Leo Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle Ange L’Evesque met and married in New Hampshire, where their families had immigrated from Canada. Leo was a job printer who had tried his hand at selling insurance before he got the money to open his own press. As a youth he had worked in New Hampshire sawmills. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was the third and last child. His sister, Caroline, “Nin,” was three years older and his brother, Gerard, five when Jack was born.
Leo and Gabrielle lived in separate worlds when they were away from their rented hearth. Leo was a hearty, outgoing burgher whose shop was crowded with his friends. They found little difficulty in luring him away for an afternoon of billiards or political talk. At one point they proposed that he run for mayor of Lowell, but he declined the draft. Leo passed on to Jack a complicated notion of his ancestry on the Kerouac side, explaining that his own father, a carpenter who had immigrated from Brittany, was descended from Cornish Celts. Leo supplied a nobleman for one branch of the family tree, a coat-of-arms with three carpenter’s nails and a motto which translated as “Love, work and suffer.” Jack’s father counted Greeks and Poles and Irishmen among his friends and customers, and he was entirely comfortable with English, the language that all of them could share. Gabrielle preferred French and conducted her household in that tongue, which was also the language of the parish where she performed novenas and sent her children to be taught.
When Jack was four, Gerard, then nine, died of rheumatic fever. Gerard was a bright, frail child who had treated Jack, his sister Nin, his pet cat, and the mice he rescued from traps with the same extraordinary kindness. Jack worshipped him and emulated him and was entirely bereft at his death, which was marked by ceremonious mourning by the teaching sisters. Gerard had been a favorite of the nuns. When he died, they thought over things that he had said and done in his brief life and spoke of him as a saint-in-the-making. The boy was buried with Gabrielle’s family in Nashua, New Hampshire, his soul consigned to a heaven which she sought to make comfortable and at-hand to Jacky and Nin. To Gabrielle there was no question that Gerard was a saint, and Jacky was told so again and again. The implication was that Jack, perhaps, was not.
The special, official saint to whom Jack was taught to pray was Thérèse of Lisieux, whose life provided something of a stencil for Jack’s memories of Gerard’s saintliness. Thérèse was the consumptive daughter of a watchmaker in Brittany, the region of France the Kerouacs considered their ancestral home. In 1888, at the age of fifteen, she took the Carmelite habit. When it became plain that Thérèse would die of tuberculosis, her Mother Superior instructed her to keep a journal, which the girl crowded with bright, simple memories of a bourgeois childhood. At her death the Carmelites edited the diary into an obituary pamphlet, The Story of a Soul, which swiftly gained hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. In a section of the journal that came close to a campaign speech Thérèse had promised to “spend her heaven doing good upon earth,” and had forecast a “shower of roses” for those who prayed to her after her death, Gabrielle Ange L’Evesque among them. The Carmelites were deluged with letters about the resulting miracles, but the Vatican was adamant about the required waiting period before canonization could begin. Finally, having confessed his certainty of her sainthood to a visiting bishop, Pius X relented in 1914 and prepared the way for her recognition. In 1923, twenty-five years after she died at twenty-four, Thérèse was accorded beatification by Pius XI and immediate ranking with Joan of Arc as co-patroness of France.
She is known today as St. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus, and the chromolithographed iconography of her is rich in images of the Holy Child, of baby lambs, of roses, and of yolk-yellow shafts of light piercing back-lit clouds to illuminate her simple, adoring face. Forty years after the canonization of Thérèse, Jack Kerouac, literally hung over from success, would sprawl in a San Francisco park and explain to the poet Philip Whalen the comfort and refuge he felt in praying to Thérèse and “little lamby Jesus” to ease his woes.
Jack harbored bitter memories of the strict sisters at parochial school, an ordeal that ended when he was sent to public school at seven. Gerard’s coffin, the dark glade where the Kerouacs made the stations of the cross, the cheaply printed portraits of the weeping Christ—all of these images stayed in his mind and his mind stayed on Lowell, or “Galloway,” as he called it in his first novel, The Town and the City. The hard times would make Jack and his family wanderers throughout the crescent of poor neighborhoods north of the Merrimack, but despite the shadows, Jack remembered and spoke of a childhood that was full and rich, a time in his life that he never tired of reconsidering and re-creating in his writing, approaching it again and again from different angles.
In The Town and the City Jack multiplies himself and uses elements of his friends’ characters to create a large and complicated family he calls the Martins. Martin was St. Thérèse’s family name and an important mercantile name in Lowell. Jack gives his fictional family a sprawling, many-porched house that he had passed on summer-evening walks with his mother and his sister. The Martins of the novel are indifferent Catholics, and given the economic realities of Lowell in the thirties, almost unaccountably comfortable. Only Mrs. Martin, the mother, is of French descent, a trait Kerouac uses to shade her character, but not to define it. The Martins probably represent an amalgam of all the wealthy families on Varnum Road with whom Gabrielle wished her son could associate.
The Twelve Stations of the Cross—“I knew Doctor Sax was there flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape. . . .”
(Doctor Sax, pp. 122–123). Photo by Marshall Clements.
Later in his writing career, when he was striving to set down his true feelings, Jack’s French self surfaced, as in Visions of Gerard, the thirty-five-year-old man’s prolonged meditation on the brother who had died when he was four. A world of steaming puddings and rainy afternoons home from school is keenly evoked. Jack portrays conversations with Gabrielle—Mémêre—in French, and then translates them. “When I read of Proust’s teacup,” he wrote, “—all those saucers in a crumb—all of literary history by thumb—all of a city in a tasty crumb—I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.”
Jack painted and drew and cocked an ear for gossip, and he was a faithful reader of the sports pages of the Lowell Sun and the Boston newspapers. By the time he was eleven he was amusing himself by writing sports coverage chronicling the fortunes of his racing stable, a box of marbles. In another season the marbles became the players in an elaborate statistical baseball game that Jack continued to play in one form or another for the rest of his life.
Children’s tickets for the movies cost eleven cents in those days, but Jack and Nin could attend for free because Leo printed the theater programs. Jack was seven when the pictures began to talk, which made him a member of the first generation to secure its fantasy in this noisy, American way. Until the talkies Lowell’s main theater, the Keith, was a stop on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit, and Leo’s connection with the theater provided his son with glimpses of the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields as stage performers, before their movie fame. As stars of the talking pictures they became full-scale comic heroes for Jack and his friends. The men of The Big Parade were real heroes, models in case the Kaiser decided to march again. The villainess of Murder by the Clock was frightening to Jack because she was only a shadow, never seen full-face.
At parochial school Jack’s catechism and his first reading of the Bible had been in French. After he began attending public school he read the popular children’s books of the day: The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins, three brace of bland siblings whose existence defied statistical common sense. All of these books were case-bound volumes of great popularity, accepted by teachers and school librarians despite their lack of literary merit, because of their uplifting moral lessons. But Jack’s tastes soon led him to the pulp thriller magazine-novels that Street and Smith and other publishers produced