CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
OCT 5th to DEC, 1970

Paul and Geneviève were having breakfast when the doorbell rang. They looked at each other — a bit early for anyone to come calling. Donat Lalonde, the cheery gardener who looked after all the residents of Redpath Crescent, stood leaning on his rake. Heavy set, dressed in his loose working clothes, he was a familiar sight; Paul and Geneviève often awakened to the sound of his hand-driven lawn mower outside their window.

Donat could be counted on for all the latest gossip. He would often come to the side door for a chat with Madame Pecetto, who spoke French, too. Housekeepers on the Crescent would get their up-to-date doings of employers through Donat, so Paul never minded Madame Pecetto catching whatever scoop she could: she would pass it on later in the day.

“What’s up, Donat?”

Donat jerked his head across the street. Paul followed his look: two police cars were drawn up outside the house of the British Trade Consul, James Cross.

To Paul’s right stood the home of the US Consul General, and to his left the large home of the Chancellor of McGill University. Directly across the street lived Kit Lang, daughter of the Montreal Star magnate, and next, the Trade Commissioner in question. “What are they doing, Donat?”

“Well, M’sieur Paul,” Donat scratched his chin, “I seen two fellas go in, dressed in raincoats. Dey come out with Mr. Cross, get in a car and drive away.”

Paul frowned. “Why the police cars?”

Donat shrugged. “Mrs. Cross, she’s still in dere, maybe she phoned.” He shrugged again.

“Thanks, Donat,” Paul said, “keep me posted, eh?” He went back into the kitchen to tell Geneviève. They switched on the radio in their breakfast nook and soon heard that the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) had kidnapped James Cross. They had been putting bombs in letterboxes to encourage the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. To cap all that, five days after kidnapping Cross, they took the Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte, and left his body, strangled, in the trunk of a car to be found on the 17th, the day after the War Measures Act passed by Prime Minister Trudeau, calling out the Army at the request of Bourassa, Premier of Quebec, and the Mayor of Montreal.

A few days later Geneviève heard that some of her friends were arrested and put in prison. “They’ve even arrested, Pauline Julien!” Geneviève exclaimed. “She’d never plant a bomb. What are they doing? The guy she lives with, Gerald Godin, he’s a poet.”

Paul knew Pierre Elliott Trudeau to be a statesmanlike prime minister — Paul and Geneviève both liked him. So what were they to make of all this? Paul at this stage was not politically engaged; his quest had been for matters of the spirit. And now, he was thinking about his next film.

***

Paul always enjoyed tracking down a new film. His idea for Isabel had been finished and distributed within two years. That pattern had been repeated with Act of the Heart. So why not this time?

The image haunting him was of a pioneer woman in a long brown skirt on the brow of a cleared field. He wanted the story to be allegorical, representing the great women pioneers who had built Canada. Now to find out about allegory. McGill pointed him to Paul Piehler who had recently arrived from UC Berkeley in San Francisco. The professor had recently seen Isabel and been taken by her encounter with the darker aspects of her ancestral Gaspe homeland. He had also been at Magdalen College in Paul’s day, and had as his tutor the great CS Lewis. While teaching in Finland, he had married a stunning Swedish sprite, Maj-Britt. For a busy academic, he was unusually amenable to meeting and the two really hit it off. The film-maker felt he was now on the way.

His first two films had been written for specific locations, so for this third one, where? What about a wilderness, untamed, and why not beside a river? Rivers had been important transportation highways, in Paul’s mind, and were also of tremendous symbolic significance — rivers of time, deep, dark, mysterious. His former English teacher, Lewis Evans with Betty his wife, had a family home in Tadoussac. Lewis was a consummate sailor and owned a small sailboat in which Paul had often sailed the forbidding and uninhabited Saguenay, one of the deepest rivers in the world flowing down from a northern wilderness between ominous black cliffs. A perfect setting.

What next? He needed an art director versed in early North American construction, so rang John Bland, head of McGill’s School of Architecture. Professor Bland pointed him to a bright third-year student.

Paul dialled. “Hello. Is that Glenn Bydwell?”

“Yes.”

“Paul Alford here. Wanna come and talk about the sets of my next film?”

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

“Have you not heard of me?”

“I think so,” Glenn mumbled.

“Well then, can we meet?” Paul asked.

“I live out on the West Island. I might come in next week.”

“Next week? No! Right now. I’ll expect you here within the hour.”

Glenn did turn up. Paul, who loved bright people, hired him on the spot.

Next step? Advance financing. On Sept 10th, Paul wrote to Michael Spencer, now Head of the Canadian Film Development Corporation:

... even after my ideas are in final screenplay form, it may be difficult to sum them up concisely. Let me at this point describe the direction my film will take.

I have been preoccupied, recently, about the problem of man’s environment. Both Isabel and Act of the Heart are concerned with the forces working on, and the development of, the Inner Man. And it is the exterior landscape that provides the symbol through which human consciousness, i.e. the Inner Man, grows. From the early civilizations, which began incidentally along rivers, Man has searched through his Hero figures (Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Christ, etc) for the Earthly Paradise, and these epic explorations have been the means whereby human consciousness has progressed. As civilization developed, the images and symbols have lost their force and now need redefinition. Our exterior world has disintegrated, our man-made landscape is a wasteland. In my next film, therefore, I have chosen to go back to a time when our explorer forefathers came to the New World and founded their settlements along river banks. Their search was, like Aeneas, for a kind of Holy City. Just as the hippie commune is a significant symptom of today, so my film will merge Hippie and Pioneer. For my Pioneer Commune, I have found a glorious location on the banks of the Saguenay River, one of the last rivers that afford great untouched vistas of raw wilderness, and in which, allegorically, present and past can fuse.

The place I have chosen is completely closed by snow from mid-December to March. Therefore work on the location must begin this autumn, before the shooting, even before the screenplay is finished. For the sets to look authentic, they must have weathered at least one winter...

In the end, Paul got an advance of twenty thousand dollars.

Paul and Glenn took off in his tiny MG for the summer village of Tadoussac, in autumn largely abandoned. At the mouth of the Saguenay, it sprawled across cliffs and a granite promontory that reached out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. One of the tributaries, the Ste Marguerite, like most good salmon rivers was privately owned, this one by Alcan. Happily, its chairman lived on Redpath Crescent. So Paul had visited the nearby grey stone mansion and “R.E.P” Powell agreed to the filming.

From Tadoussac they set off north towards Chicoutimi. They pulled up at an uneven path and trekked in to the confluence of the Saguenay and Ste. Marguerite. There they found a perfect grassy knoll. Glenn, having brought his clipboard and a thick lead pencil, sketched out a possible design — a large, squared-timber building flanked by two wings on each side: archetypal, symmetrical and pure. Back they trudged to the main dirt road.

“Now, let’s try to see that highest point, Cape Trinity.”

Glenn objected. “It’s getting late...”

But off they went again and down another rough trail, over roots and through tangled brush to where a great set of pylons held huge electric power cables over the river.

Because of the War Measures Act, the military guarded every important infrastructure. On seeing these unexpected visitors, they levelled their machine guns.

Paul leapt out of the MG and started towards them.

Their fingers tightened on the triggers. “Stop!” They called again.

Paul didn’t stop, he just kept going. “If you kill me, you can be damn sure there’ll be hell to pay! We’re unarmed, we’re filmmakers, we just want to look over the river.” He kept on going.

The soldiers relaxed and showed Paul and Glenn a track to the actual brow. But as dusk was descending, Paul complained, “Too dark! We can’t really see.”

The head soldier by now was friendly. “Wait here.”

Before long, Glenn and Paul were surprised to see a huge star shell bursting over the river, illuminating the whole bank. And then another. Paul got the view he wanted. They turned back and heartily thanked the military for breaking all the rules.

***

Towards the end of October, after Geneviève had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, as they were having breakfast, she suggested. “Why not go over to England? You’ve been having trouble getting your new script written.”

“Whatever for?”

“On other screenplays you went away. The English house is empty. Why not fly there? It might help to be alone.”

Paul frowned slightly. “I’m not ready to write yet.”

“Paul, once you get away from babies and Mme Pecettos and me, ideas will come. All you have to do is jump on a plane! Over there, you’ll be free as a bird.” She went on spooning out her grapefruit.

Paul absorbed this. “Well, maybe I’ll give it a try. Will you be all right here without me?”

“Oh yes. I have Mme Pecetto and Matthew and lots to do, I’ll be fine.” So ironic, in fact.

So Paul found himself in London, alone in his Pimlico house, with his trusty Smith Corona portable (typewriter). Now, just bang out the next script...

But what should the story be? He had no idea.

He had enjoyed having his own way far too long. A difficult and thorny path to enlightenment lay ahead. He knew it not, of course. Only that, as the days progressed, he got more and more miserable.

That conversation in the kitchen with Geneviève... Did it really sound like her? Could she have wanted him out of the way, for some reason? The script, the story, why on earth would it not come? Because no state of grace had descended? What did that mean? Were dark forces grappling with his soul? As a symptom of his spiritual unease, his physical body began to break down. He felt lost in tangled nightmares, thrashed about in an underbrush of thoughts, and few the flashes of understanding would come to illuminate his darkness.

Days passed with nothing written. Oh yes, he was about to enter his “dark night of the soul”.

Finally in December and the approach of Christmas, he wrote to Geneviève:

What a dark night, what a week, I hardly know if I’m emerging. I’ve started to write now and I have no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing; it’s been awful, this certain knowledge that the film is no good and won’t work at all. I mapped it out more or less by Tuesday, but realized how awful it all was. It’s like living with a corpse, although I’m not sure if it’s dead or just lying in wait...

***

Two days before Christmas, Paul arrived home, and Geneviève greeted him. He went upstairs to unpack, shower, and take Geneviève out to a welcome dinner at the Café de Paris, their favoured haunt.

After they had begun their first course, Geneviève asked, “So, how did the screenplay go?”

Paul shook his head. “It’s terrible, Geneviève. I’m desperate. It was just awful being alone. But now that I’m back with you, everything will be all right, and the script I’m writing for you will flow.” He looked up and smiled.

Geneviève said nothing and changed the subject. She talked about Prime Minister Trudeau, who had announced that all troops stationed in Quebec would be withdrawn by January 5th, and about Matthew’s doings and what Madame Pecetto had been up to. When the main course came, Geneviève put down her knife and fork.

“Paul, I’m leaving you in the morning with Matthew and Madame Pecetto.”

Paul looked up, scarcely believing his ears. “You’re what?”

“I’m taking the baby, and we’re going to Don and Heather’s while I sort myself out. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is. It’s been arranged.” She put her hand on his arm. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

All right? Paul had been hit by a truck. He couldn’t absorb what she was saying. She and the baby were going to leave him and stay with his own lawyer? In their den, the Christmas tree had been decorated and presents gathered. And here he was, about to celebrate Christmas with no housekeeper, no wife, no little son.

And no leading actress.