By Paul Carrier
Biographers have a particular fondness for Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation writer who hung out with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and staked a lasting claim to literary fame with his novel On the Road. A quick search of amazon.com turned up at least two dozen books which, in whole or in part, focus on the Massachusetts-born author, whose all-too-brief life ended in 1969, a mere 47 years after it began.
Joyce Johnson, who was romantically involved with Kerouac in 1957 and 1958, is no stranger to this phenomenon. In fact, she previously contributed to it with Minor Characters (1983) and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters (2000). Now she’s back with The Voice Is All, which covers Kerouac’s life through late 1951.
Which begs this question: Can biographers in general, and Johnson in particular, add anything to our understanding of Kerouac and his legacy?
The answer is yes. Unlike earlier biographers, Johnson had access to Kerouac’s papers, which are now stored in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. She relied heavily on them while researching The Voice Is All, which explores Kerouac’s youth and early adulthood, including what Johnson sees as the duality of his personality.
“Part of him remained conservative Franco-American, and the other part of him was the wild bohemian part,” she said in a 2012 interview that ran on the PBS Newshour.
Joyce Johnson, who was romantically involved with Kerouac in 1957 and 1958, is no stranger to this phenomenon. In fact, she previously contributed to it with Minor Characters (1983) and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters (2000). Now she’s back with The Voice Is All, which covers Kerouac’s life through late 1951.
Which begs this question: Can biographers in general, and Johnson in particular, add anything to our understanding of Kerouac and his legacy?
The answer is yes. Unlike earlier biographers, Johnson had access to Kerouac’s papers, which are now stored in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. She relied heavily on them while researching The Voice Is All, which explores Kerouac’s youth and early adulthood, including what Johnson sees as the duality of his personality.
“Part of him remained conservative Franco-American, and the other part of him was the wild bohemian part,” she said in a 2012 interview that ran on the PBS Newshour.
“Without those papers, there were all sorts of assumptions made about Jack, and all sorts of gaps — big gaps — in our knowledge of him,” Johnson said in a 2012 interview published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I knew what I was interested in most, which was writing a book where the whole center of it would be Jack’s development as a writer, and I also knew that I wanted to explore the influence on Jack of his French-Canadian heritage, and I felt I would find material in the archive on both those interests of mine.”
As Johnson noted in that interview, Kerouac’s roots - his parents were immigrants from Québec and French was his first language - are a focal point of The Voice is All, which argues that Kerouac’s ethnicity and native language did more to shape him as a person and a writer than is generally acknowledged. He even did some of his writing in a slangy, street-smart French sometimes known as joual.
Kerouac “made no secret of his French-Canadian heritage, but never showed what a constant preoccupation it was or admitted to his sense of being caught between two languages,” Johnson told Publishers Weekly last year. He “had to find the courage to drop the all-American mask of his literary persona and to allow the French voice into his work. This took years. In March 1951, he wrote a wonderful French novella that has never been published, just a few weeks before he wrote On the Road. In the direct, intimate voice of its narrator, Michel Bretagne, I am convinced that he found the voice of Sal Paradise,” a protagonist in On the Road.
In The Voice Is All, Johnson writes that most fans of On the Road, especially those who have not read Kerouac’s other novels, “would be startled to learn that French Canadians both in Quebec and in the United States have for a long time claimed Kerouac as their own. To them, everything about Jack’s books . . . is French, including Jack’s way of using English.”
A reader obsessed with the more famous aspects of Kerouac’s life will need patience while reading The Voice Is All, thanks to its emphasis on Kerouac’s early years. For example, Ginsberg makes his first appearance more than 150 pages into the biography. And while devoted Kerouac fans may relish seemingly endless mystical musings from his journals, other readers may grow weary of these sometimes obtuse passages.
Yet Johnson offers up a profound and nuanced portrait of Kerouac, the man and the writer. He comes across as a complex and conflicted author with a prodigious memory and a self-destructive streak. Kerouac was a brilliant and serious artist prone to drunken, drug-fueled antics. He combined an odd blend of traditional and bohemian values. He could be alternately delusional and insightful, naive and hard-nosed. Yet he was consistently devoted to his craft, at least as a young man. By his own admission, he was “lonely, mad, pompous, and foolish.”
He also emerges as the antithesis of his now-legendary image as an “all-American” author. "For Jack, whose attachment to his heritage was as strong as it was anguished, the process of becoming American would never be completed, and it would prove to be particularly wrenching," Johnson writes.
