THE FRENCH-CANADIAN HERITAGE OF JACK KEROUAC AS SEEN IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS by Peter Woolfson In his introduction to Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac specifically directs attention to his ethnic heritage: “Nationality Franco-American.”" Apparently he was both very conscious and self-conscious about his identity. As you read through the pages of his books, you see him identifying himself as “the French boy from Lowell”* as “one of Breton blood”? as “Canuck”! as one of the “puddle-jumpers (frogs)”® and as a speaker of “semi-Iroquoian French-Canadian.”* Like many Franco-Americans of the second generation, not all of his attitudes to his ethnic heritage were positive. He thought of the local “Canucks of Lowell” as a people who displayed a “bleak grey jowled pale eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian quality of man.”’ His attitude to the language of his home was ambivalent as well. Sometimes it was embarrassment: “I turn to the French book and read all those funny French words we never speak in Canadian French, I have to consult and look them up in the glossary in back, I think with anticipation how Professor Carton will laugh at my accent this morning as he asks me to get up and read.”* Sometimes it was pride in his fluency and native speaker competency: “You speak the good French, but you have an accent... ? ‘Oua, du Canada,’ ‘Ah yes, because your passport is American,’ 3536 Peter Woolfson “But I haven't learned French in books but at home, I didn't know how to speak English in America before I was, oh, five six years old, my parents were born in Canada in Quebee, the name of my mother is L'Evesque."? ‘The purpose of this paper is to examine the biographically oriented works of Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, particularly those centered around his early years at home: Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, The Town and the City, and Vanity of Duluoz. What is of particular relevance is his world view: that is, his basic value orientations towards time, the world, man, activity, and interpersonal relations. And although Kérouae was influenced by friends—Burroughs and Ginsberg, literary figures—Thomas Wolfe and Herman Melville—and diverse philosophies such as Hinayana Buddhism, nevertheless Kérouac’s Franco-American foundation is deep and it remains a base to which he frequently retreats: “I'm not a Buddhist, I'm a Catholic revisiting the ancestral land that fought for Catholicism against impossible odds.” Let us begin with his attitudes towards time. Historians, such as Mason Wade, often talk about the French Canadian obsession with the past. They cite the motto of Quebec,Je me souviens(“I remember”), as a symbol of this preoccupation. Kérouac is typical of many Franco- Americans in showing a deep concern bordering on obsession with his ancestral past: My people go back to Breton France, first North American ancestor Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kérouae of Cornwall, Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Riviére du Loup after vietory of Wolfe over Montealm; his descendants married Indians (Mohawk and Caughnawaga) and became potato farmers; first United States descendant my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kérouac, carpenter, Nashua N.H.—My father's. mother a Bernier, related to explorer Bernier—all Bretons on father's side—My mother has a Norman name, L'Evesque." In addition, his attitudes towards time are heavily influenced by French Canadian Catholicism. As Horace Miner describes this orientation in his classic ethnographic study, St. Denis, it centers on various rites de passage of the Church which lead the souls of parishioners from the secular world to the sacred:The French-Canadian Heritage 37 From baptism through all . . . stages to death, the individual has led both a sacred and secular life. He or she has lived by physical toil, met very practical everyday problems, and has felt very much a being of flesh and natural appetites. At the same time there has been continual participation in the sacred life through prayers, Masses, confession, and penance. All these activities have as their purpose the securing of reward after the final rite de passage, the Requiem Mass, and burial. At this time the individual enters the purely saered existence. !? In one sense, the religious life of the French Canadian is directed towards death: that is, a parishioner must follow several patterns which would ensure the best possible reward in heaven. Kérouac strongly suggests this orientation in Visions of Gerard, a book understandably preoccupied with death. For example, he reports his father as saying: “Don’t ery and don't bother your sweet lil head over these things—All right, we're all born to die, it’s the same story for everybody, see?” Even more telling is his description of his father's baptism “that 1889 day, Sunday most likely, when Emil Aleide was annointed for his grave, for the earth’s an intrinsic grave (just dig a hole and see),”"* Another important dimension of the French Canadian attitude towards time is a preoccupation with prophesy: “predicting in advance the course of natural events.”"* Both interpretation of omens and reading of cards are common French Canadian methods of prophesy. Kérouac characterizes his mother-figures with the gift of prophesy. In The Town and the City he writes: When she sits down to relax, there she is with her deck of cards, shuffling, peering over the rim of her spectacles and foresecing tidings of good fortune, forebodings of doom, omens of all sorts and sizes. She sits at the kitchen table with her eldest daughter and discerns the news in the bottom of her teacup. She reads signs everywhere, follows the weather closely, reads the obituaries and notices of marriages and birth, keeps track of all illness and illfortune, of all bustling health and good luck, she traces the growth of children and the decline of old ‘men all over the town, the omen-tidings of other women and38 Peter Woolfson the approach of new seasons. Nothing escapes the vast motherly wisdom of this woman: she has foreseen it all, sensed everything."” Particular omens which Kérouac mentions in Dr. Sax are “la face de skalette dans la lune” and “the smell of flowers the day before someone dies.” Kérouae’s attitudes towards the world of nature reflect the traditional duality of the French Canadian farmer. The French Canadian farmer was intimately involved with the seasons of the year which formed the organizing thread of the economic, social, and religious life of the parish. Miner writes: “The variety of farm activity throughout the year is so intimately related not only to household tasks but also to the religious and social life as to be inseparable. The natural starting point of the rural yearly round is not the calendrical one but the beginning of Spring.” This is the positive aspect of nature for the farmer—it reflects a harmony based on rythmic intimacy. Kérouac frequently describes his reaction to this intimacy with nature: Spring that makes us feel so sad and fair. It is the dizzy lyrical time, airy, ethereal, mists are bright, the sun is never exactly golden, exactly silver, never exactly bright, never exactly dark—the pierce of the arrow of April in your flesh, the promise accounted for in the Tables of Hardworking Man's Beardy Serious Propets{sic];namely ecstasy of living and dying. . . You'll have your cold wars, and warm peaces, the fretting and rubbings of all things on all sides, the ecstasy, general orgasms, screams of passion, rites of Spring, May, June, July and the Bees—” However, although the French Canadian farmer lived in harmonious relationship with nature, as Miner puts it: “Her forces are often unkind. Sickness and death, fire and storm, drought and earthquake, constantly strike terror into the heart of man.”® In Dr. Sax, Kérouac reminds us that in springtime the rivers also flood: “The clock drowned I began to dislike the flood, began to see it as an evil monster bent on devouring everyone—for no special reason.””! Yet the trials of nature serve a purpose. In The Town and the City, the father puts a positive light even on these more negative aspects of nature:39 The French-Canadian Heritage ‘In those days’ thundered the father, ‘there was honesty and good living. Things were hard, the poor devils sometimes got snowed right under by tough breaks and big blizzards and Indians, anything at all, but by God it made better men."? Here the father displays a typical Canadian attitude both French and English: “The true North” which makes one “strong and free.” The dual aspect of nature, however, is well expressed by Kérouac in Vanity of Duluoz: “Life is a brute creation; beautiful and eruel. —Ha ha ha ha she's laughing as she dances on the dead she gives birth to, Mother Nature giving you birth and eating you back." His orientation towards human nature appears to have been heavily influence by a Jansenist French Canadian Catholicism. In this particular orientation, man himself has very little importance or significance unless he is in a state of grace. Not everyone possesses this state of grace—only those who have been chosen by God. How is the grace of God manifested? Ronald Sutherland suggests the following: “The desire, abundantly demonstrated, to attend church regularly and do one’s assigned task, on earth diligently and without complaint—'La résignation chrétienne’—can be indicative of the prepossession of God's grace. Contrary inclinations, especially idleness and the wish to pursue personal comfort and pleasure, are clear indications of predestined damnation."* At the same time, because man is human, made of flesh and blood, he is expected to err in the ways of the flesh—but he must recognize that he has sinned. Sutherland goes on to say: “To succumb to the fires of passion is understandable and possibly even excusable, but to enjoy it is the sure sign of different and everlasting fires to come.”® Life on this earth is supposed to be hard—one must “suffer his purgatoire sur terre” before he can receive his “pre-issued church-stamped passport to heaven.” Kérouac's view of human nature seems to share several of these assumptions, In the first place, man is of very little significance or importance. He writes: “God doesn't look like he made the world for people. No thought, no hope of the mind can dispel nay no millions in the bank can break, the truth of the winter night and that we are not made for this world.”” Secondly, Kérouac has a sense of his own prepossession of God’s grace:40 Peter Woolfson From the very beginning I, whoever ‘I’ or whatever ‘T was destined, destined indeed, to meet, learn, understand Gerard . . . and the Blessed Lord Buddha (and my sweet Christ too through all his Paulian tangles and bloody crosses of heathen violence). To awaken to h in the bright truth. All is well, praetice Heaven is nigh.” On the other hand, he sees most men without grace: Its men, with their awful minds Their ignorance, grossness, mean petty thwartings, schemes hypocrite Tendencies, repenting over losses, gloating over gains— Pot-boys, bone carriers, funeral directors, glove- wearers, fog-breathers, shit-betiders, pissers, befoulers, stenchers, fat calf converters, utter blots & scabs on the face of it; the earth. Furthermore, he sees all men subject to the temptations of the flesh: “No man is exempt from sin anymore than he can avoid a trip to the toilet.” Yet the effects of indulgence are not satisfying, instead they produce misery. In The Town and the City, he divides himself among several characters—one of them is Joe Martin: Joe was indefatigable in his pleasures, wonderfully liked by everyone, coveted by women of all kinds, strong and responsible at work, spendthrift with his time and money and laughter. Yet in his inmost soul, like every other man, he brooded and was restless and dissatisfied and always looked to the future as a challenge and a sad enigma." ‘Thus, Kérouae views man as being of little significance or importance—that is why nature makes him suffer his “purgatoire sur terre.” Yet he has a sense of his own predestination and state of grace while most other men are mean-spirited in their pursuit of material eomfort. However, he is not free of sin, but this pursuit of carthly pleasures leaves him restless and dissatisfied. ‘To a large extent the Franco-Americans of New England carried with them the pragmatic, practical orientation towards work41 The French-Canadian Heritage characteristic of their French Canadian ancestors. Bruce Hutchinson in The Unknown Country describes this orientation: These are the things that distinguish the French Canadian from the rest of America—his grip on things, on the earth, on reality, where we have come to accept shadow for substance, radio jokes for the simple profound humors of the day's work, dessicated breakfast, powders for bread, and the synthetic celluloid fornications of the screen for life.” There is a special pride for the Franco-American in being a workingman—living a simple, industrious real life. The father in The Town and the City says: “Your mother and I, your whole family, her people, dumb as they are, and my people have always been working people, we believed in working for a living and living real lives." ® But Jack Kérouac chose another way of life—that of the artist. Neither he nor his father was ever totally satisfied with his choice: “Arguments that raged later between my father and myself, about my refusal to go to work—I wanta write—I'm an artist’—‘Artist, shmartist, ya can’t be supported all ya life.""™ Jack, himself, longed to have some workingman skills—especially in periods of artistic aridity: “At the age of twenty-one, I could have gained a lot of loyal membership to that outfit (the U. S. Navy), learned a trade maybe, gotten myself out of that stupid literary deadend I find myself trapped in now. . .."°" If there is one characteristic of the French Canadian when it comes to interpersonal relations it is his fierce sense of independence. This sense of independence became a battle cry of “la révolution tranquille” in the 1960s: “maitre chez nous”: master in our own house. In a telling recollection, the mother in The Town and the City talks about her relatives: “My uncles are still living like that on the farms in New Hampshire and others in Canada and that’s the best life there is. They work hard all right but they get rewarded for their work, they live, and they’re happy and healthy, and they're independent, no one can tell them what to do... give me a good old church-going farmer for a man, a real man—. . . living the way people were intended to live." But the independence is not necessarily the independence that we think of as “rugged individualism.” Although the French Canadians are strongly independent they are what Everett Hughes calls practitioners of “an individualism of the family.”42 Peter Woolfson Kérouac presents the Martin clan in The Town and the City with just this type of individualism: Each member of the family living in this house is wrapped in his own vision of life, and is brooding within the intelligence of his own particular soul. With the family stamp somehow imprinted upon each of their lives, they come unfolded and furious into the world as Martins, a clan of energetic, vigorous, grave and absorbed people.” ‘The curious mix of individualism and collectivism represented by the French Canadian family is perceptively presented in the following example from The Town and the City: In a large family like the Martins, when one member keeps aloof from the others, he is always regarded with suspicion, but at the same time curiously respected. ‘You can't rush Francis’ says the mother. ‘He's his own boss and he'll do what he likes when time comes." In sum, the autobiographically oriented works of Jack Kérouac indicate many value orientations that appear to be French Canadian in origin, In his concerns about his French Canadian ancestry, his preoccupation with death, his interest in omens and prophesy, he reflects a French Canadian orientation towards time. In his intimate feeling for the rhythms of the seasons, with his concern for the uncontrollable harshness of nature, yet his recognition of a duality of nature, he presents a French Canadian attitude towards the physical world; in his attitudes towards the insignificance of man, his sense of predestination, his concept of and his distrust of material pleasures, he suggests a French Canadian Jansenist orientation; in his admiration for the pragmatic realities of workingmen and his distrust of literary dilettantism, he reflects a French Canadian attitude towards work; and in his fierce sense of independence within the context of family solidarity he shows a typical French Canadian orientation to interpersonal relations. These value orientations may be found in other cultural and literary traditions, but put together with the weight and emphasis with which Kérouac infuses them, they are characteristic of theThe French-Canadian Heritage 43 French Canadian living in the United States because he is one of them: The poor Canucks my people of my God-gave-me-life were burning dull electric lights in a brown doom gloom of the kitchen with Catholic calendar in the toilet door (Ah me) a sight of sorrow and labor—the scenes of my childhood. . . University of Vermont NOTES 4. Jack Kérouae, Lonesome Traveler (New York, 1960, pe 2. Jack Kérouuc, Vonity of Duluge (New York, 1967} p72, 3. Ibid p20 4 bid, p 207, 8. Ibid p19, 8 Jack Kérounc, Doctor Sax (Now York. 1999), p. 16. 7. Jack Kérounc, Visions of Gerard and Tristssa (London, 1964), pp. 1-12 8. Kérounc, Vanity of Duluos, p28 98, Jack Kérouae, Stor in Paris (New York, 1900), pt 10. Ibid. p60, 11 Kéroune, Lonesome Traveler, p, vi 12 toraco Miner, St. Denis A Preneh: Canadian Porish (Chiengo, 1990) . 93, 12. Kérouse, Visions of Gerard. p. 15 18 Ibid p74 15. Mince, St. Donis, p. 120, 16:Jack Kérouac, The Town and the City (New York, 1950), pp. 89 17, Kéroun, Doctor Som. p. 13 1a. Minor, St. Denis p44. 19. Dérouc, Visions of Gerard, p. 64 20. Miner. St. Danis, pe 117 21, Kérouae, Doctor Sox. 22, Kérouae, The Town and the 23. Kérouue, Vanity of Duluo 28. Ronald Suthosland, "The CalviaistJansonist Pantomine: An Essay in Comparative Canadian Literatur, Hovuo d'ftudes Canadionnes, (May 1970) 11 25. Ibid 26, tht 27, Kerouac, Visions of Gorard, pe 40 24. id. p10 20. bid. p12, 50. Ibid ps, 51, Kéroune, The Town and the City. p67. 432. Druce Mitchinson, Tho Unknown Country (Toronto, 1940) B38. 533. Kerouac, Tho Town and the Cty p22, 54. Kérouue, Visions of Gorard, pps 45-40, 35. Kéroue, Vanity of Duthor, pr 72 36. Késoune, The Town an 37. bid. 7. 38. bie p. 12 539, Kércuhe, Doctor Sax, p. 6.