Sur la langue de Kerouac

Ainsi écrit-il le 8 septembre 1950, à Yvonne Le Maître, journaliste du Travailleur, petit journal de Worcester, qui avait fait une critique de The Town and the City : Excuse me for writing in English, when it would be so much better to address you in french; but I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth... Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home any more, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness all French-Canadians abroad in America have-Well, well, I was moved. Because I wanted a universal American story, I could not make the whole family catholic. Listen, Cody is full of shit; let him go; he is your friend, let him dream; he's not your brother, he's not your father, he's not your Saint Michael, he's a guy, he's married, he works, go sleeping on the other side of the world, go thinking in the great European night. Nous sommes partagés entre notre tradition littéraire et philosophique française, critique, élitiste, sceptique, et notre position américaine participative, démocratique, unanimiste, grégaire, qui se croit la seule réelle et voudrait, à la limite, n'avoir pas besoin de mots, mais seulement d'attitudes, de sentiments et de gestes pour « se dire ».