Every evening, I try to imagine what you’re doing.
Gabrielle Roy, in a letter to
Marcel Carbotte,
Mon cher grand fou
Twilight had barely begun to obscure the day in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, but at the rate things were going, I thought I might be there all night. Not that I was complaining. On the contrary – I couldn’t get over the fact that Gabrielle Roy was admitting me, a relative stranger, into her private thoughts.
The only thing was, I was starving, and longed for the glass of wine Gabrielle had promised. But she was carried away by the flow of her words and didn’t care about my empty stomach. She herself seemed completely oblivious to any lack in that area. She went on with her story, eager to tell me about one of the happiest episodes of her life.
“Right after the wedding, we prepared to leave. I didn’t have much choice: I had been elected to the Royal Society of Canada and had to give my acceptance speech in Montreal on September 27th. Time seemed short, especially because I was terrified by the thought of addressing a crowd of journalists and some of the most eminent figures of French Canada. Imagine, Ambassadors Georges Vanier and Pierre Dupuy were going to be there. I was so intimidated that on the fateful day, I was literally incapable of taking myself to the old Ermitage auditorium on Côte des Neiges, where the sixty-fifth annual meeting of the French-Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada was going to be held.
“The fact is, I arrived an hour late, which caused a restlessness in the audience that got worse with every passing minute. Some people may have thought I wanted to make a dramatic entrance, but it was sheer panic that prevented me from putting one foot in front of the other. I tried to reassure myself about the text of the speech I’d struggled with for hours and hours. I’d found the tone, form, and rhythm that suited me, but what would the rich and powerful think of my plea on behalf of the poverty-stricken people of St. Henri? Anxious, even terrified, I would have liked to have known the assembly’s reaction before even opening my mouth. Of course, I wanted the speech to be applauded,but I was afraid it would be taken as a criticism of our political system. I was trembling all the more because my talk was going to be broadcast by Radio-Canada the next day. If I was going to be sneered at, it would be throughout the whole of Canada!
“On the other hand, to stand up for the people who were choking in the soot-filled air of St. Henri had been the uppermost thought in my mind. After all, hadn’t Bonheur d’occasion been the reason for my renown? And then, I’d be talking about my own poverty in St. Boniface at the same time. I’d also be striking a blow against the ruling class, whose members dominated the audience that night. They were the ones I’d accused of being chiefly responsible for the miserable conditions those poor people lived in.
“To escape the horror of being bullied by the public and the reporters, I’d decided to leave right after putting in a brief appearance at the reception that followed the ceremony. Like a thief, I fled to New York, where we were to board ship for England. I made it appear urgent that I leave that very evening. The truth was, the Fairisle was only sailing on October 3rd, but I’d found the perfect excuse to politely slip out and avoid being attacked with poisoned darts.
“Later, I learned that my speech had caused a sensation and that liberals and leftists of all stripes had applauded my appeal. I was even told,” and here Gabrielle smiled briefly, “that the communists published my speech in installments in their weekly paper, Le Combat”
Gabrielle was enormously amused to have been put on a pedestal by this group. There was something incongruous in it, since her views were miles away from Marxist ideology. The expression “solidarity with the proletariat” had little meaning for her: she was no longer interested in politics. By this time, Gabrielle Roy possessed an overriding single-mindedness towards her writing; her only human contacts were with her relatives, a few close friends, and the rare artist or critic. She didn’t much care about the rest of humanity.
Gabrielle began to talk about living on the Continent that year, without a doubt one of the happiest periods of her life – a happiness that was all the greater because she didn’t have to count her pennies the way she had during her first European sojourn. Being sheltered from need had given her wings.
“As soon as we landed in England, we left for Belgium, where I was to meet my parents-in-law. I confess I didn’t enjoy it very much. If my sisters hated Marcel because they were afraid he’d make off with my ‘fortune,’ Marcel’s parents felt they’d been unjustifiably robbed of their son. So, with a sense of having fulfilled my duty, I rushed off to Paris with a glad heart.
“I had good reason to do so. Bonheur d’occasion had appeared in the bookstores there only two weeks before, on October ninth. I was really anxious to know how my novel would do in France. To stay in close contact with my publisher, whose offices were located, as you may know, at 27 rue de Racine in the 6th arrondissement, I moved into a small suite in the Trianon Palace Hotel, in Rue de Vaugirard. But life wasn’t quite as easy as I’d imagined it would be. France was coming out of the war, and rationing still applied.In spite of that, I understood that with money, anything was possible.
“As soon as I could, I set up an appointment with the editorial director of Flammarion, René d’Uckermann, to have a better idea of how my novel was being received. The fact was, not much was happening, and if it hadn’t been for the incredible efforts by Countess Jean de Pange, I don’t know what would have become of my book.
“I’d met the Countess in Montreal in February, 1946. She’d been excited about Bonheur d’occasion and had promised me her full support if ever my novel was published in France. Well! I assure you, the Countess more than lived up to her promise. She expended a colossal amount of energy to make sure Bonheur d’occasion would get onto the short list for the Prix Femina. She carried out such an intense campaign that the incredible happened: not only did my novel make the short list, but on December 1, 1947, it won the Prix Femina, sparking a furor in France – and an even greater one in Canada.
“I was in heaven. It was the first time a Canadian writer had won a prize of this stature. The Femina! I was floating on air.
“This time too, I was obliged to play the interview game. I submitted myself to it with good grace, knowing full well that I’d pay the price for it afterwards. It’s the same thing every time: I give myself completely, until all of a sudden, the machine breaks down. It takes months for me to recover.”
Gabrielle said no more about winning the prestigious prize. She knew all too well that the French critics had been lukewarm towards her novel. Although reporters, charmed by her beauty and refreshing innocence, had been enthusiastic about Gabrielle in their interviews, the literary critics had been more reserved. Certainly, Bonheur d’occasion was not at all a bad novel, went their common refrain, but it hadn’t really deserved first place. However, one wouldn’t dare object to the jury’s decision: the awarding of the prize was doubtless a tribute the French wished to give the Canadians, whose soldiers had died on the beaches of Normandy to save Occupied France and to end Hitler’s iniquitous war. Without Canada – without the Allies – who knew what might have happened? Perhaps the French would still be enduring the shame of domination by the Germans.
All considered, there were very few frankly positive reviews, with each critic giving Bonheur d’occasion what amounted to half-hearted praise. The result was that six months later, the book’s sales in France showed that it was barely limping along, with only 43,000 copies sold, a very pale figure for a novel that had won the Prix Femina. Usually, one would expect to sell three, even five times as many copies.
Thus, at the beginning of January, just as she’d done in Montreal in similar circumstances, Gabrielle fled Paris to hide away in another country – this time in Geneva, Switzerland. She needed breathing space, and above all, needed to recover her strength and peace of mind. Her ordeal had lasted long enough. The truth was, Gabrielle’s nerves were frayed to the breaking point. She had lost weight and was sleeping badly. There was no question of continuing to make a show of herself.
Gabrielle stayed in Geneva for a month. Her purpose was not only to rest, but to start writing again without the presence of Marcel, for she felt she’d been living on top of a volcano for months. In fact, she’d written almost nothing since the publication of Bonheur d’occasion, save a few short stories and a text on the people of St. Henri.
Now that she was about to describe another phase of her life, Gabrielle realized she’d forgotten to serve me a glass of wine.
“What an idiot I am,” she exclaimed, and I felt that she really meant it. “I completely forgot about the wine I’d offered you. Would you be kind enough to get the bottle from the top cupboard, the one on the right, and open it yourself? I’m sure you’ll do it much better than I could.”
I followed her instructions, immeasurably gratified by the prospect of finally tasting the promised wine. I located the bottle in the cupboard and was relieved to see that it was a Brouilly made by Georges Duboeuf: a good wine, but not overly expensive. I rummaged in the drawer for a corkscrew, opened the bottle, and found glasses for Gabrielle and me.
“Only a little for me,” she said. “Just to keep you company.”
I took advantage of her moderation by filling my own glass to the brim. It would keep me going until dinnertime, I thought. I had no idea when that would be: there had been no indication that I’d be eating at Gabrielle’s house. The kitchen was in a pristine state, with everything shining clean. Short of a miracle, it seemed unlikely that a meal would be forthcoming.
To crown it all, when I took my first swallow, I realized the wine had a mildly corked taste. I refrained from showing any reaction and continued to idly caress the base of my glass as if I were perfectly content. In any case, these were the only calories at my disposal for the time being, and I wouldn’t have given them up for anything.
Gabrielle, for her part, had recovered a certain serenity. She seemed to be feeling much better, as if the thought of Paris had a calming effect on her. If reliving past happiness brightened her spirits, that was fine with me.
I said to myself that the worst was already behind me and I could look forward to spending a pleasant evening, after having suffered the wrath of the aging parchment-skinned novelist. Ah! If a fairy had flown in with a silver tray full of food, I would have welcomed it with the greatest of joy.
The good fairy who entered the room at that moment bore little resemblance to Titania: she was almost as old as Gabrielle and ten times as reserved. However, she was carrying a magnificent-looking homemade tourtière, which immediately filled the house with a delectable smell.
“I saw you had a guest, Madame Roy, and I thought you might like to share your meal with him. Did I do the right thing?” she asked, lowering her eyes.
Gabrielle was delighted – not by the appearance of Berthe, since that little woman arrived almost every evening at the same time, but because she wanted to continue reminiscing about her past and had started to feel hunger pains.
“Will you have dinner with us, Berthe?”
The question was rhetorical: Gabrielle knew Berthe was much too timid to eat with a stranger. And in fact, Berthe curtly refused and slipped out as soon as she had served us.
“Don’t you find dear Berthe charming?”
Without waiting for my answer, Gabrielle plunged back into her memories.
“Where was I? Oh, yes – Geneva. Do you know,” she asked, “what it’s like to have writer’s block? I imagine you do, since you’re a reviewer. But I think it’s even worse for a novelist.
“In my case, my stay in Geneva was very trying. It was the first time Marcel and I had been apart since our marriage, and I felt as if I’d deserted him. Yet we’d agreed, he and I, that things were supposed to happen that way, that I had to be alone to bring my writing projects to term.
“Writers need time – time for doubts, and for hopes. Sometimes we need to be carried away by an idea that seems brilliant, to follow it through until we discover that it leads nowhere – or that it will come to something sooner or later. This was how the idea for Alexandre Chenevert was hatched while I was in Geneva. I believed in it as if it were a rebirth of my inspiration. ‘Finally,’ I thought, ‘I have my subject.’ I imagined that in describing the life of this little bank clerk, I could build a bridge between the infinitesi-mally small – Alexandre himself – and the infinitely large, the universal questions that he asks himself: the whole world contained within a bank teller’s wicket.
“After working for hours and hours, I realized I’d hit a wall. The subject hadn’t made any headway and was stuck in neutral. It had the aspect of a brief short story, without the sweeping breadth I’d envisioned at first.
“Painfully, I put aside the pages I’d written with such effort and uncertainty, and admitted to myself that, no, I hadn’t started the work I’d dreamed of, and perhaps I’d never write that work at all. I sank into a state very close to despair. Was I a one-novel author? That’s what it looked like to me, and the resulting anxiety almost drove me crazy.
“I understood later that writing a second novel, especially if the first one was as great a success as mine had been, is a terrible ordeal to go through. I wasn’t spared from it, believe me. I experienced my share of horrors, especially as I had to wait so long before regaining a certain renown.
“Should I tell you? I faced many of these ‘Geneva periods’ in my life. I learned that fiction is created in suffering and disappointment, and that finding a good subject means running the gauntlet of emotions.”
What Gabrielle didn’t say, and what I’d only learn several years later, was that not only did she lack inspiration, but she had to put up with Marcel’s more or less veiled reproaches. Although he had enthusiastically endorsed the idea of allowing Gabrielle to be away from him to have the full freedom she needed for her writing, he hadn’t foreseen that, in reality, he would find her absence hard to bear. Imagining a situation and actually living through it are two different things, and Marcel learned this the hard way. He had pictured Gabrielle as a sort of Montaigne, as an authoress who went off to a secret, isolated place to achieve a powerful creative experience in absolute, perfect solitude. He had thought she would live like a nun, writing unceasingly like Balzac, crossing out words and taking up the thread of her narrative again with a frenzy resembling madness. When it was over, she would return to the fold thinner, weak, even feverish, but with a manuscript of several hundred pages under her arm, ready to send off to the publisher then and there.
But Marcel came to realize that Gabrielle distilled her writing, drop by precious drop, and her progress was slower than a turtle’s. Not only that, but she would go back and start all over again, abashedly facing the fact that she hadn’t accomplished anything worthwhile. All that time and effort went into the wastebasket. What was the point of her being away from him if it didn’t produce any results? And the worst thing about it, in Marcel’s view, was that, far from being cloistered, Gabrielle would go out to attend the theatre or to meet acquaintances for lunch. All considered, she was living exactly as she had in Paris, except that he wasn’t around!
If Marcel’s reproaches were rather low-key while Gabrielle was in Geneva, they became more strident when she went to spend the summer in Concarneau, Brittany, at the Hotel de Cornouailles, from June to September, 1948. Was he wrong to complain? From Gabrielle’s point of view, yes. Yet one wonders when reading about Gabrielle’s daily routine in her letters to her “cher grand fou.” She told him that writing occupied her mornings from nine o’clock until noon. For the rest of the day, she went for walks, took care of her correspondence – especially her letters to her dear Marcel, read, usually had her meals at the hotel, and was in bed by ten-thirty.
Couldn’t she have done those three daily hours of work at home in Paris? It would have been so simple, instead of running off to the other end of the country. And for what?
Marcel may have allowed his homosexuality to rise to the surface because he felt forsaken by Gabrielle – it’s hard to say. This much is certain: in Paris, he frequented homosexual cabarets. We can also surmise that he’d had a few adventures before meeting Gabrielle Roy, when he was already in his thirties.
Naturally, these escapades had been unknown to Gabrielle at first. Did she become aware of them quite early on in the marriage? There is no definite indication, except perhaps a violent quarrel between them in June 1950, a quarrel so serious that it precipitated Gabrielle’s sudden return from Lyons-la-Forêt, where she’d hidden herself away to write. Indeed, that particular event took on an emblematic significance for them. Did it relate to Marcel’s homosexuality? We have no way of knowing.
The fact is, Gabrielle never mentioned her husband’s homosexuality in her correspondence. She did use the term “nervous illness” in reference to him, but even this expression appears much later, in the 1970s. Thus, it is difficult to know the moment that she discovered her husband preferred men as sexual partners.
In any event, Gabrielle certainly knew, although she only clearly acknowledged it at the end of her life. The proof is contained in her letters to Marcel’s lover, in which she asked him to look after Marcel, to make sure he didn’t get into trouble.
Did her discovery of Marcel’s “inversion” widen the gulf between the couple? There was no marked change in the pattern of their married life: much of the time, with the happy exception of their first stay in Paris, Gabrielle and Marcel were barely on speaking terms anyway. Their relationship was an endless series of quarrels sometimes accompanied by extremely hurtful invective, alternating with long periods of silence – an exhausting kind of trench warfare. Nonetheless, they remained yoked together, incapable of leaving each other, as if separating would wound them in their integrity or inexorably destroy them.
The attachment between couples can be a very strange thing. The link that joined Gabrielle and Marcel remains a mystery. The strongest ingredient in the glue that held them together may have been guilt. Gabrielle seems to have found the sexual act repugnant; it was difficult for her to accept that the stirrings of the heart, so beautiful and tender, didn’t culminate in a union of souls, but rather in the joining of the “shameful” parts of the body, precisely those organs that secrete fluids and waste. To her, there was simply no connection between love and sex; the two were contradictory, even irreconcilable. If Gabrielle allowed herself to be possessed during her marriage, it was essentially to satisfy her husband’s needs – to fulfil a duty, just as it was for many women of her generation, brought up in a strict Catholicism in which the notion of sexual pleasure was an aberration.
Added to this was Gabrielle’s refusal to beget children. In her view, it was the quickest way to make a woman submissive to a man. She knew this from bitter experience, having observed the tragedy of her mother’s dependence on her irascible father. Gabrielle wanted to avoid this situation at all costs.
Considering her attitude, it is understandable that the discovery of Marcel’s homosexuality presented a certain advantage to Gabrielle, as it released her from the obligation of playing the role of complaisant bed-mate. On the other hand, she realized that her frequent absences encouraged Marcel’s behavioural slip-ups. This knowledge may have increased Gabrielle’s feelings of guilt: she accused herself of being doubly responsible for her husband’s transgressions, first by her unwillingness to engage in sexual relations, and then by leaving the way open for Marcel to appease his frustrated impulses.
This hypothesis cannot be rejected out of hand, even in the light of what we know about human sexual behaviour – that is, Marcel would most likely have acted in exactly the same way even if Gabrielle had shown more interest in sex and had been at home more often. But how much do we really know about love?
As soon as she was far enough away from him, Gabrielle would be overcome with feelings of tenderness towards her Marcel. She would immediately begin writing him letters of apology and reconciliation, suggesting a new beginning for them. In sum, love would triumph.
Then, when they were together again, the clashes between them would recommence, along with the quarrels and hurtful words. The perpetual new beginning would be repeated over and over again and would end only with Gabrielle’s death in July 1983, after almost thirty-six years of shared life.
The special attachment between Gabrielle and Marcel gave full weight to the marriage vow, “to have and to hold, for better or for worse.” For Gabrielle, had the marriage been more often worse than better? No doubt, but she had nurtured a genuine affection for Marcel for so long that now, thinking of her “grand fou” she couldn’t help remembering the best of the times they’d had together. This must be why she’d never been able to leave the man who had swept her off her feet when they first met. Undeniably, Marcel was a remarkably charming and intelligent person, and had been an agreeable companion during the better moments of their relationship.
The infinite manifestations of love will always surprise us. Love can bring together people who are opposite in every way and cleave them together throughout their lives.
Gabrielle Roy’s life was full of suffering, passion, quarrels, and reconciliations, and she may have experienced love more intensely than most people do. Stormy love affairs can exist on a basis other than sensual pleasure.
Literature was the beneficiary when Gabrielle put sexuality aside and directed her passions to her writing. Her ability to see things through the eyes of a virgin1 produced a style of tender purity that is the great strength and beauty of her work.
Even plants that grow in the driest deserts can suddenly burst into striking, vividly coloured blossoms. Gabrielle Roy’s writing is an extraordinary flowering in the desert.
1 . This is François Ricard’s idea: “But this ‘virginity,’ or frigidity, whether we like it or not, is one of the sources of Gabrielle Roy’s creativity, one of the deep strengths of her work.” (Gabrielle Roy: A Life, p. 352)