Read Online Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online

was supposed to be endless, but it seemed to end where the sun came up, but I know better because I took Geography and I am 18 anyhow and so I knew and I thought about the solid ground and how we had thronged, the three of us, through the gorgeous woods to see the sunrise. On the way back, I paused to sit on a tree which hung out over the water and I looked into it and said, Lucidness. And when the sun filtered through some leaves Sam said, Chambers of beauty. We walked home and I picked flowers like a fool but I smelled the solidity of their odor so I picked them. Then we saw two women walking to church which was two miles away and I said, Fear.

[A Day in September]
    This story prefigures Kerouac’s 1942 novel The Vanity of Duluoz, with Richard Vesque standing in for Robert Duluoz. Lowell is cast as Galloway, the name Kerouac maintained for his hometown when he wrote The Town and the City from 1946 to 1949. Vesque reappears as a character in the later story “Famine for the Heart.” The name is right out of Kerouac’s deck of character-name cards. In 1950 he wrote to Franco-American poet Rosaire Dion-Lévesque of Nashua, New Hampshire: “I’m very glad and honored that you wish to write an article about me for La Patrie, especially as it will be written by a man whose name is the same as my mother’s maiden name and who comes from the town of my ancestors.”
    Vesque has William Saroyan’s short stories in his bedroom. Many of Saroyan’s early stories feature introspective but fired-up artistic characters and deal with city life and ethnic American families. In a winning letter written to Saroyan in 1942, Sebastian Sampas explained that he, Kerouac, and their friend Bill Chandler in 1939 had discovered Saroyan’s first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and asked Saroyan to write a note of encouragement to his admirer Kerouac: “God! If you could read his manuscripts to see the stuff he has got.”
    In the preface to The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, Saroyan offered rules for writers: (1) “Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make [...]”; (2) [...] “write the kind of stories you feel like writing. Forget everybody who ever wrote anything”; and (3) [...] “ Learn to typewrite so you can turn out stories as fast as Zane Grey.” He added: “Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat it, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. ”
    Writing in Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region, William Everson places Saroyan and Kerouac in the “school of naked experience,” an approach to writing that he links back to Jack London. Everson describes Saroyan as “a kind of precursor to the Beat Generation, advocating the ‘Go, go, go!’ philosophy. . . .”
    You would hardly expect a day in September to be colorless, humid, and depressing. On the other hand, you would expect a day filled with the happy tang of the fall, the keen bite of the leaf-blown winds, and people wearing the dapper autumn clothes of the brown and green, and feathered felt hats, and well-cut topcoats blowing and whipping around your body in the wind. But, reflected Richard Vesque, what a man expects in life never seems to be what he is rewarded with. You might say, he thought, that anticipation is what makes you feel happy. But if anticipation is always to remain below the actual standards of realization, how can a man be happy in such a world?
    And such was this day in September, a wet day with a long gray face. And, to make it worse, the wetness of this day was only a suggestion, a provoking dampness from yesterday’s rains; you might at least be assuaged by a neat downpour of rain, glistening