In doing research for an upcoming novel, I began re-reading a few stories that tell the tale of travelers, especially those that involved pairs of road warriors. Brimming with anticipation, I reopened Don Quixote (with Sancho Panza), On the Road (Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise), Le Grand Meaulnes (with Augustin Meaulnes and Francois Seurel) along with Huckleberry Finn (Huck and Tom). I even ventured as far afield as The Narrow Road to a Far Province, Matsuo Basho’s haiku chronicle of traveling through northern Japan in the year 1689, alongside his friend and student, Sora.
I found that there were some common elements shared among all these stories; however, the single most striking congruence was between On the Road and Le Grand Meaulnes. Reading these two classics in succession yielded a compelling number of parallel events and statements.
In the text of On the Road, narrator Sal Paradise carries a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes in his pack while traveling across America. Sal also states that the book went unread because he “preferred reading the American landscape as we went along.” This prompted the question of whether Jack Kerouac himself had read the book. One would certainly think so, since he bothered to mention it in the narrative (and possibly borrowed the author’s name as a pseudonym for one character in the book, turning Ed Saucier into Ed Fournier). The timing of the various publications of Le Grand Meaulnes certainly made it possible. The original French version came out in 1913, a year before Alain Fournier’s untimely death in 1914 during the First World War. The first English translation was published in 1928. It was titled The Wanderer, with the translation done by Françoise Delisle. Later translations retained the French title due to difficulties translating it.
A look at Kerouac’s correspondence from the years when On the Road was being planned and first efforts were being written uncovers a letter written by Jack to his former professor, Elbert Lenrow. Lenrow had been Kerourac’s teacher at the New School, for a course titled “The 20th-Century Novel in America.” In the course of this typically long and somewhat rambling note, Jack relates that he did indeed own a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes, which he had stolen from a bookstall two years before.
A word about my present reading, and other things: Alain-Fournier’s “Le Grand Meaulnes” (The Wanderer). This is a volume I took furtively from a book-stall in Hollywood, of all places, in 1947, on a night when I sat in a parking lot behind Columbia Pictures studios and made myself a transcontinental lunch out of a loaf of Pumpernickel and slices of cold meat. I intended to read this book all the way to New York on the bus, but ended up “reading the land,” as I always do when traveling.[i]
The letter, dated June 28, 1949, also makes it clear that On the Road, at least in an early draft form, was being written at that time:
Yes, my mother is going back to New York this Sunday; has managed to get her job back through friends; and is going to find an apartment. At the same time, my brother-in-law prefers North Carolina (his home) to Colorado, and refuses to go fishing out here out of some kind of pique. In the midst of this, I go right on writing “On the Road” and as a matter of fact feel a little freer than before, which is worth the advance I spent to do all this.[ii]
Evidence that Jack eventually finished reading Fournier’s book was revealed later in the letter:
But just this week I returned to Mr. Fournier, and find a strange kind of affinity with his efforts, with his whole stock of symbolistic “ritual” (to be dry about it), with his self-pathos and reverie concerning a childhood that must have been greater than his adult existence. I can see who Meaulnes is—a hero, some kid he knew, with a dash he envied; combining that with the magical beauty of Defoe’s Crusoe, also a dashing hero; combining the whole thing in fact with the pathos of childhood and the pathos of first reading “Crusoe”; mixing in the slushy schoolyards, the boredom of the classroom, the sudden magic of the blacksmith shop in the French village.[iii]
Kerouac states that he had found “a strange kind of affinity with his efforts,” referring to Alain-Fournier’s writing of Le Grand Meaulnes. And from my own experience, based on reading On the Road and Le Grand Meaulnes in fairly rapid succession, I found what I earlier referred to as “congruence”—a sense of strong echoes of Augustin Meaulnes in On the Road.
Even at the first moment I opened Le Grand Meaulnes, the similarities with On the Road were palpable and numerous. I began paging through both volumes, underlining furiously, bouncing from one book to the other. At some point, due to the sheer number of parallel occurrences, I had to resort to a spreadsheet—my habitual technique of highlighting and Post-It notes was not going to be sufficient in this case.
Dean Moriarty, of course, corresponds to Augustin Meaulnes, with Sal Paradise and Francois Seurel each fulfilling the role of loyal sidekick, observer, and chronicler of events. For both Francois and Sal, their lives were completely upended with the arrival of a new figure in their lives. For each of them, the arrival is described as the beginning of a new life:
With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.[iv]
The advent of Augustin Meaulnes, coinciding as it did with my recovery from this ailment, marked the beginning of a new life.[v]
The personalities of Dean and Augustin are described in similar terms throughout the narrative. Dean is frequently characterized as nervous and excited, often portrayed as jumping, leaping, and sprinting:
He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life.[vi]
And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions.[vii]
Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking…[viii]
Augustin Meaulnes is also presented as possessing “a nervous feverish desire to push on.”[ix] In one instance, he is portrayed as “A traveler exhausted, famished, but under a spell… His head was held high, and in his eyes there was a look of exultation.” [x]
And both Augustin and Dean were men of frenetic action. In his parking attendant job, Dean would:
Clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner’s half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run.”[xi]
As he made off with a “borrowed” carriage, Meaulnes:
Is on his feet, like a Roman charioteer, one leg thrust forward. Shaking the reins with both hands, he urges the mare at full speed, and in no time they are over the brow of the hill.”[xii]
Somewhat surprisingly, even their physical appearances are similar. Dean has a “Suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his straining muscular sweating neck”[xiii] while Augustin “Was the same tall figure, the same bony face and close-cropped head.”[xiv]
Less surprisingly, given their behavior, they are each sometimes described as “mad”:
She took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.[xv]
And so, for all we know, some tall young man, a little mad, may be roaming far and wide in search of me…[xvi]
Our narrators also have their own set of common characteristics, continuously observing, only occasionally daring to take part in the whirlwind of activity around them. For Sal Paradise:
I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.[xvii]
And as Dean himself described Sal:
There’s a kind of a dignity in the way he’s sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country.[xviii]
While in a remarkably similar setting, Francois says:
And then began endless discussions, interminable arguments, in which I too ventured to take part too, half delighted, half uneasy.[xix]
In later stages of the story, Francois says, “Very well! I’m going too. You’ve got to take me with you.”[xx] Meanwhile, Sal admits, “I only went along for the ride, and to see what else Dean was going to do.”[xxi]
In each book, the relationship between the two main characters was based on commitment, with Sal and Francois displaying almost canine-like loyalty to their friends.
It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made Dean come, and similarly I went off with him for no reason.”[xxii]
I, who had always been a dreamy, reserved, unhappy sort of boy turned overnight into what was known among us as “decided character,” when I saw the opening of a new chapter in this important adventure depended on me.”[xxiii]
For each narrator, the relationship is described as brotherly. For Sal:
Somehow, in spite of our difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother.”[xxiv]
For Francois:
Ah, brother, comrade, rover! He put his hand on my shoulder, “Of course. Aren’t you my friend and my brother?”[xxv]
And the loyalty persisted, even after each narrator was deserted by their comrade:
And a little bit of trouble or even Dean’s eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds—what did it matter?[xxvi]
It fell to me… because my companion had fled.[xxvii]
The parallels continue, even extending to physical objects, including vehicles:
A mud-spattered ’49 Hudson drew up in front of the house on the dirt road. I had no idea who it was.[xxviii]
I had pushed forward and was staring at this conveyance that had gone astray and come back to us like a piece of wreckage brought in by the tide—the first, and for all I knew, the last debris of the adventure on which Meaulnes had launched himself.[xxix]
And a final image of the baggage of the two adventurers:
Once again I saw his pitiful huge battered trunk with socks and dirty underwear sticking out; he bent over it, throwing in everything he could find.[xxx]
I noticed a small trunk, long and flat, covered in rough pig skin with hairs half worn away, and recognized it as the box Augustin had brought with him to Sainte-Agathe.[xxxi]
Even the phrase “on the road”—admittedly not an uncommon expression then or now—was indeed used in both books. At one point in Le Grand Meaulnes, the narrator (Francois) states: “But that night my companion did not tell me everything that had happened to him on the road.”[xxxii]
In the world of literary analysis, there have been many references made to the similarities between Meaulnes and The Great Gatsby, with the title of the former supposedly inspiring the title of the latter. There are other parallels. Again, the low-key, relatively passive narrator and the dynamic, energized lead character, an adventurer who is hopelessly in love with a female who represents the pinnacle of unobtainable love. However, a scan of Kerouac’s correspondence yields no exchanges that reflect anything more than a knowledge of Fitzgerald’s work obtained in his “The 20th-Century Novel in America” course. In a line in one letter, he refers to “The night we picked up the Columbian girl and the Scott Fitzgerald decadent flapper from Dallas,”[xxxiii] and in another, “He was bleary-eyed, blind, wearing brown and white saddle shoes like a Scott Fitzgerald character from the 20’s.”[xxxiv] But I could find nothing in the reams of correspondence remotely like the “strange kind of affinity” Kerouac expressed for the work of Alain-Fournier.
Enough has been said already about similarities between Le Grand Meaulnes and The Great Gatsby, so I’ll return to On the Road and the literary lineage that can be traced back to Don Quixote. Ever since Quixote and Panza first wandered off on their quest to honor Dulcinea, spirited male duos have embarked on journeys in search of love and adventure. Dean and Sal, as well as Augustin and Francois, are worthy followers of that great tradition. But these cannot last forever, and so there is an inevitable parting, with the narrator left alone, thinking of his departed friend. In Le Grand Meaulnes, the titular character leaves his wife Yvonne and never speaks to her again, leaving Francois and Yvonne “thinking of the hazardous life he might be leading on the roads of France or Germany.”[xxxv] Despite his abandonment of both, Francois says
[…] and for my part, caught up again in my old enthusiasm, I talked long and freely, with deep affection, of the friend who had deserted us…[xxxvi]
In On the Road, Dean—that serial abandoner of women—returns to his wife, inverting the actions of Meaulnes. Here, however, it is Sal and his wife who are left thinking and talking about Dean:
So in America when the sun goes down […] I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. [xxxvii]
Author’s note
In this comparison I used the 1959 Viking Press edition of On the Road. For Le Grand Meaulnes I used the 1972 Penguin version of the Oxford University Press edition, with translation by Frank Davison, from his original 1959 text. When I felt that nuances of the translation from the French warranted an alternate viewpoint, I evaluated the Lowell Bair (1971) and Robin Buss (2007) versions. In all cases I retained the Davison translation. I’m pleased to note that my own copies of each book are well worn and tattered, having been in my pack for my own adventures in days past.
[i] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol. 1, 1940-1956; p. 203
[ii] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol. 1, 1940-1956; p. 202
[iii] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol. 1, 1940-1956; p. 203
[iv] On the Road; p.4
[v] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.17
[vi] On the Road; p.5
[vii] On the Road; p.6
[viii] On the Road; p.4
[ix] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.150
[x] Le Grand Meaules; p.30-31
[xi] On the Road; p.7
[xii] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.25
[xiii] On the Road; p.7
[xiv] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.146
[xv] On the Road; p.5
[xvi] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.137
[xvii] On the Road; p.6
[xviii] On the Road; p.31
[xix] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.18-19
[xx] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.36
[xxi] On the Road; p.77
[xxii] On the Road; p.69
[xxiii] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.131
[xxiv] On the Road; p.7
[xxv] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.110,115
[xxvi] On the Road; p.7
[xxvii] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.176
[xxviii] On the Road; p. 65
[xxix] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.29
[xxx] On the Road; p.109
[xxxi] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.188
[xxxii] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.39
[xxxiii] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol. 1, 1940-1956; p.116
[xxxiv] Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, Vol. 1, 1940-1956; p.152
[xxxv] Le Grand Meaulnes; p.181
[xxxvi] Le Grand meaulnes; p181
[xxxvii] On the Road; p.178
