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A “Half-American”
Writer
Joyce ce Johnson
I
t is possible to know someone and not know them,
especially when you are twenty-one and in love, and when
there are painful things the other person never talks about.
For about two years, starting one January night in
1957, nine months before the publication of On the Road,
Jack Kerouac came and went in my life. I knew, of course,
that he was of French Canadian extraction, had a mother
he called Memere, who spoke to him in French, that he was
very fond of French cooking and that he still held on to his
old dream of going to live someday in Paris, a dream he
would never realize. In the spring of that first year I knew
him, he finally did pass through there, completely broke as
usual—but Paris, like nearly all his dreamed of destinations,
was a disappointment. “It didn’t seem to want me,” was
how he put it. (Perhaps part of the problem was that
Parisians didn’t think much of the way Jack spoke French.)
Before that he’d been in London, where he’d made a point
of looking up his family’s Breton coat of arms in the British
Museum Library. There he’d found the motto, Aimer,
travailler, soufrir. Which he felt was the perfect summation
of his life, as he told me when he was back in New York.
I often heard him speaking in a low voice to my grey
cat, to whom he’d given a French Canadian name, Tigris.
He would feed Tigris in a way that never failed to charm
me. Like a small boy, he’d lie flat on his belly with his chin
against the rim of the cat’s bowl, murmuring encouraging
words, half in French, half in English. Many years later
when I read Vision of Gerard, the eerie significance of these
little scenes dawned on me for the first time when I came to
the lines: When the little kitty is given his milk, I imitate
Gerard and get down on my stomach…”You happy, Ti Pou? –
your nice lala.” I realized then that without knowing it I had
witnessed a secret sacrament, heard Jack Kerouac calling up
his dead nine-year-old Franco American brother, who was in
some ways the submerged half of himself.
Jack never explained to me that when he was a kid in
Lowell, Massachusetts, he had only spoken the French
Canadian language in his household and that he had not
been a fluid English speaker until his late teens. I would
have been astonished to learn that all his life, to one degree
or another, he had been translating the French words in
which he dreamed and thought into their English
equivalents. Like most people who read On the Road when
it came out six years after Jack had written it, I would
certainly never have thought of Jack Kerouac as a bilingual
writer, for I could think of no contemporary novelist who
seemed so completely in the American grain and my ear did
not pick up the French overtones in Sal Paradise’s voice,
which was one of the things, I now realize, that gave Jack’s
first-person prose such a distinctive quality. That first
person voice seemed so natural and effortless, in fact, that I
did not realize it had taken Jack ten years and piles of
discarded manuscripts to finally arrive at it — or that it was
a voice he’d kept suppressing in his writing, until, in the
spring of 1951, he’d finally embraced and accepted its
power, and written On the Road in the now legendary 21
days of concentrated effort in one long typed paragraph on
a 120-foot scroll of paper. Jack did not mention Franco
Americans in the book I first read in its much edited version,
although its narrator, Sal Paradise, apparently Italian
American, expressed powerful feelings of identification with
black and Hispanic people.
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