Jack Kerouac on Mozart’s Symphony No. 40

Shortly after Jack Kerouac made some thorough notes on his novel-in-progress Galloway, he then started to describe some music playing from the radio. He started with the novel’s opening in the “morning gray” of Galloway, and the character’s “Goethean urge in the midst of darkness.” His character Alan Mackenzie is cloistered in his room, an “oasis of culture in the gray wasteland” and he is experiencing a fit of despair.

Galloway’s geographical backdrop is of course Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, the “New England Milltown at dusk.” From there the exposition evolves as a panoramic display of workaday Galloway spanning from one character’s rudimentary learning at the library, through teenaged love (early inklings of Maggie Cassidy! the novel’s hero makes love to “Margaret”). It is “universal life” and “Life the strange” and “Beautiful fantasy” and “dream of artistry.” By the novel’s nineteenth and last section, the whole of Kerouac’s ambitious work ends on the theme of departure and growth.

He then switched from his notes for the novel, to those upon hearing Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G minor. Kerouac admired the vigor and sensitivity of the strings. He wondered of their “peculiarly sharp and painful beauty.” It was in music like this that Kerouac sensed Eternity.

The symphony’s first movement was a “nervous shiver of yearning.”It boasted assertive rhythms, there was ambivalence in its introspective scope. It was a composition of delicacy.

By its second movement, Kerouac pictured the music’s message of futility of questioning fate. Wolfie has dropped his “unself-conscious mood” that consumed Kerouac since the fall of 1944. His spirit lapsed despite hearing the hammer pound the anvil. The cosmological scope of the music retained for Kerouac a “grotesque sort of unity.” In its midst, the sweet cry of Eternity begins to emerge and with it, the “ever so sweet, the ever so delicious note” of love.

By its third movement, Kerouac wondered what the materials were of Mozart’s artistry? He shunned mere eclectism in order to project his emotions through his music. He scribbled his little black notes in “eccentric patterns” and cautions the interpreter with his notes: “Adagio.” Kerouac pictured Mozart sitting alone whistling an improvised melody before striking his rich musical vein and running to his work book to transcribe his discovery. He was a “happy artist” whom relished the “joy of his artistic labors.” Or at least, that’s what Kerouac believed he was saying by the close of the symphony.