A
week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My
Brother, the so-called “lost” novel
by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his days in the merchant
marine.
I’ve
been told by people who have dipped further into the Kerouac mystique than I
have, that while “good” Kerouac is great, “bad” Kerouac is pretty terrible. For
evidence, I was invited to read Visions
of Cody or Big Sur —each of which
reportedly indulges in drug-induced poetry binges for hundreds of pages. I have
not read them, and probably never will. But having loved On the Road so much, I was
intrigued to find out just how an early
Kerouac might read.
Turns
out it’s pretty uneven. There are small flashes of the style that would evolve
in later years, but he spends way too much time cataloguing how many beers each
of the characters consume at a sitting, or letting one of them wax
philosophical about life and literature in a way that is pretty obviously a
soapbox for the author rather than believable dialogue. Oh, and every tenth
sentence ends with an all-too-enthusiastic “, by George!” Not only that, but
the story is pretty unbelievable (a college professor is granted a sabbatical
to ship out to sea in the middle of the war with about 15 minutes’ notice) and
there are lots of little mistakes (a character smokes his last cigarette and
then produces another a minute later.)
Even
the larger narrative feels unbalanced. With a title like The Sea is My Brother , you’d expect the characters to put out to
sea, right? Well, it finally happens seven eighths of the way through the book.
The rest of it is just a poor man’s On
the Road , a hitchhiking debauch from Manhatten to Boston, where the
characters are flat broke, but always magically coming up with food, liquor, cigarettes and costly
government documents out of thin air. And while the principals do manage to
move from point A to point B, it’s really more of a loose sketch than a fully
developed novel. In all honesty, I kinda wish I had this one back. I’ll bet
Kerouac does, too.
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