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A Half-American
Writer
in case he should ever need to use them. “Smooth as surah”
he wrote years later in Visions of Gerard, describing the skin
of a character named Mr. Groscorp.
In Lowell, Jack had begun his education at the
neighborhood parochial school, St. Louis de France.
There the morning classes were taught in French and the
afternoon classes were taught in English. The students
pledged allegiance to la race Canadienne as well as the
American flag. The huge redbrick mills along the
Merrimack River pointed to the fate that awaited many
of Jack’s classmates and that Jack would become determined
to escape. Very few young Franco Americans in Jack’s day
left the communities they had been raised in or succeeded in
going to college; very few attempted the kind of lonely
journey Jack would take into the American mainstream. (“I
don’t even look like a
writer,” Jack would later
confess to his journal. “I
look like a lumberjack.”)
There was still tremendous
prejudice against Jack’s
people, with most
Americans believing they
were backward. Up where
Jack came from they were
called “white niggers” of
“the Chinese of New
England.” “Dumb
Canuck” was a common epithet that I even heard used
teasingly by one of Jack’s friends. But even in the 1950’s,
Franco Americans still kept to themselves for other reasons:
the almost mystical belief that they must uphold the old
ideals and customs of what they called la survivance and
continue to speak their distinctive language, which was so
woven into their religion.
Lowell, the birthplace of the American industrial
revolution, was a melting pot, where people from various
ethnic groups—Irish Catholic, Greek, Syrian, as well as a
sprinkling of Jews—had come in the last decades of the 19 th
century to make their living in the mills, and where the
French Canadians, escaping from starvation on their
hardscrabble potato farms in Quebec, had been willing to
take the worst jobs. People from these different groups
mingled in the mills and the bustling downtown streets and
went home to their separate neighborhoods; their children
met each other in Lowell’s public schools and on the
baseball fields. There were handsome pubic buildings in
Lowell, such as the Public Library and the Atheneum that
had been built by wealthy New England mill owners; there
were also neighborhoods of wooden tenements where there
were frequent fires and epidemics of cholera and meningitis
and where many of the workers in the textile mills, where
the windows were nailed shut, suffered from emphysema
and tuberculosis. The deaths of children were not at all
uncommon in Lowell. Jack’s mother had grown up in the
nearby town of Nashua and gone to work in a shoe factory
at the age of fifteen; she could write English quite fluently
but never learned to speak it well. Jack’s. Father, Leo
Kerouac, was bright and enterprising, and his command of
English was unusually good. He was a reader, who believed
that nothing compared to French culture, and worshipped
Balzac and Victor Hugo. Until he lost it during
the Depression, when the Kerouac’s became poor, Leo had
his own small printing business, which did not confine itself
to the Franco American community. Compared to most
French kids, Jack’s early years were relatively privileged,
although they were
darkened by the death of
his nine-year-old brother
Gerard—a traumatic event
that haunted Jack his entire
life...
Jack picked up his
first words in English from
the only Irish Catholic boy
in his French-speaking
kindergarten. He learned
more from the half days of
instruction in his parish
school, St. Louis de France, but he undoubtedly would
have continued his French education through high school,
if the rezoning of his French Catholic middle school had not
forced him to transfer to Bartlett Junior High School in
Seventh Grade. If this had not happened, his grasp of
English might have remained uncertain and handicapped
his writing. His parents registered him at Bartlett as a
commercial student.
Embarrassed by his accent, one of the contributing factors
to his lifelong shyness, he rarely spoke in his classes.
Fortunately a discerning English teacher noticed how
surprisingly well Jackie Kerouac could write. She advised
him to start going to the Public Library and recommended
that he read Longfellow and Twain. Every Saturday he took
home an armload of books. He was a book-hungry kid,
who read indiscriminately and ravenously—everything from
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come to the novels of
Jack London, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. At
sixteen, when he was cutting school to spend days at the
library, he would discover Goethe, who had a lasting
influence on his thinking. He was also addicted to pulp
fiction, absorbing the American vernacular from The Shadow
series, as well as from comics, sports novels and westerns.
A happy Jack Kerouac
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