o_190rdufvh17l119a81ci61qo68hta.pdf

A Half-American
Writer
up. When I can’t sleep because my mind is ringing with
gongs of English thought and sentences, he says, Pense en
Francais, knowing I will calm down and go to sleep in
simplicity.” Jack saw this older brother as “my original self
returning after all the years since I was a child trying to
become un Anglais in Lowell from shame of being a
‘Canuck.” He wrote that it was actually the first time he
understood that he had “undergone the same feelings any
Jew, Negro or Italian feels in America, so cleverly had I
concealed them, even from myself, and with such talented,
sullen aplomb for a kid.”
Jack spent that summer in Mexico City, a place that
in many ways reminded him of Lowell with its poverty and
its many Catholic churches. There he continued to struggle
with the road novel that was giving him so much trouble.
After his mother forwarded him Yvonne LeMaitre’s review
of the The Town and the City, in which she praised his
writing but called his novel a tree without roots, he
immediately started on a new book called Gone on the Road
about a 15-year-old Franco American kid from New
Hampshire called Freddie Boncoeur, who hitchhikes across
America with an older and wiser cousin in search of
Freddie’s lost father. This novel too he put aside after
returning to New York in the fall and resuming his
frustrating attempts to write his road novel with American
characters. It was a wonder the Jack didn’t completely wear
out his material or his desire to write On the Road.
In December, however, something very important
happened that immediately opened up a new direction for
his work. Jack received a 40-page confessional letter from
Neal Cassady that immediately made him decide to
renounce both “fiction and fear.” Energized by the power
and fluency of working directly from memory, Jack
responded to Neal with a series of memoirlike letters about
his Lowell childhood and the death of his brother Gerard.
It was the most stunning writing Jack had ever done, and he
could feel it. “The Voice is all!” he wrote Neal triumphantly.
He was finally starting to use the richly evocative first-person
voice he had been suppressing in his fiction.
In March of 1951, Jack went even further—
experimenting for the first time in writing entirely in
French. His first experiment was the opening section of a
projected novel called “Sur la Route” in an awkward French
literary style he apparently had difficulty sustaining. His
second experiment, La Nuit Est ma Femme, which he also
called Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne (Michel Bretagne’s Jobs)
was far more successful—in fact, it’s a wonderful piece of
writing that has never been transcribed from his notebook,
and needs to be carefully translated and published so that
everyone can read it. Written in a strong, direct,
conversational first-person voice, with great immediacy and
intimacy, it tells the story of an unsuccessful Franco
American writer who has sacrificed everything to his creative
work and feels the need to account for himself.
In this manuscript, Jack wrote about his lifelong
dilemma—the conflict between what a man had to do in
order to survive and the dreams of immortality that kept
him an artist child, preventing him from making the
compromises others made out of necessity and causing him
to walk away from one demeaning job after another. He
wrote about the mill whistles he used to hear in Lowell and
his fear that he could end up as one of the workers trudging
toward the factories that made him get a scholarship and
start writing, and how the die was cast once he’d discovered
the classic American writers, Twain, Melville, Thoreau and
Wolfe, who wrote what he called “unknown, unsoundable
books.” Jack translated one important passage from this
book into English: “I wanted to write in a large form which
was free and magnificent like that, a form which would give
me a chance to go out the window and not stay in the room
all the time with old ladies like Henry James and his
European sisters.”
He wrote the sixty pages of La Nuit Est Ma Femme in
mid-March. In mid-April, when he sat down to write On
the Road he would keep the ingenuous-sounding
forthrightness of the Michel Bretagne voice as well as the
overtones of its cadences and the tinge of melancholy that
washes through it even when its energies seem highest. The
voice he gave his first-person narrator would seem to Jack’s
future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been
born in French. But very soon after finishing On the Road,
Jack felt dissatisfied with it. He knew he had still not been
really truthful in the way he portrayed the protagonist he’d
based on himself, even though he’d called him Jack
Kerouac, for he had only dealt with the question of his
ethnicity between the lines—notably in a rueful passage
about having “white ambitions,” which could only have
been written by someone who did not feel “white,” with
the privileged status that that word implied.
In Kerouac’s third novel, Visions of Cody, Jack would
finally openly inhabit his Franco American identity and
never conceal it again, and he would boldly and deliberately
include passages and expressions in the French Canadian
language. The Jack Duluoz of Cody would be a further
exploration of that melancholy, half-American outsider
Michel Bretagne of La Nuit Est Ma Femme.“
The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce
Johnson - was published in recent times by the Viking Press.
18