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Summary
Summary
A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist--from the award-winning author of Minor Characters
In The Voice is All , Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open , about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road , followed by Visions of Cody . By illuminating Kerouac's early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.
Author Notes
Joyce Johnson was born in 1935. At the age of eight her family moved to Manhattan, to an apartment that landed her in the middle of the Beat Movement at an early age. Her parents wanted her to be a librettist, but she only ever had half her mind on the music. At the age of 16, she was accepted to Barnard College. There she befriended Elise Cowan, Allen Ginsberg's supposed girlfriend. The two became close friends, and Cowan introduced her to the literary world of the Beat Movement. After a huge fight with her family over abandoning her music, Johnson left home.
Ginsberg introduced Johnson to Jack Kerouac in January of 1957, an introduction that would change her life and her career forever. She published her first novel Come and Join the Dance at the age of 26, four years after her and Kerouac went their separate ways. Long after their separation, she published Minor Characters a book about her life in the Beat Movement and her romance with Jack Kerouac, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 1983. Her other works include Bad Connections, In the Night Café, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958, and Missing Men. In 1983, she became a faculty member of the graduate writing program at Columbia University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An intimate of Kerouac who has chronicled his life and the beat culture (including in her award-winning 1983 memoir, Minor Characters), Johnson brings an insider's perspective to this insightful study of how Kerouac found his literary voice. Delving into his formative years, she paints a portrait of the artist as a sensitive young man, haunted from age four by the death of his older brother, Gerard, and hampered by his family's frequent moves. In her most novel analysis, Johnson asserts that growing up speaking joual in his insular French-Canadian household fostered an unwieldy internal translation process whereby Kerouac "had to figure out how to capture his 'simultaneous impressions' in English." Kerouac's voracious reading of Thomas Wolfe, Dostoyevski, and Celine; restless travels; drinking and drug use; prolific writing and revising; and socializing with fellow beats-especially Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, and Neal Cassady-kept him striving to express "'the big rushing tremendousness in me and all poets.'" In unsparing detail, Johnson depicts Kerouac's contradictions and self-destructive tendencies, and the recklessness of certain relationships that impeded as much as they facilitated the discovery of his true voice. Johnson excels in her colorful, candid assessment of the evolution of this voice-up through the genesis of On the Road-the point where most other appraisals of Kerouac begin. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Johnson chronicled her indelible relationship with the author of On the Road in her acclaimed memoir, Minor Characters (1983). She now proves herself to be a rigorous, knowledgeable, and penetrating biographer in this engrossing portrait of Kerouac as a divided soul. Johnson investigates the consequences of the childhood death of his older brother and Kerouac's compensatory entanglement with his mother and his suspension between Franco-American and New England cultures and the French Canadian dialect joual and English. Kerouac's survivor's guilt and never feeling wholly American, Johnson argues, were catalysts for his spiritual quest, hunger for books, and need to write. She offers exceptionally lucid coverage of his depression, alcoholism, and every significant relationship in his surging life, including his now legendary friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. But most valuable is Johnson's discerning analysis of what Kerouac hoped to achieve in his by-turns exalted and anguished transmutation of experience into literature as drawing inspiration from Thomas Wolfe, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and jazz he created his alter ego, Jack Duluoz, and devoted himself to the grand and demanding vision of writing the saga of his own life as it unfolded. Johnson ends her intricately revelatory biography just before she and Kerouac met in 1957, leaving readers wanting more of her insights into this revolutionary writer for whom work was everything. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN January 1949, Jack Kerouac failed to appear for an afternoon date with a woman called Pauline. He had told Allen Ginsberg he planned to marry her - "the finest woman I'll ever know" - once she had unshackled herself from her truck-driver husband, who, according to Joyce Johnson, was accustomed to "slapping her around to keep her in line." In the meantime, Kerouac began an affair with Adele Morales (later to become the second Mrs. Norman Mailer). His failure to keep the rendezvous with Pauline, however, had nothing to do with affection for Adele; rather, he had overslept after a night of sex games with Luanne Henderson, whom Jack's muse Neal Cassady had married when she was 15, and who, according to their friend Hal Chase, was "quite easy to get . . . into bed." The tryst had been engineered by Cassady, who was hoping to watch, Johnson says, to show Luanne, by then 18, "how little she meant to him." Two days later, Kerouac called on Ginsberg and found Luanne "covered with bruises from a beating Neal had given her." Johnson describes Kerouac as "shocked" by the sight; nevertheless, "they all went out to hear bebop," partly financed by money stolen by Cassady. In response to being jilted, Pauline confessed her affair to her husband, who tried to burn her on the stove. Kerouac described her in his journal as a "whore." All the while, Ginsberg can be heard in the background: "How did we get here, angels?" This is an everyday story of the Beat Generation in late-1940s New York, a tale of crazy mixed-up kids who took a lot of drugs, dabbled in criminality - with two homicides among the statistics - lapsed into madness, were fond of identifying one another as "saints, saints," but often had the barest notion of what it means to respect the individuality of other human beings. Yet three members of the inner circle, Kerouac, Ginsberg and William Burroughs, created experimental literary works of remarkable originality - in particular, "On the Road," "Kaddish" and "Naked Lunch" - which read as freshly today as they did 50 years ago; perhaps, in an instance of that trick that the best art sometimes plays on us, more so. Kerouac certainly makes a good subject, but there already exist about a dozen biographies (by Ann Charters, Barry Miles, Gerald Nicosia, among others), not to mention memoirs, an oral history - the excellent "Jack's Book" (1978) - and wider surveys of the Beat Generation. In "Minor Characters" (1983), Johnson wrote about her affair with Kerouac at the time of publication of "On the Road." She now steps back to a period of Kerouac's life with which she has no direct acquaintance, tracing the story from his origins in a French Canadian family in Lowell, Mass., to New York in 1951, where the book ends with a rare citation from Kerouac's journals: "I'm lost, but my work is found." Johnson justifies the retelling of what is in outline a familiar tale by the fact of having gained access to the vast Kerouac archive, "deposited in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 2002." So far, so good. No large-scale Kerouac biography, so far as I am aware ("The Voice Is All" lacks a bibliography), has appeared since that date. Unfortunately, Johnson was apparently refused permission to quote at length from the journals and working drafts among Kerouac's papers. The result is a life in paraphrase. The method gives rise to frustration. In 1945, for example, Kerouac began writing a novel called "I Wish I Were You," a reworking of the story of the killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr in 1944. Together, Kerouac and Burroughs had previously written "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," a collaboration on the same subject that eventually saw the light of day in 2008. According to Johnson, "I Wish I Were You" is a different beast: "In two successive drafts of the first 100 pages, Jack put in all the textural detail that had been left out of 'Hippos' and even returned with renewed confidence to the lyricism he had abandoned just the year before. It was really quite brilliant, the best prose he had written so far." A single paragraph from the manuscript, and from some of the many others in the Berg, would have helped breathe life into these sentences. Puzzlingly, however, Johnson observes a similar reticence with respect to works by Kerouac and others in the public domain. "The Voice Is All" devotes more attention to Kerouac's French Canadian background than most biographies. Johnson's account of the unhappy household, in which Jack felt himself a guilty survivor after his brother, Gerard, died at the age of 9 (Jack was 4), is the best part of the book. The family's frequent moves, combined with a burdensome dual heritage, left Kerouac with a lifelong feeling of rootlessness, which contributed to his reluctance to give or accept romantic love, and undermined every promise of domestic stability. His domineering mother emerges from these pages with no more appeal than from any other history. Johnson makes strong claims for the force of French influence in Kerouac's work. Quoting the famous passage from "On the Road" - "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk," etc. - she says, "It was a voice that would seem to his future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been born in French." Part of the justification for the assertion derives from a 57-page manuscript with the title "Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne," in which Kerouac attempted the "experiment" of writing in French. Johnson states that he wished to try out "the language of blunt, plain-spoken people who were not given to nuance or imagery," the sort he had grown up with in Lowell. This has the potential of a new departure in Kerouac biography. Johnson believes the switch produced "some of the most eloquent prose he had ever written. His French voice was plainer than the more fluidly associative one he'd used in his letters to Neal." But we are offered so minute a glimpse of the manuscript that it is difficult to gain any sense of how far the experiment went, just as it is hard to identify French rhythms in the prose of "On the Road." I counted a total of 17 words quoted from "Les Travaux," not counting the title, eight of which are in English. She cites a letter from Kerouac to Yvonne Le Maître, who had written a critical review of his first novel, "The Town and the City." Kerouac introduced himself by saying, "I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth." I know this because the letter is printed in "Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956," edited by Ann Charters. In "The Voice Is All," it is paraphrased, as usual. Some deeper discussion would have been welcome. Similar confusion lingers with the information that "in one month alone, he had read Burroughs's entire bookshelf of Symbolist poets, all of whom wrote in . . . classical French." It would subtly alter our view of the Beats to learn that Burroughs had a substantial collection of works by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud in the original, and that Kerouac was capable of making his way through them. Or were they in translation? Once again, the reader is left in the dark. (How long is an "entire bookshelf" anyway?) Johnson seems to have conducted no interviews for "The Voice Is All" and has found it necessary to set aside only half a page for acknowledgments. When a biographer authorized by the Kerouac estate is enabled to quote freely from the archives, the questions posed by those "really quite brilliant" manuscripts might be answered: if not by the biographer, then by that most competent of all judges, the reader. James Campbell is an editor at The Times Literary Supplement. His books include a biography of James Baldwin, "Talking at the Gates," and a collection of essays, "Syncopations."
Kirkus Review
An exemplary biography of the Beat icon and his development as a writer. With unprecedented access to the New York Public Library's extensive Berg Collection of Kerouac artifacts, Johnson (Missing Men, 2005, etc.) tells the familiar story of the rise of the reluctant "king of the Beats" through the unfamiliar lens of his notebooks, manuscripts and correspondence with family, friends, lovers, editors and writers. The collection was unavailable to scholars for three decades, and access to it is still tightly controlled by the Kerouac estate. Johnson uses her opportunity as a pioneer in this new era of Kerouac scholarship to turn a laser-sharp focus on Kerouac's evolving ideas about language, fiction vs. truth and the role of the writer in his time. She ends her chronology in late 1951, as Kerouac found the voice and method he'd employ for the rest of his brief career while seeking a publisher for On the Road and working on the novel he considered his masterpiece, Visions of Cody. While still detailing the chaotic and occasionally tragic events of the writer's life--from mill-town football hero to multiply divorced dipsomaniac mama's boy/cult idol--Johnson's focus allows her to trace a trajectory of success rather than follow his painfully familiar decline into alcoholism and premature death. "[T]o me," she writes, "what is important is Jack's triumph in arriving at the voice that matched his vision." Of perhaps most interest was her discovery of just how important his French-Canadian heritage was to Kerouac's sense of identity. He considered its earthy patois his native language and seems to have translated his thoughts from it into the muscular English with which he's associated. There's plenty of life in these pages to fascinate casual readers, and Johnson is a sensitive but admirably objective biographer. A triumph of scholarship.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958, Johnson recounts her love affair with the author of On the Road (1957). Now, in this well-documented biography, she focuses on Kerouac's first 30 years, analyzing the impact his French-Canadian heritage and his first language, Joual, had on his life and work. Drawing on Kerouac material in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, Johnson provides fresh insights into his early literary influences and his friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, and, especially, Neal Cassady. She is particularly good at exploring the psychology of Kerouac's relationship with women and the effect of his attachment to his mother on those relationships. The portrait of Kerouac that emerges is one of a complicated individual, full of contradictions, who, above all else, was dedicated to his art. VERDICT Johnson breaks new ground in this well-written account of Kerouac's early life. She ends in 1951 with the stylistic breakthrough that eventually would lead to the experimental prose of Visions of Cody, written then but not published in its entirety until 1972. Her book is essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of Kerouac's life and work.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xvii |
| Part 1 Franco-American Ghosts | |
| The Lost Brother | p. 3 |
| Jean-Louis Kerouac | p. 14 |
| Part 2 A Half-American Boyhood | |
| La Salle de Mort | p. 27 |
| A Catholic Education | p. 34 |
| Pawtucketville | p. 43 |
| Football Hero | p. 51 |
| First Love | p. 61 |
| Part 3 An Uprooting | |
| Manhattan | p. 71 |
| The Summer of Sebastian | p. 83 |
| Columbia | p. 91 |
| The Escape | p. 105 |
| Part 4 The War | |
| At Sea | p. 123 |
| Edie Parker | p. 138 |
| Part 5 The Libertine Circle | |
| The Season of Lucien | p. 155 |
| Birth of a Symbolist | p. 170 |
| Apartment 51 | p. 184 |
| Benzedrine Weekends | p. 199 |
| A Father's Death | p. 209 |
| Part 6 Postwar | |
| Enter Neal Cassady | p. 219 |
| The Road | p. 236 |
| Reaching California | p. 247 |
| Ozone Park | p. 256 |
| Part 7 "White Ambitions" | |
| The Conquest of Manhattan | p. 269 |
| The Summer of Visions and Parties | p. 275 |
| Enter John Clellon Holmes | p. 285 |
| "The Rudeness of Being" | p. 297 |
| Part 8 "Rain and Rivers" | |
| "Whither Goest Thou in Thy Shiny Car at Night?" | p. 309 |
| A Change in Luck | p. 320 |
| Continental Divide | p. 332 |
| The Edge of Success | p. 344 |
| The French Canadian Older Brother | p. 356 |
| Part 9 The "Rush of Truth" | |
| The Unwritable Road Novel | p. 369 |
| The Girl with the Innocent and Pure Eyes | p. 375 |
| "The Voice Is All" | p. 380 |
| The Road Opens Up | p. 392 |
| Deep Form | p. 404 |
| Part 10 Interior Music | |
| Visions of Neal | p. 413 |
| Tranced Fixations | p. 417 |
| Rêves | p. 430 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 437 |
| Notes | p. 439 |
| Index | p. 473 |
