Satori in Paris & Pic
Jack Kerouac
SATORI IN PARIS ANd PIC
OTHER WORKS BY JACK KEROUAC
Published by Grove Press
Dr. Sax
Lonesome Traveler
Mexico City Blues
The Subterraneans
SATORi iN PARiS
AND
PiC
TWO NOVELS BY
JACk KEROUAC
This edition copyright © 1985 by Grove Press, Inc.
Satori in Paris copyright © 1966 by Jack Kerouac
Pic copyright © 1971 by the Estate of Jack Kerouac
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Satori in Paris was originally published in three installments in
Evergreen Review
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.
Satori in Paris; and, Pic.
I. Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969. Pic. 1987.
II. Title. II. Title: Satori in Paris. IV. Title:
Pic.
PS3521.E735A6 1988 813′.54 87-27948
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9569-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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SATORi iN PARiS
1.
SOMEWHERE DURING MY TEN DAYS IN PARIS (AND Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for “sudden illumination,” “sudden awakening” or simply “kick in the eye.”—Whatever, something did happen and in my first reveries after the trip and I’m back home regrouping all the confused rich events of those ten days, it seems the satori was handed to me by a taxi driver named Raymond Baillet, other times I think it might’ve been my paranoiac fear in the foggy streets of Brest Brittany at 3 A.M., other times I think it was Monsieur Casteljaloux and his dazzlingly beautiful secretary (a Bretonne with blue-black hair, green eyes, separated front teeth just right in eatable lips, white wool knit sweater, with gold bracelets and perfume) or the waiter who told me “Paris est pourri” (Paris is rotten) or the performance of Mozart’s Requiem in old church of St. Germain des Prés with elated violinists swinging their elbows with joy because so many distinguished people had shown up crowding the pews and special chairs (and outside it’s misting) or, in Heaven’s name, what? The straight tree lanes of Tuileries Gardens? Or the roaring sway of the bridge over the booming holiday Seine which I crossed holding on to my hat knowing it was not the bridge (the makeshift one at Quai des Tuileries) but I myself swaying from too much cognac and nerves and no sleep and jet airliner all the way from Florida twelve hours with airport anxieties, or bars, or anguishes, intervening?
As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France, and I’m not afraid of giving the real name of Raymond Baillet to public scrutiny because all I have to say about him, in connection with the fact he may be the cause of my satori in Paris, is that he was polite, kind, efficient, hip, aloof and many other things and mainly just a cabdriver who happened to drive me to Orly airfield on my way back home from France: and sure he wont be in trouble because of that—And besides probably never will see his name in print because there are so many books being published these days in America and in France nobody has time to keep up with all of them, and if told by someone that his name appears in an American “novel” he’ll probably never find out where to buy it in Paris, if it’s ever translated at all, and if he does find it, it wont hurt him to read that he, Raymond Baillet, is a great gentleman and cabdriver who happened to impress an American during a fare ride to the airport.
Compris?
2.
BUT AS I SAY I DONT KNOW HOW I GOT THAT SATORI and the only thing to do is start at the beginning and maybe I’ll find out right at the pivot of the story and go rejoicing to the end of it, the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that’s told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.
In other words, and after this I’ll shut up, made-up stories and romances about what would happen IF are for children and adult cretins who are afraid to read themselves in a book just as they might be afraid to look in the mirror when they’re sick or injured or hungover or insane.
3.
THIS BOOK’LL SAY, IN EFFECT, HAVE PITY ON US all, and dont get mad at me for writing at all.
I live in Florida. Arriving over Paris suburbs in the big Air France jetliner I noticed how green the northern countryside is in the summer, because of winter snows that have melted right into that butterslug meadow. Greener than any palmetto country could ever be, and especially in June before August (Août) has withered it all away. The plane touched down without a Georgia hitch. Here I’m referring to that planeload of prominent respectable Atlantans who were all loaded with gifts around 1962 and heading back to Atlanta when the liner shot itself into a farm and everybody died, it never left the ground and half of Atlanta was depleted and all the gifts were strewn and burned all over Orly, a great Christian tragedy not the fault of the French government at all since the pilots and steward’s crew were all French citizens.
The plane touched down just right and here we were in Paris on a gray cold morning in June.
In the airport bus an American expatriate was calmly and joyfully smoking his pipe and talking to his buddy just arrived on another plane probably from Madrid or something. In my own plane I had not talked to the tired American painter girl because she fell asleep over Nova Scotia in the lonesome cold after the exhaustion of New York City and having to buy a million drinks for the people who were babysitting there for her—no business of mine anyhow. She’d wondered at Idlewild if I was going to look up my old flame in Paris:– no. (I really shoulda.)
For I was the loneliest man in Paris if that’s possible. It was 6 A.M. and raining and I took the airport bus into the city, to near Les Invalides, then a taxi in the rain and I asked the driver where Napoleon was entombed because I knew it was someplace around there, not that it matters, but after a period of what I thought to be surly silence he finally pointed and said “là” (there).
I was all hot to go see the Sainte Chapelle where St. Louis, King Louis IX of France, had installed a piece of the True Cross. I never even made it except ten days later zipping by in Raymond Baillet’s cab and he mentioned it. I was also all hot to see St. Louis de France church on the island of St. Louis in the Seine River, because that’s the name of the church of my baptism in Lowell, Massachusetts. Well I finally got there and sat with hat in hand watching guys in red coats blow long trumpets at the altar, to organ upstairs, beautiful Medieval cansos or cantatas to make Handel’s mouth water, and all of a sudden a woman with kids and husband comes by and lays twenty centimes (4¢) in my poor tortured misunderstood hat (which I was holding
upsidedown in awe), to teach them caritas, or loving charity, which I accepted so’s not to embarrass her teacherly instincts, or the kids, and my mother said back home in Florida “Why didnt you then put the twenty centimes in the poor box” which I forgot. It wasnt enough to wonder about and besides the very first thing I did in Paris after I cleaned up in my hotel room (with a big round wall in it, welling the chimney I guess) was give a franc (20¢) to a French woman beggar with pimples, saying “Un franc pour la Française” (A franc for the Frenchwoman) and later I gave a franc to a man beggar in St.-Germain to whom I then yelled: “Vieux voyou!” (Old hoodlum!) and he laughed and said: ‘What?—Hood-lumT’ I said “Yes, you cant fool an old French Canadian” and I wonder today if that hurt him because what I really wanted to say was “Guenigiou” (ragpicker) but “voyou” came out.
Guenigiou it is.
(Ragpicker should be spelled “guenillou,” but that’s not the way it comes out in 300-year-old French which was preserved intact in Quebec and still understood in the streets of Paris not to mention the hay barns of the North.)
Coming down the steps of that magnificent huge church of La Madelaine was a dignified old bum in a full brown robe and gray beard, neither a Greek nor a Patriarch, just probably an old member of the Syriac Church; either that or a Surrealist on a larky kick? Na.
4.
FIRST THINGS FIRST.
The altar in La Madelaine is a gigantic marble sculpt of her (Mary Magdalena) as big as a city block and surrounded by angels and archangels. She holds out her hands in a gesture Michelangeloesque. The angels have huge wings dripping. The place is a whole city block long. It’s a long narrow building of a church, one of the strangest. No spires, no Gothic, but I suppose Greek temple style. (Why on earth would you, or did you, expect me to go see the Eiffel Tower made of Bucky Buckmaster’s steel ribs and ozone? How dull can you get riding an elevator and getting the mumps from being a quarter mile in the air? I already done that orf the Hempire State Building at night in the mist with my editor.)
The taxi took me to the hotel which was a Swiss pension I guess but the nightclerk was an Etrus can (same thing) and the maid was sore at me because I kept my door and suitcase locked. The lady who ran the hotel was not pleased when I inaugurated my first evening with a wild sexball with a woman my age (43). I cant give her real name but it’s one of the oldest names in French history, aye back before Charlemagne, and he was a Pippin. (Prince of the Franks.) (Descended from Arnulf, L’Évêsque of Metz.) (Imagine having to fight Frisians, Alemanni, Bavarians and Moors.) (Grandson of Plectrude.) Well this old gal was the wildest lay imaginable. How can I go into such detail about toilet matters. She really made me blush at one point. I shoulda told her to stick her head in the “poizette” but of course (that’s Old French for toilette) she was too delightful for words. I met her in an afterhours Montparnasse gangster bar with no gangsters around. She took me over. She also wants to marry me, naturally, as I am a great natural bed mate and nice guy. I gave her $120 for her son’s education, or some new-old parochial shoes. She really done my budget in. I still had enough money the next day to go on and buy William Makepeace Thackeray’s Livres des Snobs at Gare St.-Lazare. It isnt a question of money but of souls having a good time. In the old church of St.-Germain-des-Pres that following afternoon I saw several Parisian Frenchwomen practically weeping as they prayed under an old bloodstained and rainroiled wall. I said “Ah ha, les femmes de Paris” and I saw the greatness of Paris that it can weep for the follies of the Revolution and at the same time rejoice they got rid of all those long nosed nobles, of which I am a descendant (Princes of Brittany).
5.
CHATEAUBRIAND WAS AN AMAZING WRITER WHO wanted early old love affairs on a higher order than the Order was giving him in 1790 France—he wanted something out of a Medieval vignette, some young gal come down the street and look him right in the eye, with ribbons and a grandmother sewing, and that night the house burns down. Me and my Pippin had our healthy get-together at some point or other in my very calm drunkenness and I was satisfied, but next day I didnt wanta see her no mo because she wanted more money. Said she was going to take me out on the town. I told her she owed me several more jobs, bouts, jots and tittles.
“Mais oui.”
But I let the Etruscan fluff her off on the phone.
The Etruscan was a pederast. In which I have no interest, but $120 is going too far. The Etruscan said he was a Mountain Italian. I dont care or know if he’s a pederast or not, actually, and shouldna said that, but he was a nice kid. I then went out and got drunk. I was about to meet some of the prettiest women in the world but the bed business was over because now I was getting real stoned drunk.
6.
IT’S HARD TO DECIDE WHAT TO TELL IN A STORY, AND I always seem to try to prove something, comma, about my sex. Let’s forget it. It’s just that sometimes I get terribly lonely, for the companionship of a woman dingblast it.
So I spend all day in St.-Germain looking for the perfect bar and I find it. La Gentilhommière (Rue St. André des Arts, which is pointed out to me by a gendarme)—Bar of the Gentle Lady—And how gentle can you get with soft blonde hair all golden sprayed and neat little figure? “O I wish I was handsome” I say but they all assure me I’m handsome—“Alright then I’m a dirty old drunk” —“Anything you want to say”—
I gaze into her eyes—I give her the double whammy blue eyes compassion shot—She falls for it.
A teenage Arab girl from Algiers or Tunis comes in, with a soft little hook nose. I’m going out of my mind because meanwhile I’m exchanging a hundred thousand French pleasantries and conversations with Negro Princes from Senegal, Breton Surrealist poets, boulevardiers in perfect clothes, lecherous gynecologists (from Brittany), a Greek bartender angel called Zorba, and the owner is Jean Tassart cool and calm by his cash register and looking vaguely depraved (tho actually a quiet family man who happens to look like Rudy Loval my old buddy in Lowell Massachusetts who’d had such a reputation at fourteen for his many amours and had that same perfume of smoothy looks). Not to mention Daniel Maratra the other bartender, some weird tall Jew or Arab, in any case a Semite, whose name sounded like the trumpets in front of the walls of Granada: and a gentler tender of bar you never saw.
In the bar there’s a woman who is a lovely 40-year-old redhead Spaniard amoureuse who takes an actual liking to me, does worse and takes me seriously, and actually makes a date for us to meet alone: I get drunk and forget. Over the speaker is coming endless American modern jazz over a tape. To make up for forgetting to meet Valarino (the redhead Spanish beauty) I buy her a tapestry on the Quai, from a young Dutch genius, ten bucks (Dutch genius whose name in Dutch, Beere, means “pier” in English). She announces she’s going to redecorate her room on account of it but doesnt invite me over. What I woulda done to her shall not be allowed in this Bible yet it woulda been spelled L O V E.
I get so mad I go down to the whore districts. A million Apaches with daggers are milling around. I go in a hallway and I see three ladies of the night. I announce with an evil English leer “Sh’prend la belle brunette” (I take the pretty brunette)—The brunette rubs her eyes, throat, ears and heart and says “I aint gonna have that no more.” I stomp away and take out my Swiss Army knife with the cross on it, because I suspect I’m being followed by French muggers and thugs. I cut my own finger and bleed all over the place. I go back to my hotel room bleeding all over the lobby. The Swiss woman by now is asking me when I’m going to leave. I say “I’ll leave as soon as I’ve verified my family in the library.” (And add to myself: “What do you know about les Lebris de Kérouacks and their motto of Love Suffer and Work you dumb old Bourgeois bag.”)
7.
SO I GO TO THE LIBRARY, LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE NA-tionale, to check up on the list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army 1756 Quebec, and also Louis Moréri’s dictionary, and Pêre Anselme etc., all the information about the royal house of Brittany, and it aint even there and finally in the Mazarin
e Library old sweet Madame Oury the head librarian patiently explains to me that the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944, something which I’d forgotten in my zeal. Still I smell that there’s something fishy in Brittany—Surely de Kérouack should be recorded in France if it’s already recorded in the British Museum in London?—I tell her that—
You cant smoke even in the toilet in the Bibliothèque Nationale and you cant get a word in edgewise with the secretaries and there’s a national pride about “scholars” all sitting there copying outa books and they wouldnt even let John Montgomery in (John Montgomery who forgot his sleeping bag on the climb to Matterhorn and is America’s best librarian and scholar and is English)—
Meanwhile I have to go back and see how the gentle ladies are doing. My cabdriver is Roland Ste. Jeanne d’Arc de la Pucelle who tells me that all Bretons are “corpulent” like me. The ladies are kissing me on both cheeks French style. A Breton called Goulet is getting drunk with me, young, 21, blue eyes, black hair, and suddenly grabs Blondie and scares her (with the other fellows joining in), almost a rape, which me and the other Jean, Tassart, put a stop to: “Awright!” “Arrète!”—
“Cool it,” I add.
She is just too beautiful for words. I said to her “Tu passe toutes la journée dans maudite beauty parlor?” (You spend all day in the damn beauty parlor?)
“Oui.”
Meanwhile I go down to the famous cafes on the boulevard and sit there watching Paris go by, such hepcats the young men, motorcycles, visiting firemen from Iowa.
8.
THE ARAB GIRL GOES OUT WITH ME, I INVITE HER TO see and hear a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in old St.-Germain-des-Prés church, which I knew about from an earlier visit and saw the poster announcing it. It’s full of people, crowded, we pay at the door and walk into surely the most distingué gathering in Paris that night, and as I say it’s misting outside, and her soft little hook nose has under it rose lips.
