2. GABRIELLE ROY IN THE HANDS OF MME WIACEK

  The Cold War politics of the day may explain why it was Gabrielle Roy’s La Petite Poule d’Eau that was on my high-school curriculum rather than Bonheur d’Occasion.

  Roy’s novel was a set text for the French-literature final examination, and those finals determined whether a student would go to university. We élèves pored over every word under the guidance of our meticulous teacher, Madame Wiacek. As her name might suggest, Madame Wiacek was neither French nor Québécois; she was Polish—French being, at that time, the second language of choice for educated Poles.

  Thus it was that a roomful of Canadian anglophones with terrible accents were studying French through a book written by a francophone from Manitoba, under the often amused tutelage of a woman who’d escaped both the Nazis and the Russians, immigrated to Canada, and somehow fetched up in a middle-class and very mundane postwar suburb of Toronto.

  The most alarming event on the horizon was not likely to be an invasion of storm troopers or commissars, but the Friday-night hop, at which a bunch of adolescents rocked and rolled around the gymnasium under the supervision of the German teacher, who was Bulgarian, and the Latin teacher, who was of Indian descent by way of Trinidad. This ethnic mix of students and teachers was not untypical: our high school fancied itself as Scottish, though some students were Chinese and a number of them were Armenian. This incongruous mixture was very Canadian, and would have been fully appreciated by Gabrielle Roy herself—for among the many areas of Canadian life that she explored, long before this exploration became fashionable, was its ethnic multiplicity.

  The approach we took to Gabrielle Roy’s book was intensely French. We practised the classic explication du texte—a close reading of the work itself. We unravelled the sentence structures of the text but discovered little about its author. In English studies too, New Criticism was the favoured method, so biography was barely glanced at: we learned everything about The Mayor of Casterbridge but nothing about Thomas Hardy’s life (possibly just as well, considering its gloom).

  This absence of biography was normal for me at the time, but it seems very curious now—especially since the story of Gabrielle Roy is just as interesting as the story of Luzina Tousignant, the heroine of La Petite Poule d’Eau. Who was Gabrielle Roy? How did she become a writer? And why was her work chosen for a high-school curriculum otherwise dominated by European authors, in both French and English? Dead male European authors, I might add. There were a couple of women among the English ones, but they too were dead.

  Yet here was a living female Canadian author, still alive, right on our curriculum. The astonishing fact passed without comment. The dreaded dictée hogged all our attention in our French class, and matters such as gender and nationality and class and colonialism and the bizarre circumstances of individual artists’ lives were hidden in the wings, preparing to make their appearance onstage over the next decade.

  But the unknown wise and good who selected Gabrielle Roy must have had their reasons. How did Gabrielle Roy pass their scrutiny?

  3. GABRIELLE ROY WAS VERY FAMOUS

  The short answer is that Gabrielle Roy was very famous. We weren’t told about this fame of hers, but her fame was well known to the generation of teachers who’d chosen her.

  The book that had made her so famous was Bonheur d’Occasion, her first novel. The French original was published in Montreal in 1945, just as the Second World War was drawing to a close. A translation, entitled The Tin Flute, appeared in English in 1947, and was adopted as the monthly selection by the Literary Guild of America—at that time a major force in publishing. The bestselling first print run was seven hundred thousand, a number that would be almost unheard of today, especially for a literary novel. There followed a triumph in France, where this book was the first Canadian novel to win the prestigious Prix Femina. It also won the Canadian Governor General’s Award.

  A film contract was signed, translation rights were sold in twelve languages, and Gabrielle Roy became a literary celebrity—so much so that she returned to Manitoba to escape from the demands being made upon her by the press and her admirers. The scale of her success was unprecedented for a Canadian writer, surpassing even that of Gwethalyn Graham, whose 1944 novel, Earth and High Heaven, was the first Canadian book to top the New York Times bestseller chart.

  4. A CINDERELLA STORY, MORE OR LESS

  Part of Roy’s appeal was her rags-to-riches Cinderella story. But Gabrielle Roy had no fairy godmother; she’d come up the hard way, and most Canadians could empathize with that, having come up the hard way themselves. Moreover, the hard way was in literary vogue: the roaring twenties gave us tales of the rich and profligate, such as The Great Gatsby, but the dirty thirties had been characterized by such iconic poor-people books as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Plutocrats were out, except in romance novels; “the masses” were in. Not only Gabrielle Roy’s novel, but her life, was in tune with the times.

  Roy was born in Saint Boniface, a largely francophone district of Winnipeg. Her parents were both immigrants to Manitoba, attracted by the boom times following Confederation. Her father was originally from the Acadian community of New Brunswick; her mother was from Quebec. Politically Léon Roy was a Liberal, and when Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals gained power in 1896, he was employed by the federal government as an immigration agent, helping foreign incomers settle in the province. (But live by the government, die by the government: when the Conservatives won the election of 1915, M. Roy was fired, six months short of a pension.)

  Although Roy’s family wasn’t wealthy, it was never dirt poor. Before he lost his job, M. Roy was able to build a large house on Rue Deschambault, in a newly developed section of Saint Boniface. It was this house that became the focus of Roy’s semi-autobiographical series of stories, the 1955 Rue Deschambault (translated as Street of Riches).

  Gabrielle was the youngest of eleven children, of whom eight were living. Her year of birth was 1909, the same as my mother’s. Thus, by the time of Roy’s extraordinary fame, she was just over forty. She was five when the First World War broke out, nine when it ended, and ten when the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic swept the planet, killing twenty million worldwide, including fifty thousand Canadians—which, in a population of eight and a third million people, was substantial.

  During Roy’s childhood, smallpox was still a killer, as were tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, red measles, tetanus, and polio. Infant mortality rates were high, as were maternal death rates. Both having a baby and being a baby were riskier than they are now, and this is worth noting, since babies feature largely in Roy’s work.

  Also in 1919 the Winnipeg General Strike took place—perhaps the single most important event in the history of Canadian labour. Roy’s political leanings—Liberal, egalitarian, sympathetic toward the exploited—were formed early in life, not only by the events around her, but by her family’s attitude toward them.

  Roy’s family was francophone, but due to a legislative quirk she received a bilingual education. When Manitoba was established as a province in 1870, it was bilingual. However, over the decades, the status of French as an official language had declined, and in 1916, when Gabrielle Roy was seven, Manitoba passed a law making English the only language of instruction in public schools. (This move was deeply resented by francophones, who saw it as a gross betrayal of the province’s founding principles.) But Roy attended the nun-run Académie Saint-Joseph for twelve years, where she was educated in both English and French. Thus not only was she fluently bilingual, but she had access to the great literatures of both languages. For a future novelist, this was a tremendous advantage.

  The direction Roy took after receiving her grade-twelve diploma was a common one for young women of her era. She went to Normal School—a crash course for young teachers—and became a teacher in rural public schools. The job choices for young women were not numerous, especially during the Depression years, which began in 1929 when Roy was twenty. Roy then obtained a teaching job at an English-language school in Winnipeg, so she was able to live at her parents’ home.

  Roy saved up her teaching money, but unlike many young women, she did not then get married. Instead, she went to Europe with the intention of becoming a professional actress.

  During her school-teaching years, Roy had been acting, in both French and English. The companies were of the kind that abounded in the Canada of those days—semi-amateur “little theatres”—and Roy acted with both the Cercle Molière and the Winnipeg Little Theatre. She was passionate about acting and, due to some favourable critical reception, thought she might make a career out of it. Looking at photos of her as a young woman, it’s easy to see why: she had the high cheekbones and chiselled features of the screen beauties of the 1930s. At the same time, she was writing and had managed to get some pieces published in periodicals both local and national.

  In 1937, she was ready to make her move. It was a move that Canadians and indeed Americans bent on an artistic career of any kind—painting, acting, music, writing—had been making for decades. You needed to expand your horizons; you needed to travel to Europe, where art was taken seriously, or so went the myth. (As this was still the pattern in the early 1960s when I myself was a young artist, I understand it well.)

  Despite hostility from her family—as an unmarried daughter, wasn’t it her duty to stay at home and take care of her aged, widowed mother?—off to Europe Roy duly went. Her first stop was Paris, where she stayed only a couple of weeks—I speculate that she had some problems with her “provincial” accent and the resulting snobbery, which North American francophones have been known to experience. Then she went to England. In those days the British Empire still existed, and it was fairly easy for Canadians to get into Britain. In London, Roy mingled with other young expatriates, including friends from Manitoba. She also enrolled in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which had added “Drama” to its name only two years previously.

  Guildhall was not the top drama school in England, but even so it must have been demanding for Roy. It’s hard to imagine what the experience must have been like for someone of Roy’s intense and ambitious character. Amateur theatre in Canada was one thing, but it would have been more difficult in England, land of actors, for Roy to maintain her acting dream. In each of the cultural capitals of her world—Paris, London—Roy would have been swiftly identified as being from the margins; indeed, the margins of the margins. Manitoba—where was that? In fact, Canada—where was that? Up to the 1970s, when I myself experienced it, this was the attitude of English people to colonial upstarts. (It was not the attitude in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales, but that’s not where Roy travelled.)

  So, while doing the usual young-tourist things—the visits to the museums, to the theatres, to the countryside—Roy fell back on her second string: writing. A talent for mimicry can come in handy in fiction just as it does on the stage. She already had some previous publication experience, and she managed to place three pieces in an important Paris magazine. It was in England, paradoxically, that she became convinced of her vocation as a writer, and of her chances of success.

  It was now 1939. As many foresaw, a second world war was on the way. Roy made one last visit to France, this time to the countryside, then sailed back to Canada in April. Despite more family pressure—having had her fling, shouldn’t she now be supporting her aged mother?—she did not return to Saint Boniface. Instead, she settled in Montreal, where she began the long, hard, dedicated grind that would result, five years later, in the great success of Bonheur d’Occasion.

  5. MONTREAL, SIN CITY

  Montreal at that time was the only Canadian city comparable to New York City. It was the financial capital of Canada—bustling, cosmopolitan, multilingual, and sophisticated, with impressive architecture both ancient and Victorian, and a lively nightclub scene frequented by A-list jazz musicians. It was also Sin City, known for its freely flowing liquor, its many prostitutes, and its civic corruption.

  Toronto was small and provincial by comparison: Protestant-dominated, repressed, and stiff with “blue laws” that dictated such things as who could drink what and when (almost nobody, almost nowhere). Ottawa, although the capital of the country, was thought to be even duller than Toronto. Vancouver then was a smallish port, as was Halifax. Winnipeg had made its bid for glory toward the end of the nineteenth century—the completion of the trans-Canadian railway made it a staging point for Western products such as wheat and cattle—but the glory had not lasted. Calgary and Edmonton were still small bumps on the railway. But Montreal was in full bloom, even though it was a festering lily rather than a spotless rose.

  And there was Gabrielle Roy, inspecting it with a critical outsider’s eye. She had to work hard to make a living, as she was a freelancer, not an employee of a newspaper like Mavis Gallant, who was working for the Montreal Standard at points during this period. In the war years of the early 1940s, Roy wrote for several periodicals, including Le Jour and La Revue moderne. She also wrote for Le Bulletin des agricultures, which, notwithstanding its title and rural readership, was a general-interest magazine. For it she wrote several long series of what we would now call “investigative journalism.” For these various magazines she was also writing “reportages”—non-fiction about current events—as well as descriptive pieces, which could contain impressions as well as observations. In addition, she was contributing essays, which would contain well-argued opinions.

  These projects took Roy into the intimate life of the city, especially its seamier side. She was able to take a keen look at Montreal, especially its lowest layer, where she saw abject, dead-end misery up close. Though she herself had grown up in modest circumstances, she’d never lived in an urban slum. Her own family had experienced some belt-tightening, especially after the death of her father, but nothing compared to the hardscrabble life she was now witnessing.

  Following Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes, it had become fashionable to think of Canada as divided into two kinds of people—francophones and anglophones—who did not communicate with each other. But Montreal contained a third solitude: the Jewish community. This last group was soon to be given in-depth literary treatment by Mordecai Richler, a teenager growing up in the Saint Urbain district while Roy was writing her first novel. And, like Richler, Roy identified yet another layer of solitude, since the extreme poverty she saw first-hand in the Saint-Henri slums just down the hill from rich and privileged Westmount was fully as isolating as ethnicity and religion. The great divide in Bonheur d’Occasion is not only linguistic. It’s a class divide.

  6. BONHEUR D’OCCASION, ITS APPEAL AND STRENGTHS

  Bonheur d’Occasion was a novel that made radical departures from tradition while weaving in other strands familiar to readers in both French and English. It challenged received opinions, including patriotism, religious piety, the position of women, and the expectations of what was still called, unselfconsciously, “the working class.”

  The book was ahead of its time, but not so far ahead that it left its readers behind. It was unsparing in its observations, but not overly judgmental about its characters. It described hard times and hard people, but it allowed the occasional dollop of empathy to soften its gaze.

  The title, Bonheur d’Occasion, has several layers of meaning in French: bonheur is “happiness,” but though d’occasion can mean “used” or “second-hand,” it can also mean “bargain,” “chance,” or “opportunity.” So, a shopworn happiness that is also a happy chance. This describes the determining events in the lives of the novel’s main characters, who snatch at whatever small, tawdry opportunities fate makes available to them.

  The English publishers wisely concluded that they couldn’t cram all of these meanings into a snappy title. They fell back on The Tin Flute, which points to a significant object in the novel: the tin flute is a toy passionately desired by little Daniel Lacasse, which, although cheap, is nonetheless too expensive for his impoverished mother. He finally gets his longed-for flute only when he’s dying in the hospital of what is described as “leukemia,” but by then he’s no longer interested in it. And so it goes, for quite a few of the characters in this densely populated book.

  All novels come from their own time. For Bonheur d’Occasion, this is wartime. Money is chinking, but it’s not chinking for everyone: the effects of the Great Depression are still being felt, and many lives have been warped by it.

  Roy rarely names her characters without having a semi-hidden meaning in mind. You’ll be told by name-tracing ancestry sites that the name Lacasse—the family at the novel’s core—comes from a Gaulish word for “oak,” that sturdy and useful tree, and may also refer to a box-maker. But casser is the verb “to break.” The Lacasse family contains some oaks at least sturdy enough to survive despite what they’ve been through, but they’re nonetheless trapped in a box. They’re also broken: they limp rather than sprint. Even so, they’re losing ground.

  The father of the twelve Lacasse children—eleven when the book opens, ten when one of them dies, but eleven again when another one is born—is named Azarius. This isn’t a common name, even in the French Canada of that time. It’s the name of a sedative herb, but it’s also the name of a Biblical character. In the French version of the Bible, Azariah is the name given to one of three youths put into the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel.

  In English translations, the Prayer of Azaraiah is omitted as apocryphal, but it appears in Catholic versions after Daniel 3:23. Part of it goes like this: “And thou didst deliver us into the hands of lawless enemies, most hateful forsakers of God, and to an unjust king, and the most wicked in all the world. And now we cannot open our mouths, we are become a shame and a reproach to thy servants; and to them that worship thee. Yet deliver us not up wholly.”