The Glass Canoe (1976) by DAVID IRELAND

Penguin Books Australia, 1976

 

 

 

'The study of drinkers,' he orated, 'is the study of a dying race.'  He'd had too much to drink.  'Hopefully, the results of my surveys and questions and calculations will illustrate the dimensions of the drinking problem.  And I mean hopefully.  It is entirely possible that all drinkers can be helped from total reliance on alcohol to independence of the drug.  For it is a drug problem.  Society has a good number of well-educated, well-qualified, well-disposed humanitarian people who will be prepared to give time to help, to raise up those who can't kick the habit by themselves, to reform the drinker, to absorb him into the main body of society, to integrate and assimilate him into the mainstream of Australian culture.'  Digging his grave with his tongue.

 

    'What's so crook about grog?' said the Great Lover.  Love of alcohol oozed from every pore.

 

    'Alcohol oppresses you all.  It ties you in to this way of life.'  Sibley waved a thin arm round to indicate the slopped red bar, the decrepit chairs that so often doubled for weapons, the punched door, broken glass, the cracked glass doors at the back of the pub, the hills and hollows in the pub yard, the browned paint on the rafters and high ceiling of the saloon bar, the sight of Alky Jack bent over his glass and Danny playing football in some corner of his head that still worked.

 

The Novel:  Imagine an Australia where children as young as five were allowed to play all day unsupervised in the streets, slaughtering butterflies with BB guns in weed-infested carparks and what were, back then, acres of vacant semi-rural paddocks.  An Australia where there was no internet, no such thing as the mobile phone or the iPad, and a Rank Arena colour TV represented the apex of 'new' technology, coveted by many but available, as yet, only to the rich and privileged few.  An Australia where men routinely started drinking at 10am and kept it up for twelve or more hours, then drove home stinking drunk to downtrodden wives who served them re-heated meat and three veg for their tea or, if they had 'the shits,' might choose instead to dump the entire steaming mess over their ungrateful chauvinistic heads.  An Australia where the first Labor Prime Minister we'd had for twenty-three years had just been fired on the orders of a distant and far from universally beloved British Queen and the only 'foreign tucker' you could buy was what was on the menu at your local Chinese takeaway.

 

Imagine this Australia –– or try to remember it if you're old enough to do that –– and you will already be deep inside the world of The Glass Canoe, David Ireland's third novel published by Macmillan in 1976.

 

For Lance (better known as 'Meat Man' or simply 'Meat' thanks to his impressively large penis) and his mates the Southern Cross Hotel — their local pub in the working class Sydney suburb of Northmead — is more than just a place to unwind with a few cold beers after a hard day's work at the cheese factory, the golf course or the nearby Clyde oil refinery.  It's their own sacred watering hole, a keenly guarded fortress that outsiders –– anyone, that is, who hasn't been unanimously accepted as a member of their particular tribe –– are actively and sometimes violently discouraged from patronizing.  'It was home,' Meat, their self-appointed historian, proudly notes.  'The world and history passed by on wheels.  Life stayed outside.  Babies were started, and born.  Weddings, shootings, promotions, dismissals, hungers, past and future –– all were outside.'  The pub is their cocoon, their sanctuary from a world they distrust and defend themselves against by floating away on the 'river' of beer contained in the 'glass canoes' that are their quickly emptied and frequently refilled schooner glasses.  But it's also, as Lance later reflects, 'an illuminated tomb.  A sort of past solidified in masonry.  The traffic tried to run by all the faster to stay in the present or the past might grab them.  But to us, our tomb was where life was: outside was a world fit only to die in.'

 

Death and violence are continuous presences in the lives of Meat and those –– The King, Mick, Serge and Ronny, Alky Jack, Danny, Ernie, the barmaid Sharon and even the PhD candidate Sibley who believes it's his mission to enlighten and reform them –– who think of the Southern Cross as 'home' and drink, fight, argue, philosophize and fornicate in and around its Public Bar seven days a week.  If the beer doesn't get them, then they might just as easily die in a car crash or from injuries sustained in the next pub brawl that's sure to begin the minute a stranger no one likes the look of strolls into their sanctum sanctorum and they decide he needs to leave.  

 

What matters in this world is a bloke staying true to his mates and not doing anything to disappoint or disgrace them, which generally means being there day and night to help defend the honour of 'the Cross' from interlopers and anyone else unwise enough to cast aspersions on it or any of its regular, beer-swilling patrons.  It's a hard and brutal life in which a bloke works –– if he has a job at all, which many of the pub's regular customers do not –– purely for the pleasure of being allowed to drink himself legless after he's 'knocked off' for the day.  Concepts like ambition and striving after respectability have no place in an environment like this.  While a kind of rough and rugged beauty may occasionally be stumbled upon out in the pub's weed-choked yard or within its battered walls –– the butterflies skipping and dancing as they try to evade the kids' BB guns, the memory of women slept with and sometimes genuinely loved, the sight of ten glass canoes filled with 'new' or 'old' or 'Pilsener' lined up on the bar, waiting to be imbibed by the faithful –– even this is filtered through the comforting haze of alcohol and the violence which becomes the means by which the various members of the tribe most often choose to assert their individual and collective masculinity.

 

 

The Text Publishing Company, 2012

 

 

The Glass Canoe has no plot to speak of and features nothing that could truthfully be described as a traditional narrative line.  Telling a traditional story in the traditional, scene-by-scene way is not Ireland's intention here.  He is interested in revealing aspects of this world to the reader, but only –– and the distinction is an important one –– aspects of it.  Nothing is ever fully explained, just as nothing is or ever can be fully explained in what we laughably call 'real life.'  As Nicolas Rothwell comments in his fine introduction to the 2012 Text Classics reissue of the novel:  'It's art, not entertainment;  action, not plot… The book makes up a tapestry: many perspectives, many actors, their words, their breathing, the way they mesh and move.'  This mosaic technique can be difficult for even the most gifted of writers to successfully execute and even more difficult for their prospective readers to follow, yet this is never the case with The Glass Canoe.  By keeping its language informal and colloquial, Ireland manages to make the lives of these men accessible even as he conveys their pain, their humour, their social and political opinions and the small victories and epiphanies they experience in ways that, more often than not, seem closer to a kind of post-modernist blank verse poetry than mere nuts and bolts, he said/she said prose.  This is a world the writer had personally experienced and obviously knew intimately, a world he was no doubt eager to record because it reveals an Australia very different to the 'sunburnt country' depicted in the tourist brochures and the bulk of what was officially recognized, in the 1970s and still in 2014, as representing this country's 'contemporary literature.'  

 

Meat and his mates are not sun-bronzed Aussie heroes.  They don't live in the bush, earning the right to drink themselves to death because the work they do is tough and unrewarding but is helping a raw young nation to make its fledgling way in the world.  Theirs is a completely urban, post-industrial society –– in other words, the society that 95% of us now think of as 'normal' and, for better or worse, live and work in every day.  It's a monotonous wasteland of cheap public housing and intersecting motorways where mundanity and the lack of possibility remain the only constants in lives which are notable, if and when they become notable at all, for their utter lack of notability.  

 

Yet none of these men –– and, to a lesser extent, women –– have time for self-pity.  Obscure and seemingly futile though their lives may be, they prefer to focus on the idea that life is there to be lived and not to be discussed, studied, analysed or lamented over.  Indeed, their one genuine connection with the Australia of their colonial forebears is their larrikinism, their ability to spot bullshit when they see and hear it and their instinctual willingness to identify it as such.  The humour might be dark, even savage at times, but that doesn't prevent The Glass Canoe from being an outrageously and sometimes hysterically funny novel.  Its final scene, where Meat and his mates engage in an all day brawl which all but wrecks the Southern Cross and leads indirectly to its demolition, could have come from Rabelais or straight from the closing chapters of The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West's eye-opening and equally excoriating dissection of 1930s Hollywood. 

 

The Southern Cross Hotel is more than just a decaying suburban pub, a relic of a bygone era which seems ripe for demolition and overdue for re-development.  It symbolizes Australia itself –– a place where friendliness can easily turn to violence (especially under the all-pervading influence of alcohol), where the myth of mateship has been used for over two hundred years to disguise and even excuse the inherent parochialism and xenophobia of what was, though many prefer to forget it, an artificial society formed almost entirely of criminals and the brutalized and brutalizing guards who had been sent out here to supervise, discipline and –– if the propaganda spouted by the British government was to be believed –– 'improve' them.  Nor is it an Australia which has totally vanished, not even in the age of yuppified hotels where licensees now serve cappuccino and biscotti to their well-heeled, upwardly mobile patrons and proudly serve quiche and other French delicacies in what, in less pretentious times, used to be called their 'snack bars.'  Vestiges of this rambunctious working class world can still be found in the poorer, less attractive parts of Sydney and our other capital cities and also, to an increasing degree, in many of our economically depressed, rapidly emptying country towns.  

 

If it's true that the poor will always with us –– which, unfortunately, very much appears to be the case –– then it's equally true that the drinkers will always be with us as well, reminding us that this country is no 'luckier' in social and psychological terms than any other socially repressive and economically skewed Western nation.  Every Australian male knows that nothing erases the taste of hopelessness and failure like a big cold beer.  The problem, then as now, is that the relief provided by alcohol only serves as a temporary balm to what is an ever aching, ever festering wound.  Sooner or later, frustration, hopelessness and the thirst they invariably inspire will send us lurching back to the bar to buy another round, then another and another, until the temptation to express our contempt for the world by smashing someone in the face with a glass or cracking their skull open with a chair becomes too appealing to ignore.  That's Australia, past and present, and there is no better or more reliable guide to what makes it tick than David Ireland.

 

 

DAVID IRELAND, c 1974

 

 

 

The Writer:  David Neil Ireland is only one of four Australian novelists to have won the Miles Franklin Literary Award –– the country's most prestigious literary prize –– more than twice.  He won it first for his 1971 novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and again in 1976 and 1979 for his novels The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.  

 

The fact that an author born in 1927 in Lakemba, an unfashionable working class suburb in inner western Sydney, who never attended university and was employed, among other things, as a greenkeeper, a factory hand and an oil refinery worker before taking up his 'new' career in literature is astonishing in itself, given the literary culture of Australia during the early 1970s (and, it must be noted, today).  It was a decade of change and Ireland, it could reasonably be argued, was entirely representative of that change –– a working class writer who wrote high literature that was read and praised by a largely middle and upper class audience whose ignorance of the world he described was matched only by their desire to view themselves as being socially and financially separate from it.

 

Ireland began his career as a poet and a playwright, with two of his plays –– Image in the Clay and The Virgin of Treadmill Street –– receiving their Sydney premieres (and only known performances) in 1960 and 1967 respectively.  His debut novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968.  The story of a disaffected teenager whose hatred of contemporary society is balanced by the tenderness he feels for his younger siblings and the girl who cares for them, it was described by the reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald as being 'One of the most remarkable novels –– first, fifth or fifteenth –– to appear on the scene for many a long day.'  His second novel, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, based in part on his own experiences as a worker at Sydney's Kurnell Oil Refinery, saw its forty-four year old author greeted by the critics as a startlingly original voice when it appeared in 1971, with the reviewer for the National Times calling the book 'A harsh and remarkable work…[that] will leave you shaken mildly or terribly according to your life experience.'  Ireland's third novel, The Flesheaters (1972), was set in a Sydney boarding house and saw his writing compared with that of American satirist Kurt Vonnegut, whose similarly bleak vision of humanity at the mercy of an uncaring, consumer-based society was never quite as damning as that of his lesser known but equally gifted Australian counterpart.

 

Ireland's next novel, titled Burn (1974), saw him change direction to tell the story of an Aboriginal man whose sense of identity is rooted in his desire to serve in 'the white man's war' (ie. World War Two) rather than in his swiftly vanishing tribal past.  The book was universally praised, with critic Neil Jillett of the Melbourne Herald describing it as 'possibly the most important book ever written about Aboriginals.'  It was followed in 1976 by The Glass Canoe, which won Ireland his second Miles Franklin Award.  A Woman of the Future (1979), a novel which explores the sexual and emotional life of a young girl via her private diaries, was once again praised as a unique and profoundly affecting work, with fellow novelist Patrick White singling out its 'Immense originality, wit and gritty wisdom' and stating that, in his opinion, 'David Ireland has reached the top.'  The book went on to become a bestseller and win its author his third and final Miles Franklin Award.

 

 

DAVID IRELAND, 2012

 

 

The next eight years saw Ireland publish three more novels –– City of Women (1981), the surprisingly whimsical Archimedes and the Seagle (1984) and Bloodfather (1987), which was loosely based on his own Lakemba childhood.  While each book was generally well-received by the critics, with Archimedes and the Seagle going on to win the 1984 Gold Medal from the Australian Literature Society, none managed to replicate the bestseller status of Ireland's previous work, leading to an undeserved decline in his reputation which unfortunately persisted with the publication of his tenth, poorly-received novel, The Chosen, in 1987.  Ireland has not been able to find a publisher for his work since, although he has never stopped writing.  'I don't live or die by whether things are published,' he told journalist Stephen Romei in his typically forthright way in a 2012 newspaper interview, 'I live or die by whether I want to keep writing, whether I am able to get up in the morning and write.  That's what I do, seven days a week, I get to my desk and work, and try to think.  I love it.'

 

Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for his 'services to literature.'  He continues to live, and write, in New South Wales and, thanks to the republication of The Chantic Bird, The Glass Canoe and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by The Text Publishing Company as part of its ongoing Text Classics series, is beginning to regain his well-earned reputation as one of the most original, challenging and undeniably gifted writers that this or any other country has ever produced.

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the DAVID IRELAND page at the Text Classics website:

 

https://www.textpublishing.com.au/authors/davidireland

 

 

 

Grateful acknowledgement is made to PERRY MIDDLEMISS whose Larrikin Literature Pages website provides an excellent source of information (often the only source of information!) about DAVID IRELAND and many other unjustly neglected Australian writers.  Any factual errors this post contains are entirely my own. 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 048: HILARY MANTEL

Write the book you’d like to read.  There’s no point following a trend –– it will be over by the time you submit your manuscript.

While writing your first novel, start cultivating the seeds of your second, so that you have a plan to put to agents and publishers.

Your early work is vulnerable, so protect it.  You’re not obliged to explain or excuse your new trade as writer.  Show it to people who can help you professionally, and to trusted friends if you want a confidence boost, but don’t confuse a confidence boost with a literary analysis.
 

Mslexia: For Women Who Write [date unspecified]

 
Use the link below to read more about the life and work of British novelist HILARY MANTEL:

 

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/hilary-mantel

 

 

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Poet of the Month 016: WB YEATS

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
1932

 

POLITICS 

 

 

 

 'In our time the destiny of man presents 

its meaning in political terms.' 

THOMAS MANN 

 

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
on Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

 

 

 

1939

 

 

William Butler Yeats (pronounced 'Yates' to rhyme with 'gates') has been described as the most Irish of all Irish poets, one whose quest for a truly 'Irish' voice and poetic identity led him to reject the Victorian models of his childhood and seek inspiration in the richness of traditional Gaelic and Celtic myth.  After 1900 –– and increasingly after 1923, when he became the first Irish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature –– this 'mythic' voice was replaced by one more firmly rooted in the political and social reality that was twentieth century Ireland and its long and violent struggle for political independence.  An aristocrat who supported Nationalism but despised the Catholic Church, Yeats in later years favoured the idea that totalitarianism might represent a possible 'solution' for humanity, speaking out in support of Mussolini as his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound did throughout the 1930s. 

 

Yeats was born in Dublin on 13 June 1865, the son of a lawyer and well-known society painter.  He was educated in London and Dublin but it was in the west of Ireland –– in Connaught, where his family owned a house and spent its summer holidays –– that he was first exposed to the supernatural element of Irish life that would inspire much of his early work as both poet and playwright.  Although he published his first volume of verse in 1887, it was as a playwright that he first made his literary mark, going on to produce such famous dramas as Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and become a founding member, along with fellow 'modernist' playwrights JM Synge and Sean O'Casey, of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre.  Their work, along with that of the translators and scholars who were helping Irish intellectuals rediscover their country's native language and long-forgotten legends, formed the cornerstones of what came to be known as the Irish Literary Revival.  

 

Even at the height of his success as a playwright, Yeats continued to publish poetry –– much of it in the form of laments for his country's political situation and, after the Easter Rising of 1916, condemning the violence of Catholic Nationalists.  Yeats himself had strong connections to the cause of Irish Nationalism via his longstanding relationship with Maud Gonne, an English heiress who devoted her life to the cause of freeing Ireland from its aristocratic English oppressors.  He also had a long and unhappy romantic relationship with Gonne, who rejected every proposal of marriage he made to her between 1899 and 1916.  In September 1916 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, a woman twenty-five years his junior who bore him two children, Anne and Michael, and brought a kind of stability to his life –– a life which had, up till then, been lived mostly outside Ireland –– it had previously lacked.  It was with his wife that Yeats experimented with the 'automatic writing' –– an outgrowth of his interest in the occult and Theosophy –– that led to the writing of A Vision (1925).  This book, along with his Nobel Prize and the granting of Irish independence in 1922, secured his international reputation as a poet of passion, commitment and indisputable genius.

 

Yeats served two terms as a Senator in the newly-formed Irish Senate, famously warning his fellow politicians that 'If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North…You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation.'  He retired from politics in 1928 due to ill health but was 'rejuvenated,' in his own words, by the Steinach procedure he underwent at the age of sixty-nine.  (The procedure was a type of vasectomy, which its inventor theorized –– erroneously, as it turned out –– would shift the body's balance from sperm production toward increased hormone production in middle-aged men, thereby reviving and increasing their sexual potency.)  In addition to pursuing affairs with a number of younger women, Yeats continued to produce poetry, drama and essays at an astonishing rate, describing himself as having entered 'a strange second puberty' following his operation. 

 

The procedure did not, however, make him immortal.  Yeats died in Menton in the south of France on 28 January 1939 and was privately buried in the nearby village of Roquebrun-Cap-Martin, where his body remained for a year before being brought back to Ireland under the auspices of Sean MacBride, the son of Maud Gonne and Major John MacBride, the man she had originally rejected him to marry in 1903.  Yeats's remains are now buried in the village of Drumcliff, Country Sligo, only a stone's throw away from where he spent so many idyllic childhood summers.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by Irish poet WB YEATS:

 

 

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/w-b-yeats

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 047: W SOMERSET MAUGHAM

...I began to meditate upon the writer's life.  It is full of tribulation.  First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with good grace to its hazards.  He depends upon a fickle public.  He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience.  But he has one compensation.  Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it.  He is the only free man.

 
Cakes and Ale (1930)

 

 
 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of British novelist, playwright and essayist W SOMERSET MAUGHAM:

 

 

http://www.angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/maugham.html

 

 

 

 

 

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Bonheur d'occasion [The Tin Flute] (1945) by GABRIELLE ROY

Boréal Compact Canada, 2009

 

 

Depuis quelque temps, elle épiait sa mère, elle croyait la voir s'alourdir de jour en jour, mais Rose-Anna, déformée par de nombreuses maternités, semblait toujours porter un fardeau sous sa robe gonflée.  Elle se doutait bien de la vérité à certains moments, mais à d'autres elle se disait: 'Ça doit pas être ça.  Sa mère a quarante ans passés.'
    – C'est pour le mois de mai, vers la fin, dit Rose-Anna.
    L'aveu lui semblait pénible.  Mais aussitôt, elle se reprit et demanda: 'Tu seras pas fâchée, hein, Florentine, d'avoir une autre petite soeur?'
    – Vinguienne, sa mère, vous trouvez pas qu'on est assez?
    La phrase mauvaise lui avait échappé.  Florentine la regrettait déjà, elle aurait voulu la reprendre, mais dans le silence tiède de la pièce, dans le vent qui geignait aux carreaux, il n'y avait plus que l'souvenir de cette phrase qui persistait.  L'ombre semblait la répéter, la répéter à l'infini.
    Rose-Anne se retourna sur l'oreiller trempé de sueurs.  'Pas si fort, les enfants!' supplia-t-elle.  Puis après un long silence, elle chuchota dans l'obscurité: 'Qu'est-ce que tu veux, Florentine, on fait pas comme on veut dans la vie; on fait comme on peut.'

 

For a long time, spying on her mother, she thought she had seen her grow heavier day by day, but Rose-Anna, deformed by her numerous pregnancies, always seemed to be carrying some kind of burden beneath her well filled housedress.  She hardly doubted the truth of it at certain moments, but at others she told herself: 'It mustn't be that.  Mum's over forty.'
    'It's due in May, towards the end,' said Rose-Anna.
    The confession seemed painful to her.  But immediately, she composed herself and asked: 'You won't be upset, eh Florentine, to have another little sister?'
    'The twentieth, mum, don't you think that's enough?'
    The cruel phrase had just tumbled out.  Florentine already regretted it, would have liked to take it back, but in the warm silence of the room, in the breeze which blew round the floor tiles, it was no more than the memory of the phrase that lingered now.  The shadows seemed to repeat it, repeat it to infinity.
    Rose-Anna rolled over to face her on her sweat-soaked pillow.  'Not so loud, the kids!' she pleaded.  Then after a long silence, she whispered in the obscurity:  'What do you want, Florentine, we don't do as we want in this life; we do what we can.'

 

Excerpts translated by  

BR

 

The Novel:  In a time when we're continually bombarded with images designed to beguile, deceive and manipulate us it can be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anything as humble as words printed on paper serving as the catalyst for lasting social change.  Yet this was precisely the feat that Gabrielle Roy's debut novel Bonheur d'occasion managed to achieve when it was published in her native Canada in 1945.  (Two years passed before the bestselling English translation The Tin Flute appeared in US bookstores.)  Roy's poignant, compassionate but scrupulously honest examination of the lives of a poor French Canadian family living in what was, in the early 1940s, the Montréal slum of Saint-Henri opened the eyes of her fellow Canadians to the plight of Québéc and the need for drastic change to occur in the way the province was organized, funded and governed.  While these reforms would be slow to arrive and would not take full effect until the 'Quiet Revolution' of the 1960s, it has been suggested that they may not have been implemented at all had it not been for Roy's ability to awaken the national conscience by depicting the struggles of the Lacasse family in such vivid, emotionally wrenching detail.

 

Bonheur d'occasion –– the literal translation is 'Secondhand Happiness' but it could also be interpreted as 'Happiness on Demand' –– tells the seemingly commonplace tale of Azarius Lacasse and his wife Rose-Anna, who live in a tiny two room apartment in Saint-Henri with their twelve children where conditions are, to say the least, cramped.  Azarius, a carpenter by trade, has been out of work for several years, a victim of the Depression and his inability to retain any job he gets for more than a week or two.  This makes life a constant uphill battle for himself and Rose-Anna who, being poor, uneducated, female and Catholic, does nothing to prevent herself falling pregnant every year with clockwork regularity.  With her younger children to care for –– one of whom, Daniel, is suffering from leukaemia –– the task of providing a steady income for the family falls to Rose-Anna's eldest daughter Florentine, who works as a waitress in a downtown diner and uncomplainingly hands over the bulk of her weekly paycheck to her mother every Friday night, secretly holding back a small portion of her earnings to be spent on frivolous but, to her mind, necessary luxuries like silk stockings and make-up.  

 

While working at the diner Florentine meets and falls in love with a cynical would-be engineer named Jean Lévesque, a studious factory worker torn between his undeniable physical attraction to her and his revulsion at the thought of being trapped into marrying a Saint-Henri girl whose lack of refinement will never permit him to fulfill his dream of making something of himself.  Florentine is neither smart nor sophisticated, but she is pretty, courageous and determined to get more from life than her permanently poor and disenfranchised parents have ever had by utilizing whatever charms, physical or otherwise, nature has seen fit to bestow on her.  Fascinated by Jean's acerbic personality and the strange love/hate attitude he displays towards her, she tries to win his affection by making him jealous and acting the coquette with his best friend Emmanuel Létourneau, her desire fueled by the beautiful memory of how Jean kissed her on the eyelids after bringing her home from their first unsuccessful date at a fashionable city restaurant.  

 

Meanwhile, the war has begun and is going badly for the Allies, prompting many local boys –– like Florentine's unemployed brother Eugene and the well-to-do Emmanuel, whose father makes a good living selling rosary beads, sacramental wine and other religious paraphernalia to his devout neighbors –– to do what they feel is their patriotic duty and enlist in the army.  For most of these men, joining up also represents their only chance of helping their impoverished families and perhaps creating some kind of better post-war life for themselves.  Not only will the army feed and clothe him, Eugene enthusiastically informs his mother on the day he impulsively enlists, it will also send her $20 a month –– $20 a month just for herself! –– for as long as he remains a soldier.

 

 

New Canadian Library, 2009

 

 

The story develops slowly from this point, revealing each member of the Lacasse family as a victim of his or her illusions as much as the victim of the grinding poverty which forces them to move house each spring and makes the mere act of putting food on the table an unrelenting daily struggle.  Life is tough and seldom kind to those without the money or influence required to shield them from its harshest economic, political and sexual realities.  Florentine can't make Jean love her even after she loses her virginity to him and falls pregnant with his child.  Rose-Anna can't help her daughter or save her sick little boy Daniel, who is sent to a sanitarium on the other side of Montréal where his affection for her is gradually eroded by his disease and his love for a pretty young English-speaking nurse who, with spirit-crushing predictability, is not there to comfort him when he eventually dies.  (The only person who is there is his older sister Yvonne, a pious child who dreams of entering a convent some day.)  

 

Meanwhile Azarius, his plans to make money by buying maple syrup from his wife's country relatives and re-selling it at a profit in the city, loses yet another job when the truck he 'borrowed' from his new boss without asking his permission breaks down miles from anywhere, stranding him, Rose-Anna and their inadequately clothed younger children in a freezing winter snowstorm for several miserable hours.  Even Jean finds a way to renounce his no longer burning desire for Florentine, finding a high-paying war job in another city to distance himself from her and the threat her sexual allure poses to his career plans.  His abrupt and unexplained departure, just a few days after sleeping with her, leaves the field wide open for Emmanuel, who decides to marry Florentine while he's at home on embarkation leave, completely unaware that she's pregnant with his best friend's bastard child.  

 

Despite the grimness of their lives, a kind of happiness –– 'secondhand' though it may be –– does await the Lacasses following Florentine's hastily arranged marriage and the birth of Rose-Anna's latest surviving child.  Azarius, outraged by what's being done to his beloved France (a country he reveres without ever having visited it) by the invading Nazis and tired of being viewed as a good-for-nothing loafer by everyone he knows, joins his son and new son-in-law in the army, entitling his wife to an unheard of $97 a month –– more money than she and their children have seen in their lives, money that will allow them to find the permanent home that Rose-Anna has dreamed of having since she was a lovesick and not yet disillusioned teenaged bride.  

 

Florentine, respectable and now quite well-off thanks to the generosity of Emmanuel and his comparatively rich family, becomes the petite-bourgeoise she has always longed to be, able to pass Jean when she spots him in the street without surrendering to her former compulsion to throw herself at his feet or, for that matter, to speak to him at all.  'Une satisfaction qu'elle n'avait jamais éprouvée, l'estime de soi-même l'étonna.  Elle reconnut qu'elle commençait vraiment une autre vie.'  ['She felt a satisfaction she had never before experienced, a level of self-esteem that astonished her.  She understood that she was truly beginning a new life.']  Although she doesn't love Emmanuel, having married him only to give her unborn child a father and a name, she promises herself that she'll try to be a good wife to him if he survives the war.  Nothing, she reminds herself, is perfect in this world.  But having someone and something to at least try to love, she has gradually come to realize, is better than being stuck with no one and nothing to fill the gaping void that being abandoned by Jean has left inside her.  

 

Summarizing the plot of a novel like Bonheur d'occasion is, in a way, to do an injustice to both it and its author.  No point by point description of its plot can really capture the literary genius of Gabrielle Roy, who possessed a rare ability to make the reader see and feel the full unstinting truth about her characters without sentimentalizing, trivializing or patronizing them in the process.  Describing the Lacasse family and those who move in its orbit as 'characters' seems to do them a grave disservice.  The term 'character' implies that a certain amount of poetic licence, even outright fabrication, was involved in their creation but Florentine, Jean, Rose-Anna and Azarius strike the reader as being anything but fabricated people.  They seem as real, and as human, as ourselves, subject to the same self-deceptions, the same fears and anxieties, and the same fiercely resisted but often inescapable compromises that define life for every human being, aristocrat and pauper alike.  There is also warmth and a kind of hard-won understanding to be found in their tough prosaic world, bonds of family and tradition which, while tested and often found wanting, nevertheless prove to be more resilient than might be expected given the extent of their poverty and the limited number of opportunities they're granted to escape it.  The happiness found by Florentine and Rose-Anna might be little more than a shabby substitute for what most of us would deem to be the real thing, but it remains happiness of a kind that, for them, represents a definite if limited improvement in their bleak and colorless lives.

 

 
 

GABRIELLE ROY, 1945

 

 

 

The Writer:  Marie Rose Emma Gabrielle Roy was born in the predominantly French-speaking Winnipeg suburb of Saint-Boniface on 22 March 1909, the youngest of eleven children.  Only eight of her siblings survived infancy and her childhood was spent in a state of extreme poverty, with her mother Mélina forced to take in lodgers after her father Léon was laid off from his job as a resettlement agent in 1913, just six months before he was due to retire and start receiving the pension that would have provided some measure of financial security for him and his family for the remainder of their lives.

 

Roy excelled at languages and won many prizes in both French and English during her school years, allowing her to enter the Winnipeg Normal Institute in 1928 where she trained as a teacher.  She graduated in 1929 and, following the death of her father, spent the next two years teaching in the small Manitoba villages of Marchand and Cardinal, experiences she would use to great and touching effect in what would become her final novel Ces enfants de ma vie [published in English as The Children of My Heart].  

 

In 1930 Roy was offered a teaching job as the headmistress of a boys' school in Saint-Boniface, making her the only one of her eight surviving siblings to hold down a permanent job during the toughest years of the Depression.  During this period she also joined two amateur acting companies and performed on-stage in many of their productions, earning herself a reputation as a gifted actress.  Her family –– and especially her mother, to whom she was extraordinarily close –– were dismayed, however, when she announced in 1937 that she would be using her meager savings to take a trip to France and England where, she informed them, she intended to study drama full-time in the hope of pursuing an acting career.  She worked through the summer, teaching in a regional northern area of Winnipeg known as La-Petite-Poule-d'Eau [The Water-Hen District], and set sail for England in the fall.

 

Roy spent the next two years in England and Europe –– traveling, studying and writing various articles about her experiences, some of which were published in the Paris magazine Je suis partout [I Am Everywhere] and in several Manitoba newspapers.  During this time she also began taking extensive notes for what would become her first novel Bonheur d'occasion.  She returned to Canada in the spring of 1939 and installed herself in Montréal where, contrary to her mother's wishes and advice, she set out to establish herself as a professional writer.  She soon found a job writing a 'woman's column' for the daily newspaper Le Jour [The Day] and, within a few years, was regularly publishing short stories in the literary magazine La Revue [The Review] owned by her lover and mentor Henri Girard.  

 

Although she loved teaching and described her years as a teacher as the happiest of her life, Roy never returned to the profession or –– with the exception of brief semi-annual pilgrimages to visit her family –– to her childhood home.  Montréal would more or less remain her base until 1947, when the success and furor created by the publication of The Tin Flute, the English translation of Bonheur d'occasion, obliged her to return to Europe with her new husband, the gynecologist Marcel Carbotte.  The newlyweds remained in Europe until 1950, living in Paris while Carbotte completed his medical studies and Roy worked on the novel Alexandre Chevenert, a book she eventually laid aside to write what would become her second published novel, and her personal favorite among her own works, La Petite Poule d'Eau [published in English as Where Nests The Water Hen]. 

 

After returning to Canada, the couple purchased a house in Québéc City and, in 1957, a small cottage in the nearby village of Petite-Rivière-Saint-François which they would visit each summer for the rest of their lives.  La Petite Poule d'Eau was followed by the postponed Alexandre Chevenert [known in English as The Cashier] –– a penetrating psychological study of an emotionally and socially isolated Montréal bank teller that's generally considered to be the most 'modern' of her novels –– and Rue Deschambault [published in English as Street of Riches] –– an autobiographical work concerning a young girl's struggle to become a writer –– which would go on to win her the second of her three Canadian Governor General's Awards for Literature.  (Her third would be won in 1978 for Ces enfants de ma vie.)  Private to the point of being considered reclusive and anti-social, Roy was content to spend her time writing, taking occasional overseas trips with her husband and maintaining an intense correspondence with her sister Bernadette, known as Dedette, who was a cloistered Catholic nun. 

 

The death of her sister in 1970 prompted Roy to revisit Saint-Boniface for the first time in many years and led to the writing of La Route d'Altamont [translated as The Road Past Altamont], another autobiographical novel inspired by her decision to leave Canada in 1937.  Like her previous novels, it was well received by the critics and quickly translated into English, helping to consolidate her reputation as Canada's best known and most frequently honored author.  In addition to her Governor General's award, Roy was also the recipient of France's Prix Femina, the Prix Duvernay, the Canada Arts Council Award and the New York Literary Guild Award.  She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967 and was the first woman to be inducted as a fellow of that country's Royal Society. 

 

GABRIELLE ROY, c 1980

 

 

Gabrielle Roy died, of heart failure, on 13 July 1983.  The first volume of her autobiography, La detresse et l'enchantement [translated under the title Sorrow and Enchantment] appeared a year later and was followed by a second volume, prepared by her literary executors and titled La Temps qui m'a manqué [or Time Has Escaped Me in English], in 1997.  In addition to these memoirs and her eight novels, Roy also published three children's stories and several volumes of journalism and other miscellaneous writings during the course of her long and distinguished career. 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit THE GABRIELLE ROY HOUSE, a museum devoted to the writer's life and work which opened in June 2003 in her original (and now fully restored) childhood home at 375 Rue Deschambault in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba:

 

 

https://maisongabrielleroy.mb.ca/?lang=en

 

 

A film adaptation of Bonheur d'occasion, directed by CLAUDE FOURNIER and starring MIREILLE DEYGLUN as Florentine, MARILYN LIGHTSTONE as Rose-Anna and MICHEL FORGET as Azarius, was released in 1983 and received mostly hostile reviews.

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 
The Write Advice 037: GABRIELLE ROY

 

 
The Feast of Lupercal (1958) by BRIAN MOORE

 

 
The Actor-Manager (1898) by LEONARD MERRICK

 

 

 

Last updated 24 September 2021 §