Kerouac's birth day

photo: Kerouac Estate

Today is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac—but this is about his mother.

“As for my mother, there’s no other like her in the world, really. Did she bear me just to have a little child to bless her heart? She got her wish.” —Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque was born in Quebec in 1895 and married fellow French-Canadian Léo-Alcide Kéroack in 1915.

Of the marriage, she gave birth to three children—Francois Gerard in 1916, Gabrielle Caroline (Nin) in 1918, and Jean-Louis (Jack) in 1922. Gerard died in 1926, and his short and saintly life is the subject of Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard (which I highly recommend).

Jack was born at 5:00pm on March 12, 1922, in the family house at 9 Lupine Road in Lowell, Massachusetts. From that moment forward he was Gabrielle’s Ti Jean, Little John.

Gabrielle, who everyone called mémère, was devoutly Catholic and intensely practical. “She spent no money on herself, dressing in shabby housedresses and clean aprons, her face round and serene under her glasses.” She was “fiercely devoted to her family … and was always at home cleaning, washing, cooking. (Jack) never forgot her cooking—pancakes and maple syrup and sausages for breakfast, for lunch hamburgers and pork chops; deserts of cherry pie with whipped cream; and for supper, liver pate sandwiches, followed by warm peach cake, or Leo’s favorite, date pie with whipped cream.’’¹

After Gerard’s death at age 9, she was very protective of young Jack, and as he matured he became protective of her. Jack, along with his sister, cared for Gabrielle as best he could after Leo’s death in 1946, and even greater still after Nin’s death in 1964.

Mémère worked in a New York shoe factory for five years while Jack wrote his first novel, The Town and the City. After the book was published in 1950, she “began to take a good hard look at her own life. Nin offered her a room in her home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Gabrielle told Jack, then 28, she was going to take it. She had enough of the shoe factory. He’d have to take care of himself.”²

In the 1950s and early 60s, at various times Gabrielle lived with Nin or with Jack in Florida and elsewhere, but when Nin died in 1964, Jack bought his mother a house in Hyannis because she once told him she dreamed of living on Cape Cod. Mother and son lived there until Jack’s death in 1969.

Gabrielle died in 1973.

Over the years, here and there, some, though not enough, have written about Jack and mémère, and not always in a positive vein. Critics have written that Jack’s devotion to his mother contributed to his well-documented struggles, whereas I would argue that love for his mother was one of his highest virtues.

“I am my mother’s son. All other identities are artificial and recent. Naked, basic, actually, I am my mother’s son. I emerged from her womb and set out on this earth.” —Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems

1. Kerouac, A Biography by Ann Charters

2. Ibid.