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A Half-American
Writer
Another important factor in Jack’s Americanization were the
movies he saw every Saturday from the balcony of Lowell’s
Royal Theater. There he watched cowboys gallop across the
screen, heard the twang of W.C. Fields and the New Yorkese
of Groucho Marx. His novels would be filled with cinematic
references.
Jack later admitted that the more he set himself to
master English, the more he felt he lost some of his French.
“I have no language of my own,” he would tell Yvonne
LeMaitre, who had reviewed his first novel, The Town and
the City for a Franco-American newspaper. It would take
Jack a long time before he instinctively made the transition
from one language to another. A note in his 1945 journals
shows that it was still a process accompanied by a very
conscious shifting of gears. First Jack had to remind himself
that he was not writing in French; then he had to figure out
how to capture his “simultaneous impressions” in English.
Then, because he was aiming at what he called “sense
thinking,” he had to take care not to fall into the English
literary tradition of reporting on what the writer was feeling.
Jack’s father believed that his son could rescue the
family from poverty by becoming a football star. In his
estimation, writers and artists were parasites. “There’s no one
with a name like Kerouac in the writing game,” he told Jack,
convinced that only a Frenchman like Victor Hugo with a
mastery of classical French could become a writer. The
French Canadian language, as it was spoken in Lowell, was
not the French spoken in Paris, or the French spoken in
Montreal, where it was called joual. It was a richly expressive
oral language that varied from place to place and, even in
the early 20 th century lacked fixed spellings. Joual had
developed from the regional dialects the French settlers
brought to Canada in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, plus an
accumulation of words picked up the Iroquois and the
English. The Parisians said pommes de terres for potatoes; the
Quebecois said patates. Jack’s mother said mue for me; Victor
Hugo said moi. Even as he was preparing himself to leave it
behind, Jack was proud of the richness of his native
language. “The language called Canadian French is the
strongest in the world when it comes to words of power,” he
wrote at nineteen. “It is too bad that one cannot study it in
college, for it is one of the language languages in the
world…it is the language of the tongue and not of the
pen…it is a terrific, a huge language.” In his thirties, he
would defiantly begin to write passages in that language in
his novels.
In 1941, just as Jack began his second year at
Columbia, he read Look Homeward Angel by Thomas
Wolfe—a writer with whom he felt an immediate
psychological affinity and whose depictions of small town
and urban America and richly lyrical, maximalist prose style
would have a tremendous influence upon the fiction Jack
would attempt to write himself, as he worked toward
producing his own Great American Novel. All through his
years of apprenticeship, Jack started many novels that he
would decide to put aside, only completing three of them,
the most important of which was The Town and the City,
published in 1950. All of them were novels with an
autobiographical base in which Jack heavily fictionalized his
own experiences; all of the protagonists were given typical
American names, and in none of these books did Jack deal
with his Franco American identity. Envisioning The Town
and the City as a “universal American story,” Jack deliberately
avoided emphasizing the Martin family’s half Franco-
American background and their devout Catholicism. “Isn’t it
true,” he wrote to Yvonne LeMaitre, who had astutely raised
questions about these issues, “that French Canadians
everywhere tend to hide their real sources?” They were able
to do that, Jack thought, because unlike other minorities,
such as Jews or Italians, they could pass as “Anglo Saxon.” A
fiction writer today, in our multi-culturally minded era,
would make the most of his hyphenated background and in
fact would probably consider it an asset. But sixty years
ago, the label “Franco America” would have been a liability
for an ambitious novelist.
In 1946, while writing the opening chapters of The
Town and the City, Jack had an idea for a road novel that he
had to put aside for the time being. It would be a book in
which a lone traveler, recovering from a serious illness, would
take a journey across America encountering a series of
symbolic characters. Jack had yet to meet Neal Cassady, who
would inspire the character Dean Moriarty (the all-American
alter ego of the secretly French Sal Paradise). When Jack
returned to this idea two years later, after finishing The Town
and the City, he found himself unable to get the novel off to
a good start and had to discard one manuscript after
another, which is certainly the most brutal form of revision.
He planned to make the story, with its all American cast of
characters, even more elaborately fictionalized than the one
in his first novel. But he seemed unable to find the right
voice in which to write it. He still deliberately avoided using
the first person and clung to the Wolfean third-person
omniscient narration he had been using before.
In 1950, following the disappointing reception of
his first novel, the issue of obscuring his ethnic identity in
his writing began to torment him. In May of that year, guilt
Jack had not previously acknowledged rose to the surface.
He recorded in his journal a dreamlike visitation from a
Franco American older brother, who scolded him for trying
to defrench himself. “He hinted I should go to Lowell, or
Canada, or France, and become a Frenchman again and
write in French and shut up. He keeps telling me to shut
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