The Sea is My Brother
The Lost Novel
-
- £4.99
-
- £4.99
Publisher Description
Described by Kerouac as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies", the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac's first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were "the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes". The novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said "loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down."
Jack began this work not long after his first tour as a Merchant Marine on the S.S. Dorchester in the late summer of 1942 during which he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea. Inspired by the trip, which exemplified Jack's love for adventure and the character traits of his fellow shipmates, the journals were spontaneous sketches of those experiences that were woven into a short novel soon after disembarking from the S.S. Dorchester in October of 1942.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unpublished in North America for nearly 70 years, Kerouac's first novel, written when he was 21, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the themes and characters that were to become his obsessions. During WWII, Wesley Martin, an itinerant merchant seaman on leave, stumbles around New York, from jazz clubs to the bars near Columbia University, where he meets Everhart, a young assistant professor "with the pasty pallor of a teacher of life." Over a drunken night, Everhart and his circle of hangers-on fall under the spell of Wesley's "brooding presence," after which Everhart takes leave from teaching and enlists with Wesley on his next sea voyage. In an exhilarating sequence that anticipates Kerouac's best remembered works, Wesley and Everhart bum their way to Boston to join the crew of a freighter bound for Greenland. The most interesting aspect of this work is how, amid the rough-hewn dialogue and formative instinct for motivation, Kerouac's rhapsodizing about the open road appears as an aspect of his talent fully formed. This section contains some of his first distinctive sentences: "Everhart couldn't sleep for an hour. He lay on his back and watched the richly clustered stars high above. A cricket chirped not three feet away. The grass was damp, though he could feel its substratum of sunfed warmth." Unfortunately, after this peak, the young Kerouac couldn't enliven the confined space of the S.S. Westminster. After this work, the motivations of his beat heroes would be more confidently elliptical. It would be another seven years before Kerouac's official debut, The Town and the City, and more than a decade until On the Road. While it may not be the Rosetta Stone of the beat movement, the publication of this flawed manuscript will be an event for his admirers.
