Twenty years ago this month, selections of Jack Kerouac’s early work appeared in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Viking/Penguin), which I had the great good fortune to edit.
Kerouac loved the month of October, which shows up in his prose and poetry including On the Road, where he writes: “In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”
The mighty month of October is fall, football, Halloween ghosts, New England’s red and yellow leaves, remembrance of summer joy and wistful thoughts of coming winter.
October is the annual Kerouac literary festival in his hometown, Lowell.
The excerpt below is from one of his poems written in 1941. He was nineteen years old.
from “Old Love-Light”
I thought the lonely little
houses, lost in the middle
of great tawny grass,
shaggy copper skies and
mottled orange forests, were
full of humanity that
I was missing. Instead, the
writer informed me that
it was chlorophyll that
colored the leaves. I
thought I had all the
significance of October
under my hat & pasted.
I thought that October
was a tangible being,
with a voice. The
writer insisted it was
the growth of corky cells
around the stem of the
leaf. The writer also
said that to consider
October sad is to be
a melancholy Tennysonian.
October is not sad, he
said. October is falling
leaves. October comes
between Sept. and Nov. I
was amazed by these facts,
especially about the
Tennysonian melancholia. I
always thought October was
a kind old Love-light.
—Jack Kerouac (1941)