The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [3]
No writer ever traveled farther while staying so close to home. Though he married three times and had a child, the late writer Jan Kerouac, the first two marriages were brief, and he met his daughter only once; when he wasn’t on the road, he spent most of his time with his shrewd and tenacious mother, Gabrielle (his father, Leo, died in 1946), who helped to support Jack by working in shoe factories until he was well into his thirties. Others might join the Cold War ranks of Organization Men as nine-to-five employees heading up suburban nuclear families; Kerouac preferred dependence to the sham of enforced maturity. “Infancy,” Kerouac said, quoting Emerson, “conforms to nobody.” Even after On the Road had given him enough money to put down the purchase price, Kerouac always thought of whatever house he shared with Gabrielle as hers and not his. Being born, in Kerouac’s lexicon, was sin enough; at least he hadn’t made the same mistake twice. As a writer, Kerouac’s models were Thomas Wolfe, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; as a persona and even as a person, he saw himself as Boswell, Sancho Panza, and Pip, the child who accompanies Ahab on his doomed quest for the white whale, and goes mad in the process. Kerouac’s job was to “shamble after,” as Sal Paradise does in On the Road, to record rather than precipitate, to watch the fabulous, divinely inexplicable doings of a world he never made. Kerouac always played the “straight guy,” Snyder observed, the one who gets set up and tripped up in the vaudeville routine, the second fiddle, not the star. It was a role he was born to.
The Kerouacs were working-class immigrant French-Canadians with a touch of Iroquois blood, “Canucks,” in the local pejorative term. Though Leo and Gabrielle had migrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, before Jack’s birth on March 12, 1922, “Ti-Jean,” as he was called, grew up outside looking in, part of an alternative culture, intensely Catholic and entirely French-speaking, and not even proper French at that. The Kerouacs spoke a regional, largely oral dialect called joual; Kerouac didn’t master English until his late teens, and he failed French in high school. When he went to France in 1965 in a vain and drunken attempt to trace his genealogy, he was outraged to discover that all such records were labeled, accurately enough, “les affaires Colonielles.” In his family circle too, Kerouac was, if hardly the subaltern, the acolyte; however great his gifts, he could never be the equal of his older brother, Gerard, who died of rheumatic fever at nine in 1926 after a lifetime’s worth of pain. In family and local lore, Gerard was not only an artist in embryo but a saint, visited by the Madonna in visions and preaching eloquent little sermons to the obstreperously healthy Ti-Jean about the suffering and sacredness of even the lowliest of God’s creatures. Jack prayed to Gerard for the rest of his own life—all his expeditions doubled as retrieval missions, a search for what he described as his lost “mysterious brother…across the ages.” Gerard also stood as an eloquent argument for the virtues, practical as well as spiritual, of death, of being, in Kerouac