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Unpublished in North America for nearly 70 years, Kerouac’s first novel, written when he was 21, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the themes and characters that were to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.