The Haunted Life

by Jack Kerouac, Todd F. Tietchen

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Jack Kerouac wrote The Haunted Life in 1944 when he was 22 years old and attending Columbia University. Originally intended as a three-part novel, only this first 20,000-word section was ever finished. Upon its completion, Kerouac promptly lost his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi cab, remaining unknown to the public until its appearance at Christies about ten years ago.

Kerouac's family has now decided to share this manuscript with the world.

While the entirety of the novel remained unfinished, the surviving manuscript successfully works alone as a novella with a satisfying, if open-ended, conclusion. It features a scaled-down version of the Martin family and is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, as was Kerouac's first novel The Town and The City. Kerouac had planned on writing a cycle of novels tentatively titled An American Passed Here, which was to be set primarily in the fictional town of Galloway (based on Lowell). That cycle was to contain The Haunted Life and The Sea is My Brother, tracing the story of the Martin family throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Eventually Kerouac's plans for his Martin cycle materialized into his first novel, The Town and the City, shortly before he moved on to compose his iconic On the Road.

Todd Tietchen, the editor of the project and the Jack Kerouac/Beat Scholar in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has assembled a number of archival documents to thicken out the context of this lost novella, documents that attest to the level of intention and care that went into Kerouac's writing projects.

Release date: March 11, 2014

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 208

Sample

          Introduction: Jack Kerouac’s Ghosts

            “Jack and Edie laying across my bed,

            Flying high like the spirits of the dead,

            The living and the dead, the living and the dead.

            Our Lady of Sorrows in the long dark night,

            How many candles could I light

            For the living and the dead, the living and the dead?

            What’s that black smoke rising, Jack, is the world on fire?”

                             —JOLIE HOLLAND, “MEXICO CITY”

Nineteen forty-four was a troubled and momentous year for Jack Kerouac. In March, his close friend and literary confidant Sebastian Sampas lost his life on the Anzio beachhead while serving as a US Army medic. That spring—still reeling with grief over Sebastian—Kerouac solidified his friendships with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, making up for the loss of Sampas by immersing himself in New York’s blossoming mid-century bohemia. That August, however, things took a sinister turn: Carr stabbed his longtime acquaintance David Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, claiming afterward that he had been defending his manhood against Kammerer’s persistent and unwanted sexual advances. Because he had aided Carr in disposing of the murder weapon and Kammerer’s eyeglasses, Kerouac was charged as an accessory after the fact. Consequently, Kerouac was jailed in August 1944; he married his first wife, Edie Parker, on the twenty-second of that month in order to secure the money he needed for his bail bond. Eventually, the authorities accepted Carr’s account of the killing, trying him for manslaughter rather than murder, thus nullifying the charges against Kerouac.

Writing of these experiences in August 1945, Kerouac lamented not having “kept a diary of the events of the summer of 1944 [as] I should now have material for a fine book . . . love, murder, diabolical conversations, all.” As it turns out, those events did find their way into book form—on more than one occasion—as Kammerer’s death and Kerouac’s initial immersion in Carr’s social orbit were given fictional shape in The Town and the City and Vanity of Duluoz, as well as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, coauthored by Kerouac with Burroughs in 1945. Caught within the torrent of 1944, however, Kerouac did literally lose his grasp on a potential publication—though its subject matter had nothing to do with Carr or the tempting allure of bohemian life in New York. At some point late in that year—under circumstances that remain rather mysterious—the aspiring writer misplaced a novella-length manuscript titled The Haunted Life, a coming-of-age story set in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, featuring a character based on the recently departed Sampas. In Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac briefly describes The Haunted Life as “the long novel I had been writing . . . in pencil,” admitting that he lost the manuscript, possibly in a taxicab, and that he had “never heard from it again.” Kerouac also makes mention of this mislaid manuscript in a 1954 inventory of his oeuvre, a handwritten list in which he boasts of having composed 1.5 million words, counting The Haunted Life as a “lost” contribution to that total.

The lost manuscript resurfaced, however, as an entry in the Sotheby’s auction catalog in June 2002. Fifty-eight years after its disappearance, The Haunted Life sold to an unnamed bidder for $95,600. The previous year, Kerouac’s most celebrated manuscript, the On the Road scroll, had sold at auction to Jim Irsay for $2.43 million; that sale seems to have motivated the seller of The Haunted Life manuscript to test its value on the market. Evidently, the manuscript had been willed to the seller (also unnamed) by his longtime domestic partner, who claimed to have discovered it decades earlier in the closet of a Columbia University dorm room. Although vague on the details, this explanation makes a great deal of sense, as Kerouac had spent October 1944 living in Ginsberg’s dorm room at Columbia after residing briefly with Edie in her hometown of Grosse Point, Michigan. While the thought of his manuscript making the rounds of Manhattan’s streets in the backseat of a yellow cab probably struck Kerouac as both poignant and romantic, the truth of the matter seems to be that he had left the manuscript in Ginsberg’s room after accepting a berth on the merchant vessel Robert Treat Paine (only to jump ship in Virginia and head back to New York). Why he subsequently lost track of the manuscript is impossible to say, though, true to its title, The Haunted Life eventually rematerialized in public sight like an apparition whose business in the world had been cut unexpectedly short.

In 1943, Kerouac had engaged in a less abortive stint as a merchant sailor, shipping out for Liverpool on the George Weems. Shortly after returning to New York, he drafted “The Odyssey of Peter Martin,” a handwritten planning document for the novel he eventually lost. That document reflects Kerouac’s hope that The Haunted Life would comprise a sociocultural history of the war era, seen through the experiences of Peter Martin, a character Kerouac would later recast as one of the protagonists of The Town and the City. Kerouac began composing The Haunted Life during a brief sojourn in New Orleans in May 1944, and seems to have completed Part One (“Home”) by the summer of that year. As Kerouac hinted in Vanity of Duluoz, the manuscript was written entirely in pencil on lined notebook paper (9 ½ by 5⅞ inches), and runs to a length of seventy-one pages. That total includes a concluding document, “Characters for Future Novels,” whose placement suggests that Kerouac considered his drafting of Part One complete. This supposition is further supported by the fact that The Haunted Life is an autograph fair copy, meticulously written in the author’s hand and absent of marginalia, corrective marks, and significant grammatical errors.

The cleanness of the holograph manuscript suggests previous drafting, though the relevant drafting documents appear to be no longer extant. As a result, much about the history of the manuscript and its composition remains unknowable, though we can glean certain information from the archival materials collected in the second section of the present volume. The absence of working drafts is compounded by the fact that Kerouac began writing the novel in a brief window between two of his most important histories of correspondence—one with Sampas and the other with Ginsberg—with the result being that no detailed record of The Haunted Life’s development exists in Kerouac’s prodigious corpus of letters. Of course, some guesses can be made regarding the envisioned content of the novel’s later sections based on the preparatory documents that remain, along with the plot trajectory of The Town and the City, in which Kerouac completed his rendering of Peter Martin in a decisive way. Those guesses, however, remain largely unreliable in the absence of a detailed plot outline or additional drafting documents, though we do know from Kerouac’s documentation on the title page that he originally intended to write two additional parts (titled “War” and “Change”). This is all to say that although there is no getting around the fact that the novel lacks the ending its author originally imagined—in all honesty, we do not even know how unfinished it actually is—The Haunted Life nevertheless offers a telling glimpse into the creative life and imaginative capacities of Kerouac at a critical moment in his artistic development. Faced with this dearth of more detailed information, we should focus more intently on that which remains, as it does indeed function as a satisfying, if open-ended, narrative.

The modest, handwritten manuscript of The Haunted Life stands in stark contrast to the 120-foot-long scroll manuscript of On the Road. The scroll remains one of the most renowned typed manuscripts in American literary history, in which Kerouac fully explored what many consider to be his signature concerns, taking his place among a generation of postwar authors who infused American writing with transformative energy and verve. Although the early prose of The Haunted Life may lack the edgy charisma and experimental abandon of works such as On the Road and Doctor Sax, it nevertheless provides an important window into the intellect and intentions of the aspiring artist as he made his way toward the crafted prose of 1950’s The Town and the City. That novel was Kerouac’s Dubliners; like James Joyce, he began his authorial journey in the realm of realism and naturalism—leaving an impressive document in his wake. While it has become standard critical practice to dismiss The Town and the City as a derivative take on Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac’s first published novel remains a compelling debut. Indeed, Kerouac arrives in The Town and the City as a novelist already possessed of prodigious skills: there appears to be little the twenty-eight-year-old writer is incapable of doing within the confines of conventional novelistic prose. Deft descriptions of local scenery combine with convincing dialogue and an involving cast of characters to make The Town and the City a noteworthy novel of its time. It is now clear that Kerouac arrived so impressively in print partially on account of the writings collected herein, a selection of previously unpublished works in which we can hear the portents of the mature writer to come, while finding ourselves engaged by his lifelong literary concerns in their embryonic vestiges.

What also emerges from these writings is an image of the young Kerouac as a careful and thorough drafter of his ideas, committed to an artistic process that does much to refute the public perception of Kerouac as a spontaneous word-slinger whose authorial approach merely complemented his Dionysian approach to life. This recalcitrant image of Kerouac has been prone to damaging (and oftentimes lurid) exaggeration, and is ultimately more suited to hagiographic scholarship and accompanying forms of authorial celebrity worship than to a candid critical assessment of the intellectual range of his work. In turn, a more robust and balanced evaluation of Kerouac’s merits might emerge from placing increased critical focus upon his reverence for process (a process that included generative writing, drafting, revision, and redrafting) and contextualizing his art within a richer set of influences and aspirations, both literary and historical. We might begin by being more mindful of the shaping influence of the 1930s and 1940s as first encountered in The Haunted Life documents, for (as we shall see) the cultural and social concerns of those decades cast a long (and ghostly) shadow over the remainder of Kerouac’s work.

Kerouac set his fictional treatment of Peter Martin against the backdrop of the everyday: the comings and goings of the shopping district, the smoky atmospherics of the corner bar, the drowsy sound of a baseball game over the radio. Peter is heading into his sophomore year at Boston College, and while home for the summer in Galloway he struggles with the pressing issues of his day—the lingering effects of the previous decade’s economic crisis and what appears to be the impending entrance of the United States into World War II. The other principle characters, Garabed Tourian and Dick Sheffield, are based respectively on Sebastian Sampas and fellow Lowell native Billy Chandler, both of whom had already perished in combat by the time Kerouac wrote The Haunted Life (providing some of the impetus for its title). Garabed is a leftist idealist and poet, possessing a pronounced tinge of the Byronic. Dick is a romantic adventurer whose wanderlust has him poised to leave Galloway for the wider world—with or without Peter. The Haunted Life also contains a revealing and controversial portrayal of Jack’s father, Leo Kerouac, recast as Joe Martin. In contrast to Garabed and his progressive, New Deal perspective, Joe is a right-wing, bigoted populist and an ardent admirer of radio personality Father Charles Coughlin. The conflicts of the novel are primarily intellectual, then, as Peter finds himself suspended between the differing views of the other three characters regarding history, politics, and the world, and struggles to define what he believes to be true and worthy of his intellect and talents.

Kerouac modeled this form of dialogue-based intellectual drama on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a point he would explicitly stress in his planning documents for The Town and the City. Writing of his intentions for the eldest three Martin brothers in that novel, Kerouac explained that “these three brothers—Peter, Francis, and Joe—represent the three alternatives of adjustment to American life, as the Karamazov brothers were in Dostoevsky’s Russia.” The Brothers Karamazov is primarily a novel of ideas, in which the principal characters represent different philosophical positions; the same can be said of The Possessed (now usually titled Demons in English translations), another Dostoevsky novel of which Kerouac was particularly fond. Much of the conflict in these novels is generated from the clash and evolution of dissimilar philosophies as the narratives unfold, testing the validity or wisdom of each character’s particular position. In Kerouac’s The Haunted Life, Joe, Garabed, and Dick might also be said to represent “three alternatives of adjustment to American life” during the critical historical period stretching from the Great Depression to the outbreak of World War II. Rooted in the 1930s, these voices or perspectives emanate from one of the most raucous periods in American history and speak vividly of an era in which the nation came remarkably close to revolutionary rupture.

The young Kerouac was certainly caught up in the period’s revolutionary vibe, as was the idealistic Sampas. Consider, for instance, the March 1943 letter to Sampas in which an exuberant Kerouac proposes traveling to Russia to lay a wreath on the socialist . . .