SATORI IN PARIS ANd PIC
OTHER WORKS BY JACK KEROUAC
Published by Grove Press
Dr. Sax
Lonesome Traveler
Mexico City Blues
The Subterraneans
SATORi iN PARiS AND PiC
TWO NOVELS BY
JACk KEROUAC
This edition copyright © 1985 by Grove Press, Inc.
Satori in Paris copyright © 1966 by Jack Kerouac Pic copyright © 1971 by the Estate of Jack Kerouac
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Satori in Paris was originally published in three installments in Evergreen Review Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.
Satori in Paris; and, Pic.
I. Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969. Pic. 1987.
II. Title. II. Title: Satori in Paris. IV. Title:
Pic.
PS3521.E735A6 1988 813′.54 87-27948
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9569-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
1.
SOMEWHERE DURING MY TEN DAYS IN PARIS (AND Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for “sudden illumination,” “sudden awakening” or simply “kick in the eye.”—Whatever, something did happen and in my first reveries after the trip and I’m back home regrouping all the confused rich events of those ten days, it seems the satori was handed to me by a taxi driver named Raymond Baillet, other times I think it might’ve been my paranoiac fear in the foggy streets of Brest Brittany at 3 A.M., other times I think it was Monsieur Casteljaloux and his dazzlingly beautiful secretary (a Bretonne with blue-black hair, green eyes, separated front teeth just right in eatable lips, white wool knit sweater, with gold bracelets and perfume) or the waiter who told me “Paris est pourri” (Paris is rotten) or the performance of Mozart’s Requiem in old church of St. Germain des Prés with elated violinists swinging their elbows with joy because so many distinguished people had shown up crowding the pews and special chairs (and outside it’s misting) or, in Heaven’s name, what? The straight tree lanes of Tuileries Gardens? Or the roaring sway of the bridge over the booming holiday Seine which I crossed holding on to my hat knowing it was not the bridge (the makeshift one at Quai des Tuileries) but I myself swaying from too much cognac and nerves and no sleep and jet airliner all the way from Florida twelve hours with airport anxieties, or bars, or anguishes, intervening?
As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France, and I’m not afraid of giving the real name of Raymond Baillet to public scrutiny because all I have to say about him, in connection with the fact he may be the cause of my satori in Paris, is that he was polite, kind, efficient, hip, aloof and many other things and mainly just a cabdriver who happened to drive me to Orly airfield on my way back home from France: and sure he wont be in trouble because of that—And besides probably never will see his name in print because there are so many books being published these days in America and in France nobody has time to keep up with all of them, and if told by someone that his name appears in an American “novel” he’ll probably never find out where to buy it in Paris, if it’s ever translated at all, and if he does find it, it wont hurt him to read that he, Raymond Baillet, is a great gentleman and cabdriver who happened to impress an American during a fare ride to the airport.
Compris?
2.
BUT AS I SAY I DONT KNOW HOW I GOT THAT SATORI and the only thing to do is start at the beginning and maybe I’ll find out right at the pivot of the story and go rejoicing to the end of it, the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that’s told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.
In other words, and after this I’ll shut up, made-up stories and romances about what would happen IF are for children and adult cretins who are afraid to read themselves in a book just as they might be afraid to look in the mirror when they’re sick or injured or hungover or insane.
3.
THIS BOOK’LL SAY, IN EFFECT, HAVE PITY ON US all, and dont get mad at me for writing at all.
I live in Florida. Arriving over Paris suburbs in the big Air France jetliner I noticed how green the northern countryside is in the summer, because of winter snows that have melted right into that butterslug meadow. Greener than any palmetto country could ever be, and especially in June before August (Août) has withered it all away. The plane touched down without a Georgia hitch. Here I’m referring to that planeload of prominent respectable Atlantans who were all loaded with gifts around 1962 and heading back to Atlanta when the liner shot itself into a farm and everybody died, it never left the ground and half of Atlanta was depleted and all the gifts were strewn and burned all over Orly, a great Christian tragedy not the fault of the French government at all since the pilots and steward’s crew were all French citizens.
The plane touched down just right and here we were in Paris on a gray cold morning in June.
In the airport bus an American expatriate was calmly and joyfully smoking his pipe and talking to his buddy just arrived on another plane probably from Madrid or something. In my own plane I had not talked to the tired American painter girl because she fell asleep over Nova Scotia in the lonesome cold after the exhaustion of New York City and having to buy a million drinks for the people who were babysitting there for her—no business of mine anyhow. She’d wondered at Idlewild if I was going to look up my old flame in Paris:– no. (I really shoulda.)
For I was the loneliest man in Paris if that’s possible. It was 6 A.M. and raining and I took the airport bus into the city, to near Les Invalides, then a taxi in the rain and I asked the driver where Napoleon was entombed because I knew it was someplace around there, not that it matters, but after a period of what I thought to be surly silence he finally pointed and said “là” (there).
I was all hot to go see the Sainte Chapelle where St. Louis, King Louis IX of France, had installed a piece of the True Cross. I never even made it except ten days later zipping by in Raymond Baillet’s cab and he mentioned it. I was also all hot to see St. Louis de France church on the island of St. Louis in the Seine River, because that’s the