Gabrielle Roy: Enigmatic and Still Relevant
As part of a series of articles on major personalities who have furthered the cause of tolerance in Canada, Tolerance.ca® presents Gabrielle Roy, an influential figure in French-Canadian literature.
More than twenty years after her death on July 13, 1983, Gabrielle Roy remains one of the most highly regarded Canadian authors. Success caught up with her at the age of 37, when she won a Femina Award for her novel Bonheur d'occasion (translated into English under the title The Tin Flute). In the following years, the Manitoba schoolteacher won prize after prize, from the 1957 Governor General's Award for Rue Deschambault (Street of Riches, translated by Henry Binsse) to the David Award in 1971 for her entire body of work. Gabrielle Roy's books have been translated into many languages and are on school reading lists in many countries. In this article, people who were intimate with Gabrielle Roy describe the person behind the enigmatic, reclusive façade.
Bonheur d'occasion
It is her first novel, Bonheur d'occasion, and its extraordinary success that is most remembered about Gabrielle Roy
"Since childhood, she always wanted to be a writer," confides François Ricard, a professor in the French language and literature department at McGill University, founder of the Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy, and a friend of the novelist. "She was certainly happy with her success. She liked having many readers. But at the same time, it terrified her because she felt like she was stripped of her freedom and independence. In fact, after the success of Bonheur d'occasion, she fell into a sort of depression." It would be five years before Gabrielle Roy wrote a second book.
Far from the social whirl
Gabrielle Roy quickly realized it would only be possible for her to write far from the social whirl. In 1957, she retired to a small house in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François in Charlevoix, where she lived until her death. Rarely did she receive journalists, despite frequent requests for interviews. François Ricard explains that she had nothing against journalists, "but she didn't meet with them, unlike other writers who enjoy society life. Also, her health was extremely fragile and she could not spread herself too thin. She had to conserve her strength, and she preferred to devote the time she had to writing books."
Today, few photographs of the writer exist, and in fewer still is she smiling. "To her, being a writer, an artist, was something serious. It was a very different time than today, when we are completely dominated by the media. To her, a writer was a worker, someone who was reserved, who meditated and reflected," comments François Ricard. At the same time, he remembers, she had a great sense of humour. "And she was an outstanding storyteller. She was extremely vivacious. She had acted when she was younger, so she had a sense of gesture and voice."
Annette Saint-Pierre, novelist, editor and founder of the Maison Gabrielle-Roy in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, met Roy in the 1960s when she was doing a master's thesis on the novelist. She confirms Roy's talent as a storyteller. "It was after meeting her for the first time that I decided to write myself," she admits. "She was so close to the characters in her books. When she spoke of them, it was like they were there, sitting right beside her."
Readers first
"She thought about her readers all the time," notes François Ricard. "When someone wrote to her, she would always write back. That's how I met her. I wrote to her, and she invited me to her home."
As her books were her means of communicating with her readers, Gabrielle Roy wanted them to be perfect, even if she was never completely satisfied with her work. "That, I think, is the character trait that distinguishes true artists. They are never entirely sure of what they are doing," explains François Ricard. "She didn't publish all that much, compared to other writers. She wrote a lot. We see that because she left a lot of unfinished manuscripts. She only published what she was satisfied with."
Avant-gardist in her own way
The literature of Gabrielle Roy, from Bonheur d'occasion (1945) to Ces enfants de ma vie (1977), seems not to have aged an iota. "Her work is very rich, in terms of the writing and the content," explains François Ricard. "Every time you reread it, you discover something else and that, of course, allows a work to survive. Books that you read once and feel you have gotten everything out of them on the first read, you forget right away. In the case of her books, you can reread them constantly."
The still relevant and undeniably universal themes of Roy's work also explain their continued appeal. "In Bonheur d'occasion, when the father dreams, he dreams of the whole world. The boats he watches are in a sense the bearers of messages of the universe," comments Marc Gagné, author of Visages de Gabrielle Roy and a friend of the novelist.
Intentionally apolitical in her writing and public life, Gabrielle Roy was nonetheless not without convictions. "She never carried a placard, never adopted a cause, though her political opinions were very defined, but she was very concerned with the fate of ordinary people," notes François Ricard. "Bonheur d'occasion is a novel that describes poverty, hardship and joblessness. You find that in her other novels, too."
Reaching out to other cultures
Gabrielle Roy was interested not only in the destitute and social dropouts, but in the ethnic groups that populated the country. As a child, she had come into contact with new arrivals through her father, a colonizing agent with the federal government. "I can't think of any other Canadian authors who spoke so often about immigrants in their novels. Incidentally, her short story, Un Jardin au bout du monde, contains the first Chinese character in Canadian literature," notes Annette Saint-Pierre.
No doubt inspired by her father, Gabrielle Roy developed a vision of Canada that she first articulated in a series of articles on the cultural communities of the prairie provinces. Written between 1941 and 1945, these journalistic texts were among her first published works.
François Ricard describes the articles in his biography Gabrielle Roy: Une vie (Boréal, 1996): "In this country, as the journalist presents it, all inhabitants are immigrants; all, in some manner, are fleeing the past and attempting to build a better future; and all, in that sense, are brothers."
A Possible freedom
To women who have read Gabrielle Roy's novels, it seems evident that she was also expressing the desire for freedom that led to the women's liberation movement. "In her novels, we see Gabrielle's commitment. She always suffered from her mother's condition. You see it particularly in De quoi t'ennuies-tu Éveline? She had avant-garde ideas for a woman of her time," claims Annette Saint-Pierre.
François Ricard makes clear that Gabrielle Roy was never an activist. "She never belonged to any feminist movements or groups, but she was avant-garde in the sense that she did not follow the usual path for women of her generation: she did not have any children, she married late, she worked as a journalist, she travelled alone in Europe, she was extremely independent. At the time, very few young women had the chance to do that, or dared to do that."
Other works to discover
Little did François Ricard suspect, when he met Gabrielle Roy for the first time in 1973, that he would devote much of his career to her work. After her death, he was given the difficult task of writing her biography.
"We saw each other regularly and spoke often; I took care of her books with her. She had written La détresse et l'enchantement, but had not published it. She wanted it to come out after her death and said to me, 'You can use it to write my life story.' I was a little surprised because I had never said I would write her life story. As I note at the end of my book, I never said yes, but I never said no, either. So I have the impression that she departed with the idea that I would do the biography."
In recent years, with the help of several colleagues and students, François Ricard has been publishing Gabrielle Roy's previously unreleased material.
"We published Ma chère petite sœur : lettres à Bernadette, Mon cher grand fou… lettres à Marcel Carbotte, her husband, and Le Temps qui m'a manqué. We published another book called Le Pays de Bonheur d'occasion, made up of autobiographical texts. Presently, we're working on another book of her correspondence and a collection of the interviews she gave. These books are so rich, as much in their form and style as in their content, that you're never quite through with them. They are books that continue to speak to me, deeply, personally, and intimately."
Translated by Christine York.
* Photo : Gabrielle Roy and young boys near the railway crossing at St. Ambroise Street, August 29, 1945. (ANQ-M. Fonds C. Poirier No P48,11917.)
To learn more:Works on Gabrielle Roy (in French)
Marc Gagné,
Visages de Gabrielle Roy, Montréal, Beauchemin, 1973.
François Ricard,
Gabrielle Roy. Une vie, Montréal, Boréal, 1996.
Annette Saint-Pierre,
Gabrielle Roy sous le signe du rêve, Éditions du Blé, 1975.
Web sitesGroupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy : http://ww2.mcgill.ca/gabrielle_roy
La Maison Gabrielle Roy Inc. : http://maisongabrielleroy.mb.ca
Selected works by Gabrielle Roy (in English translation)
The Tin Flute (
Bonheur d'occasion). Translated by Hannah Josephson. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
The Tin Flute (
Bonheur d'occasion). Translated by Alan Brown. Introd. by Philip Stratford. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980.
The Cashier (
Alexandre Chenevert). Translated by Harry Binsse. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.
Children of My Heart (
Ces enfants de ma vie). Translated by Alan Brown. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979.
The Hidden Mountain (
La Montagne secrète). Translated by Harry Binsse. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962.
The Road Past Altamont (
La Route d'Altamont). Translated by Joyce Marshall. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976.
Street of Riches (
Rue Deschambault). Translated by Harry Binsse. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
My Cow Bossie (
Ma vache Bossie). Translated by Alan Brown. Illustrations from the French by Louise Pomminville. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988.
The Fragile Lights of Earth: Articles and Memories, 1942-70 (
Fragiles lumières de la terre). Translated by Alan Brown. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
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