Jack Kerouac

[Bob]

What have you read by Kerouac?
I would like to find the time to read On the road.

[pledm]

Hi Bobin,if you have the time you should read this book,very well done,I read it again just a month ago.

[Bob]

I have read over half. I'm a good way into the second part. However I've got to say that it's not as good as I expected. I got a little disappointed.

[pledm]

PARDON HIS FRENCH

Kerouac's forgettable Montreal road trip

Audience laughed as famed Beat writer struggled to speak in French on TV show

It's been a Kerouac autumn this year, with numerous books appearing on the subject of Kerouac and specifically on his enormously influential novel, On The Road, published 50 years ago this month.

In all this flood of Kerouac mania, one of the most revealing episodes of Jack Kerouac's life – which took place on March 7, 1967 – has gone unremarked in many American and English Canadian literary circles. In Quebec, it's a notorious incident. And though you won't find it mentioned in any of the existing Kerouac biographies, it reveals a great deal about Kerouac, the United States and the Canadian roots of his work.

The setting was Sel de la semaine (Salt of the Week), at the time the Montreal-based, premiere televised interview show on Radio-Canada, hosted by the late Fernand Seguin. Seguin, elegantly dressed in a suit, speaking elegant French, introduced his guest to the audience – the famous American author Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Mass., to Quebecois parents.

The entire show, taken from the Radio-Canada archives, can now be seen on the Radio-Canada website. Sel de la semaine was clearly an intellectual show – interviewer and interviewee sat on a bare stage, with a jazz combo to the side. Most of the members of the audience looked like well-scrubbed university students, with the men wearing jackets and ties.

Kerouac himself was dressed in an open-necked shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. He was clearly ill at ease – furrowing his brow, fidgeting in his chair, as he tried to answer Seguin's questions in French. Almost immediately, the audience started laughing. Kerouac was puzzled. He asked Seguin why they were laughing.

"They came to see an icon – you know, Jack Kerouac, On The Road – and then he starts to speak French," explains Yves Frenette, a historian at the University of Ottawa. "But it's the French of an older generation. It's not a broken French, it's not even the French of an Anglo speaking French, it's the French of someone who's a farmer, someone far from Montreal."

Pierre Anctil, director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, agrees. "His parents came from a rural area of Quebec in the Gaspé," he comments. "They knew the Quebec of farms and quaint people and small towns and there he was in Montreal, where the entire crew spoke French. He wasn't used to that."

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," Anctil says. "It appeared as rural and unlearned and folkloric."

Rumours later proliferated about Kerouac's stay in Montreal – that he got into a bar brawl, that he was kicked out of the offices of his Quebec publisher, Gallimard, for appearing drunk and dirty, that he was looped when he did the interview with Seguin. On the clip with Seguin, he appears perfectly sober, but it is true that Kerouac felt far more at home in pool halls with working-class pals than he was among the kind of intellectuals who were in the Radio-Canada Montreal studio audience. He was also generally uncomfortable on television. A year later he did get drunk when he appeared on William Buckley's interview show, Firing Line. On that show, he almost fell out of his chair a couple times and made remarks such as, "The only reason we're in Vietnam is to sell jeeps."

It would take a while for Quebec intelligentsia to understand and accept Kerouac's roots in rural Quebec and Lowell, Mass. It would take American critics an even longer time to recognize this same reality. Yet these roots, while largely hidden, are powerful. It is no accident that two of the most controversial and influential novels ever published in America – Kerouac's On The Road and Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, whose maiden name was DeRepentigny – were written by Franco-Americans who never quite felt part of either Quebec or 1950s America.

Anctil's theory is that Kerouac was on the road so often precisely because he was an outsider in the United States. "I think he invented this notion of constant travel and movement because he felt ill adapted to American society, and he felt ill adapted to American society because of his feeling that to be Franco-American is not to be American entirely," he says.

Found this interesting,always liked this guy.

[Bob]

There's a movie coming up based on "On the road"!

[pledm]

Jack Kerouac`s original design for On the road

gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/jack-kerouac-original-cover-design-for-on-the-road