St. Anselm’s Perreault Brings Kerouac’s Franco Heritage to Light
Jerome Eno

Friday night, over thirty men and women fascinated with historic Lowellian Jack Kerouac sifted into the Pollard Memorial Library’s first-floor conference room to hear Robert Perreault, of St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., give a lecture called “Jack Kerouac’s Franco-American Identity and His Work.”

Perreault, who first gave the talk on Kerouac and his French-Canadian heritage in Lowell in 1988, started by explaining that Kerouac’s “Lowell Novels” are deeply rooted in his familial, religious and ethnic background. With the French language, strict Roman Catholicism, and work ethic, many Franco-Americans survived discrimination and a general feeling of not fitting in. This outsider’s attitude is prevalent in Kerouac’s life and his work.

As a student at the Horace Mann School in New York, Kerouac experienced humiliation in his French class. Although he was fluent in what he termed “Canuckois”, the version of French that Canadians spoke, Kerouac had a distinct accent when speaking French, and was ridiculed by his teachers, who were strict about Parisian French pronunciation.

Instances like this, Perreault said, caused Kerouac to have a “love-hate relationship with his mother tongue.” Kerouac resented his mother’s French-Canadian accent when speaking English, pronouncing the world “point” as pwaint. However, on a trip with his mother through Louisiana, Kerouac was delighted to hear Cajuns speaking a language delightfully like the French he spoke as a child. He mused that “the Cajuns are only the Acadians.”

Jack Kerouac never spoke English until the age of seven, and felt that he sounded illiterate until he was twenty-one. From when he was young, Kerouac had ambitions of being a great writer. His teachers ridiculed him for this, as he was an immigrant without a keen grasp of the English language. This only strengthened his resolve, and Kerouac went on to refashion English to fit his own French expression.

Perreault went on to discuss the influence Kerouac’s religion and spirituality had on his writing. Kerouac called himself a “strange, solitary, crazy Catholic mystic.” He once had a vision in which a statue of Ste. Thérèse turned her head and looked at him in the dark. Kerouac’s beliefs came more from his preschool years at home, culminating in the death of his older brother Gérard, than from his parochial school years at St. Louis de France and St. Joseph in Lowell. His brother, after dying, became Kerouac’s spiritual mentor or “saint.” Faithful to the Kerouac family motto, Aimer Travailler Souffrir (Translated To Love, To Work, To Suffer), Jack Kerouac felt that the only way to achieve his salvation would be through suffering. He saw suffering in his brother shortly before he died, as well as images of Jesus’ death at the Stations of the Cross in Lowell’s Franco-American School. Kerouac reflected on the fact that from the first Station, “Jesus is Condemned to Death,” a funeral home is visible. Ironically, this was Archambeault Funeral Home, where Kerouac’s wake would eventually be held.

Perreault closed by noting that like Kerouac, many of the Beats were ethnic. This is one reason the word Beat was so appropriate for them. Suffering, worn-out, and tired, the Beats identified with the ethnic minorities of America.

Among those who turned out for the event was John Sampas, who controls the Kerouac Estate. Sampas announced in the question-and-answer portion of the lecture that The Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 will be released on October 11, 2004, news that was well-received from the crowd of Kerouac admirers.

After Perreault’s lecture, the Pollard Memorial Library held a workshop on the Library’s resources for researching French-Canadian genealogy.