The Sea is My Brother

January 30, 2012
Unpublished in North America for nearly 70 years, Kerouac’s first novel, written when he was 21, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the themes and characters that were to become his obsessions. During WWII, Wesley Martin, an itinerant merchant seaman on leave, stumbles around New York, from jazz clubs to the bars near Columbia University, where he meets Everhart, a young assistant professor “with the pasty pallor of a teacher of life.” Over a drunken night, Everhart and his circle of hangers-on fall under the spell of Wesley’s “brooding presence,” after which Everhart takes leave from teaching and enlists with Wesley on his next sea voyage. In an exhilarating sequence that anticipates Kerouac’s best remembered works, Wesley and Everhart bum their way to Boston to join the crew of a freighter bound for Greenland. The most interesting aspect of this work is how, amid the rough-hewn dialogue and formative instinct for motivation, Kerouac’s rhapsodizing about the open road appears as an aspect of his talent fully formed. This section contains some of his first distinctive sentences: “Everhart couldn’t sleep for an hour. He lay on his back and watched the richly clustered stars high above. A cricket chirped not three feet away. The grass was damp, though he could feel its substratum of sunfed warmth.” Unfortunately, after this peak, the young Kerouac couldn’t enliven the confined space of the S.S. Westminster. After this work, the motivations of his beat heroes would be more confidently elliptical. It would be another seven years before Kerouac’s official debut, The Town and the City, and more than a decade until On the Road. While it may not be the Rosetta Stone of the beat movement, the publication of this flawed manuscript will be an event for his admirers.

February 1, 2012
A forgotten novel--forgotten, by its author, for a reason--by Beat Generation icon Kerouac. Years before taking to the highway, Kerouac tried his hand at a Jack London-esque yarn. He had all the material he needed out on the open ocean, where he served a short hitch in the Merchant Marine during a dangerous time of prowling wolf packs of Nazi submarines--and it's a sobering thought to realize that Kerouac first tried his hand at a novel fully 70 years ago, back on dry land. The result is a work that, well, reads in many ways as if written 70 years ago ("It was there he'd met that cute little colored girl who belonged to the Young Communists League"). The story concerns a young man, "just above average height, thin, with a hollow countenance notable for its prominence of chin and upper lip muscles, and expressive mouth...and a pair of level, sympathetic eyes"--a young man, that is, very much like the 20-year-old Kerouac--who finds himself on shore leave in New York, and there gets himself in all sorts of whiskey-soaked mischief. Though Kerouac myth has it that he sprang fully formed, like Athena, from America's brow with On the Road, this antedates his masterwork by a full decade, and it shows every sign of being a first book (as when, early on, Kerouac has difficulty deciding whether the narrative is to be in the past or the present tense, mixing both). But the centerpiece of the story is a friendship, sometimes bordering on homoerotic, between two young men in a time of war and social stress, which, of course, would remain Kerouac's grand theme for many books to follow. Not much happens in the book, which, for all its awkwardness, has promising moments. However, readers expecting the exuberance and poetry of the later Kerouac will come away unsatisfied. Of interest primarily to scholars and diehard Kerouackers; general readers ought to head to the far more memorable On the Road, The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2012
Kerouac's earliest stories were collected in Atop an Underwood (1999), but his first novel, written in 1943, when the future Beat icon was 21 and serving in the merchant marine, is just now being published. A work Kerouac never intended for publication, it is an illuminating prototype of the novels that made him a pivotal literary force. Readers will want to attack it with a red pencil, but, with patience, one sees Kerouac feeling his way toward his signature, rhapsodic style. The bare-bones story involves the booze-induced friendship between seaman Wesley Martin, a heartbreaking, rambling man, and Bill Everhart, a frustrated English professor at Columbia University (which Kerouac attended on a football scholarship). The two end up hitchhiking to Boston and shipping out to Greenland through torpedo-infested waters. As Kerouac writes poetically of sea and sky, he uses his mouthpiece characters to argue the merits of experience versus ideas, politics versus art, ambition versus compassion, and the place of life in literature and literature in life. Read this first effort to watch Kerouac learning the ropes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)