“I think if we really want to understand Kerouac and his work we have to understand his work in French.” Gabriel Anctil, Montreal author and journalist

MONTREAL—Literary scholars, biographers and historians have been beating paths through Jack Kerouac’s legacy for more than half a century, seeking to understand the thinking and writing of the man who founded the Beat Generation.

But like all good novels that hide something just beneath the literal text, there is another surprise lurking in Kerouac’s archives. The Toronto Star has learned that it could be coming to your local bookstore in the near future.

Two new novels, originally written in Kerouac’s native French tongue, are being edited and translated for eventual publication in 2016, said John Sampas, Kerouac’s brother-in-law and the guardian of the writer’s literary estate.

Sampas said in a brief interview from his home in Lowell, Mass., Kerouac’s birthplace, that a French-Canadian editor is working on the French version of the books, while the New York-based publisher Library of America has committed to publishing the translated novels in English.

La nuit est ma femme, written in 1951, and Sur le chemin, written a year later, will never compete with Kerouac’s 1957 classic, On the Road. But they will undoubtedly provide insight into the origins and thinking of an author who spent much of his short, turbulent life probing and coming to grips with his French-Canadian roots, says Gabriel Anctil, a Montreal author and journalist.

Anctil first read On the Road at 14, began researching his Quebec roots in his 20s and, just before Christmas, produced a radio series for Radio-Canada that retraced the Kerouac clan’s migration from the farmlands of Quebec to industrial New England, part of the a wave of French-Canadian migration between the mid 1800s and the turn of the 20th century that gave rise to a now largely assimilated population of Franco-Americans.

“There have been an enormous number of biographies on Kerouac, but it was always a detail. In a book of 800 pages there were maybe two lines saying he was of French-Canadian origins,” Anctil said in an interview.

Part of the oversight may be the result of the nature of the intensely private writer, who was perhaps overly sensitive about his mother tongue.

He spoke a heavily-accented French joual at home in Lowell, up until the age of 6 with his Quebec-born parents and with his siblings. He struggled with English well into his teens and he once told a girlfriend, New York author Joyce Johnston, that even as he was working on the novel that would turn American literary convention on its head and found the jazz-inspired Beat movement, his words started out as French thoughts translated into English.

Kerouac dropped hints by including several French passages in Visions of Cody, his follow-up novel to On the Road, which was published after his 1969 death. But La nuit est ma femme is where he laid it all out.

“I am French-Canadian, put into the world in New England. When I am mad, I often swear in French. When I dream, I often dream in French. When I cry I always cry in French,” according to an excerpt from Anctil’s notes.

The next steps follow naturally, says Anctil, who first revealed the existence of the unpublished French Kerouac novels when the New York Public Library opened the writer’s archives to the public in 2006.

“I think if we really want to understand Kerouac and his work we have to understand his work in French.”

Despite creating the persona of a spontaneous speed writer after feeding the famous 120-foot roll of paper into his typewriter to bang out in three weeks what would be his most-read novel, Kerouac was in fact deeply contemplative about his roots and how he ended up in the position of a celebrated writer, the figurehead and prophet for a generation of young Americans.

Whether a deliberate fable or honest misunderstanding, he put out the idea that he came from noble lineage, the ancestor of a baron who left Brittany in northwestern France in the 1700s to settle in the French colony across the Atlantic Ocean.

More recent investigation suggests the first Kerouac to arrive in what would become Lower Canada and eventually Quebec may have been a pretender —a notary who was exiled by his family after accusations of theft and rape in France, Anctil revealed in his radio series.

In the end, Kerouac’s most notable relative in Quebec may have been Parti Quebecois founder, sovereigntist icon and former Quebec premier Rene Levesque, a distant cousin of Kerouac’s beloved mother, Gabrielle Levesque.

But there has been a strained relationship between Kerouac and Quebec stretching back to a 1967 television appearance on the Radio-Canada interview show Sel de la semaine (Salt of the Week).

Kerouac supposedly left the set feeling that its stiff suit-and-tie audience were mocking the quality of his French. They laughed at odd moments, like when he mentioned the death of his two siblings, and could be seen in cut-away shots turning to friends and whispering.

Anctil said he’s heard several different versions of the actual mood from people who were there that night. His own feeling is that the audience were laughing with Kerouac rather than at him.

“Still, I think people were a bit destabilized by the accent because he spoke like a farmer. They wouldn’t have expected a celebrated writer to speak like that,” he said. “I think he could have been better received and it’s too bad because he died two years later.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The Radio-Canada interview nevertheless formed the backbone of the National Film Board’s 1987 docudramaJack Kerouac’s Road — A Franco-American Odyssey, which served as one of the deepest examinations of the writer’s French-Canadian roots until recently.

Kerouac will never get the chance to make his peace with Quebec. But Quebecers may soon get the chance reconnect with the writer of a book that influenced a generation but could not save Kerouac’s lost and lonely soul.

“I think the books are important for understanding his collected works,” said Anctil. “It’s also important as a Quebecer to know that such a great writer wrote in our language.”