The reason I liked this book is not so much because of the novella-length manuscript itself, but for what it conveys about young Kerouac. And in addition to that, the Sketches (in Part II) are planning documents that elaborates on the themes and structure of the novel of which this manuscript was to be only the first part. And finally, the last section focuses on his father Leo and Jack's relationship with him, and includes several letters written by Leo. Contrary to what is often believed, Jack sincerely admired his father - and in Leo's letters it can even be possible to trace an early influence on Jack's literary style. In Kerouac's "Reflection on Leo" (1963), he writes: "..God, in giving me birth in this mess of messes called life, did at least let me issue from the loins of my father Leo Alcide Kerouac who was the only honest man I ever knew and the only completely honest expresser of what he thought about the world and the people in it."

The novel The Haunted Life was intended to be in three parts; the first, "Home", is what is included here. The other two, to be titled "War" and "Change" were never written. The original manuscript, which Kerouac thought to be lost, probably in a New York taxicab in 1944, resurfaced in 2002 – supposedly it had been found in the closet of a Columbia University dorm room. This book has been edited by Todd F. Tiechen, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and he has also written an insightful introduction. In addition to obvious influences such as Thomas Wolfe, Tiechen mentions another early influence: Dostoevsky – a point Kerouac stresses in his planning documents for The Town and the City. In The Haunted Life, Peter Martin, clearly based on Jack himself, describes the "elite group" in his bookshelf: "Thoreau, Homer, the Bible, Melville's Moby Dick, Ulysses, Thomas Wolfe, Shakespeare, Whitman, Faust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy."

It is no coincidence that his first published book was titled The Town and the City - in a note, "Some Town and City Conclusions" (1948), also included among the Sketches in this book, he writes: "A form of masochism, (or love of helplessness,) and something that resembles impetuosity of a sort seems to make the most conclusive evidence connected with what I have been calling "intellectual decadence." This, which occurs in modern City-Centers in America, along with the crowded, harried, unhealthy, brutal life of the City-Center in general (...) The masochism occurs in various forms but springs up from the same patterned depths, the same psychology, the same "character structure," or if not that Reichian term, at least, the same character dissolution. It concerns a real fall from manliness. I mean this in the most direct sense. And concurrently, in women, it concerns a real fall from womanliness, again in the most direct sense. It renders the man helpless in the real situations of real life, that is, a kind of primary life which is arbitrarily sluffed over by convenient City-forms that can’t and never will last. (...) Since the American idea is a will-idea above all things, the mere fact that helplessness and will-lessness enters into our City-Centers is a dangerous fact indicating a decline of character and just guts in a generation." – It is also no wonder that he kept returning to Lowell, Massachusetts in his writings.

If you are going to read The Town and the City, this book is the obvious place to start. And if not, I recommend it anyway.




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Interesting to read this incomplete manuscript which was purportedly left in Alan Ginsberg's dorm room and resurfaced in the last couple of years. The editor has provided background on where it fits into Kerouac's writing history. ( )