The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac

Voice Is All: Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson (New York: Viking, 2012)Joyce Johnson is figure long familiar to both specialists and general readers with an interest in the era. Her immediate claim to fame, her romantic involvement with Jack Kerouac from 1957-1958, should not obscure her own considerable merits as writer. Minor Characters (1983), her coming-of-age memoir that describes her relationship with Kerouac, is essential reading for anyone interested in the Beats and their era. Her published correspondence with Kerouac, Door Wide Open (2000), weaves together their letters in poised and reflective narrative, through which Johnson offers her own insights into Kerouac's complicated personality. In fact, these two works are themselves so richly informative that one is justified in wondering why Johnson then felt compelled to add Voice Is All to the already crowded shelf of Kerouac biographies. There have been nineteen full biographies of Kerouac since Ann Charters' first in 1973, Kerouac: A Biography; Johnson's Voice Is All is the twentieth Kerouac biography.In her introduction, Johnson identifies two distinct but related goals. Firstly, she aims to correct the distortions caused by the Beat label, which has obscured another important side of him that has so far been poorly understood-the deeply traditional Jean-Louis Kerouac, who had been raised in French-speaking, Catholic, Franco-American family in Lowell, Massachusetts (xvii). Secondly, she seeks to track development of his distinctive style as product ofthat upbringing, asserting that one was more aware of Kerouac's dualities and contradictions than he was, and it was his genius to find voice that would contain them when he was only twenty-nine (xvii). Johnson's study therefore has clear agenda: to bring to the surface Kerouac's French-Canadian identity while charting the development of his mature voice. extent to which she manages to connect the two may be taken as test of the biography's success overall. However, we should also consider matters of scope and methodology. Voice Is All is substantial work, consisting of 436 pages of text, with the notes and index taking it to almost 500 pages. Do these 500 pages live up to the book jacket's claims that Johnson provides a revelatory portrayal of Kerouac?Two issues stand out immediately. first is Johnson's decision to end her study in November 1951, when Kerouac developed the sketching technique that became his spontaneous prose method. Her justification for this choice is not altogether satisfactory: The details of his can be found in other books, but to me what is important is in arriving at the voice that matched his vision (xx). However, Kerouac's bleak decline certainly did not begin in 1952; furthermore, the deployment of his unique voice through such radical works as Doctor Sax and Subterraneans in 1952 and 1953 surely needs to be an integral part of demonstrating his lonely triumph. As it is, we get only brief glimpse of the still-underappreciated Visions of Cody (written 1952; published 1972) before the biography abruptly ends. If Kerouac's lonely triumph was indeed (in my opinion, it certainly was), then we need to see the prose and hear the voice; however, Johnson was prohibited by the Kerouace estate from quoting any Kerouac work, published or unpublished.The second issue is matter of research methodology. Referring in very general terms to the various approaches used by previous biographers, Johnson says that her own approach was to rely upon Jack's own written words as well as the letters, journals, and books of his closest friends, especially Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and John Clellon Holmes (xix). Johnson certainly makes excellent use of the archival documents held in the New York Public Library's Berg collection. Shaping this wealth of material into readable narrative is no small task. …

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