the New York docks in August 1943, headed for Liverpool, England. Kerouac spent a few days in Liverpool and London, taking in a Tschaikovsky concert at Royal Albert Hall and visiting a few pubs. During this voyage he conceived the idea of a series of books about his adventures, the Duluoz legend—“a lifetime of writing about what I’d seen with my own eyes, told in my own words, according to the style I decided on at whether twenty-one years old or thirty or forty or whatever later age [...] a contemporary history record for future times to see what really happened and what people really thought. ”
Reading The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy on this Atlantic crossing had made Kerouac think further about “novels connecting into one grand tale. ” About a year before he had noted in an aide-mémoire titled “Recollections” that “Long concentration on all the fundamental influences of your life will net a chronological series of events that will be open to use as a novel—for a novel should have a sort of developing continuity, if nothing else. ” He returned to New York City in October.
SS: George B. Weems Port: Liverpool, England Date: September 21, 1943
The Romanticist:
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I have eaten beef stew with silent, shabby men in cheap eateries and fingered the last two pennies in my pocket with anger and irony ... I have dined most sumptuously in a spacious Park Avenue home, duck brought forth in silver dishes by a butler ... I have seen 10¢ movies on Times Square, seated in the first row of the balcony in shirtsleeves, smoking and laughing ... Under a lashing rain and gale, I have gazed at the angry mid-Atlantic for a moment, pausing in my labours ... I have stood on a Liverpool street corner in the middle of a drowsy afternoon and cursed the cobbles because the pubs had closed ... I have made love to women in Canada, Washington, D.C., Nova Scotia, England, Greenland, New York City, Maryland, and New England ... I have lain drunk in the gutter of a street ... I climbed a mountain in Greenland and gazed down on the slim ribbon of Ikatek Fjord ... I have toiled in the sun on construction jobs from Portsmouth, N.H. to Alexandria, Virginia ... I have attended cocktail parties in New York City penthouses ... I have worked in mills ... I have sold door to door ... I have worked in garages ... I have worked as a reporter on a newspaper ... I have played football in college ... I have starved in a cheap urine-smelling room in Hartford, Conn.... I have dated actresses, models, and social workers ... I have brawled in streets, in bar entrances, and in cafeterias ... I have heard great symphonies and been transported ... I have walked the streets, a lonely U.S. Navy gob, and sought women ... I have languished in hospitals and shuffled cards in melancholy abstraction ... I have written reams and reams of writings ... And through it all, I have always been restless, unhappy, and seeking new horizons. What shall I do?
The Boy from Philadelphia
On one typescript of this story, written in 1943, Kerouac’s address is 133—01 Crossbay Boulevard, Ozone Park, New York. On another copy of the story he noted: “Used by Lucien in ’44 as a term paper in Composition. ” In 1944 Edith Parker, Kerouac’s girlfriend and later his first wife, introduced him to nineteen-year-old Lucien Carr, an undergraduate at Columbia University who had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri. He became part of Kerouac circle of new friends on and around the Columbia campus, which grew to include Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. By the middle of 1944 the core group of young writers whom we know as the Beat writers had formed.