| Roy Home |

By Doug Whiteway

"Her many books have been our voice," says St. Boniface historian Lionel Dorge of novelist Gabrielle Roy who died Wednesday in a Quebec City hospital. "They've talked to the world about us in Manitoba."

Although the St. Boniface-born writer left the Prairies before the Second World War to live in Europe, finally returning to settle in Quebec City, and although Quebec these many years has come to claim her as its own, Franco-Manitobans, and Manitobans generally, place Roy firmly in their constellation of writers.

"She is Manitoban,"says Annette St. Pierre, director of research at the Canadian centre at St. Boniface College and for many years a teacher of literature. Of Roy's 12 novels, St. Pierre points out, eight were about Western Canada and her writing reflected sensibilities nurtured by a childhood of genteel poverty in St. Boniface, by the stories of her immigration officer father, Leon, and by her teaching experiences in Prairie schools.

St. Pierre recalls Roy writing to her after returning from Europe in the late 1940s. "She said she was so lonesome about Manitoba," St. Pierre remembers, adding that it was no surprise when her next novel, La Petite Poule d'eau (Where Nests the Water Hen), appeared and its dream-like quality was underscored by a sense of the same loneliness.

"I think she always felt the Prairies were her home and the French community was what gave her her start in life and in writing," says Alan Brown, the Montreal-based translator of many of Roy's later works. Brown recalls an article he wrote years ago in the Tamarack Review in which he compared Roy's works to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

"The songs of innocence were the stories about the Prairies, the songs of experience were the ones about the city," he says, "She needed them both, but there was something very powerful and renewing about her relationship with the Prairies."

A headline writer for a now-defunct magazine summed up the three-time winner of the Governor General's literary award for fiction as "perhaps the best-read, least-known novelist in Canada."

Many of her works in both English and French, particularly Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute), are standard reading in literature classes in high school and university, making her perhaps Canada's widest-read Canadian novelist. Yet, she refused most interviews, declined to become part of the media circus that attends well-known writers. She remained in her Quebec City apartment and in her country home with her husband Dr. Marcel Carbotte.

Despite her reclusive nature, she is remembered as compelling by those who knew her.

"I consider her to be one of the most extraordinary human beings I have ever known," Jack McClelland, her English-language publisher and long-time friend said in a prepared statement. "The most immediate impression she made was one of gentleness and thoughtfulness. She was considerate, compassionate and had a rare warmth that one seldom encounters."

Says St. Pierre: "You felt that she always liked poor people, the humble people. She was very, very bright. When she opened her mouth, she had something to say. The last question she asked me was, 'Are you happy?' That was important to her."

While personality finally will fade from living memory, her writing, authorities consider, will be her legacy for generations to come. The Tin Flute (1945), the story of a poor Montreal family in the Depression, described by McClelland as the Canadian novel, is considered a turning point in French Canadian literature because it spoke for the first time of real urban life of the Quebecois, not of a romanticized pastoral past.

Roy was roundly condemned for it at the time by the old guard in Quebec, "but she told me once that that novel was like a cry of revolt," St. Pierre recalls. "She was upset by what she saw there."

Of her works in general McClelland says: "She was the only Canadian novelist ever to fully bridge our bilingual nation both in the critical and the popular sense."

Toronto literary critic Phyllis Grosskurth agrees. "I think she was undoubtedly the top French Canadian novelist. Whether there is a greater one living now, I hesitate to say."

Winner of innumerable other literary awards, periodically mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, Roy may receive a final memorial back where it all started -- at 375 rue Deschambault in St. Boniface. There retired businessman Marcien Emond is living and restoring Roy's childhood home to the way it was more than 70 years ago. When it's finished, who knows, he says, it may be turned into the Gabrielle Roy museum long wished for by many Manitobans.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press, July 15, 1983.

Courtesy of John Sullivan.