What follows is the conclusion of “I Wish I Were You”–the concluding story in the new Library of Congress volume:The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished and Newly Translated Writings. “I Wish I Were You” is a dark story, but I believe my Beat brother Tom DeMott would’ve found the light in it. B.D.
Finally they found themselves in a theater watching a French movie. It was Apollo theater, on 42nd street, and they were sitting in the first row of the upper balcony watching The Port of Shadows. They puffed on their cigarettes and paid rapt attention to the film… Its quality of shadowy street-ends, the carnival in it, the fog over the bay, the old man who played Bach and spoke in a whining voice and was lecherous with his niece, the fatigued little Frenchmen who worked on the water waterfront–all this marvelous welter of human activity and weariness and slow sweet delight had been filmed for them. No one in the theater that night understood the film so well as they… and none could project himself into it, but Ramsay Allen.
The Port of Shadows was principally the story of a French army deserter, played by Jean Gabin, who comes to Le Havre to get a ship and leave the country; and while he is going about his business, he meets a girl who falls in love with him. There are scenes in the fog, on docks, in rainy streets, or in gloomy houses with rain beating on the window pane, and in taverns. The people are painfully real. Sadly, but with determination, the soldier decides to leave France in spite of his love for the girl… Their love is a kind of tragic binding in the darkness they kiss in alleys, they are oppressed and weary from life, they are absurdly beautiful and full of agonizing dignity. The soldier gets his ship… But just before sailing time, he decides to see his girl for the last time, just for a moment… Can it be that he does not want to leave her? It turns out that such is the case, according to fate, for when he visits her, for the last time, a gangster shoots him in the back. The last scene shows the ship sailing out of Le Havre harbor in the grey dawn, without the soldier…
When the picture faded from the screen, Ryko turned to Al and asked him what he had thought of it. Al had been watching the film part of the time, and part of the time he had been watching Philip, who sat beside him broodingly absorbed. “It was the best picture I ever saw,” Al said, and he turned and looked at Ryko for the first time with any semblance of compassion. It was as though he wanted Ryko to see the tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything.
So Ryko wrote this.