The Haunted Life is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s.
Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac’s work and his father’s correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the material shines a light on it.
As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge – later dropped – and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War II, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.
“Someday, we’ll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California,” says his friend, 19-year-old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.
The Haunted Life is a young man’s story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.
Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters’ thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than “say” the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off: “Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river’s moist gust of breeze . . . The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings.”
Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It’s the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.
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