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16 Chapter 2 the mAgiC of words The bed’s a place for dreams, and rest, and love—a private place. But our beds were like New England’s stony fields. You had to work hard before you could dream in them, much less hope. You piled the stones into fences, you dug and heaved and dragged at them in all weathers, raging, despairing, intent, all alone at the task, but always brooding on more than the task—because you knew the fences would outlast you. . . . Early on we both began to write away the psychological bruises of nights spent in those rocky beds. . . . We were religious men without a creed. —JOHN CLeLLON HOLMeS, “Rocks in Our Beds”1 The Depression had a devastating effect on every level of American society, including Kerouac’s family in Lowell, where he was a high school student during the worst years. Despite the economic collapse, however, and despite the dislocations of his childhood, Holmes lived in a social world that had a measure of shelter from the hard times most of the country was facing . The collapse had left many large homes in englewood vacant, and for a few years his parents moved from one to another. Holmes later figured that he had moved twenty times before his eighteenth birthday. Despite the birth of a new baby, Holmes’ father began to spend increasing amounts of time away from home, and whenever he rejoined his family the quarrels with his wife would resume. Living in various short-term rental apartments in the half-empty mansions where they found themselves, Lila and John became accustomed to lying in bed in the dark and listening to their parents’ angry words that often ended in what the children took to be violent sex. There was a temporary respite when their mother came into an inheritance from an unmarried uncle, which gave her a brief sense of finally coming into her own. the Magic ofWords 17 Holmes remembered that before his mother decided on which one of the thirty-room empty mansions she would rent, she drove their car through the streets on “The Hill,” then englewood’s most elegant neighborhood , looking at one after another of the great houses she had envied all of her adult life. After their move, she insisted on installing a special furnace, even though they were only renters. She ordered gold brocade drapes sewn for the double living room windows. She hired a cook, who was entrusted with the responsibility of feeding the family well, and for the first time John and Lila were allowed to sit at the large table in the formal dining room to eat dinner with their parents. After two years of this affluent lifestyle, they left englewood in the summer of 1935 and moved again, this time to Plymouth, New Hampshire. Once again Holmes’ father, despite all the odds against him, had found a new job as sales manager of Draper and Maynard, a manufacturer of sporting goods. Betty Holmes resisted the move, but he promised that she could continue to hire a maid who would help with the cooking and the housework. Holmes recalled, “My memories of those years [were] always buried in the quilted blankets, excelsior, and china barrels of gangs of burly Polski moving men, who loaded us on their trucks sixteen times in as many autumns.”2 In New Hampshire, living in a dirt-poor, isolated small town ringed with the scrabbling farms on the surrounding mountains, Holmes remembered “being beaten-up my first day in school because I ‘talked funny’ (that is, I had no ascertainable accent), and being taken out into the woods to learn to shoot, obliterating a squirrel when I pulled both triggers of a doublebarreled shotgun.”3 He was myopic and wore thick glasses, and he didn’t enjoy hunting or playing sports so he didn’t fit in with the crowd of local boys. Plymouth was built around a village green with a five- and ten-cent store on one side and a church on the other. Holmes’ favorite place in town was the movie theater a short walk from home. After his tenth birthday, he was allowed to see the double features that played there twice a week. Increasingly introspective, he spent hours fantasizing about directing his own movies when he grew up. Holmes’ most important memory of Plymouth, which he shared with Kerouac, was the flood of 1936, when the Pemagawassett River overflowed its banks...

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