Jack Kerouac on this day: rugged sea brother?

 

 

On this day, 19 August, in 1942 Jack Kerouac, one of the world’s great rover-writers, stopped writing his voyage journal. He was en route to the US army base in Narsarsuaq, south Greenland. 

He’d only been keeping the journal for just 31 days, since 18 July, when he joined his first and only ship, which was delivering war supplies.

Did stopping writing that journal matter? Was it a  momentous moment for the writer of 'On the Road', a man who saw motility as a kind of freedom? 

Or was it significant for the martitime literary pantheon, like being deprived of Joseph Conrad's insights?

Who knows. Sometimes creativity flourishes in moments when writers DON'T make consistent linear records but instead explore responses - say to sea life - through poems, sketches and fragments instead. 

Jack Kerouac, aged 20 and already a prolific writer, certainly carried on noticing and reflecting all that was happening to him onboard US Merchant Marine freighter Dorchester, on which he stayed till October. 

Later he reworked the experience into a novel he didn't complete.Pengun published it only in 2011, as The Sea is My Brother; The Lost Novel. The compilation includes both extracts from the journal - unfortunatley not all - and the first 130 pages of  the novel 'Merchant Mariner'.

WHY?

Why was he sailing? Kerouac explained in his journal that he joined because ‘I need money for college, need adventure of a sort (the real adventure of rotting wharves and seagulls, winey water and ships, ports, cities, and faces & voices.’ (The Sea is My Brother,  p11) 

The usual reasons seafaring men of the time gave were sometimes consciously masculine: 'to make a man of myself, to master the oceans.' Most people wamted to see 'the world' and there was metaphyiscal yearning; 'the world was a metonym.' 

Some joined to escape un-nurturing homes, and to work somewhere glamorous. Early GBT+ men wanted to shift to a less homophobic milieu than on land. And in wartime many joined up to help the war effort.

Seafaring women are said to have sailed to follow their male sweethearts but this idea is not supported by any evidence I've ever seen. Women mainly chose to the career as a way to::

• escape domestic confinement including family care work and unsatisfactory marriages
• to slough off the feminine restraints imposed on them
• to get away from home without causing too many ructions: daughters were seen (by some naive parents) as safe if they were employees on a patrichal ship, rather than roaming free as Kerouac later did 
• to fund the travel that seemed impossible to achieve given women's lw earning power  

Unlike the new men who joined up, expereinced seawomen were urged to leave the sea and thier ships in wartime. 

RUGGED SEA DOG? 

What master of maritime motility, of hegemonic masculinity, do we find these uneven pages? Was Jack Kerouac a rugged sea dog? 

Hardly. He was employed as a scullion, an unkilled kitchen worker - possibly the most lowly and non-macho role on ships. The catering side of ships was regarded as an area where effeminate men worked, but in this volume we don't see this, or indeed same-sex relationships aboard. 

Not only was he doing 'women's work.' He was sailing with literary conscience:  this was regarded as deridably not masculine enough.  The bosun jeered at him for writing “ ’Truth brothers!’   … You doggone little pansy … with all your sissy books”.  and snarlingly sets him down to drudgery. It was, says Kerouac,  'a grim, dreary night for fratricide’ (The Sea, pp8-9) . And ships are indeed  chilling places that allow disliked people to be fatally jettisoned. 

He finds he is alienated from his once-longed-for brothers.. They ‘cannot understand me, and are thus enraged, bitter and full of hidden wonder.’ (The Sea, p6).

Was the SS Dorchester a macho space?  Of course. Ships were, although it was was far from being a warship. But there’s a stern captain (male, inevitably). And in the novel there’s an impressive gun. The crew pride themselves on eschewing namby-pamby boat drill and they enjoy public farting displays. It feels to me that Kerouac was writing as a boy, along with other boys manning a boy’s toy.

FROM SHIP TO LIT, OMITTING WAR 

Kerouac carried on at the sea, on the Dorchester (pictured) until the start of that October, 1942. Then he went back to Columbia University to do his literary studies, and play football.

 At Christmas (1942) he joined the US Navy Reserve, ready to serve in WW2 if necessary. The US had joined the war in Dec 1941, after Pearl Harbor. 

Kerouac had said he said he wanted to join the Reserve for the brotherhood with American and Russians: For their danger to be my danger; to speak to them quietly, perhaps at dawn, in Arctic mists; to know them, and for them to know myself.'  See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

But naval pychiatrists regarded his lack of desire to marry as dodgy. The Reserve may have wanted personnel but they didn't want queers - although many service personnel later had same-sex experience with each other. (See for example Allan Berube's Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two.)  Quickly the Reserve discharged him as unfit for service.

Kerouac never worked at sea after October 1942. Instead he went on to become a founder and 'reluctant icon' of the Beat Generation. See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

NEXT

I will be writing soon about the autobiographical (-ish) works some of the other seafarers including: 

• non-heterosexual US writers doing 'women's work' on ships, who were not necessarily, such as Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg
• heterosexual UK women who had a domestic role at sea and observed their male counterparts: Maida Nixson and Violet Jessop
• heterosexual stewards who got along with their GBT+ colleagues such as Ken Attiiwill and John J Mahon.