Orpheus Emerged
Jack Kerouac
ja
A N E W N O c
V E L L A B Y
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kerouac
I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y
R O B E R T C R E E L E Y
ORPHEUS
EMERGED
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ORPHEUS
EMERGED
A N O V E L L A B Y
JOHN KEROUAC
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Copyright © the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas,
Literary Representative, 2000
Introduction copyright © Robert Creeley, 2000
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-9706110-0-5
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 4
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Contents
© Allen Ginsberg Trust
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 6
USING THIS LIVE READ
8
ABOUT THE BOOK
10
INTRODUCTION, “THINKING OF JACK,” BY
ROBERT CREELEY
ORPHEUS EMERGED
16
I
44
II
72
III
122
IV
156
V
180
VI
196
VII
210
VIII
218
IX
236
X
246
EXCERPTS FROM JACK KEROUAC’S JOURNALS
252
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
256
AUTOBIOGRAPHY - KEROUAC’S INTRODUCTION
TO LONESOME TRAVELER
260
TIMELINE
266
BOOKS BY JACK KEROUAC
268
THE BEAT MOVEMENT
273
THE WORLD OF JACK KEROUAC
274
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT
JACK KEROUAC
276
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ABOUT
THE BEATS
278
MULTIMEDIA ELEMENTS (AUDIO & VIDEO)
280
CAPTIONS
282
ABOUT LIVE READS AND CREDITS
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 7
About the Book
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 8
After Jack Kerouac died in 1969, his widow Stella kept
his extensive archive private. Since her death in 1990,
executor John Sampas has worked with publishers and
scholars to bring Kerouac's unpublished work to light.
Viking Penguin has published The Portable Kerouac, two volumes of Selected Letters, Book of Blues, Some of the Dharma, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other
Writings, and Joyce Johnson's correspondence with
Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters
1957-1958.
The allegorical novella Orpheus Emerged, published for the first time by Live Reads, was completed in 1945 when the 23-year-old writer still signed his work “John Kerouac” and was
deeply immersed in the process of finding the voice that came to express the spirit of a generation.
Kerouac wrote the novella shortly after meeting Allen
Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and others in and
around Columbia University. These new friends would form
the core of the group of writers know as the Beats, and they
are reflected in the characters in Orpheus Emerged, a book filled with references to the books Kerouac was reading, the
music and art he was discovering, and the concepts he was
exploring.
Set in and around an urban university, Orpheus Emerged
follows the obsessions, passions, conflicts and dreams of a
group of colorful, searching, bohemian intellectuals. At its
core is a petit roman a clef, a portrait of an artist as a young man torn between art and life—formulating his ideas
about love, work, art, suffering, and ecstasy.
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 9
Thinking of Jack
Introduction by Robert Creeley
It was Allen Ginsberg who introduced us – if that’s the
appropriate word for what happened that evening in spring,
San Francisco, 1956. I’d come into the city for the first time a few weeks before and had met Allen through the fact that
both he and poet friend Ed Dorn were working at the
Greyhound Bus Station on Market Street. So Allen had
come up to the Dorns’ apartment where I was staying –
crashed is the better term – and we talked most of the night, remaining till Ed’s shift was done. Not very long after Allen told us that his friend Jack Kerouac would shortly be coming into town and that if we went the next night to The
Place, a local bar in North Beach run by old Black
Mountainee
rs, he’d be meeting Jack there after work. At
that time just one of Jack’s novels had been published, The Town and the City, and that book by itself would probably have made little difference finally, either to us or the world.
It was what hadn’t been published yet – the great unwind-
ing string of narratives, the veritable river of “spontaneous prose” – we so respected. Few had read any of it but the
word was out. He was the astounding writer who had man-
aged to keep a thousand pages moving wherein the only
external action was a neon light going off and on out the
window, over a drugstore across the street. So we went,
hoping to meet the young novelist, already legendary at
least to such as ourselves.
Memory recalls a young man sitting by himself at
a far corner of the small space of the bar, just to the left
of the turn for the toilets, where the sidewall met the
back. There was no remarkable lighting focussed on
him, but I do see him now as singular, isolated, quite still
as he drinks. At some point he must have caught me
looking at him, so he looks back – his eyes a striking
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 11
blue, intense, very particular. I had no idea as yet this
person was Jack but when Allen came in, seeing us, he
asked if Jack had come, then saw the same fellow and
said, “There he is!” Going over, we found his seeming
quiet was a fact of his being altogether drunk, and I
never did meet him that evening more than to help with
getting him across the Bay and into bed in Berkeley.
I knew that drinking, however. I’d grown up in a
farm town in New England close to Lowell, Jack’s family
home, some fifteen miles east. For us Lowell was the big
city, along with places like Waltham. Boston itself was a
glowing metropolis almost beyond imagination. My moth-
er got my annual outfit for Easter in the Bon Marche in
Lowell. Route 3 went through it on its way north to New
Hampshire and the Boston and Maine Railroad took the
same route as well along the Merrimac River. In the awk-
wardness of that time, drinking, it appeared, eased the male
confusion, made inarticulate feelings far simpler to accom-
modate, and let one feel an unaccustomed comfort in the
increasingly blurred surroundings. Whatever the fact,
drinking was the way through, be it sexual delight –
although how drunkenness helps such circumstance is hard
to fathom – or rapport with a various social world not one’s
own. Hale fellow, well met! might quickly turn to Throw that bum out! – but by then one heard nothing anyhow.
So, in this poignantly fledgling novella what males
do, along with write and talk, is drink – with women then as an ambience, even a resource and company, but always
with a marked distance, made into objects as they are,
from the real exchange apparent. If they do enter the
action, it’s with a wry and dislocating sense of contest. For LiveREADS
ORPHEUS EMERGED 12
example, Marie is Anthony’s securing wife but then
Anthony is given a determinedly vulnerable person. When
Marie goes off with Michael to have an “affair,” she is the
most substantial of all three. She also smokes!
Michael followed her into the bedroom.
Anthony was peacefully asleep, with just the
hint of a smile on his lips.
“What a big baby!” Michael exclaimed soft-
ly. Marie turned to him and almost smiled. But
solemnly she said, “And what do you think you
are?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Hmm?”
Marie lowered the window pane, arranged
Anthony’s blankets, motioned Michael out of
the room, and quietly closed the door. She
went over to a desk drawer and took out a cig-
arette and lit it.
Jack’s journals provide an interesting reference to
Orpheus Emerged – “The Half Jest” as he calls it then, dated
“Jan. 1944.” As The Book of Symbols (February, 1945) otherwise makes clear, he is casting his thoughts and work
into large, symbolizing patterns with the sense of heroic
forbears writ large indeed: “Saroyan period,” “Joycean
period,” “Wolfean period,” “Nietzschean period (Neo-
Rimbaudian),” “post-Nietzschean period (Yeats period),”
which is where he locates Orpheus Emerged, “Spenglerian period,” “American period (Dos Passos),” with the concluding one being the “post-neurotic period,” aptly
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 13
enough. It does him no disservice, like they say, to note
that he is still not twenty-two years old. (His birthday is
March 12, 1922.) No one’s told him how to write other than
what he’s got from books as best he can. There’s no defin-
ing tradition for such as he is, no social habit sustaining
him. He’s gloriously making it up as he goes along but try-
ing with such moving determination to be a real writer, an
encompassing writer, a great writer. When his lifelong
friend and elder, William Burroughs, was asked to give his
sense of Kerouac, he emphasized that, first and last, he was
a writer.
Here then he is at work, at the beginning of it all,
and whatever one makes of the result, it’s fascinating to see his moves, call them, the interaction he manages between
his characters, foretelling what will be the “story” of so
much of his subsequent work. Allen Ginsberg is the char-
acter “Leo,” for example, or so he seems to me. Who else
would ask those charming questions? But it is the way the
imagination of a life is conceived, that life and art must find a viable company; that the relations of men, among themselves and with that outer “other” of women, must be end-
lessly rehearsed – all such matters are those of his own life as book after book records.
“Art is the only true twin life has,” Charles Olson,
fellow poet, wrote in these same years. He lived in
Gloucester and was said to be the inventor of “Projective
Verse,” just as Jack was credited with “Spontaneous
Prose.” In fact, there was even an edge of contest between
the two groups comprising their followers as to just who
was first in authority. Despite Olsen’s having written him
in September, 1957 to acknowledge his powers as a poet,
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Jack was not to meet Olson until well along in his life after he had come back to live in Lowell — as Olson had himself returned to Gloucester, to live on the upper floor of a
fisherman’s family house. One Sunday two of Jack’s wife
Stella Sampas’ brothers drove him the short distance from
Lowell to Gloucester to meet Olson. They sat in the car
while Jack went in. As it happened, the Boston Globe had reviewed a novel of Jack’s that day – which one I can’t now
remember – and gave it solid approval. Olson had taken
the pages of the paper and spread them on the wooden
steps outside leading up to his place, so that Jack might
walk up in regal manner.
In America one has to find one’s own way, step
by dif-
ficult step. At any time there is much to be learned, much to be discarded, much to be engaged and contested. To the
young man or woman it must seem often that the world they
try finally to enter, whatever their hopes, has locked its
doors. Is this what it means to be taught? To be nurtured?
To be recognized as existing? Why doesn’t Kerouac use the
French he knows instead of those literary “Parisian” tags?
Because he’s learning, because he’s young, because he
wants to be let in. We know, of course, that a few years later it will be Kerouac who, as Allen Ginsberg usefully noted,
makes the very transforming point, that one can write in the same manner as one would speak to friends. But now he is in New York, has dropped out of Columbia, is trying with all
his powers simply to write.
There will never be another moment like this one.
— Buffalo, N.Y.
October 28, 2000
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 15
I
Paulstood
in the Book
Shop facing
a shelf of
books. He came
in every day
at the same
time, shuf-
fling in his
old shoes, and
pored through
the same score
or so of books
with his dirty
fingers.
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 17
And despite the complete disreputability of
his appearance—the shabby clothing, the
matted locks of dark hair protruding over the
collar—and his constant smoking that filled
the bright little Shop with smoke and its clean
floors with cigarette ends, no one seemed to
pay any attention to him. His daily visits had
by now assumed the character of routine.
One or two of the clerks, however, were wont
to comment on his habit of looking at the same
twenty or so books every day. Nietzsche’s com-
plete works, a novel by Stendhal,
Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Ulysses, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and many others of this
kind, he peered at impatiently each and every
day, and always walked away from them with a
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