New Insights in The Voice is All

My decision to write a biography of Kerouac grew out of my years of dissatisfaction with almost all of the
preceding biographies. These books, based largely on often unreliable interviews used according to the
agendas of the various writers, did not capture the Jack I knew during my two year relationship with him
from 1957-58.  By focusing on the most sensational aspects of his story, they neglected what was most
important about him, his development as a writer.  By presenting him as the “King of the Beats,” they showed
little understanding of the contradictions in his nature.  Part of the problem was that for nearly four decades,
writers and scholars were not granted access to the Kerouac papers, which only ten years ago were sold to the
New York Public Library. The Voice Is All  is the first biography drawn from a study of  these papers, which reveal
in a detailed way how a Franco-American youth struggling to master English grew into a young novelist torn
between imaginative fiction  and autobiographically based work as well as between narrative and lyricism—
conflicts that only began to be resolved in 1951, the astonishing year in which Kerouac wrote On the Road and
started Visions of Cody.

While it has been a well-known fact that Kerouac came from a Franco-American, New England mill town
background, the implications of that heritage of pride and shame have never been fully explored up till now
by an American writer.  The Voice Is All portrays Kerouac as a man who felt only “half-American” in love with
the notion of American promise and “richness” which he felt could never be his.  It portrays him a writer who
felt he did not have a language of his own, since in the process of conquering English he began to let go of joual,
the French Canadian patois he spoke with his family and thought and dreamed in all his life.  It explains why
Kerouac was unable to separate himself from his protective and smothering mother, and why his Franco American
identity –with  its conservatism, prejudices insularity, and devout Catholicism—would reassert  itself in the last two
decades of  his life,  the period when he also began to integrate joual into his books and let a French sound, which he
had formerly excluded, come into his English prose.  One of the biggest discoveries in The Voice Is All is the
unpublished novella  La Nuit Est Ma Femme that Jack wrote in joual only a month before he finally found the
voice in which to write On the Road—a voice as American as apple pie but which has its roots in French.

The Voice Is All sheds new light on the writing of On the Road—showing how Kerouac’s legendary
“spontaneous” writing was preceded by three frustrating years of abandoned novels in which characters,
episodes and story lines were reshuffled. It shows Kerouac as a conscious and uncommonly dedicated
young artist, with a kind of idiosyncratic perfectionism which took the form of putting aside manuscripts and
starting all over again. It shows him as a lifelong prodigious reader and astute critic, and reveals for the first time
that the most important literary influence upon the writing of On the Road was Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night in which the two main characters are one another’s alter egos, just as Kerouac uses
the relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty to express his own anguished sense of duality. Rather
than being what one critic has called a “disguised memoir,” The Voice Is All  sets out to prove that it was very
much a work of fiction.  Despite what we have been led to believe by previous writers, On the Road was not
written from detailed notes, since one finds remarkably few detailed accounts of episodes or conversations
in Kerouac’s journals.  Although it has been read as a portrait of the real Neal Cassady, the novel gives us a
dramatically heightened and mythologized character, who is often used to express the thoughts of the author.
The idea for On the Road was in fact born in  Jack’s imagination nearly two years before he met Neal, and his
earliest attempts at writing it present two very different complementary road companions.

In 1972, I was the book editor who finally succeeded in getting the complete text of Visions of Cody, which Jack
considered his masterpiece, published, an event that led to the revival of interest in his work.  I was excited
to find in his unpublished journals his own blow by blow account  of the series of breakthroughs in the Fall of
1951 that led to the development of what Allen Ginsberg later called “spontaneous bop prosody”: the intense
visions of Neal that Jack at first called “visual tics”; the crucial experiments with “sketching” what he saw directly
in front of him as he wandered around New York City with a pocket notebook; his liberating realization that he
could focus the same “tranced fixation” upon scenes in his memory or even his imagination; the daring discovery
that he was finally ready to write down his “interior music” just as it came to him, as he did for the first time in
Visions of Cody.

I believe my own experience as a writer of both fiction and memoir has been an enormous help to me in understanding
Jack’s creative process, just as my own still vivid memories of Jack and his remarkable circle of friends and of postwar
Manhattan have contributed to my ability to recreate the life he lived before I met him and to make sense of his
relationships in terms of  the contradictions, cultural, sexual and psychological, constantly at war within him.

Catalog copy

A ground-breaking portrait of  Kerouac as a young artist, caught between two cultures and two languages, forging
a voice to contain his  dualities.

Three decades after her classic, award-winning memoir about her relationship with Kerouac, Joyce Johnson brilliantly
peels away layers of the Kerouac legend.  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 his boyhood  in  Lowell, Massachusetts during the Great Depression 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 decision 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 with his remarkable circle of friends, the women
who passed through his life, the father who never understood his choices, and the mother who enabled his writing but
never let him go into perspective.

Presenting a revelatory portrayal of Kerouac not only in the midst of his tumultuous existence in postwar Manhattan
and his fateful
 encounters with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and John Clellon Holmes, but in
the periods of solitude, struggle 
and visionary inspiration that produced his work, The Voice Is All liberates Kerouac
from the ill-fitting label “King of Beats” and
 creates a new and haunting image of him, drawn from what he wrote
himself in his private papers. This fascinating and compelling
 biography will change the way his books are read in
the 21st century.

Joyce Johnson’s two-year relationship with Kerouac began when she was 21 in 1957; in 1972, she was the editor
responsible for the publication of
 Visions of Cody, the book he considered his masterpiece.  Her eight books include
the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Minor Characters,
the recent memoir Missing Men, the novel In the Night
Café, and Door Wide Open; A Beat Romance in Letters.  The recipient of an O’Henry Award in
 1987 and an NEA grant in
1992, she has written for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and  has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia University
and the New School in New York City, as well as at the 92nd Street YMHA.