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A Half-American
Writer
During the period I was involved with Jack, his
publisher, Viking Press, despite the huge recent success of
On the Road, turned down his first Lowell novel, Dr. Sax,
which dealt with his Franco American childhood and
opened with the blatantly French-sounding sentence, “In
Centralville I was born.” It did not occur to me that the
book’s ethnic subject matter may have been one of the
reasons for this rejection and for the Viking editors’ lack of
interest in any novel about Jack’s boyhood, though he was
encouraged to write Dharma Bums as a followup to On the
Road. Now that I’ve written my Kerouac biography, I am
sometimes amazed by how much I didn’t understand
during the time I knew Jack.
Until it was possible for me to
read Jack’s journals in the Kerouac
archive at the New York Public
Library, I had never seen this
revelatory passage he wrote at 23
shortly after the war had ended, just
after he taken a walk through his
neighborhood in Queens:
Today, Labor Day, a clear sunny
day with the tender blue char in the sky
hinting of October. I felt a resurgence of
the old feeling, the old Faustian urge to
understand the whole in one sweep and
to express it in one magnificent work—
mainly America and American life.
Bunting, flying leaves, families
drinking beer in their own backyard,
cars filling the highways…Children
tanned and ready for school, the smell of
roasts coming from the cottages on the
leafy street, the whole rich American life
in one panorama. I had the feeling
that I was alien to all this…that all this could never be mine,
only to express…All of this America, not for my likes, never. It’s
strange, since I’m aware that I understand all this far more than
the people who do have the American richness in
them.”Acknowledging the fact that because of the Breton
bleakness in his soul, he would always feel like an outsider in
this country, Jack called himself only half-American. Six
years later, when it came time to write a novel that would
sweep its readers westward across the American landscape,
that novel would be written with the passion of an outsider.
All this America, not for my likes, never. Doesn’t that line
sound directly translated from the French? And isn’t that
feeling of not entirely belonging here very American itself?
In the fall of 1940, the incoming freshman John L.
Kerouac arrived at Columbia on a football scholarship after
spending two terms at the Horace Mann prep school
where he had been sent to make up some courses. This was a
milestone in Jack’s American journey. His entry into a
university was the goal he had set himself by the time he
started high school, already knowing he wanted to be a
writer, already aware there was no way he could use the
French Canadian language for the books he dreamed of
writing and that he would have to find a way of leaving
Lowell, Massachusetts where he had grown up in one of the
insular French-speaking communities that could be found
throughout New England. In his sophomore year, however,
he would disappoint his family by walking away from his
opportunity to get a college education. Football practice had
left him little time for his studies
and no time to write and he had
fallen under the spell of Thomas
Wolfe. He took a bus southward,
then changed his mind and went
north. He found a job in a garage
in Hartford, rented a small room
and an Underwood typewriter,
wrote one story after another and
experienced hunger for the first
time.
Not even the barrier of
language could extinguish Jack’s
inborn need to write. From the
time he was eleven, he began
working to make himself fluent
in English—a process that
continued into his adult life—
and wrote a little novel, Jack
Kerouac Explores the Merrimack,
heavily influenced by
Huckleberry Finn. His juvenilia
includes some remarkable handprinted newspapers, inspired
by the racing papers, his father constantly consulted for tips
on horses. Calling himself Jack Lewis, Jack imagined himself
its publisher, its chief reporter, a celebrated jockey and the
owner of a prizewinning horse named Repulsion—he
evidently loved the forceful sound of that word without
knowing it meant the opposite of what he intended.
Making a similar mistake, he made up a wizard named Dr.
Malodorous—MaloDORus was probably how he
pronounced it –he considered this the most beautiful word
he knew. At seventeen, when Jack was trying to write like
William Saroyan, he papered the walls of his room with lists
of words he’d found in the dictionary. At twenty-two, in
what he called his ne-Rimbaudean period, he was still
working at increasing his vocabulary, writing the definitions
of calescent, ectogenic, dysphasia and surah into his notebook,
15
above, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson,
which originally appeared in 1983, published by Houghton
Miflin. Note Joyce standing in the shadows of love behind
Jack Kerouac.