Jack Kerouac’s The Haunted Life at the Merrimack
Repertory Theatre
Peter Anastas
“But we haven’t lived. We have only thought.”
--Jack Kerouac, The Haunted Life
Lowell, MA—A singular event in
Beat history is taking place in Jack Kerouac’s home town.
The Merrimack Repertory Theatre has, since March 20, been
staging to great acclaim a dramatization of Kerouac’s long lost novel, The Haunted Life. The production will run until April 14,
2019.
Written by Sean Daniels, the company’s outgoing artistic director,
and co-directed by Daniels and christopher oscar pena [sic], the play is based
on Kerouac’s second novel, believed by Kerouac to have been lost in a New York
taxi cab shortly after it was written, in 1944.
As it turns out, Kerouac actually left his only copy of the hand-written
manuscript in the closet of Allen Ginsberg’s dormitory room at Columbia. Discovered later, and held in private hands
until 2002, the manuscript re-surfaced in a Sotheby’s auction catalogue in New
York, where it eventually sold to an unnamed buyer for $95,600, according to U-Mass
Lowell English professor Tod Tietchen, who edited the novel for publication in
the US by Da Capo Press, in 2014.
The novel, as published, is a nearly 100 page integral
text, meant by Kerouac to be the first section of a longer novel that was never
completed. Instead, Kerouac went on to write his first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), in which the story of the Martin
family, begun in The Haunted Life and
based on Kerouac’s own French Canadian family, is given fuller treatment.
What is so important about The Haunted Life for an understanding of Kerouac’s oeuvre, is that in this early manuscript
nearly all of the major themes of the work to come are present—the yearning to
move, to travel, to be on the road; the tension between Kerouac’s attachment to
his family and home town and his desire to free himself from both; and his
desire for important intimacy in conflict with his need to set all
entanglements aside in order to write. There is also Kerouac’s incredible sense of
place: the Lowell streets on summer nights, talk from neighborhood porches,
trees shaking in soft breezes, and the silence followed by the thunk of bat on
ball from nearby ballgames.
The novel—and the play—focus on Peter Martin, Kerouac’s
stand-in, and his family. Peter is home
for the summer after his first year at Boston College, where he has
matriculated with the help of a track scholarship. Peter reads Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan,
and the proletarian novelist Albert Halper.
He reconnects with his high school love Eleanor; and he and his best
friend Garabed, based on Kerouac’s friend Sebastian Sampas, talk about the
books they will write and the travels they will embark upon around the world. What neither of them know, as they walk the
streets of Lowell until dawn, is that Garabed will eventually be killed in
action on the beach at Anzio in the Second World War. It is a loss that Kerouac will never fully
recover from.
Peter is compelled to listen to his father, a Trump-like
figure and owner of a failing print shop, who attacks the immigrants who’ve come
to Lowell as degenerates that are destroying the city. The father’s virulent racism, as war rages in
Europe and will soon involve America, increases Peter’s sense of feeling
haunted. He is haunted by the books he
wants to write, the places he hopes to visit, the sex he yearns to experience, and
the call of big cities like New York.
What haunts him equally is the possibility of joining the Merchant
Marines, which he and Garabed talk excitedly about, along with the war itself,
which his friend Dick Sheffield urges Peter to participate in by enlisting in
the army (Peter will later be haunted by Sheffield’s death).
As Peter
recollects:
“This
was the last of his magnificent summers… Something grave and perhaps terrible
was impending, the war maybe, or some violent change in the structure of his
[Lowell] world.”
The novel leaves Peter with his personal issues and the
pressures on him unresolved. What writer
and co-director Daniels have been able to achieve by the use of Kerouac’s
writings about his novel-in-progress, including an existing outline for its
completion and correspondence made available by the Sampas family of Lowell, is
a play that transforms an intimate yet incomplete novel into a vibrant play. Daniels has also been able skillfully to incorporate
Kerouac’s lyrical descriptions of life in pre-war in Lowell, along with much of
the narrative itself into the dialogue of the play and the directly spoken
thoughts of the characters that connect the viewer with the time and place of
the drama:
“Soon
it would be summertime dusk. Voices
below rose softly in the air. A tender shroud was being lowered on his life.
With the darkness and the smell and feel of it would come the sounds of the
suburban American summer’s night—the tinkle of soft drinks, the squeaking of
hammocks, the screened-in voices on dark porches, the radio’s staccato
enthusiasm, a dog barking, a boy’s special nighttime cry, and the cool swishing
sound of the trees: a music sweeter than anything else in the world.”
Daniels’
The Haunted Life is staged in two
acts. The setting consists of a backdrop of windows that appear to represent
the windows of the tenements Kerouac grew up in, or the mills and factories of Lowell, which Kerouac himself
described as “eyes” looking out on the world and through which the workers of
Lowell peered daily.
In keeping with the MRT’s reputation for world-class
theatre, each of the actors has worked regionally as well as nationally, and
many internationally. Their resumes,
described in the play’s attractive program, are impressive.
Peter
Martin is played by Raviv Ullman, who not only looks like the young Kerouac but
speaks as he must have. Joel Colodner plays Peter’s father Joe, gruff
and opinionated but with a tender side.
Peter’s long-suffering mother is portrayed by Tina Fabrique. Vichet Chum is precisely how one might imagine
Garabed to be while reading the novel; and Caroline Neff is an ideal Eleanor,
who loves Peter but learns to protect herself from his conflicted and wandering
spirit.
Kerouac
is in good company at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. Founded in 1969, this versatile company has
mounted prize winning productions of Waiting
for Godot, Hamlet, Harold Pinter’s Homecoming,
Marsha Norman’s ‘Night Mother,
canonical plays by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, and a host of exciting plays by new
writers.
In recent years, the theatre has held a staged reading of
Kerouac’s only play, The Beat Generation,
the script of which was discovered in a New Jersey warehouse, in 2005, and a full production of Kerouac’s
bittersweet Lowell novel, Maggie Cassidy.
But all the stops were pulled out for the MRT’s stunning
production of The Haunted Life, created
in collaboration with Jim Sampas and the Estate of Jack Kerouac. One
came away from the play with a sense that Kerouac had been given both the
attention and the respect due him and his work by his hometown. You could enjoy the play without ever having
read a word of Kerouac. This would not
prevent you from feeling in awe of the writer’s early struggles to become one
of America’s most original novelists, in the face of family strife, impending
war, and the attractions of the new bohemia emerging in New York and San
Francisco. If you had read Kerouac and
knew him through his books and the numerous biographies that tell his story, you
would emerge from the play with an
even deeper understanding of how seriously Kerouac lived his writerly
vocation. The seeds of everything Jack
Kerouac would become may be found in both the novel and the play. But in the play we participate in ways
that only a beautifully made and staged drama can make us see and feel what the
words on the page open us to: the pathos of a major writer’s life.
(This review appears in the
Spring 2019 issue of Beat Scene, UK)
