Pwalk on the road of the Franco-Americansand in particular some of their fabulous authors, this is what this road trip culture in three episodes. To the greatest hiker the first rank of honor: the literary path begins at Lowell, birthplace of Jack Kerouac, celestial tramp, solitary wanderer, great master of the beat generation.
The scene is in Lowell, where Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, dit Ti-Jean, dit Jack Kerouac, was born on March 12, 1922, so it will be exactly 100 years ago on Saturday. The scene is actually on the south side of the new bridge linking the two banks in the city of Massachusetts.
The traces of the superstar of American letters, like those of his community of French-speaking immigrants at the turn of the XXand century, are often seen only by those who know how to see them around this central point, as everywhere else in this city of the industrial revolution of New England. The ” canucks “, Where ” frog “, isolated themselves in their “Little Canada” or only wanted to blend in and disappear into this world. And that is, in short, what happened.
Below the Richard P. Howe Bridge, closest to the Merrimack River, you can see the remains of the old pillars of the old Moody Bridge, demolished about ten years ago. It was on this old structure that Jack Kerouac, ten years old in July 1932, came across the ” watermelon man fell dead in front of him and his mother. The passerby with the large fruit, probably 68-year-old Willam F. Mulgrave, had lost his footing and fatally hit his head.
This instantaneous tragic end haunted the writer for a long time. He told it in Dr. Sax (Doctor Sax), a story written in Mexico City in 1952 and published in 1959, two years after On the Road (On the road), magnum opus and great classic of modern literature. Kerouac himself considered Dr. Sax as his best book.
Reverend Steve Edington, president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac (LCK), admires him no less. One midday last week, towards the end of a guided tour in the footsteps of Lowell’s prodigy son, he took a copy out of his pocket and began reading the passage concentrating poetic, breathless and hallucinatory prose to describe the fatal accident: I look down with him and there is the moon on shiny froth and rocks, there is the long eternity we have been seeking. “Is he dead?”, I said to my mother. »
The pastor then passed his pocket copy to Suzanne Molleur Beebe so that she could read the response written in French in the original work, according to a very typical incantatory and syncopated expressive mechanism, in this magane language, a complex metaphor of an identity fragmented: ” No, s’t’homme there is finished. Look at the water on the boards, when a man dies his udder in his loot, everything goes… »
The beautiful accent of this part of the country would not have surprised the Kerouac of the famous interview given to the salt of the week at Radio-Canada in 1967, two years before his own death. Suzanne Molleur Beebe was also born in this city. She is active in the Franco-American Committee of Lowell. His father, M. Molleur, had married a Loiselle-Plouffe.
“The Franco-American community is constantly shrinking,” she explains, in English this time. People move away or they forget their past. There are still people who grew up here who speak French in private. But there aren’t many left…”
A museum church
The tombstone of Jack Kerouac, at ground level, attracts its daily batch of visitors, as evidenced by the traces on the snow, the only ones visible around in the Edson cemetery. His funeral service on October 21, 1969, attended by barely fifty people, was celebrated in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, mother of all the places of worship of the three former parishes of “little Canadas”. Jack Kerouac was also baptized there and was a mass server there. It is therefore quite naturally there that the Jack Kerouac Foundation wishes to install a museum and an art center with a stage for shows. Who says beat say jazz.
The church is now desecrated. His stained glass windows have found believers and buyers in Mexico. The gray stone shell appears to be in good condition. The interior, on the other hand, needs a lot of love, if only to bring it up to safety, museum and musical standards. You would also have to add a lot of equipment and reconfigure the space, especially in the huge basement.
The building belongs to a private real estate developer, who agreed last summer to withhold its sale while trying to find the financing required for the tens of millions project involving the Jack Kerouac Estate (JKE).
“We receive visitors from all over the world and the idea of creating a place to celebrate Kerouac has been in the air for a long time”, explains Sylvia Cunha, Director of Marketing and Development at JKE, after opening the doors of the former church. “These visitors don’t know where to start their visit to Lowell. We must offer them a place worthy of the memory of this exceptional author. »
The project requires millions. An architect is working on sketches to convince patrons and the authorities of the feasibility and interest of the proposal. The official launch of the project will take place on Sunday, March 19. Mme Cunha hopes that the inauguration of the cultural equipment will take place before the end of the decade.
The future museum could permanently house the typescript ofOn the Road, written in three weeks between April 2 and April 22, 1951, comprising 125,000 energetically typed words, without paragraphs, all at once, on a medium cobbled together by the 29-year-old writer to resemble a paper road. The original 120-foot-long roll belongs to Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts. The roll fetched US$2.5 million at auction in 2001.
A portion of the roll will serve as the centerpiece of the exhibit Visions of Kerouac of the Boot Cotton Mills Gallery from March 18. The expo will launch the program of centenary festivities, concocted with several cultural organizations in Lowell, which will extend to the traditional Kerouac literary festival in October.
Founding writings
The building in the Centralville district where his Gérard died at the age of nine, when Jack was only four, also still exists, in an anonymous banality. Bill Walsh, another mainstay of LCK, explains that Visions of Gerard (Visions of Gerard, written in 1956, published in 1963) remains his favorite writing by Kerouac. With Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy and The Town and The City (before the road), it is one of the four so-called Lowell books, since they deal with the tormented youth of the author in his hometown.
“ Visions of Gerard influenced all the texts that followed, explains the former teacher, who was also a social worker in Boston. I too was raised Catholic, and recognized myself in the memories of the Mass and other religious elements. For Jack, his brother Gerard was a saint. This book speaks beautifully of the essential losses a person may have to endure in life. »
Across from the Howe Bridge, the former St. Joseph’s Hospital, run by the Gray Nuns of Ottawa, where the body of the watermelon man, was recently demolished and replaced by an all-glass, soulless university building. A little further still on rue Pawtucket, the Archambault funeral home, which exposed Kerouac’s body in 1969, is still in use, but the Catholic orphanage has now been converted into trendy lofts.
The parking lot of the building retains a very kitsch imitation of the grotto of Lourdes, a tribute to the Virgin, with the sculptures of a Stations of the Cross, all the indications of which are in French. Ti-Jean had passed in front of these very Catholic images before going to the bridge and witnessing the tragic end of the man with the watermelon…