Inspired by John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and
the lyrical prose of Thomas Wolfe, author of Look
Homeward, Angel (1929), jack kerouac wrote
what would be his first published novel from 1946
to 1949 to tell everything he knew about life up
to that point. Perhaps that is why the manuscript
ran to more than 1,000 pages. The edition published by Harcourt, Brace cut more than half of it.
Though not part of “The Duluoz Legend” proper,
the fictionalized autobiography of Kerouac’s life,
The Town and the City, can be read as Ur-text that
reveals many of the themes to which Kerouac
would return in his later novels when he broke
from Wolfe’s influence and found his own voice.
The novel introduces the Martin family, who
live in Galloway, Massachusetts, and who are
closely modeled on Kerouac’s own family in Lowell,
Massachusetts. Presumably to expand the book’s
scope and also to hide the autobiographical basis
of the book, Kerouac made the Martins a large
family—Mickey, Charley, Elizabeth, Peter, Julian,
Francis, Joe, Ruth, and Rose. Each of these characters receives careful development in the novel.
Kerouac emphasizes that although they are a close
family, each is an individual, and each has a secret
life separate from the rest of the family.
Francis is portrayed as a sickly youth whose
twin brother Julian dies. Peter’s reaction to Julian’s
death can be seen as parallel to Kerouac’s feelings of his brother’s death as depicted in visions
of Gerard. Francis, says Kerouac, was modeled
slightly on william s. burroughs and is portrayed as bookish and cold natured. But there are
other sources for Francis’s personality: Kerouac has
the 16-year-old Francis play out his own broken
love affair with beautiful, dark-haired Mary, who
is based on Mary Carney about and whom he later
wrote in maGGie cassidy.
Peter is the character who most closely resembles Kerouac, and the novel recounts Peter’s rise
as a high school football star, ending in his scoring the only touchdown in the Thanksgiving Day
game. Peter realizes that his own victories are the
loss of someone else’s (he resembles a Boddhisattva, Buddhist holy man, already). After the victory,
he wishes that he were anonymous again and feels
as if he has betrayed his friends by making them
praise him.
The oldest brother Joe can be seen as an early
version of the neal cassady characters in on tHe
road and visions of cody: He has the same cowboy image and passion for cross-country driving.
In this respect he personifies the spirit of uprootedness and dislocation that many Beat writers say
was the major note of their times.
In real life, Kerouac had only two siblings, and
by expanding the Martin children to nine members, Kerouac has in many ways created the additional characters from his own experiences at
different stages in his life. Thus, the Martin children are a kind of exploded version of Kerouac. For
example, the oldest brother Joe quits a good trucking job on a whim and ends up working as a grease
monkey in the lube pits, as did Kerouac after he
walked away from his football career at Columbia.
The youngest boy, Mickey, precociously prints his
own newspaper and handicaps horse races, as Kerouac did as a youth.
Francis, on the other hand, comes more and
more to resemble Burroughs. He meets Wilfred Engels, whose European sophistication masks his homosexuality. He shows Francis that there are others
like him in Boston and New York. That same summer, Peter spends his time before he enters Pine
Hall (Kerouac’s version of the prep school Horace
Mann) imagining all of his future glories. These
scenes are recreated in The vanity of duluoz
and emphasize his self-delusion. At Pine Hall,
Peter initially fears that he will not be able to live
up to his promise, but he later understands that all
the freshmen felt the same fear that he did. This
leads him to the conclusion that the world “was so
much more beautiful and amazing because it was
so really, strangely, sad.”
In the summer after his first year at Pine Hall,
Peter meets the most important friend of his youth,
Alex Panos (based on Sebastian “Sammy” Sampas), who teaches him how to be interested in
literature and how to be kind to others. Panos’s
old mother treats Peter like a son, almost as if she
realizes that someday her family will play the role
for Peter that the Sampas’s did for Kerouac. Stella
Sampas, Sammy’s sister, would be Kerouac’s third
wife. The Sampas family are presently Kerouac’s
literary executors.
Peter attends Penn for his sophomore year
and plays football; however, he breaks his leg in
the game against Columbia. The injury allows him
time for deep thought and study, which parallels
Kerouac’s own injury and his embrace of the life of
the artist. By Christmas Peter realizes that he can
learn more by studying the city and its people than
he can learn at the university. Back home, Peter
and Francis have arguments about philosophy, and
their differences are remarkably similar to arguments that Kerouac and Burroughs carried through
their correspondence of the 1940s.
George Martin loses his printing business, and
the family’s closeness is tested. This novel suggests that Kerouac had something that many of the
other Beat writers did not—a real home that he
loved and a close family. Readers can see why Kerouac’s girlfriend joyce johnson called this book
Kerouac’s “sweetest” one.
Wartime America becomes the setting, and
Kerouac shows the effect of the war on his generation of Americans and, more specifically, its
effect on the Martin family and the town of Galloway. An overlooked feature of the book is Liz’s
story. Through her, Kerouac shows the story of
the women of this generation, too. Liz falls in love
with a jazz pianist, Buddy. A notable scene shows
her entering a roadhouse by herself for the first
time in her life. Liz and Buddy develop a serious
relationship, and when she becomes pregnant,
they elope. Peter helps her in her getaway. George
Martin is devastated by Liz’s elopement and
blames himself for having lost his business and uprooted the family.
Peter, the football hero, must now shoulder the
family’s hopes for success in the world. However,
he rejects the university and its professors for “the
world itself.” When his father finds out that he has
quit football and school, he despairs for Peter, who
does not know the pain that he will cause himself
by changing his future. Peter can see no future because of the looming war. When the Japanese bomb
Pearl Harbor, George Martin is furious that his sons
will be sacrificed. Joe is the first of the Martins to
enlist. Kerouac uses Joe’s experiences to illustrate
the “great wartime wanderings of Americans” and
the sense of displacement that affected his generation to the point of actual derangement: “No one
could see it, yet everyone was . . . grown fantastic
and homeless in war, and strangely haunted.”
Liz and Buddy move to Grosse Point Park in
Detroit, and their married life is a version of Kerouac and his first wife Edie Parker’s life in Detroit.
Liz’s miscarriage parallels Kerouac and Edie’s inability to have children, which is described in The
Vanity of Duluoz. Seeing the younger boys of Galloway going off to fight, Peter joins the merchant
marines out of shame. His voyage to Greenland
is based on Kerouac’s Dorchester voyage in 1941.
When he returns, he learns that his girlfriend Judie
(based on Edie Parker) is living in an apartment in
New York.
Francis joins the navy, and his experiences are
based on Kerouac’s failure to pass the mechanical
aptitude test for training as a naval officer. Forced
to go through boot camp with the enlisted men,
Francis finds that he is incapable of submitting
to military discipline. As was true of Kerouac, he
is sent to the asylum and eventually is discharged
from the navy.
The Martins move to Brooklyn, where George
has found a printing job. George Martin is lost in
the huge city, and the remainder of his life is spent
trying to comprehend how he has arrived there.
He is also concerned about Peter’s friends, who
are based on Burroughs, allen ginsberg, herbert huncke, Lucien Carr, Dave Kammerer, Joan
Burroughs, and Phil White. Peter arrives back in
New York after a trip to Guam and is eager to start
a “new season.” Kerouac describes in detail the
Times Square scene of 1943–44. The central orchestrator of his group of friends is the poet Leon
Levinsky (based on Ginsberg), who reminds Peter
of Alexander Panos. Kenneth Wood and Waldo
Meister (based on Lucien Carr and Dave Kammerer respectively) are the main topic of conversation. Wood enjoys making fun of Meister, who has
lost an arm in a car accident in which Wood himself was the driver. In spite of this, Meister finds
himself irresistibly drawn to his torturer Wood. Although Burroughs liked the detail of Meister’s lost
arm, the preposterous set-up here is a clear coverup of the true story of the homosexual Kammerer’s
obsession with the beautiful Carr.
The portrait of his group of criminals and bohemians mirrors W. H. Auden’s view that this generation was living in the “age of anxiety.” Mary
Dennison (portrayed as Will Dennison’s sister but
based on Joan Vollmer Burroughs) popularizes the
theory that their neurotic feelings and actions stem
from “the atomic disease, everyone’s radioactive.”
Judie dislikes this crowd: “All they can do is talk
about books.” The description of Peter and Judie’s
relationship is Kerouac’s lengthiest portrait of the
wife of his youth, Edie Parker. Judie’s apartment is
often burst into by the crowd. She particularly dislikes the effeminate poet Levinsky and Waldo Meister. Peter has a dream in this apartment one night
that Kerouac later told Neal Cassady represented
his fear of becoming a homosexual. Heterosexuality and masculinity are represented in the dream by
Joe, Charley, and George Martin. Kerouac told Cassady that he secretly modeled Joe on Cassady.
Peter divides his time between Judie’s Manhattan apartment and his parent’s apartment in
Brooklyn. En route to Brooklyn, he stops off at
Dennison’s apartment and watches him shoot
morphine. The scene includes snapshot portraits
of Herbert Huncke (portrayed as Junkey) that
Huncke resented. At home, Peter’s father lectures
him about the moral relativism that is practiced by
his generation. The subtext of this lecture is that
he does not like his son running around with homosexuals, and George even appears to have read
Gore Vidal’s sensational gay novel The Pillar and
the City (1948). Much of the last part of the book
is about George’s frustrated attempts to tell his son
what he knows about life to save him from suffering unnecessarily. When Waldo Meister commits
suicide (Kerouac displaces Carr’s stabbing of Kammerer) and Peter is brought in for police questioning, his father’s warning appears justified. Then
there is news of a second death—Alex Panos has
been killed in the war.
The final part of the book begins with the arrival in New York of the troopships carrying the
returning soldiers who had survived World War II.
Peter is living with his mother and father, who is
ill, and his sister Liz is living elsewhere in the city.
Liz’s character is of particular interest here, for it
is through her that Peter learns the new language
of the hipster. She shows him her most cherished
picture of him, from 1941, in which, she says, he
looks as if life has slapped him in the face. Liz’s philosophy here is an early expression of Beat, a term
is even used near the end of the novel. Her character is at least partly based on Kerouac’s friend
Vicki Russell, who appaers in On the Road, john
clellon holmes’s Go, and is sketched in Herbert
Huncke’s books. She represents the women of the
Beat Generation.
The final section also follows Francis, who
resembles Burroughs in his interest in “Orgone
Theory” and Jean Genet. Still, Francis leaves the
Greenwich Village crowd and moves to the East
Side, where he is more comfortable in the world of
intellectuals. He has an affair with a married woman
who is heavily into Benzedrine use. Their dialogue
is farcical and is acidly exposed by Kerouac.
Peter watches his father die slowly and painfully. At last, he begins to absorb the life lessons
that his father has tried to teach him. These lessons echo throughout Kerouac’s later works.
George Martin is buried in New Hampshire, and
the funeral sets up a meeting between the two
brothers who are so at odds philosophically—Peter
and Francis. Joe is also present. Peter finds himself playing the role of George Martin, getting the
brothers to talk in the open about themselves and
their lives. Something of the debate between Burroughs and Kerouac is replayed here, with Peter
quoting from the Bible and showing a deep understanding of Christ’s sermons of compassion and
Francis studying him coldly as if he were an interesting psychiatric case. The confrontation relaxes
all three brothers, though, and they are once again
able to fall into a natural family relationship with
each other.
The novel ends with Peter hitchhiking across
the country, a scene that anticipates On the Road.
In fact, Kerouac writes that Peter was “on the road
again.” Thus, the final pages of this novel set up
Kerouac’s next novel, published seven years later.
Though The Town and the City received some critical praise, it did not sell well. When On the Road
was published, The Town and the City had been virtually forgotten.
Bibliography
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco:
Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Rob Johnson