Kerouac in Black and White

by Clark Blaise

 Two images haunt me.

Vanished French-speaking empires, multiracial and multilingual, the only two truly multicultural societies ever created north of the Rio Grande. One was Indian-- the Métis (Cree Ojibwa-French) nation of Manitoba, exterminated by the Anglo-Canadians, its leader, Louis Riel, hanged in 1885--and the other is Cajun, black and white, a little Indian and a little Spanish, colorful but threatened of bayou Louisiana. The same dream haunted Faulkner (in Absalom, Absalom! And in the character of the Indian Chief "Doom" whose name derived from "Du Homme"), and haunts Carlos Fuentes (a vision of a lost multilingual Afro-Franco-Hispano-Dutch-Anglo, VoodooCatholic-Anin-dst empire of the Caribbean), but it still drums in the hearts of most present-day québecois (their fate- extinction, or the recipe-book -if they don't protect themselves) and of a few Franco-Americans clung to the edge of the liferaft, the dream of survivance, much longer than most immigrant groups, but now they're gone. They're ghosts. That nightmare, and that dream, existed in the imagination of Jack Kerouac, French-America's most famous son, after Rudy Vallée and Leo Durocher.

An impotent, alcoholic, ruined, middle-aged, mill-town Franco-American living in Lowell, and finally in St. Petersburg with his jealously protective, corrosively ignorant and loudly bigoted mother, or with a wife he alternately loved and hated while tying to divorce, is not a candidate for progressive opinions on race, class, or sexual politics. Forget Kerouac in his youth, the beautiful boy with his breathless tales of breaking away from canadien catholicism nightmared in Doctor Sax or tapestried in Visions of Gerard; forget the trips he took us on, like swatted rubber balls on their widest orbit in On the Road and The Dharma Bums and Mexico City Blues before they crashed back to the paddle that propelled them. That was then; this later, much later.

We're looking at two pictures and one is not pretty: the "don't you know me? I'm Jack Kerouac!" vulture dining on his own corpse in his paunchy, woozy, premature middle-age. The don't-you-know-me conventional Catholic, virgin/whore sexual moralist. The you-can't-be-jack Kerouac who exposed himself at parties, ranted in interviews, who wouldn't go to parties if Negroes were invited. "Jack Kerouac" the anti-Semite, "Jack Kerouac" the would-be basher of Vietnam protesters. "Jack Kerouac" the cat-petting Buckleyite. Not ti-Jean, the Horace Mann and Columbia freshman football player; not Jack (for he still has single-name recognition), that recurrent American literary icon, the darkly handsome mute genius from improbable origins, and our national need to celebrate romantic excess even as we condemn it, not that tortured brew of innocence and superstition and omnivorous sexual, literary, and geographical hunger. We're talking instead of the ruined hulk, the alcoholic, the exposure-artist, the anti anti-Vietnam patriot, the hoarder of resentment, the racist, the bigot and what, if anything, it tells of us, of his people, and their relationship to race.

Dreiser, Saroyan, Pound, or Brando, or Presley, and of course Kerouac, were concoctions of Americana, those pure products who named a landscape (Wabash, Fresno, Tupelo) and were doomed to madness. Hard lives, all of them, making for unpleasant men. Auden was right: "Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return." Or, they keep on doing evil to themselves, in punishment and atonement. I don't think they'd agree with one of the final speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. "I believe unmerited suffering is redemptive," speaking of Black history in America, unless they sought that redemption through their compulsive writing.

Do the despised become despicable? Or ennobled? That's one difference between history and literature. In literature, we try to make it happen.

By extension, through Jack, we're talking of a particular time and place in the United States-New England in the first half of this century--and of the four or five million first- and second-generations of French-Canadian immigrants to the mill towns of New England, like my father--Leo's--Manchester, New Hampshire, like Kerouac's father--Leo's Lowell, Massachusetts, or his mother's Nashua, ("nash-way") New Hampshire. Geographically, or at least demographically, it doesn't hurt to note at the outset that the four states that received the vast majority of turn-of-the-century Quebeckers--Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts--probably had, collectively, more black bears than black people. In other words, he was a high school football star on, presumably, an all-white team. Then he went to New York.

Race, in the normal American black/white sense, was never a reality for Kerouac, never part of
his early personal history -- only a metaphor for
freedom, or temptation. He carried his blinkered
childhood within him like a malignant unborn twin,
and a white, Catholic, lost, pure French empire was
part of that childhood. But for the likelihood of
Indian blood, which he (like most French-Canadians) embraced, Kerouac was pur laine, a proud, full-blooded, full-culture French Canadian: ("Go back,"he wanted to call to his Breton fishermen ancestors,"ils vous I . jouent un tour."  That is, America's going to play a trick on you.) Against the backdrop of the Church, and his own monochromatic background, "Negroes" offered only occasions for sex, drugs and music. And since those are also occasions for merging identities, they specifically challenge the corrosive dreams of racial and religious purity. Gerald Nicosia, in Memory Babe, mentions that Jack would have married Mardou Fox, the heroine of The Subterreaneans, if she'd been white. A strange inhibition for a Beat. "Purity" rose up early, and late consumed him, his vulture-twin pouncing on a helpless host.

The French-Canadians were the African-Americans of that melanin-challenged time and place, just as Saroyan's Armenians were the "gypsies" of central-valley California. Like Kerouac, Saroyan famously embraced life whole, offered in his hundreds of stories a palate of amused social and ethnic tolerance. Yet, his marriage collapsed over anti-Semitism. Saroyan whose career and personality parallel Kerouac's in many ways, was Jack's earliest major literary influence.*

The nature of Kerouac's gift was for suggestiveness, a quickness of apprehension, a helpless reproduction of association and atmosphere. Capote, famously, demoted it to "typing." Part of what Kerouac ingested and never spat out, like Pound's "suburban prejudice" of anti-Semitism, were (as a "putter-inner" on the Wolfe-Céine-Saroyan-Pound and Faulkner model) the ancestral voices and ongoing bigotries of his life. Childhood attitudes and prejudice can be (must be) separated from adult discourse, of course, but Kerouac would not be Jack if he'd been cursed with self-consciousness. His father, eventually, hated Roosevelt, Jews, Democrats and (other) minorities. So did Jack, eventually.

Outwardly, in his final Lowell and Florida years with his mother, he was indistinguishable from many other fat drunken pugnacious Canucks, the very image of his rabidly prejudiced, right-wing father. All those other great putter-irmers also struggled against the conventions of their growingup, struck rebellious early attitudes, but settled, finally, on an essentially racist, right-wing, (or in the case of Céline and Pound, perhaps Wolfe, perhaps Lawrence, fascist) politics.

I think of Kerouac as belonging to the great, eternal "B-list" of American writing, Farrell and O'Hara, Steinbeck and Dos Passos, Cozzens and Marquand, Saroyan and di Donato--the uncanonized voices of first generation ethnicity, shanty Irish bitterness, or near-wasp snobbishness.

Many came from the newspaper world--Saroyan was the fastest teletype operator on the West Coast, and Kerouac typed off shelving-paper rolls. They typed a lot, they knew life and trusted their experience, they were cynical, they were bitter, and most of them drank a lot.

But Kerouac at his best--no, that's too academic --Kerouac at his most Jack-like-- had a generous art and all embracing energy that is, in the American context, ethnic: non-wasp, giving, awkward, curious, unembarrassedly affectionate. At his worst, admittedly, he was was a monster. But thirty-five years after first reading The Subterraneans, as a self-styled undergraduate rebel-writer, I recently read it again, wincing at my underlined enthusiasms, but not willing, finally, to change a thing. The great gift of Kerouac's ersatz Buddhism (which he strenuously denied later on) became the credo of an age not yet born (this was 1959, after all), but it is planted in the mind of every young writer: the bad news is, everything's connected, but the good news is, nothing matters. What freedom! What license! We see now how he arrived at his truths, against a deep contrary, Gothic Catholicism. (Everything matters, everything's connected and you're to blame for all of it, especially the death of your saintly older brother, and your mother is here to tell you that you'll never be pardoned.)

Consider this, (that is, go with it) part of a three-page sentence, a riff, gratuitous, about Mardou Fox's (Jack's half-black lover) Indian father:

... Concern for her father, because I'd been out there and sat down on the ground and seen the rail the steel of America covering the ground filled with the bones of old Indians and Original Americans. -- In the cold gray fall in Colorado and Wyoming I'd worked on the land and watched Indian hoboes come suddenly out of brush by the track and move slowly, hawk lipped, rill-jawed and wrinkled, into the great shadow of the light bearing burdenbags and junk talking quietly to one another and so distant from the absorptions of the field hands, even the Negroes of Cheyenne and Denver streets, the Japs, the general minorityArmenians and Mexicans of the whole West that to look at a three-or-four-some of Indians crossing a field and a railroad track is to the senses like something unbelievable as a dream -you think, "They must be Indians--ain't a soul looking at 'em -- they're goin' that way --nobody notices -- doesn't matter much which way they go -reservation? What have they got in those brown paper bags?" and only with a great amount of effort you realize "But they were the inhabitors of this land and under these huge skies they were the worriers and keeners and protectors of wives in whole nations gathered around tents -now the rail that runs over their forefather's bones leads them onward pointing into infinity, wraiths of humanity treading lightly the surface of the ground so deeply suppurated with the stock of their suffering you only have to dig a foot down to find a baby's hand. -The hotshot passenger train with grashing diesel balls by, brownm, browm, the Indians just look up -- I see them vanishing like spots and sitting in the redbulb room in San Francisco now with sweet Mardou I think, "And this is your father I saw in the gray waste, swallowed by night -from his juices came your lips, your eyes full of suffering and sorrow and we're not to know his name or name his destiny?"

Kerouac was a Presley-figure, one of the dark, transitional drug-taking, groupie-gathering (and groupie-escaping), mother-besotted, all-absorptive, grotesquely-gifted princelings, one of those famed "pure products of America," going-or-gone mad. The 'putter-inners" ingested everything, filled every cavity (you must know, do, everything), and when the habit of absorption outlived the raw nervous edginess, they got fat, sluggish, fetid. They are the legion of America's open-mouthed, wonderstruck, gullible, affirming, uncritical, experimental, but finally brittle self-taught shapers. Their tragedy is, they cannot learn, or grow; they reject editing, rewriting and criticism. They are not Jamesian, or Iowa-bred, they can't handle fame or a public. Their talent is to spend, not invest. Needless to say, their defects are the measure of their virtue. Joyce, in
English, is the only one who succeeded, and would he have made it had he been American?) They don't live long, or happily They have seen too much they can't close their eyes, they can't edit life, they repeat themselves, they're abusive, and they reject all help. Like Kerouac, their ambition finally is not art; it is religion. They want to be saints, or, like Faulkner, God.

I always believed, as Saroyan and still more, Celine, and of course Joyce did, that the secret of fiction is the ability to design a structure and a language that is apparently all-inclusive, that is plot-blind, time-free and psychologically-unbound. But the implications of that belief are close to the symptoms of madness, and can be found, abandoned, on scraps of paper in the back of a million drawers. The mad inability to disconnect the voices in the head from dialogue with the outer world. The world is their map, Kerouac's map, on a fatal scale of 1:1.

The person named Jack Kerouac came to hate niggers and Jews, though, like many a French-Canadian, he loved Indians. In that, he recognized probably forebears (there were no French women in those original stockades) and to accept the corollary that French-Canadian life on this continent is obviously tribal. French-Canadians are a Latin American people with a history less obviously interracial than the Mexican, but utterly similar in all outer and many inner characteristics. Think of upper New England at the turn of the century as a kind of south Texas today. They are also like the Boers of South Africa, a founding people locked inside a homeland, obsessed with survival, surrounded and outnumbered by would-be attackers, but deeply challenged by inner temptation.

As I said at the outset, survival as a linguistically and culturally-intact people is limited now to the province of Quebec. "French-Canadians" exist only outside of Quebec, in other parts of Canada. Inside Quebec one finds only québecois. Francophone Montrealers are not taking well to immigrant Haitian and French-Africans, turbaned Sikhs in the Mounted Police set Québeckers' teeth on edge. They draw little satisfaction from contemplating a fully multicultural city or province--Québec is not bilingual -- nor do they share enthusiasm over the 20th century adventure of recasting a continent's gene-pool. Survivalists, in other words, are not necessarily the most welcoming, the most accommodating of people.

Occasionally, French-Canadians think with their blood, see themselves as a founding race equal only to the Indians, unbeholden to newcomers, and, as hardpressed resisters of conquest, free of guilt. (Some Blacks in America assert that by definition they cannot be termed prejudiced, and one hears similar arguments in Québec) There was some of that in Jack Kerouac; he was here first, and he resented "aliens" determining his standing, and his income.

Outside the walls of a protective Québec, or the self-imposed walls composed of guilt and nostalgia among her sons and grandsons in the various Diaspora communities, French-Canadian culture is slowly sinking into Americanness, an irritating minority Canadianness, or a Blue Bayou anachronistic quaintness. Some would say, "It's time, let it go." Others, like Faulkner over Yoknapatawpha, Kerouac in Vanity of Duluoz, would choose to grieve.

End-note

In Saroyan's childhood, attempts were made, in the Central Valley, to ban the entry of Armenians as "Asians." The same prejudice continued into the 40's, when deportation, and seizure of their hard-won landholdings were a popular cause. For similar treatment of French-Canadians, see my I Had a Father particularly the editorials of the New York Times a century ago