Kerouac in Montreal

The Toronto Star recently commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road by recounting Jack Kerouac’s 1967 appearance on the CBC, on a French-language programme called Sel de la semaine.

The story is that the audience broke into laughter to hear him speak French.

Not that Kerouac’s spoken French was bad—he always spoke French with his own family, and did not learn English until he went to school. It’s that it was the French of rural Gaspe.

“To the members of his audience, anxious to be part of a modern Quebec, hearing Kerouac's French was like an educated American audience hearing a famous author speak in the hillbilly, southern accent of a guest on The Jerry Springer Show. The way he was speaking, it wasn't so much the words by themselves, it was just the rhythm of the sentences,’ Pierre Anctil, of the University of Ottawa, says. ‘It appeared as rural and unlearned and folkloric.’”

The article suggests this tells us something about Kerouac. I think it tells us instead something about the difference between Quebec and America. It is the Quebec audience’s reaction that seems to me uncultured and provincial. Hillbilly southern accents? Like those, say, of Mark Twain, or William Faulkner, or Thomas Wolfe, or Tennessee Williams? My guess is that an American audience would not blink an eyelash.

And how would such an audience have greeted uneducated, rural William Shakespeare?

Indeed, Kerouac’s Brooklyn English was no more the literary language of America than his Gaspe French was that of Quebec. The whole point of his concept of “Beats” was that all good came from the fellaheen, from the common people: the hero of On the Road was a compulsive car thief who had grown up in reform schools.

If this surprised the audience, they obviously had never read anything he wrote.

America is democratic to its toes. Quebec, and Canada, are not.