Gabrielle Roy’s Novel of St. Henri Realizes Fragile Five-year Hope

By BETH PATERSON

Five years ago Canadian-born Gabrielle Roy returned to Canada from France with little more than a typewriter, a few clothes and a hope.

Today, with the recent publication in Montreal of her first novel Bonheur d’Occasion, she is being ranked with the best of Canadian novelists.

In an interview here yesterday, this slight brown-haired French-Canadian gave some insight into a somewhat vagabond life that started after school in St. Boniface, Manitoba, with school- teaching proceeded to acting and from there to free-lance writing.

Her novel, in two volumes, was written in Montreal and Rawdon, Que., over a period of three years and deals with life in the industrial St. Henri district of Montreal, with the pre-war unemployment era and the enlistment of Canadian youth during the war.

The author herself grew up in Manitoba during the period of unemployment and pre-war false peace. Born across the Red River from Winnipeg at St. Boniface of Quebec parents, she was the youngest of a family of eight. She started writing as a youngster and as she put it “I used to shut myself up in the attic and write little stories with the whole family laughing at me.” Her family and friends later tried to discourage her when she gave up her dramatic studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and started free-lance writing. Before she left Canada for London in 1937 she has a few short stories published in the Toronto Star Weekly and the Winnipeg Free Press. Then, when she was studying in London, her passion for writing kept pushing at her until she sent a few articles on Canadian life to a Paris weekly, Je Suis Partout. Before a year was out, she had made up her mind to take her chances with free-lancing.

Leaving England, she started out with a young woman friend from Toronto on a walking tour of the Mediterranean coast. Carrying haversacks and sometimes travelling by bicycle, they went from Nice to the Italian frontier and later aronud [sic] the Spanish border. “We had only a few hundred dollars apiece,” she said, “but we managed to stretch it a long way and then people were so kind to students travelling like that.”

Just six months before the war started, she left Europe for Canada and settled in Montreal. Here she took a job on radio serial programs until she was able to write enough to keep herself in funds. Within her first year back home she wrote a prize short story on which she made $250 and this was published in La Revue Moderne. She wrote a series of articles on English and French life for Le Jour and a series on Canadian ethnic groups for Le Bulletin d’Agriculture. For the latter series, she lived for periods of time with the Hutterites of Manitoba, a group of Jewish colonists in northern Saskatchewan, the Verigin group of Doukhobors in Saskatchewan and Mennonites and Sudeten Germans in Manitoba.

Now that her novel is published, she will return to Rawdon where she has been living for the past two years and there hopes to get a small house of her own. The hurry-scurry of the city she does not like “There’s too much agitation there for God knows what,” she said, “and I feel my life is being stolen away from me in little bits and I haven’t anything left.” Her plan now is to start work on another novel. She sees Canada as a rich source of material for writing and hopes to get a good part of it on paper.

Yesterday when she was being asked one question after another about her life, she wistfully said that such a record told nothing. “Your life cannot be recorded in facts,” she said, “but in dreams and experiences difficult to put quickly on paper.”

Source: The Gazette, August 29, 1945.