"On the Road Out of Peyton Place: The Franco American Working Class New England Voice of Jean-Louis Kerouac and Marie-Grace De Repentigny Metalious"


Brooklyn College, CUNY Wolfe Institute Pizer Graduate Research Colloquium

Presentation by Anne Marie Prudhomme

Abstract: This article is my presentation at the graduate research colloquium and provides an introduction to my English MA Thesis entitled On the Road and Out of Peyton Place: The Franco-American Working-Class New England Voice of Jean-Louis Kerouac and Marie Grace de Repentigny Metalious. This talk was given on May 5, 2011 in the Brooklyn College Library in Brooklyn, NY. I was honored to be nominated for this colloquium by my thesis advisor, Prof. J. Entin, and by the Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies, Prof. J. Davis, both of whom I thank for this opportunity to share my work. I would also like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Rhea Cote Robbins for publishing this paper and for being an inspiration to me.

Author, Prudhomme, biography: I am half Franco-American and half -Norwegian American and my childhood was spent in poverty, living in a Section 8 apartment on Martins Pond in North Reading, Massachusetts. In a reflection of Kerouac’s life, I left Massachusetts for New York City, and I currently reside in Queens. As a mirror of Metalious’ life, I am a homemaker. I am also a graduate of the Borough of Manhattan Community College CUNY, AA, Liberal Arts, and Brooklyn College CUNY, BA, English, Secondary Education, as well as a current candidate for an English MA at Brooklyn College. I have student taught in Brooklyn and have worked in a both a middle school and a high school in Long Island. I hope to continue in working-class studies, eternally proud of my working-class, cultural, and ethnic heritage.


Jack Kerouac’s friend David Amram stated in a 1969 interview, “In early 1958, all of us went to Brooklyn College, where Jack, Phillip and Howard read. Jack spent most of the time answering the student’s questions with questions of his own . . . and the students finally realized . . . If they wanted to meet the Author Jack Kerouac, they would have to read his books” (“Evergreen Review” 1969). Grace Metalious states in her groundbreaking novel Peyton Place (370) through a conversation between two main characters, “‘Tom, what a difference there is between writing something or reading something, and living it.’ ‘The main difference is that it is easier to read or write than to live,’ said Tom.” Kerouac also once wrote, in a 1950 letter to the critic Yvonne Le Maître, “All my knowledge rests in my French Canadianness.” Metalious once stated that “I think I began Peyton Place the day I was born.” These quotes reflect how the personal experience of these writers is central to understanding their work. In my thesis title “On the Road and Out of Peyton Place: The Franco-American Working–Class New England Voice of Jean-Louis Kerouac and Marie Grace de Repentigny Metalious” I use the birth names of Jack Kerouac and Grace Metalious, because their heritage peppers all of their novels. My thesis focuses on their two most popular works, On the Road and Peyton Place.
I first read On the Road many years ago, followed by Peyton Place a few years ago, and in both instances I was driven by curiosity. When growing up in North Reading, Massachusetts I heard the phrase “it’s a Peyton Place” bandied about like a dirty term for bad things going on in another town. I didn’t hear about On the Road until my first year of college during which a professor took great joy in playing Kerouac’s recordings on an old record player. I thought, “I’d know that inflection anywhere, that’s a Lowell voice.” Yet in literary studies of Kerouac and Metalious, scholars have neglected to adequately attend to the authors’ New England, working-class, Franco-American roots. However, after researching both books and both authors I found that these writers’ class, religious, and ethnic identities are at the center of their fiction. This resonates with the majority of Americans, who are themselves working-class. As I say in my thesis, each writer’s memories of their humble beginnings would not deter a brief moment in November 1957, in which they shared a place on the New York Times Best Seller List; Metalious at number six, and Kerouac at number eleven. Two poor New England “Canucks” captured something beyond themselves, in a wondrous dual force.
As I read the two novels I wondered about the authors’ similarities in ethnicity and class, and how it may have been informed by their shared New-England childhood. What jumped from the pages was compassion born of experience, and I was struck by the literal French references and subtle French allusions that “litter” both novels. Kerouac is known for “Beat” insurgency, and Metalious is known for shaking out the hypocrisy-driven scandals of small-town America, yet all I could see was a Franco-American sympathy for the poor. When I delved into the myriad books related to Kerouac’s life and the invaluable Inside Peyton Place about the life of Grace Metalious, written by Emily Toth of Louisiana State University, I felt that my thoughts were validated. In my pursuit, I read Richard S. Sorell’s 1982 “Melus” article, “Novelists and Ethnicity: Jack Kerouac and Grace Metalious as Franco-Americans” and the heritage of the writers’ and their parents’ struggle with ethnicity in New England became clear. Yet, I wondered, what did coming of age in New England as a “frog,” a “Canuck,” as part of the so-called, “Chinese of the East,” (Fong, Chuang 302) do to each writer’s psyche? According to the scholar C. Stewart Doty, “Especially hostile to Franco-Americans was Madison Grant, [writing in the 1920s], . . . his book The Passing of the Great Race warned that the Nordic race was being replaced by lesser races, such as ‘Alpine’ French Canadians . . . Grant told his many readers that French Canadians were but ‘a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes of the South.” Another contemporary scholar, Niles Carpenter, “warned in 1927 that if the number of French Canadians in the Northeast continued to increase at its current rate for another ten years, the United States might be faced with ‘plebiscites of the sort which have been held in Upper Silesia and Transylvania’” Furthermore, in 1926, a respected professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University, Clifford Kirkpatrick, alarmed his readers with the information that “48.1 percent of French Canadians were ‘retarded’ — almost twice the percentage of native-born English-speaking.” Doty gives other examples of “elitist” disdain for the Franco-American. A disturbing one states that in adventure books for boys, Franco-Americans of Maine are portrayed as “evil and dirty” (Doty 333-335). As the scholar Robert Chodos observes, Franco-Americans were left with deep psychological wounds “in which feelings of guilt, inferiority, and stubborn pride festered, and which were constantly reopened by the insensitivity of the surrounding society to cultural differences and linguistic transitions . . . They were ‘frogs’ or ‘dumb Canucks’, and in socially stratified New England that was the wrong thing to be” (Québec 181).
What did being considered an unwanted “other” do to each writer to make them care about the downtrodden enough to want to write in depth about their existence? They defied the silence that had been insisted upon by “La Survivance,” or the tenets of family, language, faith, and community that insured the survival of the French-speaking immigrant in the ghettos of mill towns throughout New England, a place culturally and politically ruled by WASPs and the Irish. Silence was not necessarily passivity, for Franco-Americans were always active politically, if not always effectively, because of a longstanding psychological ennui and loyalty to their church leaders. They sought anonymity in this host country and they faded into the background, making social progress slow.
Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, and Metalious was born 2 years later northwest by 30 miles, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Both childhoods suffered through the Great Depression. Each of their fathers worked in the printing business and Jack would speak of the typewriter ribbon ink staining his hands, just as the printing presses had permanently done to his father and the skiving machine used to assemble dyed shoes had done to his mother. Jack’s father kept the family on the move due to tremendous bouts with poverty, and Grace’s father left her when she was 5, leaving her alone in a family of bitter and somewhat ambitious women: a grandmother, a mother, and a sister, who could not escape poverty. Each was raised Roman Catholic, and spoke French in the home. Each absorbed the life around them and both were therefore determined to lead remarkable lives; they were full of tremendous fortitude and personal tenacity. All that they strived for was to sit at a typewriter and write, and somehow, they accomplished it.
My thesis covers seven themes. I start with the far reaching history of the French in North America. The original French settlers were fur traders in league with the French royalty, these adventurers came during the early sixteenth-century. The free agents called coureurs des bois, or runners of the woods, held sway to no one but the Native Americans they learned from and lived with, and their companions were the voyageurs, or travelers, underwritten by the British Hudson Bay company. The habitants, or settlers, desperate French peasant farmers and the king’s daughters, or Paris orphans, soon followed. As the years passed and the French lost political autonomy, a feeling of dispossession and abandonment by the motherland crept in. All that was left was tradition. Unlike many other early North American settlers, Quebecois farmers, loggers, and factory workers suffered limited prosperity which fed a nineteenth-century exodus into New England in search of financial security. French-Canadian child-labor dominated the mills, and French-Canadians were prejudiced against for their language, religion and insularity. A small number returned to Quebec, yet most stayed. Even today many find it hard to escape limited options due to what I call the institutionalized shame of Franco-American heritage in the highly class aware strata of New England. During Jack and Grace’s time the mills began to relocate and Franco-Americans became surplus labor. The sense of community that Kerouac and Metalious had known around them was all but gone by World War II, when the returning Franco-American veterans left for the suburbs, and the community dissolved. Jack and Grace showed a desire for the lost community in their writing and in their life. In spite of inherent shyness, they enjoyed nothing more than conviviality with friends and family, often speaking and singing in French and English. Each spent long hours on the phone with old friends in the last few years of their lives, in drunken late night searches for the past.
My second theme is family. Both writers were loyal to their families, particularly to their mothers, as this was the way in the Franco-American community. Jack vowed to his dying father in 1946 that he would always take care of his mother Gabrielle, and Grace strove to show undeserved kindness to her mother Laurette and sister Bunny. Both writers cursed and fought with their family, yet the ties were unbreakable. On the Road is an effusive dirge to the breaking away from the family life of one’s childhood into the unknown; it is a celebration of a young man’s chosen family of beloved friends, while he dreams of the eventual comforts of a wife and children. Family is a constant dream as Jack, who had just lost his father when he had set to write, along with his cohort Neal, was looking for a father. Both novels illustrate, through family struggle and search for fathers, the slow demise of their community and what it might search for next. In Peyton Place, in the case of the shack dweller Selena Cross, or as I believe her to be, Celine Croix, family is brutal. She loses her battered mother Nellie to suicide after she finds out that her husband, Selena’s stepfather, repeatedly raped and impregnated Selena. For the middle-class girl Allison, her family is fatherless and tense, but secure. Grace acts to show the realities of class boundaries and how a lack of money and upward mobility can destroy from the inside. Family is almost never fulfilling. In both books family is longed for, and, as in both writers’ lives, and in a larger context as in the Franco-American community, it is just a dream.
The third theme reflects the importance that their religion played in their lives. Each writer had abjured their youthful religion. Kerouac was discovering Buddhist study, Metalious had become agnostic. Both held on to sympathy for the poor, and both returned to their earliest faith before their early and tragic deaths from alcoholism, Jack at 47, and Grace at 39. In both books religion is treated with respect. In On the Road, the natural landscape is holy, and Jack becomes fascinated by both the highway and its teachers. He speaks of Methodist ministers and Jesuit students, a Jewish hitchhiker, and God-like jazz men. Even his magnetic car thief, his Lothario companion Neal, is a crazy road saint. Peyton Place opens with a description of unease between Catholics and Congregationalists. Peyton Place has a Jewish chicken farmer. The Christian sects fight when Nellie’s burial becomes contentious dogmatically due to her suicide. Eventually, the pastor of the Pentecostal Church approaches Selena to offer burial of Nellie. In both books religion is a powerful symbol for what stands to be lost in assimilation and what stands to be gained in remembering the past.
The fourth theme is sexuality. Each writer lived a life on their own terms in this regard, and each would have been aware of the stigma attached to being the Franco-American exotic “other”. This is reflected in their books: promiscuity, explicitness, and homosexuality are explored in a very racy temperament for the 1950’s, yet in a very human manner for the ages. These writers had courage enough to write what was real and not just scandalous. The fifth theme, is the working-class consciousness that saturates both books. As Jack travels in On the Road he describes the poor and hungry. This culminates in the beaten mother and wife and physical double of Jack, “Bea Franco,” a Mexican-American migrant worker whom he meets on a Greyhound bus in the American end of Los Angeles. Their intense love affair lasts only two weeks yet it becomes a love affair with himself, and his past. Perhaps the name of the Mexican-American Bea Franco, means to “Be a Franco-American.” Peyton Place offers the same in Celine Croix. The poor girl on the wrong side of the tracks is described as a “perfect gypsy” with “honey-tan skin that never faded to sallowness in the harsh New England winter,” she is “full-lipped” with “long dark hair that curls of its own accord.” Celine is Bea Franco too. Both writers create alluring and poor French characters.
The sixth theme involves the voyageur and habitant as it relates to each writer’s life and writing. Jack acts as a modern-day voyageur riding Cadillacs and rails. He is the “King of the Beats” seeking a habitant lifestyle. Grace is the habitant as housewife author, the “Pandora in Blue Jeans” driven by the voyageur alter-ego of imagination. In this manner, each embodied their heritage in modern life. The seventh theme is of loyalty and traitorism. Each writer personally held a psychological connection to their homeland and culture, and when they broke its silence to write about being Franco-American and working-class the pain of breaking that taboo destroyed them. They became traitors to those they loved most. Jack’s mother and Lowell peers had little interest in his writing. His last wife Stella once stated “you know no one in Lowell reads. I’d say, ‘Look at Jack Kerouac’s new book,’ and they’d look at the cover, flip through it and say, ‘Very nice’” (Gifford, Lee 304). Grace suffered the same fate. Peyton Place was at one time banned from Canada and certain New England towns as something filthy. Grace felt this banishment deeply as persecution and she was especially saddened that her own aunt never read her books. Their humble beginnings led to chastisement from their own people and society as a whole. Yet they wrote two bestsellers that changed American literature. People related to what they read.
Did the circumstances of their lives determine what they wrote? Not necessarily. They could have been just two roustabouts who drank a lot, wrote lightening in a bottle, and just happened to share an ethnicity. My argument is in the “halo of shame” that acted as a mantle over their entire formative years. The very essence of what they endured comes through in the eloquent detail they offer to those with nothing on America’s road or to those stranded in Peyton Place. This legacy wasn’t enough to stave off self destruction, the very high cost of literary voice. America responded thankfully that the two had recognized its own collective discontent and hidden fury, and yet, this wasn’t enough. Growing up working-class was alright, wanting to write when one could sell insurance or work in a factory was less so, yet telling the truth … it had little payoff. Ironically, academia has been taking notice of these writers, Jack, who spoke of “college boys” and Grace, who thought she wasn’t smart enough for college but put it on her to do list, and I have to believe this means something. The fame they garnered meant nothing when they craved their ethnicity back: family, faith, language, community, a sense of confidence in their New England roots.
Jack and Grace were American and celebrated their country of birth through their brilliant observation. They also challenged America to consider whether Her lowest-common denominator might be Her grandest domestic product. Jean-Louis and Marie Grace: Franco-American, working-class, and from two mill towns, didn’t do too shabbily for a couple of “Frenchies”—and for that I thank you Jack and Grace, your spirit is here among us. I thank you for listening.


Works Cited
This section includes works that are cited in my thesis and that have informed this talk.
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