Considerable Complexities

In the past twenty-five years, there has probably been more biographical interest in Jack Kerouac than in any other modern American novelist. Most readers will be familiar with the broad outlines of his abbreviated life: his lower working class origins in Lowell, Massachusetts; his truncated football career at Columbia University, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs; his inability to find a publisher for On the Road (1957) and almost a dozen other fictions written during the 1950s; the notoriety and booze that capsized him after 1957 when On the Road finally appeared and was declared a sign of generational identity.

On my bookshelf, I have eight biographies, a valuable oral biography edited by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, several literary portraits, and half a dozen memoirs by former lovers, some of them designed with cudgels and sharpened axes. The biographies are all flawed either by estate prohibitions and inadequate access, haphazard writing skills, faulty judgments, an undeveloped sense of literary history, or the inability to separate the actual from literary legend and self-perpetuated myth.

Most biographers are only capable of wooden prose and are distracted by their own mundane curiosities. It is rare to find a biography written with the style and imagination that Joyce Johnson exhibits in the perceptively entitled The Voice Is All. Johnson has had the advantage and hard work of examining the huge Kerouac Archive deposited in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and she explores with the discrimination no previous biographer seemed to have. She made me, for example, want to read Box seventy-three, folders ten to twelve, “Love Letters Written to Jack Kerouac.” As a novelist herself, she has a genuine interest in the creative process and has lived with this subject for over half a century, enough time to give her the distance she needs. She was Kerouac’s lover when On the Road was originally published in 1957, and her intimate account of that friendship, Minor Characters (1999), won the National Book Critics Circle award for memoir in 1983.

The Voice Is All is written with a poised balance between narrative and literary analysis, with the most nuanced view so far of Kerouac’s volatile moodiness and considerable complexities. Fusing lots of intuition with personal observation, Johnson is able to identify Kerouac’s emotional dynamics with more sympathy than any of her predecessors:

By nature, he was silent, and when he was sober, he probably kept most of his angry, unacceptable ideas to himself. When he was drunk enough, he would express them with the alcohol-ignited vehemence of someone dangerously certain that he alone sees the truth.

Unable to tolerate routine (with football practice, the military, the notion of a steady job or marriage), his duality was only compounded by a simultaneous desire for irreconcilables: the alienated, introverted observer who searches for camaraderie, the man with a fundamentally melancholy nature who was so quickly surprised by his own inexplicable enthusiasms. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Kerouac had a secret, isolating conviction of his difference, or loneliness as Johnson sees it; his friends, however, were drawn to his shyness, his warmth, and his childlike, appealing naïveté.

Johnson gives us our most coherent account so far of the cultural conditions that motivated Kerouac. She understands the formative influence of his French-Canadian heritage, how his joual first language would subsequently contribute to the freedoms he would take with his acquired English, a second language with which he did not feel entirely secure until his late teens. The French-Canadian ghetto of his Lowell childhood, however, also came with its reputation of backward insularity, a heritage Johnson explores by considering Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, a bestselling account of provincial French Canadians written in 1913. Using Hémon is typical of the way Johnson will skillfully incorporate an insight of Vladimir Nabokov’s or Virginia Woolf’s or Ralph Ellison’s to amplify an argument, or use the work...