'The Haunted Life: And Other Writings,' by Jack Kerouac

The Haunted: And Other Writings, by Jack Kerouac The Haunted: And Other Writings, by Jack Kerouac Photo: Da Capo Press Photo: Da Capo Press Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'The Haunted Life: And Other Writings,' by Jack Kerouac 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The Haunted Life And Other Writings

By Jack Kerouac; edited by Todd Tietchen

(Da Capo; 193 pages; $24.99)

Over the past 15 years, we've seen an assortment of new books by Jack Kerouac, pulled from the vast unpublished archive he left at his death in 1969. Most have added little to Kerouac's reputation as a writer; some, like his first try at novel writing, "The Sea Is My Brother," would best have been left unpublished. By contrast, "The Haunted Life" will probably take an important place in the Kerouac canon, but more for what it has to say about Kerouac himself than for the writing.

"The Haunted Life" is billed as a "lost novella-length manuscript" - whose reappearance now is never clearly explained in Todd Tietchen's introduction - supposedly "based on the author's recently departed friend Sebastian Sampas."

The truth is, I could find no similarity between Sampas and the main character, Peter Martin, besides the fact that both Sampas and Martin went to college in Boston. In fact, the Peter Martin in "The Haunted Life" is the very same Peter Martin in Kerouac's first published novel "The Town and the City," and Peter Martin in both books is unequivocally based on Kerouac himself.

Like Kerouac, Martin is a young, poor French Canadian writer who has gotten to college on an athletic scholarship, with a penchant for alcohol, bebop, pretty women and wild times, torn between pleasing his hard-working Catholic parents and breaking through to a Rimbaud-like "new vision." What this novella comprises, in actuality, is several early draft chapters that were not incorporated in the published version of "The Town and the City," which by Kerouac's account was far shorter than the manuscript he delivered to Harcourt Brace.

But once one gets past this book's strange mis-billing, unbelievable riches open up to the reader. For one thing, by the time "The Town and the City" was published in 1950, about six years after the material in "The Haunted Life" was drafted, Kerouac had done a fair amount of work to disguise Peter Martin's similarity to himself.

The Peter Martin in "The Haunted Life" is a lot rawer, and more honest, photograph of the real Kerouac. It is autobiography from a period when we have precious little biographical material about him, the period before he had perfected the persona of the devil-may-care, Jack London-ish, vagabond Beat novelist.

What we learn, for example, is that the young Martin (Kerouac) cares almost too much about everything, and is torn almost to the point of schizophrenia by a welter of conflicting passions and beliefs.

I began listing the dichotomies in Martin as they appeared in the story, and before long the list had taken up too many pages to continue. There are dichotomies between the adventurer and the mama's boy, between the idealist who loves beauty and poetry and the cynic who sees human ignorance and greed everywhere, between the Canuck peasants who are his family and the French aristocrats he imagines himself descended from, between his avid pursuit of madness and almost a scholar's love of coherence and reason, between the child in him he would never surrender and the manliness he desperately sought through athletics and conquest, and too many more to recount here.

But the most interesting ambivalent and conflicted feelings that manifest in "The Haunted Life" - thanks in good part to the supplemental material provided by Tietchen in the form of correspondence, diary entries and the like - are those of Kerouac toward his father Leo.

The accepted view is that Jack scorned his old man as a fat buffoon, a bigoted, working-class slob who blew the family's food and rent money at the racetrack and lost his printing business through his own weakness and feckless lifestyle - and that Jack's rush to join the bohemian underground in Greenwich Village was hastened by a desperate desire to escape the horror of his father's life. What we find, on the contrary, in "The Haunted Life," in both the novella and the diaries and letters, is that Kerouac had an unabashed love and almost childlike awe for a father he saw as superhuman, a father he could never live up to.

Describing Peter's (and his own) father's burial in his hometown of Lacoshua (Nashua), N.H., in one of the most eloquent passages Kerouac ever penned, he writes: "here is his father's realization of an ambition, back home again and at last with his kind and kin and in his true land ... and it seems suddenly to Peter as he stands before the coffin weeping, that all of the richness to which his father's longing soul had been dedicated, an American richness, now returned ... a richness of longing - that in the life of such a man, despair is cast aside because the heart wishes to love and to long for life."

The real surprise in "The Haunted Life" is not the discovery of a lost manuscript, but of how much - after hundreds of books, dozens of movies, an infinity of articles and learned opinions - we still have to learn about the man and writer Jack Kerouac.