LES

DELA RENCONTRE INTERNA TlONALE JACK KÉROUAC

No 2

The image of Québec in Jack Kérouac ' s fiction

Maurice Poteet

avril 1987

Publié par : LES AVANr-VIRE

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Rém,z FeJr..ta.nd Québe.c., le. 25 ja.nv,zeJr. 1987 AVANT-PROPOS

"Dans les romans de Jack Kérouac, le thème spécifique du Québec revêt une certaine importance: toutefois sous l'angle de l'identité réelle de Kérouac, l 'héritage culturel du Québec est transformé et exprimé d'une façon beaucoup plus profonde que ces simples références".

Cette courte phrase, tirée du texte qui suit, exprime en quelque sorte l'invitation que nous fait Maurice Poteet dans ce second numéro des Avant-dire de la Rencontre internationale Jack Kérouac. En fait, nous sommes conviés à beaucoup plus; non seulement Poteet fait-il ressor­ tir l 'image du Québec dans le texte et du texte (voir explication en page 1) mais il nous convie aussi à pénétrer parallèlement l'univers de la littérature franco-américaine contemporaine de Kérouac. Finale­ ment, l e texte nous laisse avec une interrogation sur cette image au­ tre du Québec, ou image de l'autre Québec.

Bien que tous admettent la séparation de l'oeuvre de Kérouac entre les romans de "la route" et ceux de "L owell", ou "Beat" et "Lowell", ou encore, comme certai ns 1 e sout i ennent, entre 1es romans "franco-améri­ cains" et les romains "américains", il n'en demeure pas moins que l'en­ semb l e s'inscrit dans une même cosmologie, "one heaven and one hell" (p.2). Ainsi, tout en gardant intacte cette division, Maurice Poteet part à la recherche de cette vision du monde, cette vaste Légende des Duluoz dans l aquelle niche l'héritage canadien-français de Kérouac. La particularité de sa recherche réside dans la tentative d'insérer l'écriture de Kérouac dans le monde des valeurs et des formes de repré­ sentation de sa communauté d'origine. Dans cette analyse littéraire sans pareil, Poteet nous convainc de l'importance de l 'héritage culturel franco-américain, non pas comme unique entrée dans la connaissance de l' écrivain mais comme un des pôles de cette tension au fondement de l'identité de Kérouac. Et quoi de mieux pour exprimer cette tension que la trouvaille de Poteet sur la signification du nom Duluoz; de Du­ Lu, prononcé à l'anglaise, qui fait émerger un "du loup", ou Rivière­ du-Loup, origine de la famille Kérouac au Québec, qui s'associe à oz, du magicien d'Dz, ce classique de l a culture américaine. Bref, l' asso­ ciation est saisissante et nous incite à aller au fond de ce texte, principalement pour ce 1 ien qu 'établ it Maurice Poteet avec la 1 ittéra­ ture franco-américaine.

L'auteur poursuit ici dans sa volonté de situer Kérouac dans le monde de son héritage culturel. Il s'agit à ma connaissance d'une unique tentative de comparaison des romans de Kérouac avec certains écrivains franco-américains contemporains ou ayant précédé Kérouac. On ne peut qu'être étonné de 1 a parenté ex i stant entre 1 a fami 11 e "Del usson " de Ducharme (The Delusson Family) et la famille Martin de The TOvln and the City. Et que dire du petit "Beson" du Canuck de Cami lle Lessard (Lowell, 1936) qui, sans l 'ombre d'un doute, constitue un jumeau de Gérard dans la sainteté. Effet du hasard ou non, Beson avait également un frère ... préoccupé par sa fragilité et sa pureté. Finalement, la division reconnue (1) dans la littérature du Terroir et celle de l'émi­ gration nous conduit avec Poteet à d'intéressantes hypothèses sur l'oeu­ vre de Kérouac elle-même. Au début des années soixante-dix, le Département de littérature de l'U­ niversité de Montréal décidait d'approfondir le thème de l'image du Québec dans la littérature étrangère. Des romans français, canadi ens­ anglais et américains furent ainsi l'objet d'analyses et de disserta­ tions. C' est dans ce climat combien propice que Maurice Poteet s'est lancé à l a recherche du portrait du Québec dessiné par l a littérature franco-américaine d'expression anglaise. Le défi apparaît d'autant plus intéressant que l'image exp l orée provi ent de cet autre Québec, "le Québec d'en-bas", celui de l'émigration et des "petits Canadas" des vil les industrielles de la Nouvelle-Angleterre; l'image d'ici offer­ te par un ai lleurs étrangement familier. Mais s'agit-il de notre Québec à nous ? A tout prendre, ce Québec dont on recherche l'image n 'a ni cadre géographique précis, ni peut-être d'existence réelle. Ne s'agi­ rait-il pas de l'être du Québec, c'est-à-dire l'univers canadien-fran­ çais non seulement dans sa volonté mais aussi dans son impossibilité de s 'enraciner sur l e continent nord-américain. Condition existentiell e de la race humaine vécue ici sans l'illusion de la permanence de l'ex­ tra-individuelle, le social, la nation, qui n'a que le mouvement et la tension d'hier à aujourd'hui pour se maintenir, et qui a tenté histo­ riquement la voie mythique pour se croire permanent. Drame individuel dont Kérouac ne pouvait se détourner vu l'effrondrement de son héritage ethno-culturel, drame collectif aussi, dont il n'est pas sûr qu'il puis­ se se vivre froidement sans illusion. L'image du Québec dans les romans de Kérouac interroge le Québec contemporain et l'image qu' i l veut se donner . La recherche de Maurice Poteet est une pièce importante dans la discussion de cette quête permanente.

Loui s Dupont Le 13 avril 1987

(1) Voir Richard Santerre (1974), "Le roman franco-américain en Nouvel­ le-Angleterre, 1878-1943", Thèse de troisième cycle , Boston Collège. ENGLISH SUMMARY

Maurice Poteet's research constitutes a rare attempt to situate Jack Kerouac's fiction within the framework of his ethnie community, notably with regard to the many parallels he draws with contemporary franco­ american litterature. Surprisingl y, we discover that the Martin fami­ ly of The Town and the City closely resembles the Delusson's of Duchar­ me's Delusson fam ily, and that Jack's brother, Gérard, has a twin in t he Lessard' s Canuck, who also claim s sainthood before dying as about the same age beside a younger brother.

In looking closely at the image of Québec in Jack's Kerouac fiction , Poteet proposes a very convincing picture of the intense tension bet­ ween the past and the present that lies at the basis of Kerouac's iden­ tity. This matches the same division that many have already made bet­ ween the "Lowell" and the "Road" novels. And what best describes this division is the stunning interpretation of the name Duluoz that Maurice Poteet proposes: Duluoz from Du-Lu, which resembles in French (when pronounced "à l'anglaise") to du loup or Rivière-du-Loup, the place of origin of Jack's family in Québec; and end as oz in English, the Wizzard of Oz, that classical culture hero of the american imagination . Thus, past, present and futur, as well as the void and the eternity, all, surprisingly, converge in The legend of Duluoz.

Louis Dupont Le 13 avril 1987 NOTE LIMINAIRE DE L'AUTEUR

Ce texte est tiré de ma thèse de doctorat qui porte sur l'étude du contexte socio-littéraire de l'image du Québec comme lieu d'origine dans les nouvel­ les et le roman franco-américain (écrits en anglais sur l'immigration et l'assimilation) publiés au cours de la période allant de 1939 à 1974. La première partie de notre recherche résume l'histoire des Franco-Améri­ cains et les trois autres comportent des études, soit d'un groupe d'au­ teurs, soit des ouvrages d'un écrivain, selon l'importance de leur produc­ tion littéraire. Nous avons accordé une place spéciale à l'oeuvre de Jack Kérouac et à celle de Clark Blaise. Les six autres auteurs analysés - ­ Jacques Ducharme, Albéric Archambault, Vivian (née Lajeunesse) Parsons , Grace (née Royer de Repentigny) Metalious, Gérard Robichaud et Robert Cor­ mier -- sont regroupés par génération avant et après la deuxième guerre mondiale.

Dans chaque cas, l'image du Québec est examinée sous deux aspects: (1) le Québec dans le texte (le thème, la référence, etc.); et (2) le Québec du texte (la tradition littéraire du roman québécois, la tradition orale, les légendes, l'utilisation de la langue française, les codes culturels, etc. ). Nous avons, de plus, essayé d'établir des liens entre ces portraits du Québec et la réalité socio-hisforique vécue pour les Franco-Américains en voie d'assimilation. En plus de la littérature proprement québécoise, nous avons comparé la production en anglais à celle des Franco-Américains qui écrivaient en français au dix-neuvième siècle et durant les premières décennies du vingtième siècle. Par rapport à cette littérature d'expres­ sion française, la représentation du Québec non plus comme nation mais comme le "vieux pays" n'a rien de surprenant, compte tenu de l'adoption de la langue anglaise par les romanciers franco-américains depuis les an­ nées trente. Cependant, ce "vieux pays" d'origine, qui est à peine visi­ ble dans les romans des années 1950-60, reprend vie comme "nation" dans les nouvelles de Clark Blaise. Ce phénomène de retour au pays, phénomène qui renaît à la fin des années 1960, apporte à la littérature franco-améri­ caine un problème d'identité culturelle complexe car le héros le plus ré- cent des Franco-Américains se trouve doublement aliéné: une fois comme "émigré" dépossédé de son identité propre dans le "melting pot" américain ; et, ensuite, comme "étranger" au Québec, après son retour au pays.

Mi\URICE POTEET In this paper*, we present an analysis of the image of Québec in Jack Kerouac's "legend of Duluoz". Confessional fiction dominates most "chapters", or books, that make up this legend at the center of which is "Ti-Jean's" , bi- cultural consciousness: his relation to himself is almost without exception 1 his major concern . This means that while the image of Québec "dans le texte" is to be found in the theme of origins, Québec as part of Kerouac's identity and can be found, also, at the level of expression and form "du texte" . The "untranslatable" Québécois language, as he called his mother tongue of Lo- well 's "little Canada", is the most evident manifestation of this Québécois heritage and identity. But there are other dimen sions of this "fait français" in Kerouac ' s writing. The pages which follow show what these other dimensions are and how they relate especially to Kerouac's "spontaneous" and confession- nal approach to fiction.

Jack Kerouac's novels are usually divided in two groups - - the "Lowell"

* Thi s paper constitutes an excerpt of Maurice Poteet'sPh . D. thesis, enti­ tled The ima e of Québec in Franco-American Fiction of Immi ration and As­ similation . in English, from 1934 to 1974 , presented at the Université de Montréal, August 1980.

1 This distinction between "dans le/du texte" is very important, as we are reminded in André Belleau's recent-Study, Le Romancier fictif (Montréal: Presses de l'Uni versité du Québec, 1980), p. 147. The "world" in a novel, for example, is but the tip of the ideological iceberg; ideologyand cul-. tural values are best studied at the level of structure and form because both are wrought well only as "ensembles", globally, not at something one can stumble across going through a work. The same can be said of the "ima­ ge" of a cultural heritage (from Québec) in Kerouac's case: the theme of Québec is one thing, of sorne importance, but as part of Kerouac's very identity, Québec heritage is transformed and expressed in ways that go deeper than surface references to the outside world .

- 1 - (Massachusetts) and the "Road" novels. 2 It is true that, thematically, The Town and the City, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Visions of Gerard, and much of the 1960's version of Kerouac's first novel, Vanity of Duluoz, concern mainly the family and growing up in "Galloway", or Lowell, just as the perhaps more famous of Kerouac's novels, On the Road, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, Tristessa,3 The Dharma Burns, Big Sur, Satori in

Paris, and Lonesome Traveler capture a much larger ~lOrld of travel, poets, drugs, contact with other cultures, etc. This thematic division has a number of weaknesses, however, the major one being that Kerouac's universe, although it might ~/ell have t\~O hemispheres has but one cosmology, one heaven, and one hello Kerouac's "visions" are ·all-pervading ones, and they

2 Or "Low~ll" and "Beat" novels; see, for example, Charles E. Jarvis, Visions of Kerouac (Lowell: Ithaca Press, 1974), pp. 207-208. Also, see probably the first comprehensive study of Kerouac's novels, Howard W. Webb, Jr., "The Singular Worlds of Jack Kerouac," in Contemporary Ameri can Novel i s ts, Harry T. t'loore, ed., (Carbonda 1e: Southern 1111 noi s Press, 1964), p. 121 (Note 4a). For reasons given shortly in the discussion above, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac's novels are grouped in this study according to Francophone criteria: (a) Neutral and non-Francophone works: The Town and the City (London: Quartet Books, 1974); On the Road (New York: Signet Books, 1957); The Dharma Burns (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); (b) Francophone and autobiographical narratives: (1) Dr. Sax: Faust Pa rt Three (Ne~1 York: Grove Press, 1959);. ~lagoi e Cass i dy ( Ne~1 York: Avon Books, 1959); and Vi si ons of Gerard (New York: f~cGraw-Hi 11 Book Company, 1976); and (2) Vi s i ons of Cody (New York: f4cGraw-Hi 11 Book Company, [abridged 1959J, 1974); The Subterraneans (New York: Avon Books, 1959); Lonesome Traveler (Nevi York: Grove Press, 1970); Desolation Angels (Frogmore, St. Albans: Panther Books Ltd., 1972); Satori in Paris (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Big Sur (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy; 1962); and Vanity of Duluoz (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1967). References to these novels in our text follow the abbreviation procedure explained and used earlier. 3 (New York: Avon Book Division, 1960). This short work and the posthumous Pic (Ne~1 York: Grove Press, 1970) are only occasiona11y referred to-rn this study.

- 2 - defy the confined "here" and "present", wh ether or not the work is "sketched", "spontaneous", "taped"', "straight" (and revised or edited), confessional or meditative . Ta a large degree, the "Lowell" or "Raad/Beat" world impinges on and gives color and significance ta the other. The works that present the beat world carry references ta Doctor Sax, Gerard, and other figures and sights of Lowell; those which present the Lowell world are [at times] cast in "spontaneous prose" of the beat generation and carry mysterious allusions ta Fellaheens and Sutras. But Kerouac's loyalties are not divided. He celebrated Lowell because it remains for him a place of unsullied beauty; he celebrates the beat generation because he finds in it what he, like Peter ~lartin, had once thought \~as forever lost. Both his worlds contain the qualities he finds most,important in life: joy, tenderness, and spirituality. 4 To an important degree, scenes from Lowell crop up on the roadside by means of comparisons, allusions, and, of course, by "remembering " passages. These Lowell references are sometimes so subtle as ta be missed at fi rst gl ance, but they are there neverthe l ess. Such woul d be the case when, i n r~orocco, Kerouac exc la ims ta Hi 11 i am Burroughs "Look, a real shepherd boy carrying a baby lamb!" and Bill said: "0 well, the little prigs are always rushing around carrying lambs." (1L p. 142)

The more obvi ous cross-references between LO\~e 11 / road are numerous. For example, in the LO~le11 "hemisphere" of Visions of Gerard, an affectionate work dedicated ta Lowell innocence, Kerouac's universe is troubled by the comets of literary fame, career problems, and cross-country friendships, not ta forget the heavenly bodies which spin off Kerouac's study of oriental philosophy. And there are other reasons which lead us ta agree

~lith Kerouac who felt that all his novels together form "only a story of

4 Webb, op. cit., p. 121.

- 3 - the world and ~Ihat happened in it" by a "poorboy, a French-Canadian like me" (DA, pp. 156 and 148) .5 Like his predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his Confessions viewed the world through his own "petite histoire",6 Kerouac's world of Lowell or the road is centered on the man of feeling, an outs i der "self" ~Iho neverthe l ess expressed, and to some degree he l ped to determine, the ethos of an entire generation. His view was a simple one : "All things that move are God, and all things that don't move [such as Lowe 11] are God." (L T, p. 146) . That, perhaps, l'las the assurance that many were looking for .

The other reasons that ~ie mentioned are to be found at the level of Kerouac's literary method: Lowell and road works were written at times within months of each other, or nearly simultaneously, such as Dr . Sax and

Visions of Cody (1951-52), both of ~Ihich show Kerouac's interest in and

5 Kerouac himself and his various narrators, mainly "Ti-Jean" Jack Duluoz (at first Daoulas, see VC,p. 103), refer to themselves indiscriminately as "French-Canadian," "Franco-American" (see Author's Introduction to LT, p. iv), but mainly as "Canuck," "Canook," Kanook," or simply "French" (see Sub, p. 11; DA, pp. 296,276, 280, or SP, p. 81). The term "QuébécoiS"i s used byKerouac in reference to Dul uoz' French lanquage (DA, pp. 343-46). The term "Canadian" in KeY'ouac's wcirks by itself also-refers to French Canada (VG, p. ·80), but whenever English Canada is the sense, it is spelled out(BD, p. 118). For simplicity's sake, in these chapters on Kerouac, our reference to Kerouac's themes and identity will be in terms of "Franco-American" only.

6 Kerouac's possible debt to "confessional" Rousseau is examined in Chapter Eight. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Antheneum, 1967), pp. 307-308, reminds us that autobiographical works are creative in that the author selects "events and experiences" that tend to provide an "integrated pattern" which can transcend "self". Frye also reminds us that there is no reason to restrict "confessional" works to the author­ as-subject, and he cites Moll Flanders and the "stream of consciousness" technique as examples of the form as it fuses with the novel. In Kerouac's case, what was greater than his self-experience? The answer seems to be his expression of a contemporary sense of alienation and a search for a Iost harmony of the individual in the world.

- 4 - experimentation ~lÎth detai l "sketching", 7 combined ~/ith free-wheel ing fantasies on the subject/form of" tapes and films, all of which strengthen Kerouac' s i 11 usi on of immedi acy , spontaneity, and "the rea 1" . And there are many such Lowell -Road bridges at this level . Briefly: (1) characters representations of the legendary Neal Cassady can be found in both The Town and the City and On the Road; (2) tone - - the semi-religious preachings and the mystical passages occur just about everywhere, but especially in the rueful and elegiac "Lowell" Visions of Gerard, which is about Kerouac 's angelic brother l'/ho died at age nine in 1926, the year of "twin" Cody's birth (VC , pp. 97 and 318- 329), as well as in the "Road" Dharma Bums , which is about the San Francisco scene at the time of its "renaissance"; and , finally, (3) the legend "Duluoz", Kerouac 's major narrative mask spans both groups of novels. The re is, then, a great deal of Lowell on the Road, ma i n ly because ,for Kerouac' s heroes, a 11 "1 ittl eboy" tO~InS were li ke

Lowell and all cities ~/ere just bigger Lo~/ells (VC, pp . 34 and 88) . 50 , whether moving or still, in the final analysis, it is the "interior" landscape that counts in Kerouac's art, which is "narrative rundowns of what 1 saw and how 1 saw" (DA, p. 230).

7 "Sketching" is a kind of William Carlos \~illiams' "no ideas but in [details]", the tar on the cracked sidewalk in OS, the plate glass scenes in the dingy restaurant in VC. This writing technique, v/hen appl ied to experience (emotions, dreams), results in what is called Kerouac's "s pontaneous " prose technique, a romantic idea that seems to have been more of a publicity affair than rigorously exact. The only truly "ad-libbed" or "beat-think" prose is in Pull t1y Daisy (New York: Evergreen Books, Ltd., 1961) \'/here according to Jerry Tallmer's introduction (p. 18), Kerouac's somewhat rehearsed (and spliced) but spontaneously composed soundtrack comes out -- just like that, off the top of his head; but see Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Bioqraphy (New York : Warner Paperback Library Edition, 1974), p. 400. It is reasonable to assume that after sVleating through "a million words" written dO~1n and revised Kerouac used his craft more or less automatically; see Robert A. Hi pki ss, Jack Kerouac, Prophet of the New Romanti ci sm (La\'/rence, Kansas: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1976), pp. 75-94. In fact, Kerouac wrote the usual way -- emotions recollected in relative tranquility.

- 5 - To conclude this review of the "Lowell/"Road" division, in order to reformulate it, Kerouac's heroes are almost always involved in the action of the writer, which for Kerouac was to redeem from darkness the otherwise "poor history,,8 of the ~lOrld somewhat tributary to the American "mainstream" . This stream of people and events runs through Kerouac's "little Canada", of course, but it also takes in the hobo and the far-out scholar living in a shack, as well as ship crews and stragglers on buses, field hands, poets, and the insane. For all these reasons -- thematic overlappings, choice of subject, literary styles, and the "legend" of Duluoz", - - the "Lowell" and "Road" division of Kerouac's canon appears to be more convenient than entirely justified or revealing. The aim of this study of Kerouac's novels -- to assemble and analyse Kerouac's image of Québec -- suggests a different approach , one which avoids the facile boundaries among his ~lOrks and I"lhich departs l ittle from the chronology of his writing. This approach is quite simply one which traces the Francophone presence in Kerouac's no vels viewed as an ensemble, with relative "LOIo/ell" or "Road" emphasis. The extremes of this Franco- phone presence are: (1) the neutral or non-Francophone stories ~- those of Peter ~lartin and Ray Smith, for example; and (2) the plainly autobio­ graphical accounts by Kerouac himself -- such as Vanity of Duluoz or Satori in Paris. Between them are found the novels about Leo Percepied and, above all, Ti-Jean (Jack, Jacky) Duluoz. On the whole, one can safely say that Kerouac' s wri ter-heroes sel dom stray far from a Franco-Ameri can identity in novels which are best classified as "confessional" since the illusion of autobiographical-journal writing is quite strong in Kerouac's

8 Kerouac's fame rests largely on his role as "Beat" king (beat as in "heart," and "down", DA, p. 140), but his writing is that of the observer of the scene more than-that of a participant. In fact, that Kerouac felt himself to be outside looking in is abundantly illustrated in his works: according to Jarvis, op. cit., Kerouac preferred "talking with •.. angels ... " p. 133.

- 6 - 9 work .

Our approach suggests that Kerouac is more of and "ethnie" writer than was first understood ty the cri tics and general reading public, except, of course , among the Franco-Americans themselves who can situate Kerouac as one of "les nôtres" even though his personality and work are considered by many to be less "typical", say, of traditional values than the life and work of Ducharme . For example , the poet-historian Rosaire Dion -Lévesque as early as 195 7 inclu"ded a short chapter on Kerouac in his monumental Si lhouettes Franco­ Americaines!O Then, in 1970, Paul Chassé claimed that the very fi rst para- graph of The Town and the City

nous plonge dans le mystère de l'extase et de l'agonie d'être Franco-Américain à cette épo­ que -- je veux dire au momen t de sa naissance dans les années vingt. 11

And Armand Chartier, in a paper presented at the Texas Tech University "Sym- posium on Ethnie Literatures", observed, in 1975, that

9 Somewhat swallowed himself by this own legend and myth , Kerouac writes in Satori in Paris that "made -up stories and romances about what would happen IF are for children and adult cretins who are afraid to read themselves s in a book just as they might be afraid to look in the mirror when they're sick or hungover or insave." (p.10). Elsewhere, Kerouac refers to the writing done or being done as "true-story novels"; and he saw himself (via his mask, that is) more and more as not actually "beat" but as a "strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic ... " whose "dut y" on this earth was "the preachment of universal kindness, which hysterical cri tics haved failed to notice" (in LT, p. vi). Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's work, Jack's Book An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1978) is the Duluoz "legend" with the original cast whose "truth" does not always rhyme that of "Duluoz"/Kerouac. 10 (Manchester, N.H.: Publications de l'Association canado-américaine, 1957), pp. 432-436 11 "Jack Kérouac: 1922-1969", Le Canado-Américain, Vol. VI, No . 1, (janvier, février, mars 1970), pp . 16-20.

- 7 - Jack Kerouac. i s not genera lly thought of as an ethni c author, so secure is his niche in the mainstream of American literature, and -so myopic has been the majority of his readers. Yet the freight of his ethnic heritage is nothing short of overvlhelming... 12 Other critics outside the Franco-American community have been less "myopic" than the general reader, of course, such as Seymour Krim whose essay "The Kerouac Legacy" 13 was first published in 1965. What our "ethnic" approach seeks to make clear in Kerouac's work is the relation between Kero uac 's cultural heritage received in LOl'/ell and his techniques as a novelist; even in Kerouac's early, non-Francophone . works, si gns of a "French fact" 1 iterary heritage can be di scerned. The connection seems to be mainly Jacques Ducharme's fiction and history, a

matter l'le come to shortly. Our argument is that what Allen Temko (see excerpt) regretted was actually there all the time in one form or another "du texte". Kerouac did "do more with" his cultural background than many have noticed. In addition to the Ducharme-Delusson connection, there are signs in even the apparently totally non-Francophone works such as On the Road and The Dharma Bums of a "north/turning about" pattern that is asso- ciated v/ith Canada. Kerouac's "little Canada" certainly informs novels such as Maggie Cassidy . But vlhat is Kerouac's possible debt to its

"1 ittl e-known 1 iterature"? Why Kerouac began his writing career with heroes who are somewhat Irish, American-Italian (Sal Paradise) or simply non-ethnie (Ray Smith) is not too mysterious. Kerouac apparently went over the question of soft-pedaling his Franco -American identity with the dean of Franco-American

12 "The Franco-Ameri can Li terature of New Engl and: A Brief Overview" (unpubl ished). 13 In Shake it for the World (London: Allison and Busby, 1970), pp. 193-216 .

- 8 - poets, Rosaire Dio~-Lévesque, who reported t ha t "la situation franco-améri - caine y fut maintenue à l'arrière plan, pour des raisons personnelles de de l 'a uteur,,~4 To explain this reluctance about using clearly his ethnie back - ground , Chartier writes that "it was not fashionable t o be Franco-American in the ninteen-forties" and that Kerouac 's " 'personal reasons' are not comple­ tely unfathomable.,,15 But there are other less personal and more literary reasons, as we shall demonstrate. 50 , for the remainder of this chapter, the relative calm comes before the storm of Dr. Sax and other novels in which, fashionable or not, Kerou ac give full and free expression to his "little Canada" experience.

1) The Lowell books A) Th e Town and the City Kerouac 's first novel , Th e Town and the City, takes us out of the more or less enc hanted New England town setting into the New York City jungle of a "country turned upside down", as father George Martin , form New Hampshi re, says (TC, p. 408). The theme of this roman fleuve about dispersion and chan ­

ge in World War II America is voiced best by Peter Martin, who, of all the Martin brothers Joe , Francis, Mickey and Charley - - stands out as t he major character, along with the father. The central themes of fam ily and dispersion are based on father George Martin's misfortunes and "old" values, and Peter is especially sensitive to both.

As both fortunes and "ways" f a 11 a\~ay, Peter l aments:

What a simple good little guy l used to be. What happened? Is it the war? Where am l going, the way l do things, why is everything so strange and for away now? (TC, p. 336)

14 Op. cit., p. 433. According to Richard Santerre, the Lévesque-Kerouac correspondence has been lost. Lévesque was Kerouac's relative, on hi s mother's side of the family tree. 15 Op. cit., p. 3

- 9 - Returning soldier Joe puts it succinct1y: "What a hell of a fami1y this turned out to be . " ... "Hell knows, I was bad enough myself -- but this! Who wou1d have thought it, when we were a11 kids in Ga110way, in the house when he [dying father George] was big and fulla pep. If there was some way to make everything go back to the way it was, or something 1ike that, not let it go on 1ike this ti11 he dies. And he is going to die, anybody can see that, and it won't be long . -- "No Joey, it won't be long," said the mother, shaking her head slow1y. (TC, p. 448) And such grief about the effects of change are to found everywhere in the nove1 . The fo110wing sums up the sorrow of the father: "Everything your mother and 1 taught you [Peter] is gone, it's all twisted up in that damn silly heàd of yours till I can't make you out for the 1ife of me. It hurts, you devi 1, it hurts!" he shouted. "I 'm your father and l' m worried about yo~,." (TC, p. 422) The country as a who1e, the entire fami1y, and especia11y Peter, undergo the profoundest of changes in The Town and the City. The United States i s in the grips of another IoJor1d Uar, the Martins are "torn" from Ga110way (an idea1ized Lowell) by flood and economic disasters, and Peter's self-perception is troub1ed by "a1ien" pursuits and persona1ities . As fami1y and persona1 suffering increases, Peter resigns himse1f to accept "1 oss" forever , but to keep fa ith -- to remember (TC, p. 496) . The nove1 ends with the buria1 of the father and with Joe taking up his dream of owning a New Hampshire farm. Peter takes his place as a vagabond, haunted by his father's image and by all the voices from the pasto Kerouac's use of the Francophone e1ement in his first nove1 is moderate, ta say the 1east, but, still, The Tawn and the Cit~ is nat as "vague1y Irish-Catha1ic" as Ann Charters c1aims . 16 It is true that the

16 Op . cit., p. 64.

- 10 - world of Kerouac's first novel is peopled mainly by the Cronins, Daleys, McNairs, Kernochans, Campbells, Gradys, and Fathers Mulholland and Connors in Gall oway and that one must be very al ert to fi nd a "French fact". The

r~artins, therefore, are intended to be an average American working family, with sorne Irish and sorne French roots. However, in the text there are several indications that Kerouac was not entirely cut from his "little Canada" background . For example, eighty percent of trains that whistle mournfully in the night are headed for Montréal (TC, pp . 7, 15, 216, 222 and 499). Other muted facts are the river's source (TC, p. 3) in Canada and the fact that God Himself speaks French (TC, p. 39 1), plus sorne explicit references to Franco-Amerjcans and to Canada in the text. These rather submerged elements together form what we call a "north/turning about" pattern which begins in Kerouac ' s first novel and which continues into the non-Francophone works. 17 The ingredients of this image-cluster of"turning about in its earliest expression are: north, Canada, or Montréal orientations coupled with experiences of bewilderrnent, wonder, or a sense of mystery about life and identity. Sorne association with "home" is very often made. The pattern begins on the first page of The Town and the City:

Somewhere far north of Gallo~lay, in headwaters close to Canada, the river is continuallyfed and made to brim out of endless sources and unfathomable springs . .. little Mickey ~1artin kneels at his bedroom window and listens to the river's rush, the distant barking of dogs, the soughing

17 Outside Kerouac's first three novels, and apart from the distinctively "little Canada " works, this pattern becomes the "going home" theme, such as the "Pauve Ti Leo" vision of "mémère" near the end of "The Subterraneans, and the "cross" vision ~Ihich directs Duluoz towarc! home and mother at the close of Big Sur.

- 11 - thunder of the falls, and he ponders the wellsprings and sources of his own .mysterious life.

This roman fleuve opening is the one cited by Chassé as being familiar to most Franco-Americans : Toute la turbulence de la prospérité de l'après-première­ guerre, les difficultés racial es, ethniques et religieuses d'un peuple en train de chercher son identité sans pouvoir la trouver parce que personne ne semblait vouloir lui tendre la main, les avaries d' une dépression économique qui ébranla, sans toutefois les désintégrer, des centaines de familles franco-américaines comme ces milliers d'autres familles à travers le pays, est-il étonnant que ce jeune écrivain se sente perdu même parmi les siens? 18 Although Hickey is not quite "lost" yet, he is in later scenes:

... r~ickey started home from schoo:l in the wrong· direction, towards Galloway Road and the old house, not realizing that he l'las doing this ... he l'las suddenly plunged iri an awful confusion as he positively could not remember which l'lay he l'las supposed to go to get home ... [to a tenement owned by a deaf Franco-American]. (TC, p. 240)

. . . ~lickey l'las the stranger, the lonesome unknown returning. How many times he had started back towards his new home in the tenement,stoppi.ng to look back at the old house longingly .. . in that world ... and none of it ~Ias his or for him. (TC, p. 243)

.. . Now suddenly r~ickey saw his family' s ne~1 house: they had come back from the junkyard by another route and quite taken by surpri se he rea 1 i zed that they were in the nei ghborhood . . . "Hey!" he cried. "That's our house!"

Youngest brother Mickey is closest to Kerouac's later Ti -Jean Du l uoz; at the start of the novel he is six years old, stunned by the sudden discovery that he does not know who he is, where he came from, what he is doing hFre ... aIl children are first shocked out of the womh of a mother's world before they can know that loneliness is their heritage and their only means of rediscovering men and women . (TC, p. 15)

18 Op. cit., p. 17.

- 12 - The other brothers, includ1ng Peter, are Duluoz as he is divided up among the possible answers to Mickey'searly questions and mysteries: Francis, the aesthete-intellectual; Joe, the vagabond; Charley, the war hero; and, finally , Peter, the writer. That which can be said ta be "familiar" ta many Franco-American readers of Kerouac's first novel, besides the geography of the opening

passage , i s its nosta 1 gi c mood . The Town and the City opens with a pano­ ramic view of Galloway, above which, on a hill, lies a cemetery; this view ends in the wee hours of the morning on the Martin front porch from where the "White Mountains are visible sixtY miles north" (TC, p. 6), the location of the cemetery at the close of the novel Ivhen father George is buried. That which is familiar, we can recall here, is the cemetery, often the ending or very close by in the final passages of the "roman du terroir" Lacombe's La Terre Paternelle, Beaugrand's Jeanne la fileuse, Archambault ' s Mill Village, Ducharme's The Delusson Family, and Ringuet's Trente Arpents. Nevertheless, it is mysterious life itself which is Kerouac's subject: "There are old people, living and still remembering, who could tell you so

mu ch about the dead of Ga11oway" (TC, p. 4), but for them as for the 1 iving, the heart of town is still "the shadow of the mill v/alls" (Ibid.). So witti. the coming of morning, "Ga11oway cames ta life" (TC, p. 5)

It can be agreed, then, that for the Franco-Ameri can reader, as we 11 as for the New Englander in general, Kerouac here is tending to familiar ground. Yet, there is no narrative about immigration to the United States in Kerouac's first novel. This is not so exceptional as it first may seem: there are two kinds of Franco-American novels in French by Franco-Americans. The first is centered on the experience of immigration; the second, on

•

- 13 - village life an"d manners. 19 Ke rouac, as we have seen, is less interested in the immigration of "LaPlanche, who moulders by the old wall" (TC, p. 4) than in the Town (then the Ci ty) as it i s: "Start from the center of town in the sunny afternoon" by the "great factory walls" up "along the river" across the bridge above "Merrimack Falls", into the suburbs, up to the

"rambling Victorian house with a battered grey look", and, finally, the "home of the Martin family" (TC, pp. 5-6).

In fa ct , it is quite l'iell into the story that we learn about ancestors: the r~artins a re at l east partly Franco-American. Father George' s mother

~Ias a "devout Irish-Catholic l'Ioman" (TC, p. 24), a Kernochan, but mother

Narguerite Martin l'las a Courbet:

... the youngest daughter of a French Canadian lumber \1orker in Lacoshua "who had saved his money and gone i nto a profitable l ittl e ta vern bus i ness, on lv to di e swiftly and tragically at thirty-eight from [a] heart attack. This left her an orphan, her mother being dead since her infancy, and subsequently r·larguerite was taken in by her father' s si sters and went to ~lOrk in Lacoshua shoe-shops on her own initiative, as a girl of fifteen making herself self-dependent from that time on ... (TC, p. 23)

This brief picture of mother Martin's early life .is easily missed in a long novel ~Ihose subject is upheaval ln" the universal experiences of leaving vi llage life for the decadent city, of leaving childhood bliss for adulthood, and of leaving the father's traditional values for the son's adventures . All the while, the depression gnaws at familiar comforts and joys and the war looms larger and larger as a determining force in everyone's life. But the Courbet and Francophone themes play an important part in the resolution of these drastic changes. Near the close of the novel, when the father is dying, and then at his burial, the Courbets return:

19 See Richard Santerre's Ph.D. thesis, "le roman franco-américain en Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1878-1943", Boston Co ll ege, 1974, pp 161-162.

- 14 - [~larguerite says about New England lifelMy uncles are still living like that _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 . You can have your Communists and your neurotics and all that stuff, but give me a good old church-going farme r fo r a man, a real man . .. (TC, p. 413) George i s buried in New Hampshire where reformed Joe has decided to buy a farm fo r hi s wi fe and future fam i ly, and for hi s mother and young brother Mickey, too . But Peter /1artin can not go home aga i n. Dislocation abso lute ly un-New Hampshi re exper i ences for the time - - has sea l ed hi s fate , \'/hich is now as problematic as the open road . The road may soothe Peter' s sense of loss:

A family leaves th~ ol d house that it has always known, the plot of ground, the place of earth, the only place where it has ever known itself -- and moves somewhere else; and this is a real and unnameable tragedy. For the children it is a catastrophe of their hearts . (TC, p. 239) Ne i ther Lacombe nor Ringuet nor Archambault wrote more poignantly about the earth theme or sense of ancestral place. Now , to less obvious Franco-American dimensions of this first novel by Kerouac . In several ways, it is as if in The Town and the City Kerouac had adopted Jacques Ducharme's Delusson family, although, as we have pointed out, Kerouac's f1artin family suffers the profoundest breaks with the past and with "routine", a Delussonian hallmark. Here is a comparative list of Ducharme's and Kerouac's families: The Delussons The Martins Jean-Baptiste (father, dies) George·(father, dies) Cécile (née Landeau) Marguerite (née Courbet) Etienne (eldest-vagabond-farm) Joe (eldest-vagabond-farm) Louise (marries in Quebec) Rose (like a mother)

- 15 - Jean-Baptiste Jr. (dies early) Julien (dies early) Léopold (Quebec -Rome educated) Francis (off to the Sorbonne) Marie (in business) Ruth (marries, "business-like") Pierre (principal character) Peter (principal character) Wilfrid (farm and bees) t,Ii ckey (to farm ~tith Joe) Adélaïde (homebody) Elizabeth (singer) Clément (dies after one year) Charley (HH II victim) The death of the hard-working father is the most moving part in each novel, and the Etienne-Joe similarities are striking, but the Pierre-Peter parallel, other than the names, seems a bi t \'ieaker . We can wonder, in any case, if the name "Del usson" had anything to do in the invention of Kerouac's mask of his forthcoming "Duluoz". t~ore intriguing, perhaps is the fact that the phrase "shadows of the trees" -- the title of Ducharme's history of Franco-Americans -- can be found in Kerouac's first novel (TC, p. 7) very close to a reference to trains hooting "on their ~tay to Montreal". Finally, the Ducharme "f'lount Tom" snake experi en ce coul d presage Tommy Campbell' s venture from home. Similarly, Etienne's ~tandering could have helped Kerouac shape his first "road" expression wh en Joe Martin leaves home; as Etienne leaves, he mutters something about exciting New York City, a city that Pierre Delusson often wonders about. To be sure, autobiographical arguments can be used to dilute these resèmblances:· Kerouac did lose his father and a brother. Also, the Joe-vagabond theme might well have been modeled after the Neal Cassady's life, although the farms are harder to explain away. At the level of the writer's craft, as well, the differences bebteen Ducharme' sand Kerouac's novels tend to bury in their wake any thematic-structural parallels. Kerouac's more varied descriptive passages as well as his keener ear for dialogue are evident in the first lines of The Town and the City. In fact, Kerouac's Galloway scenes embody many moods that just are not to be found in Ducharme's slow-paced and parochial universe: Kerouac's range of moods sweeps from the brooding and nostalgie through the merry and idealistic to the very near tragic and certainly

- 16 - depressive, "nightmarish". In contrast, Ducharme's world is tidy and simple to the point of becoming severe. Despite these differences, however, it is not far-fetched to consider Kerouac's first no ve l as a variation, within strict limits, of the long -standing "roman du terroir" tradition, more than likely transmi t ted to Kerouac via Jacques Ducharme's The Delusson Family . 20 But while in the earlier family and village chronicles that

~Je have studied, where little concern is shown for how any one character sees and feels the compl exity of the world about hi m or for how one is perplexed by his "self" , Kerouac's focus is clearly a new direction. Hhat we experi ence in The Town and the City is the catastrophe of the children' s hearts, and of these, mainly Peter's, the catastrophe caused by the fact that the child's world is an illusion: "The most beautiful idea on the face of the earth," he thought unaccountably , "is the idea the child has that his father knows everything." (TC, p. 42 3) That is the tone and the theme in a nutshell . Secondly, the ea rlier Franco-Ameri can novels in English, including Parsons', unfold according to a plan of minor albeit steady gains. In Kerouac's first novel, the central , cumulati ve expe rience is that of "1055" , the romanti c theme abo ut which more ~Jill be said later. Nevertheless, Peter's vow and determination to remember and to keep faith (TC, p. 439) is central. On the face of things, of course, the father George Martin understands Just the oppos ite.

20 Arma nd Chartier suggests another link with the Québec and Franco­ American tradition: first, the "ethnic" size of the t·1artin family i s "reminiscent of Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'Occasion . .. a Book-of-the­ Month Club Selection ... to the extent of warranting a comparative study." Op . cit., p. 4. The only quarrel here is that vlerl often , from Lacombe to "Gastonguay, Québec and Franco -Ameri caniaJ"àr~ quite small, at times with only one child : second, both are~urban novel s built around Ho! II upheavaïS:""

- 17 - Hhat we come to now is the relation between Kerouac's socio-cultural environment and his writing techniques in his first three novels . Little can be said, as \'le have pointed out, about the non-existant "image of Québec" in either On the Road or The Dharma Bums, but they can be grouped with The Tovin and the City for this part of the discussion of the early neutral and non-Francophone novels. Paul Chassé, Robert Perreault, Armand Chartier, Richard Santerre and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu have discussed in various works the bewi ldering loss of cohes i on among Franco-Ameri cans fo 11 owi ng Horl d \-Jar I. These were Kerouac' s chil dhood and teenage years; th en the -Second Worl d Har drasti ca 11 y changed America from a country burdened by economic depression into a wor1d pov/er never equal ed in hi story. Whil e the country vias "mad with war and history" (TC, p. 308), Franco-American culture collapsed, became "invisible". 21 A reflection of these changes, which were felt by everyone, shows up in the refrain of confusion, questioning, puzzling identity, mental depression, and philosophical discussion in Kerouac's first work of fiction. There is, then, a thematic paral1el between this broad (war-history) social environment, as v/e11 as the partlcular Franco­ American story of co11apse and Kerouac's Martin novel C'a "neutral" Franco­ phone work). There are structural and artistic para11els, also, but for now, let us concentrate on the thematic. At this level, the upheava1 of fami1y, country, and dreams is quite evident: all male characters plus the mother are portrayed in moments of identity crisis:

21 See le Travailleur (July, 1977), p. 8, for an article by Paul Chassé on an apparently "benign indifference" policy 'of Americans toward Franco-American cultural realities, VLes 'Canucks' et les 'Cajuns' des Etats-Un is". . she had paused (the mother), uneasy, . . on the porch i n that strange red light; and she had wondered who she really was, and who their children were who called back to her, and what thi s earth of the strange sad light could be . . . (TC, p. 25)

This "orphan loneliness" strikes nea r ly everyone in the r,lartin household .

He have reviewed young Mickey's moments of puzzling mystery and confus i on centered on the "home". Neither brother Francis nor Joe escape from a similar loneliness, but it is Peter who accompanies it into the night- marish inferno of New York's drug and hipster real i ties .

Structurally, the f i ve Books of The Town and the City r epresent steps a~lay from a happy home , a healthy father , and a universe untroubled by catastrophes. In Book One, Peter go es off to school ; i n Book Two , bankruptcy endangers the famil y home ; in Book Three, the ~la r tins leave

Gall oway Road for tenement 1 ife, Peter interrupts his studi es , Vlorld

\~ar II i s declared, and the father an d mother move to Ne w Yo r k City to be cl oser to the childr en in service. In Book Four, the "uprooted" Martins begin a terrible decline, just as Peter learns ot' the '''spiritual geekishness" and "molecular comedown" of t'lan; the \1orld is "upside d0\1n"

(TC , pp . 370 to 422) . The death of father 'George t1artin dominates Book

Fi ve, ~Ihi ch ends with Peter on the road .

Kerouac's double literary heritage and environment had some role to

play, also, in the thematic and structural design of The Town and the City.

First of all, on the Franco-American side, certain thematic echoes of the

farm- to-farm tradition, not to forget textual allusions to ancestors, all suggest that Kerouac wrote The Town and the City with some kno~/l edge

of his minority culture ' s literary past in novelistic form . The Delusson

Family was most certainly involved . Less certain are t~/O other novels,

Alberte Gastonguay's La jeune franco-américaine and Camille Lessard's

- 19 - Canuck. The evidence is perhaps weak, but it is worth a quick review. Gastonguay' s work, for exampl e, i s about the peril s of a Franco-Ameri can maid 11ho is exemplary in her fidelity and who survives New York City's inferno potential. Better still is Gastonguay's portrait of a foxy

Russ i an émi gré , Baron Kenovitch, ~/ho seems to presage Kerouac' s mysteri ous "Engles" from Vienna: both are into the intrigues of the artistic world and both Gastonguay's Jeanne Lacombe and Kerouac's Francis meet their patrons in scenes involving books -- Francis in a book store; Jeanne in a li bra ry ~/here she wor ks . But Gastonguay' s frequent moral i zi ng about religion , race, and language has no parallel in The Town and the City , a "neutral" Francophone work at best. Canuck stands a better chance of having been a novel that Kerouac might have studied seriously'since Lessard's novel takes place partly in Lowell , Kerouac's hometown . Besides this coincidence, the heaven described by Lessard as reflecting in the innocent child eyes of "Besson" is very similar to Kerouac's representation of the saintly child hero. identified as Julian in The Town and the City. That Francis and Julian are twins reinforces this possible tie because Lessard's "Besson" and Maurice are also twins . There is, inadd.ition, in Lessard's novel a father-son confl ict, and her novel, too ends ~/ith the open road, but happi ly. But as the son of immigrants, Kerouac was drawn given the break- down of his minority culture as we have seen -- more towards an almost "total involvement", as Seymour Krim describes it, in America "its folkways, history, small talk, visual delights, music and literature" .. . a rich heritage that was "gobbed up ... with the grateful passion that only the children of immigrants understand." 22 Within The Town and the City,

22 Op . cit., p. 199. - 20 - something of this "passion" is evident in the section concerning Peter's "me1ancho1y Greek" friend, Alexander Panos, a poet .. He hesitates to interrupt Peter, the "Young Faust" v/ho, at the Ga110way 1ibrary, is into the "study of everything" (TC, p. 275). t·1ighty wor1d events meant virtua11y nothing to [Peter], they were not rea1 enough, and he was certain that his wonderfu1 joyous visions of super-spiritual existence and great poetry were "rea1er than a11" . (TC , p. 274) This "penetration of Great Books" (TC, p. 274) by Peter is Kerouac's story, a1so. It was his answer, l'le cano safe1y say, to the question of

"~Ihere to go?". Some of the answers l'lere in Thomas Wolfe , others in He rman 11e 1vi 11 e, and Wa lt ./hi tman, just to name a few whose i nf1 uence can be felt in The Town and the City a10ng with Ducharme's. Hence, this double heritage -- the strict1y Franco-American and the v/or1d of 1iterature at large -- he1ps exp1ain the "turn about" imagery as vlell as the "agony" which Chartier mentions. According to Beaulieu, Le tort du Père était de croire qu'il était possible ... de parvenir au confort américain sans laisser derrière soi le vieil héritage franco-catholique -- c'est tout cela que Jack, dans une grande tentative d'exorcisme, ramène à la surface dans The To~m and the City. 23

This "exorcisme" v/orked, for a ~lhi1e, at 1east. In Kerouac's next nove1, On the Road, the possibi1ities of picaresque fiction are exp10red ; the patience of the roman fleuve a thing of the pasto Simu1taneous1y with this change in writing technique, Kerouac drops any interest in his own ethnie background, a1though Sa1 Paradise is an ethnie hero, an Ita1ian American . What is 1eft of Canada and the north concerns a kind of running off in a11 directions, as the saying goes (OTR, pp . 11-13), on the subject

23 Victor-Lévy Beaulieu , Jack Kerouac: Essai-poulet (Montréal: Editions du Jour, 1972), p. 67.

- 21 - of confusion over which highway goes West. Mainly, however, the north/ turning about image is continued in the "Ghost of the Susquehanna" scene where an oldtimer turns Paradise in the wrong direction: 1t was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with a paper satchel who claimed he was headed for "Canady" ... He were bums together. He walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna ... A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and tol d me l was on the wrong road ... "Heh?" sai d the 1ittle ghost, "Can 't tell me l don 't know my way around here . Been walking this country for years . 1a m headed for Canady" (OTR, pp. 87-88) So, while the image of Québec in The Town and the City lin·gers by virtue of a weak "roman du terroir" echo in English (via Ducharme), in On the Road the image has shrunk to a "ghost" who is wandering . This disappearance has a direct relation to Kerouac's passion for America's "small talk", for the colloquial and confessional writing that Kerouac learned from Neal Cassady's Denver narratives/letters. 24 He are down from the "ghost" to near absolute zero with the image of Québec in any form in The Dharma Bums, another travel novel , . but· more meditative and where the hero is a Southerner named Ray Smith . Is it significant that the "mond(e)" is missing from that name? Nevertheless, the "turn about" pattern occurs even in th i s 1east Francophone of Kerouac' s novels, duly transformed this time into a series of paradoxes: riding backwards, standing on one's head, and walking down the wrong side of the road (DB, pp. 218, 219 and 235). These paradoxes explain themselves in the meditative Zen mood and action of knowing the Void, which is the quest

24 Krim, op . cit., p. 202 .

- 22 - In the middle of the night while half asleep l had apparently opened my eyes ' a bit, and then suddenly l \voke up with my hair standing on end, l had just seen a huge black monster standi ng in my w;indow, and l looked, and it had a star over it, and it was Mount Hozomeen miles away by Canada leaning over my backyard and staring in my window. The fog had all blown away and it was a perfect starry night. What a mountain:!: ... It was built with a kind of winding rock-ledge road going around and around, spiraling to the very top where a perfect witches' tower peakied up and pointed to al l infinity. Hozomeen, Hozomeen, the most mournful mountain lever seen, and the most beautiful as soon as l got to know it and saw the Northern Ligh ts behind it reflecting all the ice of the North Pole from the other side of the world . (DB, p. . 234) The "other side" of Kerouac 's world is that of Lowell 's "little Canada" the true beginning and source of the Duluoz "legend", a word which provides a clue as to what techniques Kerouac will begin to exploit. To conclude this chapter, let us separate the two kinds of images of Québec that we have discussed: the textual and the formal (novelistic) ones . The textual "image of Québec" is at best an extension of quiet New England where the idealized Corbets of The Town and the City live. A few more or l ess muted "French facts" are significant, such as the sources of rivers and the directions of trains, but they are hardly stronger than the "French novels -Engles-European" shading which is given to Francis' portrait. Apart f rom Marguerite Mart in 's childhood, then, Kerouac's first novel èxploits very little of the "French fact" and absolutely nothing of the immigration narrative. All proportions respected, little more can be found in The Town and the City than in the shorter novel about Sal Paradise where one character is Remi Boncoeur, an immigrant from France. Finally, nothing is made of the Francophone/Québec theme in . Ray Smith's non-ethnie s tory. At the formal level, the image of Québec as it is transmitted via the

- 23 - "roman du terroi r" traditi on, i s s lightly stronger than a 11 the textua l image patterns put together. The major debt seems to be Ducharme's work; the possibilities of sorne link with Gastonguay's and Lessard's novels are slight, it must be admitted, even though certain elements seem to correspond. What remains important is that Kerouac, in one way or another -- whether by means of explicit allusions, image patterns, or literary inspiration of sorts -- was writing with his "little Canada" heritage near at hand, from the start. This heritage manifests itself quite naturally in another way when French is extensively used, such as in Dr. . Sax. The "image " and "presence" of Québec in Kerouac's work b€comes more distinct when the Lowell of boyhood is re-explored, partly in French.

- 24 - Kerouac's >"revolt" against convention, given a bit more wit and style, would have tickled Tom Sawyer. J . H. Justus Al l Lowell is adult chill; only the child's eye could have created and captured the fantasy of the place. Barry Gifford

B) Dr. Sax

After the fi rs t cross-conti nenta l nove l s, we come to Kerouac ' s "Little Canada", l the mill-town community in Lowell (Pawtucketville),

l This term designates a working class community, more often than not a Ne\~ England milltown populated by French-speaking Americans . As we have already seen (Chapter One), transplanted "rangs" and at times much of a Québec parish survived with some success for a number of de cades in the United States, a country once characterized by its "Little" ethnie groups. In the case of the French Canadian immigrants, first came the New England factory or Midwest mine bell or whistle, then the church steeple, around which Franco-Americans grouped themselves for economic and cultural survival. The routine (or fanatic) representation of mill (or mining) town life in the novels by Archambault, Ducharme and Parsons tells very little, really, about "Little Canada" in contrast with Kerouac's Dr>. Sax, whi ch leaves few "wrinkly tar" corners of it unturned>. For Charles Jarvis, op. cit., who grew up in Lowell (see KÙouac's small map on p. 42, OS), Kerouac's town was a ramshackle but simple world "roiling in French­ Canadian Catholics . . . a storm of poor, hard-working people whose ethic was to obey, to accept •.. a complete French-Canadian world -- school, church, language, customs ... [where people were} wild with the desperation of making a living, ~Iild with the desperation> of seizing some pleasure in life ... ", pp. 9-11. See, also, Iris Saunders Podea, op. cit., p. 375. For a very recent account of impressions of Kerouac's town, see Gifford's little book already referred to. On new efforts to maintain the "French fact" (but not necessarily "Little Canada") in the United States (TV, language courses in French), see Ri cha rd Santerre, "Les Franco-Améri cains le Retour aux Sources," Forces, No. 43 (2e trimestre , 1978), pp . 52-57, and Perreault, op. cit. , pp. 5-51. Most streets of "Little Canada" are now silent, says Perreault.

- 25 - Massachusetts, which is the setting .for the rainy, gloomy, and often wittY novel about boyhood, Dr. Sax, Faust Part Three. The "travel" here is inward, into dream, fantasy, and vision -- back through memory to the child's world made up of great brooding, shadowy, beautiful (or horrifying) and mysterious forces of life and death. These forces are all somehow wrapped up in the shadowy fi gure (and name as we sha 11 see)2 of Dr . "Sax". For the moment, our concern is to describe the universe of Dr. Sax and to assemble the direct references to Québec in this 1952 novel. They are among the earliest that Kerouac makes via Ti-Jean (Jack) Duluoz, a Franco-American "pure laine" as opposed to the Martinized Peter in The Town and the City. In a discussion with Jarvis about his Lowell childhood, Kerouac said:

"I want everybody to know what a crazy kid l was." He was talking to me and Jim Curtis one day on a drive up to New Hampshire. This was in 1968, the second year of his final return to Lowell. "But l also want everybody to know", he went on, "that my chil dhood years were fantasti c fl i ghts of beauty into a world populated by saints and incredible monsters. Dr . Sax, you know, tells about that. But there was even more. Wh en we moved from Centralville and came further into the city, to Pawtucketvi11e and to "Little Canada," l fe lt li ke l had l anded on a new planet. l guess l was about six. l took one look and one listen to all the faces and sounds of my new world and l said -- or l must

2 Also, later in this chapter, we shall discuss two other minor Lowell novels, Maggie Cassidy (written one year after Dr. Sax, in 1953), a relatively straight-forward high school love story about sports and broken hearts, and Visions of Gerard, a meditative narrative dedicated to the memory of Kerouac's older brother who died at the age of nine. Less spectacular in form and content th an the expressionistic Dr. Sax, these two works nevertheless contribute new elements to Kerouac's image of Québec. Th ~ particular, a "pi cture" of the fi rst Dul uoz fami ly members to emi grate from the Province (VG), and the rather melancholic heritage of suffering and labor (MC)~hey apparently brought with them.

- 26 - have said -- Jesus Christ, l've gotta dig every inch of this place. And, believe· me, l did." 3 The general impression one gets in reading Dr . Sax is precisely that: "every inch" of Ti-Jean's "new planet" is seen and recorded . This takes place against a backdrop of boyhood 's "monsters" -- forces of eros and thanatos , the raging Merrimack River, the redbrick textile world of mate r ial Pawtucketville. The world itself, it is revealed, is a monster , a "Snake" (with lake eyes, river mouth, mountain head, OS, p. 226) 4 and Evil is bu i lding to a head underground (the apocalypse will be a self- regulating metamorphosis, not an "end"). These are more than the usual bogey-man or "bonhommes Sept-Heures" which haunt little boys, especia.lly, since the forces of death and eros are but partial texts held together by a mythical structure and perspective, tha,t of thei r transcendence through wit and intelligence (which seems to account for the reference to a third Faust, one who can meet the Oevil and still save his soul).5 All Kerouac's

3 OP. cit., P. 19. We can aqree with Beaulieu, OP . cit., on the "fantastic" understanding of "petits crimes" among children, an under­ standing which is usually just worn down by the "light of common day" among adults, not substantially altered. The "child is the father of man" is one thing; to get back to the child's experiences (as an adult writer) i s another. 4 Like the Gatineau River in the French-Canadian l~gend"La Chasse-Galerie," in Claude Aubry, Le Violon Ma i ue et Autres Lé endes du Canada-Fran ais (Ottawa: Edition des Deux Rives, 1968 , seen from above only with the help from the Devil himself, pp. 59-64. 5 Similar to the Beauce legends of "Satan, [aussi "Satin"] "L'Amuseur" or "Le diable déjoué", presented by Jean-Claude Dupont, Le Légendaire de la Beauce([Montréal]: Leméac, 1978), pp. 132-176. In these legends, pacts with the Devil (Faust) do not lead to the loss of one's soul, which is saved by means of a ruse.

- 27 - "monsters" are tamed, that is, by the writer looking back o'ter his early quest for truth and knowledge. The ' gloom-witty mood is set by filtering childhood's bliss and terror and first steps towards understanding through the remembered pages of 'Shadow Magazine' (and, to a lesser degree, Boston Blackie films), that is, through the prism of American popular culture which is amalgamated with the art and fanatasies of the parish illustrated catechism, old records, Québec wall calendars, and legends: As the rain hit the windowpane, and apples swelled on the limb, l lay in my white sheets reading [Shadow Magazine ] with cat and candy bar ... that's where all these things were born. (~, p. 43) Lurking in the shadows (beside the numerous coffins with satin linings, along the Stations of the Cross, in the fog, in the dark hal lway, at the foot of the bed) is the gradually 6 assembled figure of Doctor Sax, a satanic kind of shadow or shroud who is out to battle Evil with "moral nerves . .. and herbs", unlike the amazing Shadow himself who is armed with a "b lue .45 •.. " (!l.S., p. 32). As the nove l ends, however, Doctor Sax himse l f admits that the whole program is "silly" (~, p. 225). This means that Ti-Jean (like Sax himself) has to turn in his cape and personal inflatable rubber raft. He had to face Death like a man: "Goddam, [says Sax], it didn't work." His normal voice is rueful. "Funny thing is, l never knew that ! would meet Judgment Day in my regular clothes without having to go around in the middle of the night with that silly

6 All who know something contribute to the Sax figure invented by ' Kerouac's boy-hero: the "black angel" /Jesuits , pool shark St. Louis, cousin Noêl (with his Phantome d'l'Opéra laughter), the "Shadow", of course, as well as William Burroughs -- even the rocky (sax) t1errimack River (linked to the Shadow's and Sax's identity on p. 32). The Wizard of Oz (all puff) element, however, cancels the "Faust" reference to tragic knowledge; but, for a child, all knowledge can be "soul-shattering". The original idea was totitle this work "A Novella of Children and Evil, The ~1yth of the Rainy Night".

- 28 - cape, with that silly goddam shroudy hat, with that black face the Lord prescdbed for me." (~ , p. 240) The novel closes with the world freed of boyhood fears and with Ooctor Sax dea l ing only in "glee" -- there among autumn '5 kids at play:

l went alang home by the ding dong bells and daisies, l put a rose in my hai r. l passed the Grotto agai n and saw the cross on top of that hump of rocks, saw sorne ol d French Canadian ladies praying step by step on their knees . l found another rose, and put another rose in my hair, and went home. By God. (OS, p. 245) In the meantime, however, we knowthat Ti-Jean 's fears and anguish must have been true and deep ones for a child of about ten or eleven years of age. Kerouac told Jarvis some things that are not in Dr . Sa x as such (but invested nevertheless in Sax's pOvler and appearance) : "Wh en l started elementary school, St. Joseph 's, l was at first shit scared of those Jesuit teachers. They looked like great big black angels with huge fluttering wings beating over us and swooping down on us whenever we dared look them straight in the eye and ask a stupid question. But it didn't take me long to get over that. l just decided that they knew what they were doing -­ they got it from heaven didn't they? And l still believe that -- yes, l deci ded they knew what they were doing , so l began to relax. 7 Like the at first scary Jesuits, Ooctor Sax, also, "knows", and the first of his knowledge (that is, one of the earliest grim lessons about life learned by Ti-Jean) is death . vJe first "see" Ooctor Sax near coffins, at funerals (OS, p. 4) . Many children and adults die in this novel. Since death come s ta the boy's world like a stranger, Ooctor Sax's origins are foreign . He is from elsewhere, South America (OS, pp. 7-8) . At first he

is mute and nameless (~, p. 33), but his presence "is strongly felt by

7 Jarvis, op. cit., p. 19.

- 29 - Ti-Jean; only rarely can he put death out of mind. He succeeds in doing this while at play. For instance, while imitating with his pals his fa ther' s a ll -ni ght cardgames, Ti -Jean remarks, "We di dn 't gi ve a sh it about no Dr. Sax .. . " (OS, p. 40) Later in childhood, and as the name Sax suggests, there are other worries, other knowledge: sex and "sex appeal". As in the case of the experience of satin-coffins-funerals, sex threatens Ti-Jean's very life: "Ton chien est mort! ..." and they brought it home dying -- on the kitchen floor we and Blanche and Carrufel with hat in hand watch Beauty die, Beauty dies the night 1 discover sex, they wonder why 1 am mad -- (OS, p. 121) The first words spoken by Ooctor Sax and addressed to Ti-Jean, now an adolescent, while they stand on a hill together overlooking Lowell, are: " . . . you just stood here at nightfall with your mouth hanging open and fisting your entail piece --" (OS, p. 193). Ti-Jean protests, "Not all the time~" But we must not forget that Doctor Sax is rumored, àt least, to have supernatural powers, too. There is a well-developed "spooky" aspect to Ti-Jean's world. After all, he was a native mystic at age seven (OS, p. 35). He gradually senses that Sax "was my friend ... my old, old fi'iend ... my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover." (OS, p. 34). \~hich is a profoundly accurate intuition df the Freudian theory that both desire and the death instinct are but different manifestations of a unified unconscious drive. Yet, prior to this friend-lover intuition and understanding, all "ghosts" are sGary:

In darkness in mid-sleep night 1 saw [brother GerardJ standing over my crib with wild hair, my heart stoned, 1 turned horrified, my mother and sister were sleeping in [the] big bed, 1 was in crib, implacable stood Gerard - 0 my brother ... it might have been the arrangement of the shadows. -- Ah shadow! Sax! (OS, p. 35)

- 30 - This passage, we might add, illustrates as well the structural device of the "fantastic" narrative, the "might have been" that accompanies the "other-worldly". The "spiritual kingdom" in which Ti-Jean finds himself is presided over by "Saxish" church, school , and nèighborhood : It was in the auditori um [of St. Louis Parochial School] . . . that 1 saw the Ste-Thérèse movie that made stone turn its head ... Th e dark nuns .. • had come to my brother's hoary black funeral in a gloomy file (in rain), had reported they were knitting in a thunderstorm when a ball of bright white fire came and hovered in their room just inside the window, dancing in the flash of their scissors and sewing needles ... (OS, p. 35) While at home: Open closet doors, everything under the sun's inside and under the moon -- brown handles fall out majestically - ­ super-numerary ghosts on different hooks in a bad void, peeking at my sleep bed -- the cross in my mothe r 's room, a salesman had sold it to her in Central ville, it was a phosphorescent Christ on a black-lacquered Cross -- it glowed the Jesus in the Oark, 1 gul ped for fear every time 1 passed it the moment the sun went down, it took that own luminosity like a bier, it was like ~1urder by the Clock the horrible fear-shrieking movie about the old lady clacking out of her mausoleum at midnight •• . Square, tall, thin, severe Count Condu has stood in my doorway many's the time -- 1 had an old Victrola in my bedroom which .was also ghostly, it was haunted by the old songs and old records of sad American antiquity ... Fear of gigantic spiders big as your hand . . . Nothing worse than a hanging coat in the dark .•. (DS, pp. 44-45)

It is in this setting that Ti-Jean wants to "face my duty" (OS, p. 43), stop his Central ville crying over Gerard's loss and about the fear of death

(OS, p. 43); but to grow up is nothing short of heroic: gloom of dead relatives kneeling in a chant and the son of the house is wearing a black suit Ah Me! and the tears of mothers and sisters and frightened humaQs of the grave, the tears flowing in the kitchen and by the sewing machine upstairs, and when one dies -- three will die ... (two more will die, who will it be, what phan tom is pursuing ~?)

- 31 - Ooctor Sax had knowledge of death ... but he was a mad'fool of pO\yer, a Faustian man, no true Faustian's afraid of the dark ... (OS, p. 43)

So it is knowledge that saved Ti-Jean: the "Shadow", like Ooctor Sax "knows"; i.e., Ti-Jean's intuition and imagination guide him, eventually, through the labyrinth of boyhood (~yee hee hee ha ha) through the initiation into manhood. Or. Sax is the game-plan for the transition, one that allO\ys us to partiêipate in the world of boyhood once more without all the p~in, just the "glee" part (the technicolor theatrics at the end of the ventur!! are less successful). Organized as a writing "game" (at least as an interior "bookmovie" scenario), the structure of this novel reflects important matters at the level of content and atmosphere: Ti-Jean "ran" ho'rse-racing, baseball, hockey, pool, news(}apers, and a bookie joint (not to forget his diary), all \yith pen, marbles, ball-bearings, paper, and so on. On the floor of his room. Alone. As in the early card-game scene, while acting out his father's night out with the boys, Ti-Jean "didn't give a shit about no Or. Sax ... ". And baggy, slouchy, and even "fooled" Ooctor Sax incarnates for the adult writer looking back into his childhood the first "moves" of a fresh, ne\1 intelligence paired with the old world. The problem with the Sax "game", however, is that the rules seem to change while it is played. Sorne of the Count Condu horseplay seems to take us out of Ti-Jean's boyhood and into the writer's later literary career. And the resolution of tensions at the close of the novel (while we admit that sorne remarks and attitudes are very funny) appears to be a surrender: a big bird simply carries the

- 32 - enigma of Evil away (OS , pp. 241-244) . 8 Which makes it quite easy to be "Faustian" . Still , Dr. Sa)) is a textile town portrait of the artist as a young boy. 1t might lack the moral and aesthetic force of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but then the mood of Dr. Sax is very different. Dr . Sax is both saddening and hi larious. 1t seems to have been conceived in way that precludes any special program other than writing: The other night 1 had a dream that r was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass. , with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself "Oescribe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile 1nstitute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J. '5 always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better - - and let your mind off yourself in thi 5 work. (OS, p. 3) The resulti ng (spontaneous) "pi-cture" is part drealll , part fantasy, part word play, but much feeling which seems to hit most boyhood moods and experiences right on the nose. That is the novel '5 major quality. Some scenes are stunning. For example, the great "bath robe vision " (OS, p. 18), or the blissful object-subject experience of "1 am the pudding" (OS, p. 19) , or of Ti-Jean's mother sprawled out on a pooltable with needle and thread to repair a tear in the green cloth (~, p. 97}.

The "pi cture" of Kerouac' 5 l ittleboy Lowell i 5 as complete and deta il ed as anyone could possibly want. He visit the textile fields, smell mémère ' s

8 The "flight" with Ooctor Sax, as we have said, is part of the folklore that Kerouac probably knew; even more probable, "flying" is part of the 1ndian-Mexican drug experience of which Kerouac certainly knew. See the works of anthropologist/novelist Carlos Castaneda, whose first perceptions (recalled in drug experiences) resemble those recorded in Dr. Sax (p . 18, for example). See, also John Tytell, Naked Angels: the Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), pp. 187-188, for further resemblances between Dr . Sax and Don Juan's "death" .

- 33 - kitchen gocdies, hear the raging falls, sit through cowboy films, vi sit libraries (where beautiful fairy-tale bo.oks are read), and scout the tenement and candystore territory -- alerted to the boundaries of the "gang", and aware of the sickest-looking man in the whole world, old eirty Destouches. In the woods around the town we meet idi0t, giggly Fourchette.

Abov·' all, we witness the monstrous ~'errimack River swell ing to engulf the low-lying districts of Lowell. We come close, then, very close, to death and total destruction (the "raft" scene). These are only a tiny sampl ing of the novel 's universe of sights, sounds, and emotions. In many ways, Kerouac's Ti-Jean is as real and believable as Huckleberry Finn}who, had he been raised in Lowell, would have also become the mysterious "Black Thief" of the night, with cache in cellar (OS, pp. 47-49). On second thought, that would be more in line with Tom Sawyer's "style". But now that we have mentioned another moral hero, Huck, we can add that Ti-Jean's victory is one of the imagination. There are no serious social problems as such underlined in ~he novel. In Dr. Sax, the whole question seems to be oiie of lifting the "adult chill" of Lowell by faithful adherence to 'the "Child's" view of it, as Gifford says in Kerouac's Town. A small part of the picture of Lowell in this work refers us directly to Québec . In the following pages, we give these references in full. Seen together, they represent another instance of the child's equally-divided interest (and need) in the zany and the heroic about which more is to be said in the discussion of the form of Dr. Sax. First, "LaPoule OuPuis," a Québec priest. Lapoule, it seems, was forced into priesthood. He was the l ast "unmarried son of a huge Québec family that according to tradition felt it would be damnée if someone in the house didnt belong to the priesthood ... " (OS, p. 61). But LaPou le,

- 34 - according ta Ti - Jean's account, was a kind of "sexfiend", and women we re not ta be trusted with him alone . 50 LaPoule fits in wi th the Saturday night drinking crowd known as "La ~laudite Gang" (including Ti 'Jean '5 fa ther and mother plus their close friends) .. Their Saturday night cel ebrations (spooky musi c on the piano; a floured face i n a picture frame, laughter, drinking) were riotous enough ta "knock me outa my bed one f l i ght abo ve ... " What fo l lows i s Kerouac at hi s zaniest: One Saturday ni ght [LaPouleJ got dead drun k after pirouetting with all the ladies at a big roaring pa rty and passed out before midnight (woulda stopped drinking at midnight anyway, as he was saying Ma ss in the morning) -- Come morning Joe's father hauls LaPoule into the shower , shoves black coffee down his thro~t, then calls the whole gang ta come see the fun at eleven o'clock Mass ~ - They're all there, the Duluozes , the Fortiers, the Duquettes , the DuBois, the Lavoisiers, the lot, a11 in the front pews , and out cames LaPoule " in chasable with the solemn altar boys and weaves and totters ta his work -- Every time he turns his bloodshot suffering eyes ta the front pews, there's my father or Joe's ... giving him surreptitious little moc king waves of the hand ... and a11 through the ~lass Joe '5 father you can hear his spluttrous inheld explosions of don ' t-laugh -- My father makes everything worse by waving his strawhat between his legs, or Blanche crosses her eyes at LaPoule just as he's raising a hast at the communion rai l -- mad gang - ~ the poor fe110vl laboring ta kneel, altar boys clutching at hi s arm as he almost fa11s over, as good aman of gold and Gad l'd say as the most postrous Bishop ever levied frowns on his flock -- LaPoule at our wild parties loved ta tell the joke (which was actually a true story) about the parish priest in Canada who wouldn't pardon some guy for a sin an d in revenge the guy smeared shite on the rail of the pulpit Of here it i 5 Sunday morni ng the pri est i s about ta begi n: "Today, ladies and gentlemen, 1 want ta speak about religion, la nature de la religion -- Religion," says he , beginning , putting his hands on the rail, "religion . . . " he brings his hand up ta his nase, puts it down again .. . "rel i gion is .,. .,." once again he brings his hand ta his nase, frowning in perplexity, "la religion -- mais c'est d'la marde~" Which jOke was one of those that used ta send off Joe's big happy mother Adelaide into such a scream you could hear it clear down the river rocks and inevitably blasted my cat off my pillow and set me wondering out of dreams (OS , pp. 62-63)

- 35 - As Kerouac writes, "it'll never happen again in America . .. Riot Loveliness " This workaday vJOrld and the American Thirties are, Kerouac writes, "some­ thing that can't possible come back again in America and history ... " (OS, p. 180). At least not for Kerouac. This kind of "lost history" is a constant Kerouac theme; he is Proustian in this sense, but as he Vlrites in hi s "Preface" to Bi q Sur years l ater, Kerouac' s remembrances Viere l'iri tten "on the run", not from a sickbed. 9 And part of the "lost history" goes even further back, coming to Kerouac's Ti-Jean via long-time a-dying Uncle Mike . 10 This history is recounted to the trembling Ti-Jean in French: o mon pauvre Ti Jean si tu sava tout le trouble et toute les larmes epuis les pauvres en voyages de la tête au sein, pour la douleur, la grosse douleur, impossible de cette vie ou on's trouve daumé a la mort -- pourquoi pourquoi pourquoi -- seulement pour suffrir, comme ton père Emi 1e, comme ta , ,tante f'lari e -- for nothi ng, my boy, for nothing, -- mon enfant pauvre Ti Jean, sais tu mon âme que tu est destinez d'être un homme de grosses douleurs et talent -- ca aidra jamais vivre ni mourir, tu va souffrir comme les autres, plus

Napoleon était un homme grand. Aussie le General f,10ntcatm a Quebec tambien qu'il a perdu. Ton ancestre, l'honorable soldat, Baron Louis Alexandre Lebris de Ouluoz, un grandpère -- a marriez l'Indienne, retourna a Bretagne, le père la, le vieux Baron, a dit, criant a pleine tête, 'Retourne toi a cette femme' -- soi un homme honnete et d' honneur. ' Le' j'eune Baron a retournez au Canada, a la Rivière du Loup, il avais gagnez de la terre alongez sur cette fleu -- il a eux ces autres enfant avec sa femme. Cette femme la etait une Indienne

9 "t1emory Babe" (Kerouac's nick-name) is a vernacular Vlay of suggesting Kerouac's affinities with Proust l'lho, like Kerouac, l'las eternally attached to his mother. See André f~aurois, A la Recherche de t,larcel Proust (Paris: Hachette, 1949). It is interesting to note that Proust l'las called "mon petit Saxe psychologique" by one intimate friend . See f1aurois, p. 42.

10 Dr. Sax is almost entirely sublunar; see p. 129 for the "skalette dans la lune ... " and p. 125 for the seemingly ubiquitous reminders of death in the Saxish Vlorld. Heaven-like bliss is associated with mémère only, see p. 148.

- 36 - on ne sais pas rien d'elle ni de son monde -- Toutes les autres parents , mon petit, sont cent pourcent Français - - ta mère, ta belle tite mère Angy, voyons donc s'petite bon femme de coeur, - - c'était une L'Abbé tout Français au moin qu'un oncle avec un nom Anglais , Gleason , Pearson, quelque chose comme ca , il y a longtemp -- deux cents ans -- (OS, pp . 118-19 ) It should be noted here that Kerouac's written French is usually as rough as that in the above passage . It is obviously written "by ear" (and as remembered), which substantiates what Benoit has already remarked about Franco-American French in general (see Chapter Two, p. 39) . Just the same , Uncle Mike's lamentations (he was the saddest Oulu9Z and that was sad) and hi story have a certa in di gnity. The story he tells to Ti -Jean concerns a point of honor: "Retourne toi a cette femme - - soi un homme honnette et d'honneur .. . à la Rivière du Loup . . . il ya l ongtemp . .. deux cents ans . " But the future , it will be noted, is just more of the same: great suffering and loss. Kerouac's novels as a whole, and the Lowell-centered ones in particular, present a stormy and emotional history and view of the Franco­

American experience . Only The TOI~n and the City with its faint but recurri ng nosta l gi a for the (Courbet' 5) "bon vi eux temps" and wi th its attention to the t1artin family's (lost) fortunes, bears any resemblance to the cut and dried narratives of acculturation by the previous three writers' works in English. As we have seen, the Franco-American presence is at a rock-bottom level in On the Road and in Dharma Bums, novels which nevertheless "turn" north at crucial moments as the story of a young and struggling writer continues. But beginning with Dr. Sax, Kerouac's

Ti -Jean Oul uoz will se l dom if ever "perd le nord" or hi s Franco-Amer i can identity which is, for Kerouac, part "Rivière du Loup" (OULU) and part popular American culture (OZ) . Like his Ti-Jean mask, and like the

- 37 - French-English pages of Dr. Sax, this identity is mixed: DULUOZ.

Th i s hybri d mas kwas gi ven shaoe by the 1oca 1 1 i fe of Lowe 11 (home,

church, school , parish of 'little Canada') on the one hand, and, on the

other, by "The Shadow" (magazine and radio program) . Dr. Sax is what

happens, in other words, when "Little Canada" meets "The Shadow". As a

general rule, the encounter, which makes for difficult reading at times,ll

is often amusing and droll. Sorne are impressed by monstrosities and

images of "destruction" 12 and sorne find it a11 "boring". 13 But negative evaluations seem to overlook Kerouac's joy (not Joycean) with words and

styles (often convoluted and bardic, "deliberately archaic" 14 at times) which come from the kitchen, or from films, magazines, or perhaps ' the radio ~

For example,

no, the Snake's not real, tsa huck of doves, tsa tsimis , tsa rained out. I talk -- "how" howp?" He looked up

11 While even whole sections of Dr. Sax verge on the "unreadable", Kerouac' s work i s not as "i ncoherent" as it i s made out to be by Davi d Dempsey, "Beatni k Bogeyman on the Prowl," New York Times Book Review (3 May, 1959), pp. 28-29. 12 See. V. Lévy Beaulieu's sympathetic reading of the Sax universe, op. cit., p. 47. In view of Howe's principle concerning the collapse of sub­ cultures just as their "voice" is found among its artists, V. Lévy Beaulieu's reading of the "monsters" and "violence" in Dr . Sax is sociologically accurate. 13 See Tytell, op. cit., p. 190, for Marc Van Doren's rejection of Dr . Sax as a "du11" gothic fairy tale; for Tyte11 's comparison of Dr. Sax to Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (with its "nocturnal doctor"), p. 189. 14 Ibid. Tyte11 finds Dr. Sax "lugubriously dro11," and its style -- at times deliriously incoherent, highly mannered, grandiloquent, murky, etc. , which reflects Kerouac's mock-serious attitude towards boyhood's "petits cri mes" as we have ca 11 ed them.

- 38 - symbol of heaven and hell : Sa X - CHRIST, which gives SA C(H)RIST; and, Sa X - TEN, which gives SATAN

As well, there is a rough bal ance struck between the "wrin~ly tar" depiction of Lowell itself and of Ti-Jean's "game" - dominated solitude and imagination. The final effect, reflected strongly in the "Hizard of Oz" ending 15 is simply that all things in this world are illusory. Kids, perh~ps, see that immediately . For example, in ehurch, the ever-watchful crowd of little ones (including Ti-Jean, of course), witnesses a young priest' s "sensational" wheeling and kneeling that "fails" when the priest barely loses his balance before the attar (OS, p. 187). That scene is true regarding the fragility of man's actions on earth, even in his worship of hi s creator; so, we are perhaps as well off with the rickety, wobbly, ramshackled -- such is the universe of Dr. Sax. The Québec references, then, fit quite well into a baroque novel. In the LaPoule scene the sacred and the blasphemous are entwi ned in t he form of a "marde"jreligion joke. Sickly and old Uncle Mike, the Oul uoz family poet and historian, goes on and on about noble ancestry; and about pain, suffering, and hell o Hhich causes nightmares. But mémère was there : Le monde il meur, le monde il meur (If people die, people die) is what she said -- "Uncle Mike has been dying for ten years -- the whole house and yards smell of death - -" "Especially wit de coffins." "Yeh, especia lly wi t de coffi ns and you gotta remember

15 Ann Charters, op. cit., p. 158, writes that Kerouac completed Dr . Sax after seeing the movie "Hizard of Oz". Also, Dr . Sax was written for the most part in Mexico where "saxish" William Burroughs provided room and board. Apparently, Kerouac wrote this novel stoned; see Charters , pp . 156-57.

- 39 - distracted. "But I '11 go through the motions ... " (~, p. 218) "How eagerly the youth doth pursue his legends, with a hungry eye," whispered Doctor Sax mu ch amused. "Woul d now the Ko-ranns of the grown up gul pitude make keen misery of that hitch. (DS, p. 202) NIN: Oooh je veux le plus belle tite robe aujourdhui Ma~ -- ... a 1 'ava des belles boules d'or sur une epaule -- Ma: Hay -- way -- des boule d'or -- pi? (OS, p. 206) "Qui a farmez ma porte?" and they said nobody (par­ sonne voyons donc") .. . (OS, p. 5) As a general rule, the local and "exterior" forces influence each other in Kerouac's novel. The gothic, rain-drenched Church, the gloomy school, the creaky tenement home, and the ramshackled neighboring yards are all depicted as "saxish" -- or inner-sanctum-like. On the other hand, however, Ooctor Sax, a "shroud" and a satanic-looking "shadow", is charged with considerable moral responsibility -- to do battle with Evil (the world Snake). This criss-crossing of inverted worlds, of native seven­ year-old mysticism (OS, p. 35) and of Lucky-Strike mystery hours and

"Weird Tales" (magazines are numerous, see pp. 203 and 207), not to forget the Ste-Thérèse movie at school, together account for the baroque form of this movie-scenario inspired novel (see the Book headings, especially "Gloomy Bookmovie", OS, p. 79). Dr. Sax is a blend of the sensuous and the spiritual, of the playful and the obscure. As Kerouac writes, Dr. Sax is a "mad universe" of dream, memory, fantasy (~, p. 5). There are, for example, as many rough-house scenes and boyish theatrics as there are feelings of anguish about death, desire, and the life of the soul. The name "Sax" is, accoustically, very close to the sound of "sex", a matter to which we return shortly, just as, semantically, the name sugges ts a

- 40 - honey Aunt Clementine has suffered all these many year s trying to keep ends together ... With your Uncle sick and lost his grocery store .. . (OS , p. 120)

Clear ly , in Dr. Sa x , Kerouac handles his "little Canada" backgr ound and assimilation exper ience in a very special way . We can recall here that his "multiplication" of himself by means of the "neutral " (part Irish, part Franco-American) Martin brothers runs parallel ~o the central theme of the no vel, which is : in a world "upside down" - - the causes are globally the War cri si s and locally the decline of the "French fact" -- the quest ion is "where to go?" . The answer, as we have seen in Chapter Six , for Keroua c the writer was a derivative one in many ways, the Ducharme connection and the Wolfean title providing the major clues. With Dr . Sax , however, Keroua c explores very different ground. Not the traditional novel but, rather , the bountiful alleys of popular culture : legends , superstitions, jokes , comic books, fairy tales, films, old records, victrolas , movie "zoom" -ins, tade- ins and fade-outs, spl i cing, montage, radio programs , chil dren' s games, and so on. If we believe Hipkiss, another "mass" movement underway then, drugs, had something to do with freeing these elements from memory . 16 and from the censorship of social and personal value systems . This aspect, however, is best left to the psychoanalytic cri tics and to socio- logists . Without knowledge of the personal drug experiences df the author

Kerouac, one can still formulate notions concerning the relation between a cultural environment and the writing techniques that Kerouac employed t o

16 Op. cit. , p. 90. According to letters that Kerouac wrote to Ginsber g , Kerouac "found, like the opium- taking Coleridge, that when his mind was stimulated by drugs the images of the mind took on such force that they seemed more real than the facts of the physical world. "

- 41 - express sornething of that world. Also, clearly Dr. Sax can ternpt one to take direct steps frorn the text to the "referent" wor l d outside, in a "truth to reality" stride that wou ld be far too easy. For example, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu claims that Dr. Sax is the meilleur document que l'on possède sur la vie franco -améri­ caine des années 1920- 1930. En le lisant une première fois, j'ai été frappé par le grand nombre de monstres, d'idiots, de névrosés et de personnages vicieux qu'y décrit Jack. (N'est-ce pas l à le lot de toutes les sociétés se décultu­ risant?) - .. . j'insiste parce qu'elle est importante, non seulement pour la description du milieu social de Lowell, mais également si l'on veut comprendre ce que, plus tard, deviendra l'oeuvre de Jack: toute sa vie, Jack aura une prédilection pour les fous, l~s illurniné~; les malades et les psychopathes -- 17 Dr. Sax is in sorne ways a very important social document: it depicts domestic and factory life, Franco-American social clubs, Church and school, and neighborDood characters all in their daily (and nightly) attire. But every sound, smell, sight, and va lue is presented from the point of view of a writer rummaging about his glee-and-terror filled memory of boyhood. The title is not "Lowell" but Dr. Sax, Faust Part Three and that had earl ier been "A Novella of Children and Evil, The My th of the Rainy Night". In other words, the main setting is a boy's imagination and sense of real ity. Just as "Ti-Jean" becomes what he reads (The Black Thief), the semi -human character Ooctor Sax embodi es the forces of "evi 1", the mysteri es of life and death, and the evolution of a young intelligence grappling with experience. And as the French passages make quite clear, that experience was channeled in both "old" and "new" ways. On the subject of a mystery "thriller" magazine, for example, Ti-Jean's mother exclaims:

17 Op. cit., pp. 30-32.

- 42 - "Tu vas arretez d'lire ca ste mautadite affaire de fou l~; tu m'attend ta?" (OS, p. 50) So , the monsters and idimus and vicious people in Dr. Sax are not in themselves of key importance, but the many media and cross-cultural references are. Dr. Sax, is, after all, a fantasy world . It is a grim- wittY fai ry tale of initiation: death, sex, philosophical resignation, adulthood. And like most fairy tales, Dr. Sax is peopled by a monster or two, a dim-wit, and a few vicious characters. But would they have been depicted as grotesques, as ogres, and as a "fairy god-father" (Doctor Sax) in a less mythically-organized work? Are they not to be understood, finally , as projections of an anguished child who has grown giddy by fears and joys and questions about who he is? If "Weird Tales" had as much reality to Ti-Jean as the rites and representatives of the traditional Church, school, and home, can we wonder that pitiful Ali Zaza becomes so uncha ritab ly "wei rd"? Isn' t Kerouac' s associati on of dogs and monstrous acts a sign of cynicism? To get back to Beaulieu's commentary , the question is not that monsters and idiots, and so on, are presented but by what means? He shall see that the references to "'spontaneity" in writing are important, mor:eso th an the fact that certain descriptions occur. In fact, the "gothic" atmosphere of Dr. Sax requires and leads to the grotesque, but the gothic-grotesque is not univocal. If we agree with Beaulieu concerning the monster-deculturization process, to a point, then his view should make some room for the other side of the coin: gargoyles and monsters are noted for their power ta suggest something "new", "other". 18. . He have pointed out that the world of Dr . Sax· is a cross-bred one of

18 Georges Crépeau, author of 1 'histoire d'un crime ( Lowell, Mass.: Ateliers Typographiques de l'Etoile, 1892 announced at the close of his novel a forthcoming, illustrated Le Fantôme du Merrimack. Never published, this idea could be related to Kerouac's "comic strip" version of Dr. Sax. See Santerre , op . cit., p. 117.

- 43 - Cathol ic wall calendars from Québec and the "Lucky Strike" mystery hour. Perhaps the best image in the novel of the "old world" hooked up to American becoming is the "gadget" crucifix, that neon-Christ that glows in the dark hallway (OS, p. 44). In such a tourbillon, one can ask "who is Ti-Jean"? To answer this question, let us begin by examining again the first words of Dr. Sax: The other night 1 had a dream that 1 was sitting on the sidewalk on ~loody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to my self "Oescribe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute , or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J. 's always sittin and dont stop to think of words and when you do stop, just stop to t,hink of the picture better and 'let your mind off yourself in this work. " In the next few lines, Kerouac uses his "patois" French: "Eh, batêge, ya faite un grand sarman s'foi icite" (OS, p. 3). The insistence here is all on the logic of dreams, the fertile ground of the unconscious mind, upon memory, "mi ndl ess" writing, upon free-associ ati on, de ta il a 11 the elements of the language of the' unconscious mind. Let us call this writing "spontaneous". Given such a program of writing, the question about "who is Ti-Jean" is answered: he is bbviously pieced together from various sources, as various as those in Lowell at the time. The "American media" speak for themselves, but there are other - "Little Canada" - sources: that is, there is a very good chance that Ti-Jean here is a bit of the legendary Québec-and-Franco-American "Ti-Jean le parresseux" who, according to the comic book we have seen, 19 does battle with charging unicorns and

19 Adapted and drawn by Claude Poirier and Serge Rilson (Saint-Lambert, P. Q. : Les Editions Héritage Inc., 1976) from Aldéric Perreault (compiler), Les vieux m'ont conté (Montréal : Editions Bellarmin, 1973). This "Ti -Jean" is so lazy that his mother throws him o'ut of the house. Sister Therri ault, op. cit., p. 197 mentions the popularity among Franco-Americans of the "cycle de Tit-Jean" in folk l ore and legends.

- 44 - fire-throwing dragons. And, equally propable, could be not be something like Adélard Lambert's "Jean Dubeau" character, who does battle with the Devil himself?

L'autre nuit j'ai r~vé que le diable venait à ma rencontre, . . . je m'emparai d'une hache, je couru après, et le diable s'est sauvé comme un peureux qu'il est." 20 Further, could Ti-Jean be in part, at least, related to Kerouac's heritage of Franco-Ameri can legends of, say, "the revenant" or drawn somewhat from folk tales, such as "connaissances" of death (Doctor Sax "knows"), such as those collected recently by Paul Jacob in Les Revenants de la Beauce . 21 For instance, if something "knocks" on your door, you say "Ouvrez" but not "Entrez". The first question, in French, posed by "Ti-Jean" in Dr. Sax is " . .. (Qui a farmez ma porte?)" and they said nobody' (Parsonne voyons donc") -- and l knew l was haunted but said nothing; not long after that l dreamed the horrible dream of the rattling red livingroom, newly painted in a strange 1929 varnish red and l saw it in the dream all dancing and rattling like skeletons because my brother Gerard haunted them and dreamed l woke up screaming by the phonography machine in the adjoining room with its Masters Voice curves in the brown wood -- (DS, p. 5) "Ti-Jean" is "haunted". We know that Kerouac read extensÎ'VeTy; he writes, also, that he learned his art of story-telling from "listening to tales from relatives (MC, P.90). Huch of Dr. Sax, we can safely assume, cornes to us from folklore, beliefs and taboos, and oral literature. In fact, "Doctor Sax" is "Doctor Sex", since the "a" of "parsonne", "skalette", and "sarman" replaces the normally written "e" . But these same words, personne- skelette-sermon remind us , also, that Doctor Sax is first seen near coffins

20 Contes de Tante Rose, contes du bon vieux l es enfants Montréal : Editions Edouard Garand, 1927 21 (Montréa 1: Boréal Express, 1977).

- 45 - (OS, p. 4) and that his first knowledge is that of death. And of all the

"mixed" e1ements of Kerouar's "spontaneous" world of mainstream American and traditional Québec/Franco-American rea1ities, the coffin rea1ity of the nove lis probab 1y the key "French fact". Why? Because Dr. Sax i s what Margaret Atwood would call a "coffin nove1" and, therefore, very

Québécois. Acco ·rding to Miss Atwood's comparative reading of American,

Canadian and Québec literature:

If the central European experience is sex and the central mystery "what. goes on in the bedroom," and if the central American experience is ki~ling and the central mystery is "what goes on in the forest" (or in the slum streets), ~urely the central Canadian experience is death and the central mystery is "what goes on in the coffin". Nowhere is this more evident than in Québec literature. 22

For Miss Atwood, the image of the coffin and death (an obsèssion she says) is an "image of ultimate sterility and powerlessness, the result of being a iJictim". 23 Thi~ interpretation may be an oversimp1ification, in the same way that Beaulieu's views on monsters in Dr. Sax are too quick1y invested with the keys to Kerouac's nove1 of boyhood. Just the same,

Miss Atwood's view of Canadian (especially Québec) 1iterature seems to bring Dr. Sax into ancestral focus - - and in a startling way. Dr. Sax is about "what goes on in the coffin", for sure. All that we can add is that the "obsession" with death surfaced in Dr . Sax for both personal and cultural reasons, knowing full we1l the power of the latter to determine most, if not all, of the "personal". By this, we mean that Kerouac's be10ved brother Gerard died and "haunted" Ti-Jean. The notion of being

22 Survi va 1 (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p. 222.

23 Ibid., p. 224.

- 46 - haunted t"spooks", etc.) is, no doubt, first of all cultural. It is obvious that death is a central mystery in life, but, culturally , Ti-Jean's

"ultra- montai ne" Church invested death with the power to salvage human beings from world misery. Still, if the ancestral-cultural focus is clearly "coffin"-oriented, Dr . Sax is not "sterile" or "powerless " in its effect upon the reader. Childhood moods and memories in Dr. Sa x are at times resurrected in a brilliant way .

To conclude, the spontaneity of Dr . Sax ("dont stop to think", baroque phrasing and form, word-play, bilingual texts, film- book compari sons) permits Kerouac to bàild br idges to and from a number of inner and local realities which otherwise might not "become" American at all. In other words, "spontaneous" writing and effect are one answer, at least, to an ethnie situation that in many ways resembles the "double bind" of psychology : if a writer can not be himself in his work (a minority back- ground) he is lost; if he becomes an "ethnie" writer, he is off on a tangent. Also, "spontaneous" writing, as a technique, reflects a cultural set of values which pins hopes ~pon the individual ("1 had a dream") who can come up with something original and new. Dr. Sax is meant to be some- thing new -- a transformation of experience partly in the American grain, partly against it, something perhaps "Joycean" and promising. But Kerouac seems to have realized that Dr. Sax, while it contains many memorable scenes of "little town" childhood, peters out as a "Faustian" exercise: The sky is too bright, the sun is too mad, the eye can't follow the grand ecstatic flight of Bird and Serpent into the UnknOlvn. (OS, pp. 244- 245)

Not everyone can participate in Dr. Sax and follow all its fl ights of fancy. Especially those flights which have some relation to Québec and the "French fact" history and culture. In Dr. Sax, Kerouac shows how "Ti-Jean" lost and found his "~me franco-américaine", his "soul" in Duluoz "à l'envers".

- 47 - C) Maggie Cassidy and Visions of Gerald We briefly examine here two other novels about the early years in Lowell, Maggie Cass idy and Visions of Gerard, works which are not baroque or gothic in form and content, but rather straightforward accounts of adolescence and early childhood . Both add new dimensions to the image of Québec in Kerouac's 'IOrk; his "pi cture" of emigration occurs in Visions of Gerard. Maggie Cassidy is a sad and sweet-sixteen story of heartbreaking love and divided schoolboy loyalties. By this time (age sixteen and seventeen), Ti- Jean Duluoz has outgrown his rainy afternoons of solitary games. His life is a regular affair of thirty-five minute kisses on Maggie's front porch, and one-hundred-yard-dash heroism, l ettered ("L" for Lowell) sweaters, catcher's mitts, proms (but no more capes). Older now than in Dr . Sax, more experienced,

Ti-Jean , now Jack or Jacky, i~ neve rtheless junior to tender and caressing Maggie. Her desire is to be married and settled in a red-shuttered cottage. she is a poor sport, all things considered, because Jacky's heart is set on fame and a college career. 50, they break their young hearts. In addition, a family favorite, Pauline, pines away wondering about the boy she loves: friends and parents keep her informed about Jacky's whereabouts and concerns. Needless to say, Jacky receives advice from nearly everyone, mainly to keep his mind on sports (track and baseball), on his future, and off girls. Maggie is not the only girl on the beach. Such are the "grave facts" of Maqqie Cassi­

~ a novel which captures a very American world of high sc hool loves, victo- ries, and defeats:

today 17,000 notes will be delivered from shivering hand to hand in this ecstatic mortality ... writing, dreaming the enormous sad dream of high school deaths you die at sixteen ... running for vice-president of the sophomore class ...

- 48 - "0 wounded Wolfe . .. " (MC, pp. 54-58)

It comes as no surprise, therefore, inthis nostalgica11y-framed adolescent universe of "adult love torn in barely grown up ribs" (MC, p. 119) to find that references to the past (including any direct reference to QUébec) are at a minimum . All our attention is directed towards the pleasures and pains of abandoning childhood. The basic conflict rests on Jacky's departure from home for either marri age (~laggie's wish) or co11ege sports (at Horace Mann, eventua11y Columbia). "Becoming a man ... " (MC, p. 147) in other words, whatever the decision. "Ti-Jean", as he is ca11ed at home, leaves for college, but the title of this novel tells us that he left much of himself on Maggie's porchswing in work-world Lowell. The main quality of this novel lies in the authenticity of the spoken word captured by Kerouac. Everything said (about baseball statistics, local transportation, meals, or in confidence -- many secrets are whispered) rings true . Everything written, too: Naggie's notes to Jacky are classics of the genre: muddled feel ings· and desperate contradictions: If you have to talk with Pauline please dont let any of my friends see you because it gets back to me ... 1 will try and remember that it is your privilege to go out and do as you please ... Please forgive. Write soon tear this up. (MC, p. 117) Ditto for the letters from pals G.J., Scotty, and Vinny (who wrote "like he talked", MC, pp. 165-67). Here is another sophomore note: "Beware if not signed -- -Signed, the Unknown" (MC, p. 115). "Straight from the scene" (MC, p. 165), also, are the wild teenage discussions in Ti-Jean's gang- fi11ed room: my mother let them in from the front; it was gray Sunday, symphonies on the radio, papers on the floor. Pop snoring in his chair, roast beef in the oven ... (MC, p. 115)

- 49 - As in The Town and the City the Duluozes, the Cassidys, the Bissonnettes, had "No idea in 1939 that the world would turn mad . . . " U1C, p. 237). And like Peter Martin, :Jacky goes off to prep school (in New York City):

1 lay in bed thinking 1 was going ta be a big hero of New York with rosy features and white teeth -- an idiomatic post-Iddyboy incarnation of the American Super Dream Winner, Go Getter, Wheel, -- and white snowy scarf and big top coat with corsaged girls in tow ... [goneJ all the times that winter between Haggie and High School l'd played hooky in ... now l'm in New York ... (MC, pp. 161-162)

It is during this daydreaming that Jacky experiences a timeless "worldview" of life and his part in it. Québec appears as a small link in an elaborate and awesome process of fate and chance that has brought Ti-Jean ta New York and away from "sweet Lowell ": the viaduct from landing beaches and cold pines of the St. Lawrence River, over the mer the Breton fisher boys are snarling up the nets with-salt cracked hand ..• my whirls of world-seeing race around the room ... (MC, p. 162) Following a "terrifying" experience with a New York City prostitute, Jacky returns home for Christmas, "a big grown-up man of Lowell." (MC, p. 172) . Maggie has correctly interpreted his hints of sexual prowess and pleads all the more for his love. But "1 have also been drummed with the

idea that if 1 want ta marry ~laggie it's better ta wait," Jacky reminds himself (MC, p. 162). Sa Maggie and Jacky part once more. After one more try -- at a disastrous prom in New York City where porchswing Maggie is snobbed -- they bid each other farewell again. There is no hope of luring Jacky away from jazz, books, horn-rimmed intellectual friends, and the glamor of the Apple. Three years after the prom, Jacky, drunk, contacts

~laggie for the last time. But "the sweetness of the girl was hidden from

- 50 - the boy . .. "; she laughs in his face. Jacky "put out the l ights, drove her home, drove the car back skittering crazily in the slush, sick, cu rs i ng ," (MC, p. 189). The reader is prepared for this kind of ending to Maggie Cassidy, not so much because of its bittersweet tone, but because the novel is padded (sometimes incomprehensibly, p. 58) with graveyard musings voiced by father and by Jacky . Such as "Hhen you' re young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die". (MC, p. 84). Or, "the incredible ruin of years and the death they have wreaked on the flesh and jaw-bones of men including baseball stars," (MC, p. 88). These depths are coupled with some peak experiences:

l knew that the earth, the streets, the floors and shadows Of life were" 'holy -- like a Host. .. of great smoke of men and things ...

l was ecstatically insane in my innocence [and track victoryJ. l knew joys not by name but that they crossed my clotting breast of hot blood and disappeared unnamed, unknown, uncommunicated .•. l cried remembering the beautiful faces of life that night. (MC, p. 103) Such sensitivity is, of course, many-sided. Jacky is awed by love and by life, but he also can grow very sad. Melancholy is the refrain in Maggie Cassidy which measures the vanity of Jacky's wishes: "impossible mountains, the incomprehensible satires of blank humanity -- congeal, cark, sink and seal my blôëd --" (MC, p. 72). Although there is a surprise birthday party (during a record 20-inch snowfall in Lowell), with parents and friends, the Dul uoz fourth-storey tenement (over "Textil e Lunch", MC, p. 60) has los t mos t of its Saxi sh glow. Fantasy and glee have vanished. Lowell $$ bleaker -- there are the housing blocks for textile workers right out of "Dickens' memoirs" (l'1C,

- 51 - p. 53) . The spit-on-the-floor poolhall called Le Club de Paisan (MC,

p. 79) could be from Stephen Crane (but their Maggies do not resemble each other): there, "L~Père knows how to make a fire against a howling wind .. . one horizontal wild line from Canada . .. " (MC, p. 79). Father Buluoz

is out of work (I~C, p. 67). One hope is sports. The one refuge "home": I passed the Textile Lunch windows, saw the bent fisty eaters through steam panes, and turned smartly into my gloomy rank doorway -- 736 Moody Street -- dank -- up four flights in eternity. In. "Bon, Ti Jean est arrivez!" my mother said. (MC, p. 67) The image of Quebec in this novel is somewhere upwind in the raging winter storm (HC, p. 79). Even the trainwhistles belong to "Boston and

Maine" engines (MC, p. 36), unlike those in Kerouac's first no vel where an echo of Montreal could ge heard. In Maggie Cassidy comparisons to other places refer to vast stretches of the United States: Lowell tenements and washlines are like those in San Francisco ("enduring the fog", MC, p. 16), and Lowell itself, with Greek and Irish communities, is like any small American working town with its "cafeteria and soda-fountain devotees" (NC,

p. 87). Nevertheless, an important dimension of Ti-Jean 's universe is French, which is "French-Canadian": "Comprends?" loud in French, like an Uncle calling the idiot from the corner making clear to me meanings that can never be recorded in the English language ... (MC, p. 95) ... the French Canadians yell in French, the boys hear it with rat-tat-tat disbelief, composts and rim-posts, jabberous, impossibly -- my father yelling, "Okay, let's talk in English so we can chat with ... the boys here ... (~1C. p. 131)

- 52 - " let the name of Lowell make a noise il1 their hearts after this -- that in the world where the name is Lowell the bOJs brothers and mad hurl themselves howling in this mortal ocean .. . brothers, boys, wolves of the North . " (These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable). (MC, p. 103)

"Mon Doux, Mon Doux." (Canadian boy's pronunciation of Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, 14y God) . (MC, p. 106)

When French dialogue is used in Maggie Cassidy, the scene is close to home (parents, neighbors, Church, lunch counters, pp. 20, 43, 46, 47,

67, 93-94, 113, 125), never in the presence of Maggi e .

The relation of socio-cultural realities to Kerouac's, writing techniques is very clear in ~laggie Cassidy. As the title suggests, the

Franco-American and Ir-ish ident,ities are at the heart of the matter.

According to Ann Charters , 24 Maggie Cassidy amounts to a reworking of The

Town and the City themes of an Irish sweetheart, prep school, and sports.

That which is changed is the point of view. In Ihe Town and the City, we find the Martins presented by means of an objective, third-per son narration .

In Maggie Cassidy, according to Charters, the point of view shifts to the first-person. In place of the "divisîon" of Kerouac's self (division among the Martin brothers), we find in Maggie Cassidy a Jacky Duluoz who is "in the center of the scene" . 25 This center, however, is defined as Franco-

American: " . .. these thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable."

(MC, p. 103). Unlike the "translated" Martin brothers, part1y Franco­

American, partly Irish, Jacky Duluoz ~ Franco-American. But hiss French, as we have said, is not used in Maggie's presence; Jack's French is employed

24 Op. ci t., p. 176. 25 Ibid.

- 53 - at home, or very nearby. So Jacky and Maggie, who live three miles apart, also live in different linguistic environments. The very structure of the novel emphasizes this difference. The fact is that not all of Maggie Cassidy is in the first-person . The novel begins and ends with third­ person narration. It is important to the understanding of Maggie Cassidy to note that the main ly French-Canadi an "horsep l ay" (Chapters 1 th rough

IV) and the 1055 of Maggie (Chapters XLVI and XLVII ') are separated by the

first-person of Jacky Duluoz, known as "Memory Babe" (MC, p. 14) who introduces himself with these thoughts: Never dreaming, was 1, poor Jack Duluoz, thatthe soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends, the ministers thereof . •. No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me, no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, the only word ... choked forever. (MC, p. 27) The semantic field here is bbviously charged with references to a complex inner life: "Ilreaming", "soul",. "inside" "first and only skin", (the opposition first/last): "death", "life within", "word . .. choked". Further­ more, Maggie ("an Irish girl", MC, p. 29) is immediately "translated" when Jack and she dance together for the first time: Maggie Cassidy -- that in its time must have been Casa d'Oro -- sweet, dark, rich as peaches -- dim to the senses like a great sad dream (MC, p. 29) Once again, important social realities of the Franco-American community in New England are thematically but also structurally presented by Kerouac.

"Jack 0 diamonds", as he is often called, was deep down a "valet de carreau".

The "Square of life" (MC, p. 27) supports this interpretation, although Jacky is not a knave or contemptable fellow - just unlucky at love . Jacky and his first love Maggie are separated not by religious differences,

- 54 - because "Maggi e coul d have been the mother or daughter of God --" (MC, p. 35), but ràther by cultural and linguistic ones. "You ' re French

Canadian aintcha?" (t~C, p. 39), asks Maggie when they first meet. * * * Visions of Gerard is an affectionate "holy" work 26 dedicated to the memory of Kerouac's older brother Gerard who died at the age 6f nine. Th e setting of this novel and the period take us back to the years prior to Pawtucketville and Dr. Sax, to Centerville, close-knit truly French community such as you might not Mnd anymore (with the peculiar Medieval Gaulic closed-in flavor) in modern long-eared France ..• (VG, p. 80) where

for the first four years of my life, while he lived, l was not Ti-Jean Duluoz. l was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped misposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness of his teachings of tenderness to me •.. (VG, p. 8) In contrast to Gerard's vision and light, or this "hatch of Duluoz sai ntliness", the world of "redbrick smokestacks of Lowell mills" is mean and unfriendly. In a book about a saint, could things be expected to be otherwi se? Plourdes -- a Canadian name containing in it for me all the despair, raw gricky hopelessness, cold and chapped sorrow of Lowell ... (VG, p. 13) l can remember the faces of the Canucks of Lowell .. . the hungjawed dull faces of grown adults who had no words to

26 See Charters, op. cit. , p. 252: VG is "the mostreligious book in Jack '5 fictional autobrography".

- 55 - praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to Sê've the mouse from the trap... 27

men with their awful minds -- Their ignorance, grossness, mean . petty thwarthings ... "Mouse? who cares about a god dam mouse ... " 1 don't count Gerard in that seedy lot, that crew of bulls The particular bleak gray jowled pate-eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian quality of man with his black store, his bags of produce, his bottomless mean and secret cellar, his herrings in a barrel, his hidden go ld rings, his dirty broom in corner, his ~~ousness, his cold hands, his easy greeting and hard opinion -- Lay me down in some sweet lndia or old Tahiti, l don't want to be buried in their cemetery ... 28 Yet not l ikely Gerard ever, if he 'd have li ved, would have fattened as l to come and groan about people and in plain print loud and foolish, but was a soft tender-h~arted angel the likes .of which you'~l never cind aga in. .. ". (VG, pp: 15-17) 50, for little brother Ti-Jean, the pale face of angelic Gerard (the innocenti is the one bright spot in an otherwise grim "little Canada" world of experaènce: The cussingest people in the world the Canucks in their cups, all you have to do is go to their capital and range up and down the bars of Ste. Catherine Street in

27 The trapped, saved, murdered, or poi soneo mouse i s a mi rior· theme in Kerouac's moral and spiritual world; see especially DA (p. 88) and the nightmarish BS (p. 37).

28 And he was not. Stella Sampas, Kerouac's third wife, buried Kerouac in the Sampas plot in the Edson Cemetery, along side Kerouac's boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas. See Gifford, Kerouac's Town , p. 10, and p. 50: "He really loved Sammy."

- Sb - l~ontrea1 to see some guzz1 ing and profanity... 29 (VG, p. 76)

Gerard's story -- once the rough wor1d is summed up ~- is a charming one about a sickly boy too weak to play and who is doomed to an ear1y grave: Summers he'd 1ain a-afternoons, on back, in yard, hand to eyes, gazing at the white c10uds passing on by, those perfect Tao phantoms that materia1ize th en travel and then go, de-materia1ized, in one ~ast planet emptiness, 1ike sou1s of people, like substantia1 fleshy people themselves, like your quite substantia1 redbrick smokestacks of Lowell Mil1s a10ng the river on sad red sun Sunday afternoons . . . "Mon pauvre ti Loup, me pour l il Holf, you were born to suffer". (VG, pp . 9-10) . Before his 1ast i1lness, Gerard dozes off in catechism c1ass and dreams of Heaven :

29 For a different view of Ste-Catherine Street in Montréal see Book of Dreams, which, as the title suggests, ming1es Montréal with "Russia" (p. 141). "HAPPY DREAI·1 OF CANADA, the illuminated Northern land - - l 'm there at first on Ste . . Catherine or some other Boulevard (sic) with a bunch of brother French-Canadians and among old relatives and at one point Nat King Cole is there talking with my mother (is not dark, but light, friend1y, l call him 'Nat' [the reverse of 'tan']) -­ \~e all go to the Harsh Northern Schoo1 and are sitting (like the grey wood room of Mechanical Drawing class in Bartlett J.H. shack) and the teacher is a freck1ed redhaired Scotchman and acts a 1ittle contemptuous of the Frenchies, has his favorite teacher's boy in the front row and he too is a sarcastic freckled redhaired British Canadian -- l've been close and ta1kative and 1ike Saint1y Ti Jean with everyone 50 now contemp1ative1y l 1ean forward and study the situation, watch the teacher and his asskissing sarcastic prototype, and softly, in French, nodding, for l see it a11 and on1y because an outsider American Genius Canuck can see, "Ca-na-da" -- (I say) Ca-na-daw -- and my brother darkhaired anxious angry Canucks vehement1y agree with me -- "lt's a 1ways them!" they cry and l see that sarcas ti c non-French smi rk on the redheads' faces, smashab1e faces, something hatefu1 l must have seen on Ste. Catherine St. in 1953 March, that arrogant Britishified look or some ancestors' memories of old French-lndian canoe wars -- Had l gone back to Canada l wou1dnt have taken shit one from any non Frenchman of Canada ... took everything from Brother Noe1 and mourned but God the fist mashed face of my redhaired Eng1ish Canadian enemy ... '·

- 57 - "Well what are you doing Gerard! you're sleeping!" "We 11 1 was in Heaven . " "What?" '''{es 5ister Marie, 1 've arrived in Heaven!" He jumps up and looks at her straight to tell her the news. "It' s your turn to read the catechi sm!" "Wh ere?1I "There -- the chflflter -- at the end " (VG, pp. 66 -67) 50 goes the story of Gerard. 30 At his death, the 5isters visit the 1itt1e boy and take notes on what he sees as he 1eaves this wor1d (VG, pp. 128-129). Ti-Jean, be1ieving in his older brother entire1y (about what Heaven and God were 1ike -- "Bl anc d'or rouge noir pi toute ... ") is overjoyed for Gerard: gleefully 1 'm yelling "Gerard est mort! " ... as tho it was some great event that wou1d make a change that wou1d make everything better, which it actua11y was, v/hi ch granted it actually was. But 1 thought it had somethi ng to do with some ho 1y transformation that wou1d make him greater and more Gerard 1ike -- He wou1d reappear, following his "death" so huge and powerfu1 and renewed -- The dizzy brain of the four-year-01d, with its visions and info1d mysticisms . .. (VG, pp. 129-130) An important part of "Ti-Jean" never forgot Gerard nor their visions of great transformations: 1 don't see him in the coffin but he's there, his ghost, brown ghost, and 1'm grown sick in my papers (my b100dy 'literary career' ladies and gentlemen) and the who1e reason why 1 ever wrote at a11 and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensib1e

30 A story made up of stories repeated by Kerouac's mother: "1 had no objection to acting 1ike a 1amb because my mother'd to1d me so many stories about my 1itt1e brother died at nine who was so 1amby, Gerard, wou1d rescue mice from traps and bring them back to hea1th in 1itt1e cardboard box hospita1s that were a1so cathedra1s ... (MC, p. 90). 5ee, a1so, DA, p. 238: "The background [to "Ti-Jean'sldentity"] · being my brother Gerard who said things to me before he died, though 1 don't remember a word, or maybe 1 do remember a few (1 was on1y four) ... about a reverence for 1 ife, no, at 1east a reverence of the idea of 1ife, which 1 trans1ated as meaning that 1ife itse1f is the 110 1y Ghos t -- "

- 58 - Usable pencil, bec~use of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero -- "Write in honor of his death" (Ecrivez our l'amour de son mort) {as one would say, write for the love of God -- for by his pain, the birds were saved, and the cats and mice, and the poor relatives crying -- . . . Lord bless it, an Ethereal Flower, l saw it all blossom -- they packed me to bed . They raved in the kitchen and had it their way. (VG , p. 132) Other little boys and girls were in a different mood (Doctor Sax obviously lurking somewhere in the shadows): t1eanwhile the kids at church did the sign of the cross sorne of them wiU, the fo11owing words: "Au nom du père Ma tante Cafi ère Pistalette de bois Ainsi soit-il." (VG, p. 24) Appropriately enough, Kerouac's "picture" of Québec emigration to the United States takes place near a baptismal fount; in the air, though, there i s cursing: Emil Alcide Duluoz, born in upriver St. Hubert Canada in 1889, l can picture the scene of his baptism .at sorne wind whipped country crossing Catholic church with its ironspike churchspire high up and the paisans all dressed up, the bleak font (brown, or ye11ow, likely) where he is baptized... Forlorn, the Plains of Abraham, the winds bring plague dust from all the way to Baffin and Hud~on and where roads end and the Iroquois Arctic begins, the utterly hopeless place to which the French came when they came to the New World, the hardness of the Indians they must have embrothered to be able to settle so and have them for conspirators in the rebellions against ~ontarious potent churly England -- Winds all the way from the nostril of the moose, coarse rough tough needs in potato fields, a little fold of honey enfleshed is being presented to the holy water of lite -- l can see all the kinds of Duluozes that must have been there that 1889 day, Sunday most Hkely, wh en Emil Alcide was anointed for his grave, for the earth's an intrinsic grave (just dig a hole and see) -- Maybe Armenagé Dul uoz, bowl egged 5 feet ta 11, pl ank-stiff, bapti sma l best boots, tie, chain and watch, hat (hat slopey, Saxish slouch) -- His statuesque and beauteous sisters in endless fold­ draperies designed by Montreal couturiers tinkling delighted .laughter late of afternoons when parochial children make long

- 59 - shadows in the gravel and Jesuit Brothers rush, bookish like "ill angels," from darkness to darkness -- The mystery there for me, of Montreal the Capital of al l French Canada the cùlture, out of which came the original potato paternity that rioted and wrought us the present family-kids of Emil -- 1 can see the baptism of my father in St. Hubert, the horses and carriages, an angry tug at the reins, "Allons ciboire de cawlis de calvert, wait'll they fi ni sh wi pi n i m" -- Poor Papa Emil, and then began his life. A whole story in itself, the story of Emil, his mad · brothers and sisters, the whole troop coming down from the barren farm, to the factories of U.S.A. -- Their early life in early American New Hampshire of pink suspenders, strawberry blondes, barbershop quartets, popcorn stands with melted butter in a teapot, and fist­ fights in the Sunday afternoon streets between bullies and heroes who read Frank r~erriwellOf Emil much l ater more -- (VG, pp. 94-95)

The above -- wi th i ts te l ~scoped ti me and scene -- i s a "pi cture" , as Kerouac writes, a kind of imagined vision of New World history and geography which seems to jet forth in an alliterative and spontaneously j,umbled collage of sights and sounds. Characteristically, life-death, holy-blasphemous, and Québec-Americana are found mingled in one breath broken here and there to keep the story line relatively straight. This is as far as Kerouac ever got in writing the emigration story na whole story in !tself ..• " as we have thus far seen in this study. Readers and critics generally agree that Visions of Gerard is a moving work. Kerouac himself liked the work very much; it was his favorite book, according to Charles Jarvis. 31 For Malcolm Reid, Visions of Gerard ranks as one of the two "evocations of French-Canadian life in English

31 Op. cit., pp. 199-221.

- 60 - that" have moved me ... ". 32 Beaulieu, too, was moved to tears during the reading of Visions of Gerard. 33 Hipkiss. although he considers the novel about Kerouac's older brother to be "unremarkable", does credit it with a nostalgic charm, a tender quality that lingers in Kerouac's writing about childhood once the anguish of Dr. Sax is filtered out. 34 Visions of Gerard _is, then, aB "affeotionate memoire",.35 as Gifford and Lee put it. and it is unusual for critics to come down hard on such writing. But that has been done: Malcolm Cowley found Visions of Gerard to be "marred" by its many references to an "alien religion" . 36 What is not "alien", however, is Kerouac's "trailing clouds of glory" theme in Visions of Gerard . Gerard may be just a boy but his grasp on the

32 The Shouting Signpainters (NY: ~lodern Reader:; 1972), p. 39. The other work is Robert Fontaine's The Happy Time, a collection of Ottawa-Hull sketches that we have included in our partly-annotated bibliography. 33 Op. cit., pp. 10-11. 34 Op. cit., p. 136. Hipkiss considers Kerouac's Pic, another work devoted to brotherly love, to be equally banal. Pic is a kind of dream come true in terms of a returning big brother. Slim, Pic's big brother, returns after years of absence to rescue the narrator-hero, Pictorial Review Jackson, who is mistreated (and he?

- 61 - meaning of life is saintly wise. In Lowell, his soulful actions and thoughts mean one thing: Gerard has all the makings of a future priest (VG, pp. 24 and 47). Terms such as "karma" simply reinforce the rare depth and scope of Gerard's holistic vision; they in no way replace the confessional booth, the nuns, Father Lalumiëre's influence, etc., which are all very much part and parcel of Catholic Lowell. In fact, wh en one reads Visions of Gerard along with Camille Lessard's Canuck, a novel already mentioned in connection with Kerouac's writing, nothing could be more indigenous than Visions of Gerard. Canuck, as we have already stated, is, in part, a mill and tenement novel. Its first setting is Lowell at the turn of the century. Just as in Visions of Gerard, workigg Lowell in Lessard's novel is grim, noisy, and dirty. Adults of Lowell are, in Lessard's novel, summed up in the greedy, mean figure of the Labranche father. Kerouac pictures adults of Lowell as chilling personages, too. But at home, the soul of an invalid brother, "Besson", gives hope and li ght (and even transforms the father), much as is the case in Kerouac's novel abouthis bro.ther Gerard. It must be recalled, as Kerouac himself states, that

l dont remember rationally but in my soul .: and mind Yes there's a mouse, peeping, and Gerard, and the kitchen the scene of this heart-tender little hospital. (VG, p. 16) Could part of this memory be that of reading or hearing retold the story of Lessard's Canuck? Certainly the third chapter of Lessard's novel, titled "Besson a un ami", suggests that, probably, yes, the story of Besson may have contributed something to the story ·of Gerard. For example, Kerouac's "soul" remembers "Yes there's a mouse" and there is Gerard with his "heart-tender little hospital" (VG, p . .16). In Canuck, Besson, an

- 62 - invalid twin to Maurice, takes refuge from a street "gang" which tortures him for his deformed back . They call him "grenouille" , so he prefers to watch the action below from a fourth-storey window: Quelquefois il s'endormait sur sa chaise et, autour de son front, le soleil traçait une couronne d'or ... Sous la chaleur bienfaisante, l'enfant rêvait aux arbres, aux prés verts, aux fleurs de l a ferme canadienne. Il rêvait. également aux goujons des ruisseaux, aux fraises des champs, aux mŒres des bois, mais il rêvait aussi au ciel . .. (f, p. 25) Gerard, too, passes long hours at his windowsill, but with his birds "that neighbor and relative could swear did know him personally ... "Arri ve, mes ti's anges . .. ". (VG, p. 26). And he dreams of Heaven often:. "Gerard has eyes up to sky and knows .. • from that sky of silent mystery ... " ,etc. (VG, pp. 36-39). More striking, still, is the picture of "Besson" with his mouse, a white "rat" really, a gift from his friend "Cadet Roussel", other- wise known as "Trois poils" due to lack of hair on his head. Cadet Roussel brings to his friend, also, an injured bird (f, p. 28): they spend hours together building a protectivecage for this "moineau avec une aile brisée . .. ". (f. p. 29). Cadet Roussel 's last gift is a goldfish which is del ivered just moments before Bessons 's death:

" Comme il n 'y a pas de chat, ici, pour sauter dessus tu pourras le faire mettre dans un plat et le regarder nager. Voi s comme il est beau et petit." Et ce di sant, le gamin faisait miroiter la bouteille en l'agitant au­ dessus du lit. Un sourir, -- le dernier en ce monde, - - illumina les traits de l'informe. La mort faisait interlude. Le ciel s'ouvrait et les anges, ravis, contemplaient deu x de leurs petits frères de l a terre... "Goodbye Besson, je revi endrai demain pour voi r si tu es mieux." (f, pp . 38-39) 50, Lessard's novel is a moving work, also.

It is interesting to note that in both works emigration from Québec occurs: although admittedly sketchy in Kerouac's case, the emigration

- 63 - narrative, cited above, is the on1y instance of that part of the Du1uoz

story. In addition, it is significant that in Lessard's nove1 a "passant"

figure called "Le père L'Allumette" is given much importance in the nove1

once the setting shifts back to Québec. One priest in Kerouac's nove1

about Ge rard is named "Père La1umière". Coincidence? Perhaps, but

especially in terms of the "Besson" - Gerard sj'ri111arities, chances are

that Kerouac had some know1edge of Lessard's 1936 nove1 . In any case, as we have a1ready stated, Catho1ic "litt1e Canada" Lowell is portrayed in

both nove1s . There is no doubt that this common background inspired Kerouac to write Visions of Gerard, one of his "ho1y"'nove1s.

* * *

To conc1ude this section, Kerouac sought in his Lowell nove1s of

chi1dhood and youth to give form to cultural, historica1, and psycho10gica1

rea1ities hard1y "trans1atab1e": his abundant use of French in Dr. Sax,

Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard amounts to the 1ion's share' 0f his

"image of Québec". The priests from Québec, "LaPou1e" in Dr . Sax and Père

Anselme Fournier in Visions of Gerard (p. 46) are but bit p1ayers. Even

the narration of the Du1uoz emigration from St- Hubert pales by comparison

to the universe evoked by Kerouac's use of French. As Beaulieu writes, on

the subject of Kerouac ' 5 French, "Si vous ne commencez pas à comprendre 7 pourquol. J.,. al malS. J ac k d~eS ce momen t , prenez ce 1 1. vre, d'ec h'1 rez-1e ... ,,3

Language is more than an image: it ~ Québec. The history of emigration,

37 Op. cit., p. 86. This passage refers to Beau1ieu's reading experience of Satori in Paris, but the effect ho1ds true, no doubt, for such works as Dr. Sax and Visions of Gerard.

- 64 - the exi stence of Franco-Ameri ca, the Church, 1egends, nove 1 sand conventi ons·, values, menta1ity - - a11 are in the final ana1ysis based upon this "French fact". And this exp1ains, perhaps, Kerouac's continua1 theme of "loss" and "going home". His French in his nove1s signify both, simultaneous1y.

In his Lowell nove1s Kerouac seems to have rea1ized the ve rity of the old adage that "traduire" means "trahir". In other words, as opposed to the nove1s of "translations" (the Martins, Sal Paradise's story, or the Ray

Smith interlude), the nove1s of Lowel1ian chi1dhood and youth orbit about the American contradition of "je me souviens". From there come the baroque form of Dr. Sax, the heartbreak of ~ie Cassidy, and the melancho1y of

Visions of Gerard.

- 65 - A11 paradises are lost ones ... André Mauroi s L'autobiographie, c'est le choix que je fais de mes mensonges ... Victor-Lévy Beaulieu

II) The "Road" nove l s

In the remaining prose works wbere Ti-Jean is a grown man, Kerouac's adventures are set outside Lowell and Pawtucketville in California and on the West Coast for the most part. Nevertheless, the Lowell of boyhood is present in a persistent way, enough to make Lowell (and early .memories) a continuous theme in Kerouac's writing. And now and then there is sorne reference to Québec and to the Québécois language, both of which are now important to Ti-Jean's "Canuck" identity: a slight accent in English (DA, pp. 183-184); his reluctance to a110w room for any other "French Canadians" (8S, p. 71); his brooding "Indian"-ness (VC, p. 333); his running argument with certai n French "wise-guys" about hi s own (Québec, or Cana di an, or French-Canadi an, SP, pp. 46, 63-64, 81, respecti ve ly) ton gue and· French-ness. Our aim in this concluding chapter on Rerouaè"s' writing is to assemble these references in order to see how Québec as a vital part of Kerouac himself fares in the "beat" worl d. The works sel ected for thi s purpose are a 11 lengthy ones -- Visions of Cody, Desolation Angels, Big Sur, and Vanity of Ouluoz. l These works map out the "beat" world, from its early days (VO) to Kerouac's farewell to it (B5), but as we have pointed out earlier,

1 The Subterraneans, where Kerouac's mask is Leo Percepied provides nothing additional concerning Quebec. Plainly autobiographical (Lonesome Traveler and Satori in Paris) works exclude themselves from the category of fiction -- a definition already stretched to embrace the thinly disguised confessions of Ti-Jean (Kerouac) Ouluoz. We shall, however, come back to LT and ~ briefly in the final pages of this chapter.

- 66 - our interest in these works is Ti-Jean ' s own consciousness (\~hose light illuminates the world about him 2). As we have seen, the source of that consciousness ~prings from Québec: Kerouac's first language was "Québécois".

Let us see how it now travels as Kerouac himself, its "porte parole".

As in Proust, the slightest event experienced by Ti-Jean can send dpples back to the dimmest of memories :

"inexpressibly delicious" . .. for as memories are older they're like wine rarer, ti11 if you find a real old memory, one of infancy, not an established often tasted one but a brand new one~ [hence, the paradox in Kerouac's world: newly discovered memorœes]it would taste better than . .. Napolean brandy .. . (VC , p. 26)

Remembering A la Kerouac can go to incredible lengths:

One of the first if not the very first, memories of my life, L'ru in a shoel"epair store and there are shelves cluttered with shoes, innumerable battered shoes, and it's a gray rainy day.. . l 'm presumably with r~a and probably one year old in my baby carriage (if it happened atall) ... (VC, p. 145)

But reco11ection, even while wondering "if it happened", takes us back past the barrier of "childhood amnesia", to prenatal (1917) bliss (DA, ' p. 288) and into another life (OTR, p. 144, "1 had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn 't remember ... "), to the end of a11 memory of self (the peyote experience, VC , pp . 332-333) . It is not surprising, therefore, to find that birth -- "being torn from my mother's womb . . . "

(DS, p. 111) -- is the figure, or model of Kerouac's life experiences:

. . . \~ith each step from Home Lowell into the Unknown ... a serious lostness that has never repaired itself in my shattered flesh dumb-hanging for the light .. . (~; p. lll)

2 See Charters, op.cit., pp. 147-148.

- 67 - Our purpose here, however, is not to trace" Kerouac 's hero back to the womb and beyond. Just to Lowell and Québec is sufficient:

while l struggle in the dark with the enormity of my soul , trying desperately to be a gréat rememberer redeeming life from darkness .. . (VC, p. 103)

First, Visions of Cody, a latter-day and in-depth version of On the

Road. 3 If it can be said that the earlier novel 's action "is the avoidance of interpersonal conflict ... " 4 then Visions of Cody is the meeting of personalities head-on. All action in Visions of COdy centers on Ti-Jean's fascination for his "brother" Cody Pomeray (who replaced Sal Paradise's

Dean Moriarty). The "conflict" is a profound one since this work on Cody threatens Ti-Jean's very identity, (like a Catherine Heathcliff) Ti-Jean's di rge goes " l am made of loss -- l am made of Cody, too." (VC, p. 397)

Visions of Cody is a magnificent failure that tries to get in everything, including the kitchen sink, 5 as the Book subtitles themselves indicate

3 Allen Ginsberg's estimation of VC as compared wij;h OTR; see "Introduction" to VC, pp. vii-xii. It was also, in Ginsberg's 1View, a "holy mess", but~hat is not a contradiction; see Barry Gifford, ed., As Ever (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 130.

4 We have already àrgued with this evaluation by GoodmanJwho seems to forget the repeated tearful and embarrassing meetings and farewells in OTR, pp . 156 or 203, for example, which if developed into a major theme, would have altered considerably the picaresque quality of the work as a whole. 5 Charters argues that the "immense" book writing is related to Kerouac's Catholic upbringing: unis sketching method had its roots in his experience inside the confessionals of the Catholic Church. In the confessional it was a sin to hold anything back ... " op. cit., pp. 141-142. A more plaus­ ible theory is that Kerouac associated writing to the transcendence of the "ruins of time": "1 'm writing this book because we're all going to die -­ In the 1 one 1 i ness of my 1 ife, my fa ther dead, my brother de ad • my mother faraway .. . nothing here but my own tragic hands"... VC, p. 368). Still, Hipkiss, also, links "spontaneous prose" to Kerouac""'S Catholic training, op. ci t., p. 91.

- 68 - in Visions of Cody that: (1) "newness" is an illusion because, somehàw,

Jack has already "known" the "present", (VC, p. 110); and (2) it is impossible to reach or to record the present moment: Now events of this moments are so mad that of course l can't keep up but worse they're as though they were fond memories that from my peaceful hacienda or Proust-bed l was trying to recall in toto but couldn't because like the real world so delugingly vast, l wish God had made me vaster myself -- l wish l had ten personalities, one hundred golden brains, far more ports than are ports, more energy t ila than the river, but l must struggle to live it all, and on foot, and in these little crepesole shoes, ALL of it, or give up completely. (~ . pp. 99-100) There is an illusion, at least, in Visions of Cody that "ALL.of it" is there but the topics are mainly two: sorrows and joys of knowing COdy and words. Words can do wonders. For example, Jack and Cody become "sujet/subject" in a bi-lingual passage which is unique ' in Kerouac's writing. It goes " .•. let's hear what my French-Canadian side has to say about him. Now we're conni ng nature. Si tu veux parlez apropos d'Cody If you want to talk about Eody pourquoi tu'l fa -- tu m'a arretez why do you do it - you stopped avant j'ai eu une chance de me before l had a chance to continuez, ben arrete donc. Ecoute, continue, stop won'tyou! Listen, · j'va t'dire -- lit bi~n . Il faut tu te l 'm going to tell you· -- read well: prend soin · -- attend? -- donne moi you have to take care of yourself, une chance -- tu pense j'ai pas d'art hear it? give me a chance -- you moi français -- ça? -- idiot -- crapule think l've no art me French? - eh? " (VC, p. 362) These columns continue for a full printed page, and end :

à Cody, un corp; To COdy, a body.

(VC, p. 363)

The name of Cody, then, is a bilingual hybrid of bodies : CO (corp) + (body) -

DY = CODY . The principal reference to Québec in this work devoted to Cody occurs

- 69 - wi th thei r "recor:çli ng" references: "Tapes,"" Imi tati on of Tapes," and filming sections, "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog". As a diary of everything said during many rap sessions, or felt, Visions of Cody is a maddening clutter of description, "ree1s," confession, dialogue, and "sketched" detai1s of various scenes -- an enormous and amorphous work. Content (main1y the minutes of a "huge confessional night" VC, p. ix), and form (recorded as it went, i.e. spontaneous) together spring from a sacramental effort to worship the "now". Neverthe1ess, Ti-Jean's Lowell is se1dom very far away, especia11y in the ear1y descriptive prose . The Harrisburg,

Pa., streets are "18th century streets ... 1ike Lowell (VC, p. 110); the brown, dingy restaurant scene in New York City, at the corner of Third Avenue and 47th, on a winter night "reminds me speech1ess1y of 01d blizzards when my father was ten, of '88 .. . " (VC, p. 5); across the street there is a "b1eak rectory", and with "people going by", we suddenly come across another scene: THE POOR LON ELY OLD LADIES OF LOWELL who come out of the five-and-ten with their umbre~las open for the rain but look so scared and in genuine distress not the distress of secret1y smiling maids in the rain who have good legs to hop around, the old ladies have piano legs and have to wadd1e their where - to -- and ta1king about their daughters anyway in the midd1~ of their distress. (VC, p. 21) The objective of this work is to share with Cody ("Hore and more l thought of Cody ... ", VC, p. 25) all 1ifë's experience from the death of Gerard to the present moment ("Cody is the brother l lost ... " born the year Gerard died, 1926 ,VC, pp . 319 and 97). Part One dea1s mainly with Ti-Jean as a writer who sketches the scene before his eyes but who goes back to chi1dhood and Lowell in many comparisons 'and memories. Part Two deals with Cody's boyhood in Denver, but, fina11y, what counts is that

- 70 - both men - - mi les · and cul tures apart -- had many of the same "vi si ons" (VC, p. 83, for example) . Part Three is a tape and the structure is that of a dialogue: JACK. COOY. JACK. COOY. and so on. Ti-Jean and Cody talk about everything under the sun. They even talk about the tape (on the tape). Part Four is as rambling as the preceeding part, but seems to be as much a parody as an "imitation" of what went on during their talk

since this Part is headed "COMPOSITION .. . .. by Jackie Ouluoz ... . . 6-8" (VC, p. 249) . Part Five begins playfully, àt the expense of Joan Crawford's name ("Joan Rawshanks" etc.). The heart of the book is in this final part, however, since it is here that the two men get down to brass tacks of their feelings for each other: BUT IT WAS ONLY yesterday that Cody said ta me ... "1 love you, man, y.ou've got to dig that; boy you've got to know . " (VC, p. 328) Although it is apparent that Ti-Jean worships Cody, his affection remains

implicit between an early letter (VC, p. 40) to near the end of the work

(VC, p. 370), where JACK and COOY talk of each other and themselves in the third persan: COOY. l'm blasting the rods to hell, it's not my Cadillac. JACK . Far back in the funereal seat the two college boys asleep. COOY. Meat for Chicago. JACK. We pass the hobos of the road with the fire under a watertank -- we don't pause to inquire -- Iowa is pale green, Cody is grimly driving. We love each other and talk all night about it and comment on memories. Tom Sawyer never had a better time. (VC, p. 370) That seems to be a curious way of being "Present": talking about the past as if the pri nci pa 1s were "other". On the other hand i t has been made cl ear

- 71 - during a peY0te session: l commented only once,my hair hanging in strands with square edged backhead like an Indian, Cody repeatedly saying that l look like an Indian and l tell them my Iroquois grandmama-ma in the North Gaspé, l being of the race of the Indian who was pushed out of every place in the western hemisphere New World except America, ha ha .•. (VC, p. 333) No doubt, if they had been high on cider, Kerouac might have appeared cl oser

to the St-Hubert /Rivière du Loup habitant of the "bon ~ieux temps", but

cactus knobs being what they are, the North Gaspé is Indian . Kerouac's ï

Indian identity has occurred earlier in the work (~, p. 251), near a passage concerning "a spectral l ittle Canadi an choo-choo' rail road H in a dream involving mother - North Pole - Siberia - precious jewels. We should also note that for Ti-Jean, Cody ("a Nietzchean hero of pure snowy wild

West," VC, p. 338) appeared at their first New York City meeting in 1947 to have

..• long sideburns like certain French-Canadians l used to know in my boyhood in Lowell, Mass., who were real tough, sometimes were bo~ers, or hung around rings, gyms, garages, porches in the afternoon [with guitars] •.. (VC, p~ 3'39) "Visions" are subjective; this book about Cody is inevitably about Ti-Jean himself. Scattered throughout the book are many new scenes of boyhood Lowell (VC, pp. 36, 61, 103, 108, 262, 267, 270, 320, etc.) concern- ing relatives and Ti-Jean's and his father's old friends. Visions of Cody in another "translation" attempt by Kerouac. Perhaps "projection" is a better word, because Cody is everything that Ti-Jean was not: a westerner, a car-jockey; a cowboy and as American as the proverbial apple pie. Even his writing technique is eody's as the transcription of "tapes" makes quite clear.

* * *

- 72 - As a "sequel" to Dharma Bums :; Kerouac's Desolation Angels takes us back to "Desolation Peak" where for seventy solitary days and nights "Jack" (who n0\1 replaces the earlier Lowell Ti-Jean) works as a forest fire-watcher and firefighter. To the north is Mount Hozomeen again, and the "'clouds of hope' lazing in Canada ••. " (DA, p. 29). "Desolation in Solitude" is a journal of observations in nature, of dreams, of memoriés, and of medita- ti ons - - a sort of Kerouacean "sermon on the mount" preached On the nature of the Void. Once again we find the baseball games (of Dr. Sax) but replayed in great detail and solitude (DS , pp. 38-41). Duluoz dreams again of Maggie Cassidy (DA , p. 53). But above all, are the memories of youth and Lowell : "r go out to fetch a pail of snow to put in my old t1n washtub that reminds me of my grandfather's in Nashua ... (DA, p. 49). Sunday mornings and late afternoons "remind the lonely writer of "Ma 's house" with papers, shower, wine and a hearty breakfast (Jack Duluoz is eating out of tin cans, mainly): Then as the day lengthens and Sunday drags ... r always begin to think instead of the earlier days in Lowell when the redbri ck mil l s were so haunted by the ri vers ide about 4 in the afternoon, the kids coming home from the Sunday movies, but 0 the sad redbrick and everywhere in America you see it, in the reddening sun, and clouds beyond, and people in their best clothes ... (DA, p. 54) When a dangerous el ectri cal storm th reatens, Jack "senses" a remembrance of his birth: near Lupine Road ... some thunderstorm night in the summer of 1922 with grit in the wet pavement, trolly tracks electrified and shiny, wet woods beyond, my apocloptatical paratomanotial babycarriage yeeurking on the porèh of blues, wet, under fr.6ited lightglobe ..• (DA, p. 62) Hunger brings back the memory of Duluoz' father, who adored a good Chinese

- 73 - dinner (DA , p. 64); and across the face of the moon can be seen flying a brief "dream of a kid" '-- "across the face of the moon the Shadow of

Doctor Sax ... " (DA, p. 65). The stars above Mount Hozomeen are "the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad . .. " (DA, p. 70) . And thus goes sol itude, of memory and meditation, of desol ation, " .. . my heart aches from human -- Sunday -- the Sundays in

Proust . .• " (DA, p. 82)

Duluoz decides that he and everything are just a "passing through"

(DA, p. 85). Lonesome and vanishing, like the American hobo (see LT, pp .

172-183):

lA Bowery friend says] "1 wish things was like they was wh en my father was known as Johnny the Walker of the White Mountains. ---- He once straightened out a young boy's bones after an acci.c;lent, for a meal, and left. The French people around there called him 'Le Passant '" (He who passes th rough. ) (LT, p. 182)

The "passant" or "passing through" sums up quite well both content and form of this story which continues as a "confession" once down the mountain

(DA, p. 87), bound for the "sweet city", first Seattle, Wash., and then

San Franci s co . Book Two i s made up of accounts of tra'{e l s through Mexi co,

New York City, Tangi ers, France, and London. The fi na l voyage i s "Pass i ng

Through America Again", this time with Jack's "Ma", on a bus. Along the way life on the "beat" scene is presented. We meet Burroughs, Ginsberg,

Cassady, Corso, Orlovsky, and Duncan. We also meet two other "French­

Canadians", one nameless (DA, p. 273) and one called Levesque (DA, p. 203).

But nothing is really important since life is for Jack more and more like a "tale told by an idiot":

The uni verse is on fire and a big swindler like Melville's confidence man is writing the history of it on inflammable gauze or something but in self-eradicating ink on top of

- 74 - all that, a big hype fooling everybody, like magicians making worlds and letting them disappear by themselves . (DA, p. 247) The Bbeat" world has become more than Jack had bargained for in terms of his responsibility (as a "King", or model-leader, DA, p. 325) and of style (dreary "coolness", DA , p. 324, and the rudeness of some, related in

Big Sur, p. 110). As in Eliot:s poem, Jack laments that that isn't what he meant at all . Solitude, binges, and friendships all have a way of go i ng sour . . Ditto for fame and success: . .. back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we're famous writers more or less, but they wonder why l'm so sunk now, so unexcited. (DA, p. 366) In such a mood it is no wonder that the very few references to Québec in this story are cast negatively. For example, "The deep French faces of Canada staring forever in the ground." (DA, p. 269), and the woodlots in Montréal are "dismal" (DA, p. 327) . Duluoz' Francophone personality takes a turn for the worse: "cold-blooded, money-fisted Canook .•. " (DA, p. 296); the "crook" in the story is from Montréal (DA, p. 273), and Jack is told out-right by an ill-intentioned acquaintance in New York that he is a "bad-blooded Kanook --" -- "Why do you keep saying l 've bad blood?" "'Cause you grow tails in your family." (DA, p. 277) Which makes part of the despair a bit comical. Not so amusing are the many arguments about money (for example, DA, p. 276). It seems that success has changed all to sadness : Like the old photographs all brown now of my father and his gang posing erect in 1890 New Hampshire -- Their mustaches, the light on their heads -- or like the old photograph you find in abandoned Connedi cut farmhouse attics showing an 1860 child in crib, and he's already dead ... (DA, p. 249)

- 75 - And so goes desolation, as Uncle Mike has predicted. Or "Duluoz of the Do 1ours" (VC, p. 94). On the anci ent Lebri s de Kerouack coat of arms i s the devise : AIMER, TRAVAILLER ET SOUFFRIR. (SP, p. 105). Kerouac knew it all before he read those words For the student of literature, there are many passages in Desolation Angels that are important concerning the how and the why of Kerouac's writing. There are many metanarrative details on past literary creation (OTR, OS, TC, MC, etc.) and on Ti - Jean's wrtting methods -- nickel notebooks, pencils, typing (DA, pp. 229, 230, 232, 238, 241, 246, 260 , 291, 297, 338). As well, this work contains many good sketches, such as the one of Burroughs in Mexico, trying to eat a sandwich ' ''arranged and rearranged" ~ith "thïn whi te fi ngers" that are gifted "Iii th the dexterity you mi ght expect 'from tweezers ... " (DA, p. 233). GO,ing, "hm-m-m ... " all along, and comparing artists with "dope fiends". But the most vivid of the travel journals deals with Duluoz' and Ma's bus trip from back East down through Mexico and on to California. Ma 's "essential" packing scene is well-done (DA, pp. 336- 337), and her contact with Mexicans is touching in its message of simpl icity and faith: "C'est du monde qu'il on du coeur," she whispers to Ti-Jean. And in Lafayette, La., she is amazed to find "local people talldng French exactly as we do in Quebecois ..• " (DA, p. 343). Contrary to her depressed son, Mémère is of good cheer: A relentless hope. Just like my father she just wont let anytfiing discourage her. l walk sheepishly by her side. And she's been doing this for 62 years: at the age of 14 there she was, at dawn, walking to the shoe factory to work till six that evening, till Saturday evening, 72 hour work­ week, all gleeful in anticipation of that pitiful Saturday night and Sunday wh en there'd be popcorn and swings and singing. How can you beat people like that? (DA, p. 343) "Beat" but "imbattable", Mémère manages to reunite momentarily the

- 76 - broken strands of history (Louisiana, Québec). She ev,en reaches Mexico with her optimism, hard work, courage, generosity, and friendliness virtues that seem to be lacking in Duluoz' own make-up. l'm 34, regular looking, but in my jeans and eerie outfits people are scared to ~ook at me because l really look like an escaped mental patient .. . Walking through towns in the middle of America l got: stared at 'weirdly ... (DA, p. 237) Although Desolation Angels is about isolation 6 and the "beat" movement of the mind and late 1950's, and about Kerouac's relation to himself -- solitary in and away from the crowd -- it is difficult to establish any crystal-clear relationship between Kerouac 's social and cultural environment and his writing technique in this work which was written for the most part prior to the publication on On the Road. Seymour Krim argues ", that Kerouac's ever-widening capacity for a 11 and any Ame ri can experi ence i s rel ated to Kerouac' s "French Cana di an­ Catholic-Yankee arc •.. "'? As a "Stranger", in other words, "the history and raw beauty of the U.S. legend was •.• crucially important to his imaginati on ••. " 8 He took very little of the United States "for granted,,'. 9 Especially its vast geography and solitude which contribute to the raw beauty, tone, and shape of Desolation Angels. One can wait a long time i n American i solation for something to happen, and the waiting can be very

6 Jarvis, op. cit., p. 164. 7 Desolation Angels, pp. 12-13, the "Introduction". 8 Ibid., p. 11. 9 Ibi d.

- 77 - long in journal form. So, what Ann Charters says about thi s work is true: ]0 "What happened to him on the mountain top was that a1most nothing happened." Except, of course, the writing down of who the writer is, as Montaigne did in his Essa ys, as H. D. Thoreau did at Wa1den Pond, as Emily Dickinson dia in her 10ft, and as another Jean, Jean-Jacques Rous seau, did in exile: 1712-1719 l have reso1ved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to disp1ay to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man l sha11 portray will be myself . Simp1y myse1f. I. know my own heart . . . l have bared my secret sou1 as Thou thyse1f hast seen it, Eterna1 B eing~ So let the number1ess 1egion of my fe110w men gather round me, and hear my confessions .. . 11 Our reference to these writers means that Desolation Ange1s .is 'at once both persona1 and very 1iterary. The text is crammed with allusions to autholls, from Lucien, who gave us the "True Hi story" of an ear1y voyage ta the moon, the ancient "paradise", to Dostoevsky, or Molière, or Shakespeare. Then there is Christopher Smart, Hil1iam Blake, Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote, and Céline -- "Sudden1y l'm writing 1ike Céline" (DA, p. 121). Then, equally suddenly':we find: "Eh maudit Christ de batême que s'am'fend. How can anything ever end?" (DA, p. 86), which is one way of rearranging the "great order or words", one way of writing Kerouac's identity c1ear and broad among the stars. The question can a1so

la Charters, op. cit., p. 266. 11 The Confessions (Middlese x: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 17. See a1so, C.A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi (NY ': E.P. Dutton & Co., n.d.), pp. 63-78 for the writing technique of "interiors" painted whi1e "travelling on foot", which pretty well sums up Kerouac's writing in On the Road and Desolation Ange1s, not to forget Lonesome Trave1er and Sato ri in Paris.

- 78 - read "How can anything ever begin?" , and that would be more apropos since if it is true that Kerouac did "originate"

(without knowing it , you say?) a new way of writing about life, no fiction , no craft, no revising after­ thoughts" the heartbreaking discipline of the veritable fire ordeal where you cant go back but have made the vow of "speak noV' or forever hol d your tongue" and all of it innocent go-ahead confession [it was because] .. . In fact, I dont even know what I was . .. (DA , pp. 238-239)

50 , while Franco-American identity is on ce again at the center of the relationship that exists between a social background and writing technique , in thi s novel about writing (and art of all kinds ), it is literature itself (Thoreau, Dickins on , and Rousseau) which determines the result. "Who am I?" is a very literary question, while Lowell, or French , or Québec references are part of the answer in Kerouac's case.

* * *

Which brings us to the "Jekyll and Hyde" question or paranoia of

Big Sur, a painful story of Duluoz ' physical, emotional ,.and mental collapse on the harro~ling shores and coves of sinister Raton Canyon. · · ~

Sur is Kerouac's "Dr . Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (this novel i s the only reading material available in a loaned shack near the ocean). It relates the events leading to Duluoz' delirium tremens and hellish visions. Big Sur closes on the same theme of "home" as Desolation Angels (p . 332), only this time the "turning about" beckons Duluoz to Heaven which he sees in a

"virgin's white veil vision" as he flees what feels like the Devil come in search of him. Then Duluoz sees "the Cross" (BS, p. 204): '' l'm with you Jesus, for always , thank you . .• " (BS, p. 205). This Cross come s and

- 79 - goes in Duluoz' sickness, and finally the Devils seem to go off to do "battle elsewhere"(BS, p. 206). As could be expected in a Jekyll-Hyde story, Big Sur is made of extremes; it is a psychomachia, of well-being and great suffering. Thus, the Francophone element varies greatly. Duluoz speaks as woclQ a contem­ porary St. Francis with animals (Alf the burro, mice, etc.) in French: "Allo ti bonhomme" (BS, p. 37). Everything talks, including the sea: "Les poissons de la mer parlent Breton"· (See the poem "Sea" published as an Annex to Big Sur, pp. 219-241). And Duluoz (becoming Kerouac) replies in the poem "Mon nom est Lebris / de Kerouack -- / Parle, Poissons, Loti, parl e •.. " Such contact with everything leads Duluoz to believe in paradise: everything "talks" (or Duluoz as St. Thomas would say "speaks" everything the ferns, leaves, paper bags, sand, man). Everything is "passing through",

coming and going; all is paradise (~, pp. 35-36). Yet, (because of alcohol) "1 went crazy inside three weeks" (BS, p. 39). And in his great agony (as in his earlier bliss of well-being), Duluoz expresses his pain and sense of horror, his inner disintegration, in French: o mon Dieux [sic], pourquoi Tu m'laisse faire malade comme ça -- Papa aide mué -- Aw j'ai mal au coeur J'envie d'aller à toilette 'pi ça m'interesse pas Aw 'shu malade -- Owaowaowao ... (BS, p. 114) This is Duluoz' "crucifixion" (the Cross appears later) as anyone who is familiar with French can see, but Kerouac then adds, after realizing that his lament has been overheard by a buddy, "Idiotic, too, cretinous even, maybe on ly French Canadi an, who knows?" (BS, p. 114). Other than a reference to a "mad French Canadian" drinker named Pascal (BS, pp . 59 and 71), therce are no other references to Franco-Americans or

- 80 - to Québec in Big Sur. Much is said about the idealism and perfection of Duluoz' friendship with Cody, an "Okie" who, like "Canucks", fights only about money (BS, p. 136) . Again, the names are joined: the two men become one, a "Duluo-mery", true "angelic friends" (BS, p. 135) . The theme of Kerouac's divided self is not a new ône : we have seen it before in The Town and the City, in Dr. Sax, and in Maggie Cassidy, In Big Sur , in other words, the subject matter is familiar; what changes is the shape of Kerouac's agony, which is expressed in French, as we have seen, and which is symbolized by the Jekyll-Hyde reading in the cabin. Big Sur presents the experience of "going crazy", of going down hill until a sign of sal vation occurs, as in The Subterraneans. In its combination of the sub lime and the mad, the baroque form of Dr. Sax cames ta mi nd, although that novel '5 saving wit is missing in Big Sur. And, as a Proust­ like narrative of human experience recalled in minutest detail in a "worl d of raging action and folly", with the narrator "on the run", as the Preface states, Kerouac had done it all before in On the Raad, and especially in Visions of Cody. Probably the fairest observation that one can make con ­ cerning Kerouac's writing technique and his by now familiar "outsider's" perspective is that Kerouac shows in Big Sur that he is the master of the art of the futile -- this side of existentialist atheism. Hhen things hit rock bottom, in other words, Kerouac rediscovers the high road and goes back home. For the last time, really, since on the !4est Coast, in the waves of the Pacific, what he heard were voices, ancestral voices l ike those he had heard in childhood.

* * *

Vanity of Duluoz, as the title suggests and as the works described

- 81 - above have foreshadowed, is Kerouac's final statement on the theme that "All is vanity" . "Du1uoz (Kerouac)" 12 has done "everything you're s supposed to do", but "nothing ever came of it... All is vanity. " (VD, p. 279) . The remainder of the tit1e, "An Adventurous Education, 1935- 46", narrows the materia1 thus considered: Horace Mann Prep Schoo1 promise as a football hero, "Joe College" nonsense, Gidean "actes gratuites)', Audenesque

"Anxiety", wartime "goofing-off", fo11owed by the evil wantonness of drugs and crime in New York City and by the "horror" of home where Du1 uoz' father is dying of Banti '5 disease.

Although there seem to be severa1 ho1es in Jesus' "bag", the fallen '. nature of man and of all "brute creation" appears to Du1uoz (Kerouac) to be penetrated by Him and His compassion (VD, p. 275). This vision and . . - fài.th ('' ... l'm now one of the wor1d's worst secret Jesuits .. , " VD, p. 48) seem to be the sole reason for writing anything. Thus, writing as a sacrament, presumab1y, is Kerouac's message: "to t,t-cl.;VpOV,Àa. [which] means 'from the Cross'," is the work's dedication, and "Hic Ca1ix" closes the book. "All is vanity" except writing to redeem 1ife from pain and darkness. Kerouac here tru1y "confesses" a11 his bitterness, fo11y, and even his part in a crime (a rather innocent part in the "honor slaying" of "Franz") committed by a college friend. When Du1uoz-Kerouac closes his eyes, he still sees "the Cross (VD, p. 276), the one he saw at the

12 This kind of parenthesis occurs often in VD. "My name is Jack ("Du1uoz") Kerouac ... " (VD, p. 12), for examp1e. On the sub.iect of names, we 1earn in this book that "Du1ouse" is a trans1iteration Kerouac's own narne rilispronounced as "Ker Roach" (VD, p. 187, and even misspe11ed by sorne of Kerouac's unc1es in the same-way (SP ~ p. 95). In LT, Kerouac's name is garb1ed into "Kerroway" (p. 45)-.- In bther words, the name "Du1uoz" is not a French Canadian joke meaning "Du1ouse" as Charters c1aims, op. cit., p. 176. In fact, "Lousy" comes frorn "Louis" (VD, p. 158).

- 82 - close of Big Sur which "turned" Duluoz' souLtowards home (Lowell) for the last time, leaving the West Coast and friends there forever. This

notion of writing as being Christ-lik~ (or "holy") is reinforced by comments on passages (Chapter and Verse) quoted from the Bible and by Duluoz-K"'!rouac's perpetual grief at the loss of his father: "he died in his chair right in front of my eyes ... 'You have forsaken me, my father ... '" (VD, p. 278). Presumably, we have said, since Duluoz-Kerouac seems to take himself and his "message" half-seriously. "Be sure there's wine in it" (the Cnalice) is the final line of the book. Whatever seems doubtful or unconvincing on the matter of why Kerouac wrote, it is clear that man's relationship to his Creator has influenced the brief reference to Québec in Vanity of Duluoz. The short passage is King Lear-like in its rage (with the Fool close by):

1 am the descendent of Jean-Baptiste LeBris de Duluoz an old gaffer carpenter from St. Hubert in Te miscouata County, Quebec, who built his own house in Nashua, N.H. and used to curse at Gad swinging his kerosene lamp during thunder­ storms yelling "Varge!"1 Whack! 1 Frappe! 1 Hit! 1 Vas y! 1 Go ahead! 1" and "Dont give me no back tal k" and when women htt up on him in the street he told them where to get off with their bustles and bounces and desires for bracelets, he did. The Duluoz family has always been enraged. Is that a sign of bad blood? The father line of Duluoz it. isnt French, it's Cornish, it's Cornish Celtic(the name of the:language is Kernuak), and they're always enraged and argui ng about something, there is in them, not the "angry young man" but the "infuriated old man" of the sea ... (VD, p. lll) On the question of writing technique, Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz is simply a reworking of The Town and the City and Maggie Cassidy, The only real change is that Peter Martin and Jacky Duluoz are rep l aced by their creator, Ti-Jean Kerouac himself.

* * *

- 83 - Lonesome Traveler is a collection of eight prose sketches previously published in periodicals. 13 Ti-Jean is no longer a Duluoz at all, but autobiographically Kerouac himself (LT, p. 10), which is true also of Satori in Paris, an account of Kerouac's search in France for information about his· Breton family history. There is an occasional reference to Lowell in Lonesome Traveler where the mood is often nostalgic (for example, pp. 38 and 90), but Lowell appears in happier moments as well, especially in Marseille: How old my old life in France, my old Frenchness, seemed -­ all those names of shops, épicerie, boucherie, the early morning little stores like those of my French-Canadian home, like Lowell, Massachusetts, on a SunQay. Quel différence. l was very happy suddenly. (LT, p.153) But there are no Québec references in Lonesome Traveler. As could be expected, however, Sato ri in Paris does contain references to Québec. Kerouac's "accent" in French and identity require explanation àt times, and Québec is part of the explanation. (~, pp. 81, 104, and 118, for example). Still, these references are quite secondary in importance because Sato ri in Paris is a record of Kerouac's encounters with the men and women of France, a country where Kerouac had "hundreds of conversations"

(~, p. 46). These conversations bring us to our concluding remarks about Kerouac's use and expression of Québec on the "beat" circuit. More often than not, QUébec,as part of Kerouac's identity, is accompanied by an acoustic or linguistic framework, such as "conversations": those with Cody,

13 See Ann Charters, A Biblio ra of Works b Jack Kerouac (Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac)~~Ne~w~y7o~r~k~:~~T~h7e~Ph~o~e~n~i~x~B~o7o~k~S~h~o~p~,~I~n~c~.~,~9~6?7~J~~ pp. 23ff.

- 84 - those with the Void, or with animals and the sea, those with God, and those in French with citizens of France . 50 there is a continuity in Kerouac's Québec image, ne arly from start to finish, that is, from his Lowell novels to Satori in Paris. To make this clear, let us review briefly the major references to Québec ("dans le texte") that have been presented in previous chapters . There we can find an imag~ned "picture" of the emigrant Ouluoz family (VG , pp. 94-95) but in this picture the organizing element is the wind "straight from the nostril of the moo se" which breezes through the vast geography and long history from the Iroquois and the Plains of Abraham to the emi gra ti on to New Engl and. And whil e there i s a bapti sm taking place, the atmosphere near St-Hubert rings with the cursing of a

Ouluoz, "Allons ciboire de cavllis . . . ". \ole earlier presented, a150 , the "ghost" of the Susquehanna who repeatedly travels about on his wandering \vay towards "CANAOY" (OTR, pD. 87-88; VC, po. 108 and 110; Pic, pp. 106-110 ). In addition, we have seen that Québec, Canada, Montréal, and words and phrases in French frequently appear in Kerouac's dreams (~, pp . 20, 30, 31 , 53,56,62,65, 76, 86, 89 , 102 , 104, 117, 141 , 143, 167 and 174). It woul d not be farfetched to say that wind, ghosts , and dreams all share something that is like an echo. But more solidly related to the auditory are the fo 11 OIv i ng references: 1. Father Oupuis' sermon/joke (OS); 2. Men cussing in Montreal (BD); 3. Ti -Jean' s (Québécoi s) accent (DA); 4. His Québécois lanquaqe (ancien~vocabulary ) (~); 5. Uncle Mike's oral history (OS); 6. The far-off Vlhistle of many trains to Canada (TC); 7. The howling blizzard from Canada U~ C); 8. The silent Void-like Mt . Hozomeen in Canada (OS); 9. The license plate that "says Quebec" (BD); - 10. The Dronunciation of key words in French --"Ca-na-daw" (BD) There is, therefore, a definite emphasis on the "sound" of Québec in Kerouac ' s text. But, one may ask, how could it have been otherwise in a

- 85 - "confessi onal /spontaneous" voi ce of a Franco-Arneri can who spoke Ameri can English after living in "Québécois" for his earliest years? Elementary is the answer: Québec is much more than its "picture" at St-Hubert as a place of origins. It is a shaping force "du texte". We have described this force, for instance, as Québec's "roman du terroi~" transmitted to Kerouac probab ly by means of Ducharme' s nove 1. He have found some s imi- larity between Kerouac's writing and stories by émigrés from Québec such as Camille Lessard, Alberte Gastonguay, and possibly Georges Crépeau. There is no doubt about Kerouac's knowledge of the Tit-Jean cycles: he learned the art of telling stories from listening to relatives and friends. 50, the l oca l "Québécoi s" language, li terary conventi ons, l egends, s tori es, . oral history, and perhaps other "little knovm" material of ·littleboy Lowell helped to shape Kerouac's universe and imagination. Stated very simply, it is hardly possible to divorce Kerouac's concept of Québecfrom his self­ awareness because both are inseparably linked to the "fait français". But this same fact is the source of a negative force, too, as Paul Chassé explains : Une question d'une de mes élèves lors d'une premlere conférence sur notre littérature m'avait touché de près, en septembre. C'était une jeune Franco-Américaine qui me demandait la même question que Kérouac s'était posé toute sa vie: quel est le rôle du Franco-Américain dans une société d'aliénation et de confusion comme la nôtre? Comment parvient-on à ne point se sentir déraciné et à trouver sa propre identification? Sommes-nous des Améri­ cains ou des Canadiens? Sommes-nous des personnes dépla­ cées par le sort? Comment faire pour rester attachés à ses traditions nationales, sans pour cela, être moins américain? Cette question ne résume-t-elle pas la quête de Kérouac, sa frénésie d'identification, lui qui, au cours de toute sa vie d'homme et de tous ses romans s'est laissé dominer par le doute et l'introspection, lui qui ne voulait en rien renier son passé mais qui rompait quand même tous les l iens de son héritage québécois, lui qui subissait volontairement tous les tabous religieux

- 86 - et nationaux de ses ancêtres pour révolter, non. pas violemment, mais par un lent écoulement de coeur et de l'âme? 14 "Translations" of Kerouac's identity and heritage, in other words, are not \'/hat the general American reader can recognize at first or even second si ght. What Ameri cans fee l i5 Kerouac' s "frenzi e" to be Ameri can, to find an answer to the question of what ~ an American, what is America? The answer Kerouac gave was the open road, passing through, visions, love of the land, and above all, of tell in9 it all. The "errant", the "passant", the "ange", the "roman du terroir", the "raconteur" are the shared Québé- cois-American cultural values. Hhat was not so shared, for the time, was the choice of himse l f and his question of identity as the subject of fiction. That choice is not to be found in the pub l ic, storybook, chronicler Archam ­ bault, nor in the novelist-historian Ducharme, nor in the assimilationist Parson, our three previous Franco -American novelists. They very rarely if ever question what America is. So, while the Franco-American community became more and more "invisible" as its \~riters answered, in American English, the question of identity, Kerouac may have had in mind "Ah que c 'est bête" \'/hen he came up \'/ith the name of a decade .: "beat": I·Jho knows?

In any case, both .the content and the form of Kerouac.' s ~/ork, \'Ihen vi ewed from the angle of émigration, place Jean Louis LeBris Kérouac among those writers \~ho are anachronigues, faiseurs de procès verbaux des col lectivités en voie de disparition ... c'est-à-dire, l a fin de quelquechose, la fin du Québec-de-par-en Bas". 15

14 "Jack Kérouac, 1922 - 1969," Le Canado-Américain·, Vol. VI, No. l, (janvier-février-mars 1970), p. 18. 15 Beaulieu, op. cit., p. 233.

- 87 - LES AVANT-DIRE DE LA RENCONTRE INTERNATIONALE JACK KÉROUAC

No. 1 Perreault, Robert B. Au-delà de la route: le côté franco- amé ricain de Jack Kérouac, février 198 7 25 pages - coût: 4,00$

No.2 Poteet, Maurice The Image of Québec in Jack Kérouac fic­ tion, avril 1987, 87 pages - coût: 4,00$

No. 3 À paraître Travaux prati ques: Cr i ti ques de l itté- rature comtemporaine par Denis Vanier

POUR PLUS D'INFORMATION SUR LES AVANT-DIRE ET SUR LA RENCONTRE INTERNATIONALE JACK KÉROUAC:

Comité organisateur Rencontre internationale Jack Kérouac Secrétariat permanent des peuples francophones 129, Côte de la Montagne Québec (Québec) G1K 4E6 Téléphone: (418) 692-5177