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BEING WORDS FOR THE READER

BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI

It is not likely that Roger Lemelin, an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, saw his first novel, Au pied de la pente douce, as a milestone work in the unfolding process of francophone (mostly Quebec) writing in Canada. What was more probable and likely is that Lemelin wanted to tell the story of a neighbourhood and its people not unlike the working-class milieu from which he himself came. The eldest of eleven children (only one girl!) of Florida and Joseph Lemelin, the latter a work-worn member of the urban underclass eking out an existence through part-time manual labour in order to support his family, Roger, from all accounts a bright and promising student, had to drop out in grade eight to go to work in his early teens and help support his siblings.

Any prospect of classical college (the usual route for ambitious young students) was beyond the Lemelin family’s means, so Roger enrolled in the equivalent of a trade school to study stenography, a skill that he acquired and put to good use in the early years of his employment. Intelligent and ambitious, it is no small wonder that the gaze of this young man, a product of the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur[1] of Quebec City, the basse-ville as it was called, should fix itself on the heights of the “Rock” on which stood all its history in walled stone, and on which had perched, sometimes only symbolically, the elites of New France, and now in Lemelin’s time, the new elites of church, state, and commerce.

For most visitors to Quebec City, it is the “Upper Town” of the ancient capital (la vieille capitale and today the capital-nationale) that offers itself as the premium experience of historic buildings, convents, and churches redolent of French architecture. The great gates of Saint-Jean and Saint-Louis so reminiscent of medieval France as well as surviving portions of the old city walls, and the towering, iconic Château Frontenac, queen of hotels in that city, overawe the tourist. There are chic shopping and gastronomic delights with a choice of fine wines and elegant phrasing on restaurant menus. It is there at the old hotel Château Montcalm (now demolished), in its more than adequate restaurant the Marquis de Montcalm, known for its bonne cuisine, that one learned to order cuisses de nymphes, translated as “thighs of nymphs,” but also known as frogs’ legs to a less imaginative sensibility. There one also acquired a taste for Digby scallops, meilleurs au monde, said the waiter, as well as the occasional bit of sturgeon from the Gaspé. They did have a bonne cuisine, perhaps not as refined as at the old Restaurant Kerhulu, a short walk from Quebec’s finest bookshop, the Librarie Garneau, with its dark ceiling-high bookshelves, and where the clerks wore sleeve coverings and tucked pencils behind their ears. It is to the Librarie Garneau that Roger Lemelin rushed in anxious anticipation to look for copies of his just-released novel. And it is at the Garneau that he was told that Monsieur Lemelin was a good writer but that it would be better to read Lionel Groulx, the arch traditionalist, whose L’appel de la race (1922), published pseudonymously, is a touchstone of Franco-Canadian linguistic tensions.

In 1940, a nattily dressed and well-pressed Roger Lemelin, was twenty-one.

All of these upper reaches of the Rock were essentially alien territory to the likes of the Lemelins who, as a matter of fact, were known to refer to their fellow citizens of Upper Town as les étrangers, or “the foreigners.” For the residents of Saint-Roch and Saint-Sauveur, life was set at a very modest level indeed. As an adolescent, Roger picked wild berries, raided orchards, and fished in the St. Charles River to help with the family’s larder. For many of the residents of those working-class districts, life, especially in the years of the Great Depression, the years that shaped Roger Lemelin, was frequently lived on the edge of survival. Men, like Lemelin’s father, worked on the grain elevators and on the docks, scooping up spilt grain from the road and bringing it home to feed the chickens that families kept in their backyards. It is this worker underclass that supplied the manpower for the dockyards, paper mills, shoe factories, lumber yards, and all the other industries that employed the Lemelins and their neighbours, and about whom not much had hitherto been written. The story of these lives, always hard and frequently tragic, was waiting to take its rightful place in the literature of Quebec. Of this class and its cast of characters, Roger Lemelin and Gabrielle Roy would weave great if disturbing tapestries of social aspiration and the pain of failure, thereby wrenching Quebec fiction out of its long and deeply rooted tradition of land, religion, and language, and set it on the course of urban realism.

For Roger Lemelin the clear intention was to tell the story of a protagonist, Denis Boucher, who, like himself, yearns to improve his lot and make something of himself. At least one francophone critic, Antoine Sirois, writing in the Spring 1977 issue of Canadian Literature, has drawn an interesting parallel between Denis Boucher and Duddy Kravitz, the protagonist of Mordecai Richler’s near-classic study of lower-class Jewish life in Montreal. Sirois has noted about Richler’s and Lemelin’s novels that they “illustrent une conquête sur le plan horizontal, où les ambitions des protagonistes tendent vers les valeurs plus matérielles et extérieures …” As Duddy’s grandfather had pointed out that a man without land is a nobody, so Denis Boucher (who, by the way, is given roles of varying importance in other novels of Lemelin) should be seen as the authorial alter ego who yearns to climb that deceptively gentle slope to the upper levels of achievement and status.

It is not surprising therefore that the first and unpublished version of Au pied de la pente douce was called Les grimpeurs (loosely translated as The Climbers) before it was reworked with the help of Lemelin’s friend Albert Pelletier and published in 1944. The novel reportedly inspired a short-lived radio drama that was withdrawn because of objections by the public, although one senses that this was an indicator pointing to Lemelin’s future successes in radio and television, the two media that would become the principal sources of entertainment for the public from the later 1940s onward.

Lemelin looks splendidly bourgeois in front of his family home in 1941.

A year after the publication of Au pied de la pente douce, Lemelin, still plying his stenographic and accounting skills and beginning to display a good deal of business acumen, married Valeda Lavigueur. He was twenty-six years old and had already been noticed by Radio-Canada, which had invited him to give a series of talks. Lemelin also started revising his next novel, Les Plouffes, a work that would lead him more firmly into the media and, to a considerable extent, bring him fame and fortune

Cover of the first edition of Au pied de la pente douce (1944) — an understated, typographical design typical of French publishing.

as a novelist, scriptwriter, and creator of extremely successful television drama. It should also be noted that his good business sense involved Lemelin in the food business where he became the owner of a popular brand of delicatessen products. That, too, contributed significantly to his financial success. However, it is surprising how quickly and how definitively luck, good fortune, and success had all turned his way.

Inscribed and signed copy of Au pied de la pente douce. The inscription, translated, reads: “To Monsieur Wilfrid Gauthier [unidentified] with my sincerest admiration, Roger Lemelin. September 21, 1945. On the occasion of our lunch at the [restaurant] Kerhulu.”

To be sure the generous reception by reviewers that was accorded Lemelin’s first novel helped immeasurably to establish his young reputation on a solid footing. Although some critics were initially hesitant,[2] the overall critical climate surrounding the novel was positive, and signalled the opportunities and good fortune that were about to descend on a young writer with seemingly limited literary credentials. This good fortune began to unfold in 1946 first in the form of the Prix David, French Canada’s distinguished award for a writer, followed by the medal of the Académie française and a Guggenheim Fellowship. It is not only that Lemelin was awarded distinctions and prizes, but it is also that the critics and reviewers had singled out Au pied de la pente douce as a breath of fresh air that by its directness and its welcome “insolence” of youth was proof that French Canada was not dying of senility, while an anonymous reviewer writing in Le Devoir in 1951 compared Lemelin to a kind of Bernard Shaw pulling the beards of “solemn old fogeys.” For Marcel Rioux, destined to become a distinguished sociologist, the novel was a striking and unique example of the younger generation turning on its fathers: “Poor you Jos, your son will achieve that at which you failed.”

It is small wonder therefore that Lemelin’s novel was noticed and, curiously enough, was picked up by a short-lived New York publisher with a noteworthy if slightly curious list. Reynal & Hitchcock had been founded in 1933 and was absorbed by a much larger and established publisher in 1948. In the course of its publishing history it featured the work of major writers such as Pearl S. Buck, Malcolm Lowry, and Arthur Miller, to name a few of the better known authors. But the name that jumps out at us today is that of Adolf Hitler,[3] the English translation of whose Mein Kampf[4] was published under licence by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1939. It may be said that the young Lemelin was in strange and good company indeed.

In addition, Reynal & Hitchcock engaged a well-known name of the left-wing American avant-garde as the translator of Lemelin’s novel. He was Samuel Putnam (1892‍–1950), a prominent figure on the cultural scene of the time. A committed francophile and scholar of Romance languages (his translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a classic), he took on the challenge of a French-Canadian text for which he felt the need to write his own “Translator’s Note” to help guide the American reader through “certain [Canadian] allusions.” Putnam modestly acknowledges the help of Lemelin with what he described as “the peculiarities of Canadian French and the abundance of local argot ... [and] also the frequent psychological subtleties of the narrative.” Understandably, for Samuel Putnam, an American with a love of cosmopolitan Europe, much of the French-Canadian flavour of Au pied de la pente douce would have felt strange.

In any case, the novel, newly minted in its Anglo-American translation, appeared in 1948. It would later (1961) find its way into McClelland & Stewart’s signature series — the New Canadian Library — as would the other three novels by Lemelin. In the meantime the distinguished French publisher Flammarion brought out its own edition in France. Au pied de la pente douce/The Town Below had moved from the rather modest embrace of a small literary publisher, Les Éditions de l’Arbre, into the big leagues of New York and Paris. The previous year, 1947, Lemelin had the added distinction of being awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, which made it possible for him to gain the experience of American life, and very likely opened doors into the world of U.S journalism.

Since 1945, Lemelin had been at work on an idea that became Les Plouffes (1948), translated as The Plouffe Family (1951), a novel of working-class French-Canadian family life that, in turn, became a popular television series on both the French and English networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is an irony that, initially, Lemelin had had to publish Les Plouffes at his own expense with another small literary press, Les Éditions Belisle. In general, 1948 can be seen as a year of auspicious developments in the life of Roger Lemelin, the most significant being his having been hired as a reporter and feature writer by major and prestigious American magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune. They engaged him to report on provincial affairs. The next year, 1949, Lemelin was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, becoming at the age of thirty its youngest member.

The dust jacket of the Reynal & Hitchcock edition of The Town Below (1948). Note the tenements in the foreground and the looming heights of Quebec City overshadowing them.

Viewed in retrospect now, we see an almost unbelievable run of good fortune that went on bringing Lemelin wealth and prestige until at the age of fifty-two he was made president and editor-in-chief of the Montreal newspaper La Presse, the biggest and most distinguished French-language newspaper outside of France. It was a position in which he served for nine years.

Lemelin’s inspired creation of the Plouffe family became the centre of his creative and published life and, with its successful move into the entertainment world, assured the author considerable financial well-being. It was as if he had come to realize in the events of his own life the aspirations of his alter ego, the ambitious Denis Boucher. But Lemelin’s success was not only one of popularity and financial reward. There were numerous accolades and distinctions from literary prizes and medals, to an honorary doctorate and, eventually, to being named to the Order of Canada and the National Order of Quebec.

Lemelin was also politically outspoken and courageous in expressing his views about Quebec nationalism, which sought to separate Quebec from Canada. This position earned him the enmity of separatist intellectuals, which manifested itself in the disparagement of his work or in dismissive criticism. However, it is interesting to note that those critics who were not radically parti pris admitted the importance of the breakthrough that Lemelin had achieved with his pioneering novel Au pied de la pente douce/The Town Below. Together with Trente Arpents/Thirty Acres by Ringuet and the equally bold and contemporaneous effort of Gabrielle Roy with her novels of working-class francophone Montreal, Au pied de la pente douce established social realism and helped to push French fiction in Quebec more decisively into the twentieth century and away from its traditional terroir roots.

Analysis and interpretation by literary critics and historians notwithstanding, we have Lemelin’s own words loosely translated to tell us how it was in the beginning:

One day when I was making my way down the gentle slope, my eye fell distractedly on the jumble of little houses which made up the neighbourhood of Saint-Sauveur. I had been thinking and looking for a subject for a novel. I stopped suddenly, happy and surprised. The idea for what would become Au pied de la pente douce hit me like a bolt of lightning. A ball of fire. The neighbourhood revealed itself to me in a new light. It was now a huge encampment. A whole class of people that was besieging what was an impregnable citadel: the rise to social betterment. With what fury and with what enthusiasm I now took up my task.

As president and editor-in-chief of the important French newspaper La Presse, Lemelin had reached the pinnacle of his prestige, doubly so if we bear in mind that, after all, he was a self-educated grade eight dropout who had successfully achieved what he had hoped for in charting the lives and social ambitions of the grimpeurs or “climbers” of his earliest literary effort. In addition there was the very considerable reputation he enjoyed as creator and principal scriptwriter of Les Plouffes, an almost archetypal lower-middle-class/working-class French-Canadian family.

Prosperous, well-established, and always sartorially well turned out, Lemelin had a splendid residence built on a promontory in Cap Rouge outside Quebec City, which he named Villa Capricorn in honour of his wife. Having taken on the presidency of La Presse in 1972, Lemelin divested himself of his food business, which he sold to a large corporate conglomerate. He stayed on at La Presse for almost ten years, a period that was also abundantly rewarding for his creative life.

In addition to various translations of the Plouffe family saga (there was even one in Spanish in which the family was purportedly Mexican!), Lemelin continued to write and to publish and to win acclaim and distinction as an author. In 1974 he was elected (the first Canadian) a member of the Académie Goncourt in France. In 1979 he published Les voies de l’espérance, a collection of speeches as well as an account of his semi-official visit to the Soviet Union. In 1980 he published La culotte d’or, a collection of stories and recollections. In 1984 came the English edition of The Crime of Ovide Plouffe, which was also made into a film, Les Plouffes, having also been made into a film in 1981. Books and television movies followed in the mid-1980s. Fond of tobacco, he published Autopsie d’un fumeur in 1988, a somewhat wry reflection on his own habit. France named him to its Légion d’honneur in 1990.

Lemelin died in 1992, a shade over the biblical three score and ten. There were posthumous honours, as well. The sloping street known as Côte Franklin was renamed La Pente Douce. In 1994 Roger Lemelin Square was inaugurated in his old neighbourhood of Saint-Sauveur, and in 1995 a library was also named in his honour in Cap Rouge.

Now, read the novel.

Lemelin at his desk in his executive role as president and editor-in-chief of La Presse.

Notes

1. Roger Lemelin fudged the truth about Saint-Sauveur and his origins. In the biographical blurb on the dust jacket of the American edition of The Town Below, Lemelin claimed that he had been born in Saint-Sauveur in the Laurentian Mountains, a rather respectable skiing area and not the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur from which he really came.

2. There were clearly varied opinions regarding Lemelin and his work. Gerard Tougas, whose History of French-Canadian Literature (1966) was for many years the primary source for anglophone readers, saw flaws in Lemelin’s writing and felt that “Whatever may be the relative value of Lemelin’s novels they will have had the particular merit of furnishing a healthy lesson in literary independence.” Much later critical opinion chose to look at Au pied de la pente douce through the spectacles of Roland Barthes and preferred a structuralist approach that tended to take away much of the “authority” and independence of the writer in favour of the pre-eminence of the structures of the imagined.

3. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was of Austrian parentage and was one of the leaders of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in Germany after the First World War. He became the leader of the Nazi Party, was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and was responsible for starting the Second World War, causing millions of deaths, catastrophic destruction, and the genocidal persecution of people of the Jewish faith.

4. Mein Kampf was Adolf Hitler’s testament of his ideology with an admixture of autobiography. The title means “My Struggle.” It was written and/or dictated by Hitler while in prison and may have even been ghostwritten to some extent. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926 and became the “holy book” of Nazi Germany.