105 KEROUAC, Jack. Autograph letter to Norma Blickfelt. Lowell, Massachusetts: 15 July 1942 “WHAT A STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL LIFE THIS IS . . . AS WEIRD AND LOVELY AS THE VERY SEA” An excellent early love letter, lengthy and self- consciously literary, in which Kerouac portrays himself as a Jack London-like itinerant writer, who goes “quietly, with my plans, and commit[s] nothing, and expect[s] nothing, but love[s] everything”. He and Blickfelt had met in Manhattan when he was 18 and she 16. They had dated briefly in April 1940, and Kerouac maintained a correspondence with her, despite maintaining that he “wasn’t in love with any girl” (Maher, p. 109). Kerouac’s letter, written in a booklet form that gives it the feel of a self-consciously literary object, narrates his days as a “listening and smoking” wanderer, “drowsing on a New Orleans river wharf, yawning, slapping off the flies, humming the blues”, whose “ancients, Breton fishermen, stir in my blood” and urge him to shrug off “dull, prosaic living” in favour of the brotherhood to be found at sea: “to know them, and for them to know myself . . . . An elusive thing, I speak of now, but I know it is there. I want to return to college with a feeling that I am a brother of the earth, to know that I am not snug and smug in my little universe.” There are early shadows of his first unrealized first novel, The Sea is My Brother , and an awareness of his own commercial potential: “And I want to write and write and write about the Merchant Marine – the young men in its unsung service, youths with death in their eyes; irresponsible rogues who fear nothing, spend lavishly, and feed on Fate – As you know, these stories I could write may be in demand. I am on very good terms with Esquire – I believe they would be interested in such subject matter.” He references authors he is reading (Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, Thomas Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson); describes his dream library (“a huge collection including the Encyclopedia Britannica ; classical records and Le Jazz Hot , from “Tristan und Isolde” to Art Tatum”); talks of taking part in the Second World War (“I wish to take part in the war, not because I want to kill anyone, but for a reason directly opposed to killing – the Brotherhood”); and his confidence in himself as a writer (“If I don’t come back soon, apparently I wasn’t destined to become a great writer. That is why I think I shall come back”).
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SPRING 2022
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