that’s the opening line from Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City, published in March 1950. Kerouac turned twenty-eight years old that month, and he must have had extreme satisfaction in knowing that at last, after countless false starts and obsessive ruminating over what he wanted to say, that at last it sat there, albeit neglected, between two covers.
“Galloway,” Kerouac tells us, is a “milltown in the middle of fields and forests.” My own upbringing in Lowell tells me that for the most part, this is correct. Lowell in the 1970s was crime-ridden, gone to seed, and the river itself, the Merrimac, was utterly polluted. The fields were reduced to weedy lots, very Kerouacian in itself, and the fields were parks dotted with baseball diamonds. Hippies smoked weed under the bleachers.
The river had a smell to it, something raw, earthy and muddy, as if it had become antiquated in its southward rush from the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The shores, away from the detritus of junkyards and mill refuse, were dotted with indian arrowheads that only took a little digging to find them. If you looked out from the shore, when rain began to fleck the surface, one could see the tails of carp splashing the water. Carp by then had utterly infested the river, and boys like me launched fishing lines weighted by oatmeal balls that were fisted in our determined hands.
Is it fair to say that after reading this fine novel, and then later reading what most were telling me his masterwork, that I was very disappointed in On the Road?
Kerouac’s investment in The Town and the City was profound, for he had infused a saintly consideration into the pages of his novel. The veiled portraits of his mother and father conjures the very embodiment of tough determined living. They were people just like my grandmother, Gertrude Maher, who was also of French-Canadian extraction and living in Centralville, Lowell. They each endured the Great Depression of the 1930s only to be socked by the hammerfall of World War II.Grandmother Gertrude was a little older than Jack and so she wasn’t that aware of him, other than he was the kid brother of Caroline “Nin” Kerouac, whom she did know.She was friendly until Nin turned eighteen or so, and married Charlie Morrisette.
But I digress . . .
Kerouac’s portrait of his parents brought them to life in all of their simple complexity. Simple, because they are simple people ingrained with a typical work ethic representative of a people that have been kicked to the curb for a long time. Leo Kerouac’s stand-in, George Martin, is a “man of a hundred absorptions.” Gabrielle Levesque Kerouac is “Marguerite Martin, and she is aptly reduced to her celebrated role as “superb housekeeper.” Both are steely strategists. One eyes the Galloway streets he proudly struts like a cigar-puffing cock-of-the-walk. He is a businessman eyeing his competition as carefully as he eyes the playing cards he ham-fistedly holds in backstage poker games. Marguerite is a surveyor of kitchen scraps and Sunday roasts, for she is a Depression-era survivalist equipped with a thriftiness to expertly not only feed her eight children, but to make them full each day.
Be-spectacled Marguerite is suspicious of others and “foreseeing of good fortune, forebodings of doom” and able to detect “omens of all sorts and sizes.” She is the same Canuck soothsayer of Doctor Sax who is telling of death in the river below as the man with the watermelon drops dead, pissing his pants. She can “read signs everywhere,” perhaps gifted more with an innate sense of xenophobic suspiciousness than a sixth sense. Her absorbing mind is a regulator of life and death, for the birth of one is the death of another across town. It is she that has endured the death of Francis Martin’s dead twin, Julian of the “pale brow” and “little sad eyes.” Julian is a stand-in for the long dead Gerard who passed on in the spring of 1926. Marguerite is a dreamer. She gets “nervous when something wrong is going to happen,” which must leave her bereft at the series of misadventures her Karamazovian sons get into throughout the book. There’s seventeen year-old Joe who runs his car off a road and into a tree after a night of “stamping furors of roadside polkas” and fakes a serious injury to avoid the wrath of his father. Then the mopey fifteen year-old Francis who stands around a lot and stares sullenly at the silent shuffling feet in Galloway High School. He is beyond the comprehension of his family. “You can’t expect too much from Francis,” his mother tells the rest, “he’s not well ad probably never will be. He’s a strange boy, you’ve just got to understand him.” Then Peter, thirteen years old, is just coming into life’s folds, impressed by the glitter of a dance, and the womanly attitude of his elder sister, Ruthie, who has managed to score a dance with the heroic Lou White, he of high school football fame and glory. The last two boys, Charley who is nine, and Mickey, six, embody the childlike wonderment that Kerouac cannot seem to escape for himself. They are just as profoundly moved by the rhythms and pulses of life that erupts and exudes in pockets of humanity seen around Galloway. If twelve year-old Elizabeth is “seen strolling mournfully beneath the dripping wet trees” carefully considering the “horrid legend of life,” her brother Charley is equally imbued with a Kerouacian depth of character that somehow eludes other characters like Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx. Charley is described as having “dark wings appear above him as if to shade a strange light in his thoughtful eyes.” Charley is also described as having been born in June 1926, the same month and year that Kerouac’s older brother Gerard died.
Kerouac describes Mickey last, because it is he that is the germ of all of the others, possessed of that Kerouacian wonderment at the mysteries and sanctity of life: “And finally, if on some snow dusk, with the sun’s sloping light on the flank of a hill, with the sun flaming back from factory windows, you see a little child of six, called Mickey Martin, standing motionless in the middle of the road with his sled behind him, stunned by the sudden discovery that he does not know who he is, where he came from, what he is doing here, remember that all children first shocked out of the womb of a mother’s world before they can know that loneliness in their heritage and their only means of rediscovering men and women.” Kerouac writes of a similar scenario not too much later on in On the Road, when Sal Paradise loses his sense of self somewhere on some dark American by-way across the country. Even earlier, Kerouac’s character of Wesley Martin feels the same way in a room he boards in for the night in a draft for The Sea Is My Brother called Two Worlds for a New One.
In The Town and the City, wrongly maligned as a simple Thomas Wolfe knock-off, Kerouac invests the narrative with a sensitivity that often eludes his later beat counterparts. The descriptions of Galloway are of a teeming canvas of humanity prone to all of the foibles and flaws of day-to-day hand-to-mouth paycheck-to-paycheck living. It is a “town” illustrative of Joseph Campbell’s point that one can detect what that particular pocket of humanity holds most sacred. In Galloway, the “factory stacks” rise higher than the church steeples. Later, in the city of New York, it is the banks in their polished skyscrapers that rise higher than anything else, a simple symbolic aspect of the soullessness of modern living that somehow strips out all of the carefully-constructed soul-digging Kerouac does to describe his Martin family.
The solution, it seems, to escape the shores of this country completely. Peter Martin walks the gangplank of the Westminster in July 1942. It is out there, pitching to and fro in the heart of the merciless Atlantic that he comes to understand the limits of his mortality, along with the rest of the death-haunted crew. After a sister ship, the Latham is sunk, Peter cries out “What am I doing here?” Scanning the dark sea after the ship had disappeared completely, Martin and the rest of the crew are quiet: “Some of them were silent thinking of the men on the Latham, of their familiar faces gazed at and understood for months, months of loneliness, deprivation, meaningless fond conversations, those selfsame faces gone down now to drown in black waters of unbelievable night.” Kerouac here has managed to capsulize the very civic sensibility of World War II, of that sudden snatch from the living of faces we knew, voices we heard, memories we stored as sacred keepsakes to preserve the sanctity of lives gone before their time.
The Town and the City is a novel of death. Where the town of Galloway is emblematic of lives lived with fearful determination, the war and its kaleidoscopic description of Times Square is stamped with the imminent spectre of death. The death of the Martin patriarch in his Brooklyn apartment is book-ended by the wartime death of his son, Charley Martin whose crumpled body is revealed after a bulldozer attacks a pile of rubble at the edge of an airfield. In his pocket is a crumpled letter from his father, now joined together in death. It is the same reach beyond the grave that Peter Martin experiences when he opens a letter from his dead Galloway comrade, Alexander Panos: “Now Alexander’s face was lost, Alex’s face, in the strange unthinking world, all awful and raw and grieved.”
Earlier, Peter takes a visit into the morgue to identify the body of Waldo Meister. Meister is now a “mangled thing,” stripped of his dignity on a marble slab, a victim of senseless murder. He is of the “children of the sad American paradise” hopelessly tossed into the whirlwind of modern chaos. “In the end,” Kerouac writes, “everyone looks like a Zombie, you realize that everyone is dead, locked up in the sad psychoses of themselves.” Later, “Everyone feels like a Zombie, and somewhere at the ends of the night, the great magician, the great Dracula-figure of modern disintegration and madness, the wise genius behind it all, the Devil if you will, is running the whole thing with his string of oaths and his hexes.” This, Kerouac’s grand statement of imminent disillusion and disenchantment that makes him, in the guise of Peter, shoulder his canvas bag and hit the road: “He was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river’s cape, toward tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life.”
It is the perfect transition, looking ahead, toward what was to come.
JACK KEROUAC 