God Bless Armorica

SATORI IN PARIS by Jack Kerouac. 118 pages. Grove. $3.95.

When Jack Kerouac took the oldfashioned track west to never-neverland in On the Road, he became pie-eyed piper to a footloose segment of the postwar Beat Generation, advancing, it was assumed, into the future.

But Jack, the aging jalopy jockey from Lowell, Mass., swings to a beat of his own. The pad-dwelling poets are looking elsewhere for a laureate. Kerouac, 44, has let them down. He is a true pilgrim, and his objective is not the future but the past. The latest fragment of his nonstop autobiography records, of all things, a search for noble Kerouac ancestors in ancient Armorica (Brittany) just as if he were some crude millionaire of the Gilded Age shopping at Heralds College for something fancy in the way of ancestors. That Kerouac has simple faith became evident long ago; that he has Breton blood is the slight burden of this little book.

The record of the ten-day quest--a flight from Florida to Paris, train to Brest and back--comes with an engaging disclaimer. The tale is told, writes Kerouac, "for no other reason but companionship. This book'll say, in effect, have pity on us all and don't get mad at me for writing."

The odd thing is that this simple-minded formula works. It may be of limited interest to non-Bretons that the author was "the first Lebris de Kerouac ever to go back to France in 10 years." Or that he "had come to France and Brittany just to look up this old name of mine, which is just about three thousand years old and was never changed in all that time, as who would change a name that simply means House (Ker), in the Field (Ouac)." Yet the bounce and burble of Kerouac's gusto and dropout grammar carry the reader along his wacky safari. Actually, Kerouac claims that it was less safari than satori (the Japanese zen term for sudden illumination), although it is not clear just what the satori conveyed.

Happily, he got his armorial bearings in Brest (and a motto to match: "Love, Work, Suffer"), though he made no headway in claiming the barony that is said to go with the name. It is fortunate, too, for the reader, that Kerouac lost his own bearings so often: amusingly drunken cafe brawls, busted suitcases tied up with neckties, lost planes, overcharging tarts and mercenary French petite bourgeoisie. Kerouac is an engaging fellow. Brave, too. At one point, he undertook to explain to goggle-eyed Parisians that he speaks purer French than they, because "I roll my r's on my tongue and not in my throat." For that coup alone he deserves a barony.

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