Windblown World The Journals Of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

SECTION I The Town and the City The Town and the CityWorklogs These meticulous logs of Kerouac's progress on his first novel, The Town and the City, filled most of two journals, running from June 1947 to September 1948, when Kerouac completed the manuscript. They begin with Kerouac's summer ?mood log.' In November 1947, he begins his ?winter writing log,? which catalogues his progress on The Town and the City. Other than a brief portion written in North Carolina, this was all written in New York while Kerouac was living with his mother in the small walk-up apartment above a drugstore at 94-10 Cross Bay Boulevard in the nondescript working-class town of Ozone Park, Queens. Leo Kerouac died in the same apartment in 1946. It had two small bedrooms, a kitchen in which Kerouac wrote each night, and a sitting room with a piano. The first journal itself measures about 7H by 8H inches. The cover has ?1947?1948? written at the top, with ?NOTES? in bubble lettering below it and ?JOURNALS? below that. In the bottom right is: John Kerouac 1947 N.Y. June?December The second journal these logs were pulled from, like the previous one, measures about 7H by 8H inches. On the cover ?FURTHER NOTES? is written in block lettering, and below it is written ?Well, this is the Forest of Arden.' In the bottom-right corner is the following: J Kerouac 1947?48 N.Y.C. JUNE 16?47? Just made one of those great grim decisions of one's life'not to present my manuscript of ?T & C?* to any publisher until I've completed it, all 380,000-odd words of it. This means seven months of ascetic gloom and labor'although doubt is no longer my devil, just sadness now. I think I will get this immense work done much sooner this way, to face up to it and finish it. Past two years has been work done in a preliminary mood, a mood of beginning and not completing. To complete anything is a horror, an insult to life, but the work of life needs to get done, and art is work'what work!! I've read my manuscript for the first time and I find it a veritable Niagara of a novel. This pleases me and moves me, but it's sorrowful to know that this is not the age for such art. This is an excluding age in art'the leaver-outer [F. Scott] Fitzgeralds prevail in the public imagination over the putter-inner [Thomas] Wolfes. But so what. All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on. But enough of this. The next seven(TEEN) months are joyless to view'but there is as much joy in these things, there is more joy, than in flitting around as I've done since early May, when I completed a 100,000-word section (Mood Log). I might as well learn now what it is to see things as they are'and the truth is, nobody cares how I fare in these writings. So I must fare in the grimmest, most efficient way there is, alone, unbidden, diligently again, always. The future has a glorious woman for me, and my own children, I'm certain of that?I must come up to them and meet them a man with things accomplished. I don't care to be one of those frustrated fathers. Behind me there must be some stupendous deed done'this is the way to marry, the way to prepare for greater deeds and work. So then?10-DAY MOOD LOG, JUNE 16? 26 ?47JUNE 15 (SUNDAY)?I find it almost impossible to get underway again: my mind seems blank and disinterested in these fictions. I give up after 500-words of a preliminary nature. MONDAY 16?Feeling just as hopeless'feeling that I may not, after all, be able to complete anything. But I write 2000-words pertaining to the chapter, and things begin to break, or crumble & seethe. TUESDAY 17?Reluctance! Reluctance always! We hate original work, we human beings. Wrote 1800-words pertaining. I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's myBrinkley, Douglas is the author of 'Windblown World The Journals Of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954', published 2004 under ISBN 9780670033416 and ISBN 0670033413.