An Incalculable Loss to Canadian Letters

What was so marvellous about Gabrielle Roy, this country's most important French Canadian novelist who died last Wednesday at the age of 74 in Quebec City, was the way she carved her themes and characters out of common humanity, touching us all.

The often cynical and doom-laden thrust of contemporary fiction was not for her. Her 13 books have a cumulative effect, portraying a world of humane impulses in the face of bleak poverty and an often unforgiving, baleful environment. Innocence is shadowed and overtaken by experience, the vulnerability of childhood by the harsher realities of adulthood - yet she was always a celebrant of life, of the virtues of courage, loyalty and generosity.

"Apart from the fact she was one of our best writers," Margaret Laurence told me the other day, "she was the first and probably the only one to heal the breach, the only one who had a sense of both anglophone and francophone cultures. I cherished and loved her. She was a compassionate, noble lady, and incredibly courageous, for she was extremely ill for a long time.

" I met her only once - she hardly ever travelled - but we corresponded for the last eight or nine years. She grew up in Manitoba, as I did, but she was unique. She could say so much in so few words. She influenced all of us."

Born in St.Boniface, Man., Roy learned about poverty and deprivation during the Depression as a young school teacher in rural Manitoba, the countryside she brought alive in such novels as Where Nests The Water Hen (1950) and Children Of My Heart (1979). She had thought of making a life in the theatre, and it was only after a sojourn in Europe that she took up a career as a freelance journalist in Montreal.There she discovered the working-class district of St. Henri. "I had never seen such indigence," she said."And I never thought that what I started writing would grow into a novel."

Dreams and hopes

The book was The Tin Flute (1945), which remains the touchstone of Roy's mind and craft, focussing on the Lacasse family of St. Henri and particularly on Florentine, the young dimestore waitress whose dreams and hopes are thwarted by circumstance. It was a huge critical and popular success, selling more than 1 million copies and winning the first of her three Governor General's Awards as well as France's Prix Femina, (Some 38 years later and a few hours before her death, ironically enough, the movie version of the novel was presented as Canada's official entry in the Moscow Film Festival.)

The 1940s were a heady time. Canadian writing was coming of age, with such novelists as Morley Callaghan and Hugh MacLennan shucking off the last vestiges of post-colonial literature. Roy's novel was pivotal, too. Translated into English, The Tin Flute provided, almost for the first time, a perception of big-city Quebec poverty and backyard squalor, unlocking by its social realism a literature still mired in romantic rural idylls.

Perhaps, as some critics claim, Roy played on her well-loved themes too often in the books that followed, even if the settings ranged from Montreal in The Cashier (1954), Manitoba in Street Of Riches (1957) and The Road Past Altamont (1966) and the far north in The Hidden Mountain (1961) and Windflower (1970). But that would be to say that the virtues that Roy espoused are out of date. In The Fragile Lights Of Earth (1982), a collection of reminiscences which is the closest to an autobiography she has left, Roy wrote: "I cannot conceive how a novelist could fail to pity or love the smallest creation of his imagination; incomplete as these characters may be, they are the writer's bond with the real world, its suffering and heartbreak."

Final work

It is a feeling which, I think, is wonderfully crystallized in a story in Children Of My Heart, her final work of fiction. It is narrated by an idealistic teacher, at 18 young enough to sympathize with her pupils' adolescent confusion, who slowly gains the trust of an unruly Metis boy and opens the world of books to him, while he, in turn, introduces her to the wild beauty of the prairies. But this close relationship is altered when she realizes he is falling in love with her:

"I reached out to take his hand and comfort him, but broke off my gesture, realizing I would never dare to complete it, that I must never do so; and from the feeling of that deprivation came a confused regret that seemed to stretch out into an indefinite future, for I wasn't sure who was to be pitied, he or I or any being who, on reaching adulthood, loses a living part of his soul."

Such images drop, like uncontrollable tears, into a pool, rippling outward in concentric circles of musing and insight, then blending into all that has come before and all that will follow. Under the vast prairie bowl, such images are startlingly different from the soot and factory whistles of The Tin Flute. But from first to last, she remained true to her vision. She never lost touch with the truth, with the sadness and beauty of people.

Reclusive life

Roy lived almost a reclusive life in Quebec city with her doctor husband Marcel Carbotte. She gave few interviews and never took part in promotional tours, once saying to Jack McClelland, her English language publisher, " You sell the books, I'll write them "

Toronto writer Joyce Marshall, who translated three of Roy's books into English, says, "People think of her as a retiring person. They don't know how much fun she was as a person. She used to act out the parts and had me practically lying on the floor with laughter."

McClelland, in turn, says, "Her perceptions and insights made any conversation or any exchange of letters a remarkable experience. She had that rare warmth that one seldom encounters. I fell madly in love with her on first sight in 1947 and have remained a devoted admirer. Her death is an incalculable loss to Canadian letters."

Source: The Sunday Star, July 17, 1983.

Courtesy of The Toronto Star Syndicate.