Québec City, December 7, 2008
From Solitudes to Diversity: The English Community’s Contributions
to Quebec’s Literary Tradition
Notes for a speech to the Literary & Historical Society of Quebec
Graham Fraser – Commissioner of Official Languages
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Good evening.
It is always a pleasure to be back in your wonderful building. When I was living in Québec City, the Literary and Historical Society Library was a favourite retreat from the intensity of the debates at the National Assembly, and a wonderful resource for my family. I had a book launch here in 1984, and used it to draw ministers to this jewel of Old Québec.
It was just over 60 years ago that Hugh MacLennan’s novel Two Solitudes added an indelible phrase to the language. It was published in 1945, and its sweeping epic of linguistic and ethnic tension suddenly became the permanent template through which English Canadians perceived French Canada.
I am not a literary scholar. But I would like to use this opportunity to take a brief look at how English writing in Quebec—and on Quebec—has shaped perceptions of Quebec society. In particular, I would like to look at a group of Anglophone intellectuals who summered in North Hatley beginning in the 1940s, then look at Mordecai Richler before making some observations about the current diversity of English-language writing in Quebec.
Hugh MacLennan, Mason Wade, I.M.B. Dobell and F.R. Scott were all friends, and all of them spent their summers in North Hatley and had a profound influence in shaping modern Quebec and Canada.
MacLennan came to Montréal as an adult; I heard him once say, in the defiantly provocative way he sometimes had, “I am not a Canadian, I am a Nova Scotian.” He was a deeply passionate man, fascinated by the contact between French and English, the impact of history on society, the relationships between fathers and sons, and the tectonic plates of social change. Two Solitudes entered the language—sometimes in a distorted fashion—as a description of the relationship between French and English in Canada. Writing during the conscription crisis of World War II, he drew a character—Marius Tallard—who was a nationalist campaigning against conscription in World War I.
Mason Wade—an American who became fascinated with French Canada after writing a biography of Francis Parkman—was a large man, with an excessive appetite and a dark mixture of gloom and enthusiasm. Tall, loud, sometimes cheerfully abrasive, he had a surprisingly gentle seriousness with children.
Interestingly enough, in 1942, when he was working on his history of French Canada (The French Canadians 1760-1945), Wade would bring his friends to Bloc populaire rallies, opening up a window on Quebec nationalism that had been hitherto unknown to them. “He would never say so, but he had an understanding of Quebec that we often could not grasp,” I.M.B. Dobell told me after Wade’s death. She remembered accompanying him to hear Henri Bourassa speak at a rally in Granby in the early 1940s. “He sensed, as we did not, that there was a possibility that the country might be torn apart by the problem. He could see what was coming.”1
Dobell herself was a historian, author and, most importantly, curator of the McCord Museum, transforming a collection that had been left to moulder in a forgotten corner of McGill University into a dynamic display of material objects reflecting Quebec’s evolving history. In August 1943, Wade told his friends in North Hatley that Henri Bourassa was speaking in Magog on behalf of a Bloc populaire candidate in the Stanstead by-election. Bourassa was about to turn 75, and it would be one of the last opportunities to hear him speak.
So, a group headed over to hear him.
“Bourassa was introduced by a man with blazing eyes, a lock of hair, a high voice filled with passion and hatred,” MacLennan told me almost 40 years later. “I said to Wade, ‘Who in the hell is that?’ ‘That’s André Laurendeau.’ ‘I just put him in a book and mailed him to New York a week ago.’”2
To MacLennan, it was the shock of recognition: his character Marius Tallard in the flesh. The two men did not meet then, but five years later, Laurendeau sent MacLennan a copy of a children’s book he had written, inscribed “D’une solitude à l’autre.” And twenty years after the speech in Magog, Laurendeau became co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism—with Scott as a member.
MacLennan did not only write about Quebec in his fiction. In a number of essays in the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote about the changes that were underway in Quebec society, and how the rest of the country should respond.
In 1960, when only three percent of English-speaking Canadians outside Quebec spoke French, MacLennan made an impassioned plea for bilingualism. “The matter is so important to our national existence that the most radical plans should be considered for improving the situation,” he wrote, noting the twofold benefit of learning French.
“On the one hand, the study of a language like French is rewarding in itself and gives a superlative training to a student in the precise handling of his own language,” he wrote. “On the other hand, an interest in bilingualism may well be the sole measure which can save Canada from absorption by the United States. This country of ours is a dual one or it is nothing: the essence of Canadian nationhood lies in this very fact, that it is a political fusion of the two elements in North American history which refused to belong to the United States.”3
In 1966, he called for the creation of minority French-language schools in English-speaking provinces, and the creation of a federal public service where French-speaking Canadians could use their language and be understood.
“It is essential in the interests not only of justice according to the B.N.A. Act, but also of an efficient partnership,” he wrote. “A great deal of a man’s ability is left behind him if he has to do business and be judged in a language not native to him.”4
At the same time his friend and North Hatley neighbour Frank Scott was wrestling with the debates of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism, which came to exactly the same conclusion.
Laurendeau was co-chairman with Davidson Dunton, but his real counterpart on the Royal Commission, his intellectual and emotional counterweight from English-speaking Canada, was Frank Scott. Like Laurendeau, he had a subtle mind, political idealism, personal charisma and a poet’s sensibility; also like Laurendeau, he had only reluctantly joined the Commission. As Laval political scientist Guy Laforest puts it in his essay on the two men, “While both were intellectuals involved in the political debates of their society, they were also artists, two figures endowed with a remarkable aesthetic sensibility.”5 Laforest traces the parallels: both men engaged in the arts and were politically involved, both withdrew from political life somewhat at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, and, at the end of the decade, both were “éminences grises:” intellectual leaders of Quebec and English-speaking Canada respectively.
They shared an erudition, intellectual rigour and sensuality—but while Laurendeau had an almost therapeutic sensitivity, listening to people without judging them, Scott had a cutting sense of humour. “I can still hear that great laugh that made you know he was there at a party even when he was two rooms away,” wrote Michael Oliver in 1997—twelve years after Scott’s death. He observed that everyone knew a different Frank Scott. “For me he was myth incarnate: the co-author of the Regina Manifesto, the vanquisher of Maurice Duplessis, the man whose name the Montreal Star would not publish, the magician who could put social as well as personal passion into the frame of verse.”6
Born in Québec City in 1899, Scott was a Rhodes Scholar who, on returning to Montréal, became engaged not only in English-speaking political and cultural life, but also with French-Canadian traditions. “I could understand Stendhal reading the Code Napoleon to improve his prose style,” he wrote. “One summer to occupy my spare time as a student in a Montréal law office I translated the whole of the Coutume de Paris, the principal source of the Civil Law in Quebec prior to the adoption of her own Civil Code of 1866. The continuity of Quebec’s traditions with old France, and through the civil law with ancient Rome, has always seemed to me a fascinating part of our Canadian heritage.”7
Scott was a socialist and a wit in conservative English Montréal when to be a socialist was an outrage and to be witty was outrageous. His laugh was unforgettable; he was a tall, handsome man, and his mouth often curled with what seemed to be the effort of keeping in the laughter. When it burst out, often loud and raucous, it would fill a room and linger like pipe smoke. His best-known commentary on bilingualism was in a poem first published in 1954, Bonne Entente:
The advantages of living with two cultures
Strike one at every turn,
Especially when one finds a notice in an office building
‘This elevator will not run on Ascension Day’;
Or reads in the Montreal Star:
‘Tomorrow being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,
There will be no garbage collection in the city’;
Or sees on the restaurant menu the bilingual dish:
DEEP APPLE PIE
TARTES AUX POMMES PROFONDES8
What did these four extraordinary people have in common? They were brash, outspoken, provocative intellectuals. They had a deep knowledge of Quebec and Canadian history. They had a profound sense that the future of Canada depended on a creative, dynamic relationship between French-speaking and English-speaking Canada—and each, in their different ways, worked to bridge that gap. But they also lived in a particular era, while the English community in Quebec was still psychologically part of the English-speaking majority, and did not yet consider itself to be a minority.
Two events changed that—and changed their views: the October Crisis of 1970, and the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976. Scott and MacLennan both supported the imposition of the War Measures Act. “Democracy has to be able to protect itself,” said Scott. These hooligans are holding up our government, threatening our civil rights. They have to be stopped. And so do the hotheads who are encouraging them. People are afraid, the situation is volatile, and the War Measures Act is the only instrument we’ve got, however clumsy, to restore some sense of order.”9
For Scott, it meant an irreparable breach with French-speaking writers and poets: nationalists who had previously been friends.
Then, as a result of a nasty brush with two cars near North Hatley in the fall of 1970, MacLennan became convinced that he was an FLQ target.10 The decades that followed the October Crisis contributed to the emergence of a different kind of writing in English-speaking Quebec; what one might call a “littérature de combat.”
Mordecai Richler emerged as a distinctive voice at the end of the 1950s, and presented a very distinctive part of Montréal: Jewish Montréal. Jewish Montréal was not part of the city or the society that MacLennan and Scott had written about. But, as Concordia literary scholar Sherry Simon writes, it had deep roots in the city. “In 1931, there were some 60,000 Yiddish speakers in Montreal, about six per cent of the total population of the city,” she notes. “This community functioned with a considerable degree of cultural independence from the mainstream Anglophone and Francophone majorities.”11
The poet A.M. Klein served as a bridge to the English-speaking literary community, a role for which Richler mocked him. Simon observes that Richler wrote a parody portrait in Solomon Gursky Was Here: “Klein’s forays into gentile bohemia,” as Richler jokes, “were on the condition that he take the role of ‘Montreal’s Eloquent Israelite,’ an exotic, a garlicky pirate, living proof of the ethnic riches that went into weaving the Canadian cultural tapestry.”12
Richler was an equal-opportunity satirist, turning his jaundiced eye with equal ferocity on Jews, WASPs and French-speaking Quebeckers.
He was not alone. In 1979, his friend William Weintraub wrote a bitter satire, The Underdogs, portraying an independent Quebec as a totalitarian state taking revenge on the few Anglophones who had not fled. But his bitter exaggeration had much less impact than Richler’s attacks. The novelist abandoned satire to launch a constant series of assaults on the language law.
Always an iconoclast, Richler hammered on one of modern Quebec’s most painful and repressed memories: the support of Quebec’s Catholic and nationalist elites for fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s. It was a taboo that made otherwise sensible people quiver with anger. One of his New Yorker pieces began, “I was brought up in a Quebec that was reactionary, church-ridden and notoriously corrupt—a stagnant backwater—its chef for most of that time, Premier Maurice Duplessis, a political thug—and even its intellectuals sickeningly anti-Semitic for the most part.” He then went on to quote the anti-Semitic remarks made by Abbé Lionel Groulx, Le Devoir’s founder Henri Bourassa, Laurendeau and other nationalists of the 1930s—while noting the continued esteem in which Groulx was held in contemporary Quebec. But the remark that most outraged Francophone Quebeckers was in his article published in the New Yorker, in which he commented on the traditionally large Quebec families, writing “this punishing level of reproduction, which seemed to me to be based on the assumption that women were sows, was encouraged with impunity by the Abbé Groulx, whose newspaper, L’Action Française, published in 1917, preached la revanche des berceaux [the revenge of the cradles.]”13
Richler picked at the scabs of Quebec’s nationalist past, and the reaction was furious denial. Periodically, he would throw in an asterisk, but there was always a barb. “René Lévesque was not an anti-Semite. Neither is Jacques Parizeau,” he wrote. “All the same, Jews who have been Quebecers for generations understand only too well that when thousands of flag-waving nationalists march through the streets roaring ‘Le Québec aux Québécois!’ they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg. Or MacGregor, for that matter.”
Ironically, Richler was only known in French-speaking Quebec for his polemics; his fiction had not yet been translated, and there was little or no awareness that he had been just as sharp in his mockery of everyone else, including the Jewish community, which deeply resented his early fiction. He had been, as he wrote in the postscript to the book based on his New Yorker articles, “no less critical of WASP bigotry and English Canadian nationalism than I have been of Francophone follies.”
Richler’s 1992 book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country caused an incident. His own sense of pain and the memory that had driven so much of his work of seeing “À bas les juifs [Down with the Jews]“ painted on the highway to the Laurentians in the 1940s was masked by a deep and unforgiving anger. He argued in his book that Francophones in Quebec “are still doggedly fighting against injustices that no longer exist.” Others responded that the Quebec anti-Semitism he was attacking no longer existed. Hugh Segal, then Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff, was deeply troubled by the book. “My problem with the thesis that French-Canadian nationalism draws much of its roots from anti-Semitism is that I just don’t think it’s true,” he told me, arguing that the roots of French-Canadian nationalism are much broader than that, and that the Union Nationale even funded Jewish schools. “You’re looking at a guy who went to two levels of religious education in Quebec…up to Grade 11. That didn’t happen in any other province in Canada.”
Richler infuriated many Quebeckers, not only because he spoke no French himself, but because his work encouraged the complacent belief in English Canada that Quebec is a harsh, intolerant society. In doing so, it reinforced the sense that English Canada seeks out examples of injustice in order to attack Quebec, while overlooking its own anti-Semitic past. In addition, there was great resentment about the fact that Richler was able to use the international platform of the New Yorker to vent his mockery and scorn, leaving Quebeckers unable to reply.
When novelist, filmmaker and publisher Jacques Godbout was asked to write a piece for the Sunday New York Times in September 2001, his anger at Richler, and his sense of finally getting a platform to respond, almost overwhelmed an article written about a Quebec arts festival in New York. What was intended as an essay on Quebec culture and how it had emerged over the years, kept returning to Richler, who had recently died; according to Godbout, Richler had taken advantage of his fame as a novelist in order to embark on “a malicious campaign… in which he denounced, more or less honestly, the project for a sovereign and French Quebec.”
But Godbout was clearly conflicted. Calling him “Quebec’s greatest writer,” he expressed regret that Richler had died before being able to attend the arts festival. “This man who never tired of denouncing the desire of Quebeckers to exist in French could nonetheless have kicked off the New York festivities with a blast and could perhaps even have finally apologized, with his timid half-smile, for having described his French-speaking compatriots as raving fanatics.” Unlikely as that might have been, there was something doubly poignant about Godbout’s essay. His account of how Quebec had emerged from its clerical past kept swerving back to Richler—and the argument, which would have baffled most New Yorkers, was totally lost in the trauma of the events of September 11 (as was the festival).
In some ways, Richler was an heir to Frank Scott’s fierce opposition to Quebec nationalism, and his long memory of its admiration for fascism in the 1930s. But while Scott also remembered Laurendeau’s change of heart and his opposition to Spain’s Generalissimo Franco, Richler never acknowledged Laurendeau’s apology (although he quoted from other parts of the book where it was reprinted), preferring to rub salt in his own wounds and stoke his own anger.
But like many polemicists who are hated for what they say, Richler had an unacknowledged impact. The debate over Esther Delisle’s research on French-Canadian nationalism in the 1930s, which provided Richler with the basis for his own polemics, resulted in a series of waves; Jean-Louis Roux was forced to step down as Lieutenant-Governor in 1996 after he was quoted in L’Actualité14 as recalling that he had worn a swastika on his lab coat in medical school15. And in December 2000, the National Assembly unanimously condemned Yves Michaud after he had repeated on the radio a sharp verbal exchange with Senator Leo Kolber in a hair salon, where Michaud had sarcastically suggested that the Jews were the only people in the world who had suffered in the history of humanity, and then vented his rage at suggestions that the Lionel-Groulx metro station should be renamed. Lucien Bouchard cited the Parti Québécois‘ support for Michaud as one of the reasons for his resignation in January 2001.16
Conclusion
Where are we now? What is the current state of the English-speaking minority’s contribution to literature in Quebec? And how does it reflect Quebec society?
The most obvious thing is the enormous cultural diversity of that literature. There is popular fiction—like Louise Penny’s detective series set in Three Pines, and Michael E. Rose’s series of international thrillers starring Frank Delaney, who starts out as a reporter for a thinly disguised Montreal Gazette and ends up as a freelance journalist and CSIS operative. There is the Kathy Reich series of novels starring Temperance Brennan, who, like Reich, is a forensic investigator shuffling between Quebec and North Carolina.
Strangely, perhaps, language is more in the foreground in Reich’s novels than in those by Rose and Penny. It is as if the two novelists from Quebec had so internalized the province’s linguistic realities that they don’t notice them—while Reich, an American, observes them with a sharp eye.
In the area of literary fiction, two current books stand out—both by ethnic minority writers.
Nino Ricci’s The Origin of Species is set in 1980s Montréal, and includes the language debates as part of its setting. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Rawi Hage’s second novel Cockroach was short-listed for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and also won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Award.
One of the intriguing things about Hage’s book is that it is never clear what language the characters are speaking. One of the characters, a social worker, is named Geneviève, which suggests that she is a Francophone; there are French phrases thrown in here and there, which suggests that other relationships occur in that language. The main character also gets a job in a restaurant owned by an Iranian, and many of the conversations here are in Farsi, which the main character does not speak. The drama of French-English duality barely exists, except for the following description of the clientele of the bars on St. Laurent: “All those McGill University graduates love to hide their degrees, their old money, their future corporate jobs by coming here dressed up like beggars, hoodlums, dangerous degenerate minorities. They sit, drink and shoot pool… I have never understood those Anglos, never trusted their camouflage. Some of them are the sons and daughters of the wealthy. The very wealthy! They live in fine old Québécois houses, complain about money, and work small jobs.”17
Hage’s is the fiction of trauma; the trauma of Beirut and the Lebanese civil war. Interestingly, this is the same trauma that drives the work of Montréal playwright Wajdi Mouawad—who writes in French. Our language debates and disputes fade into the background, barely noticeable in the struggle to overcome trauma and survive in a new world.
That is the new English-language fiction—the new Montréal, the new Quebec and the new Canada.
Thank you.
1. Quoted in “Solitary U.S. scholar wrote seminal work on French Canada,” The Globe and Mail, January 18, 1986.
2. Quoted in “The Last Saga of Hugh MacLennan,” The Globe and Mail, May 18, 1985, p. B1.
3. “French is a must for Canadians,” in The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan: Selected Essays Old and New, edited by Elspeth Cameron, Toronto, Macmillan of Canada, 1978, p. 164.
4. “An English-Speaking Quebecker Looks at Quebec,” in op. cit., p. 234.
5. Guy Laforest, “The Meech Lake Accord: The Search for a Compromise Between André Laurendeau and F.R. Scott” in Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream, Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.
6. Introduction, McGill Law Journal, special issue, Vol. 80, No. 1.
7. Introduction, Poems of French Canada, Blackfish Press, 1977.
8. First published in Events and Signals, Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1954.
9. Quoted by Ron Graham, The French Quarter, Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, Toronto, 1992, p. 204.
10. See The Globe and Mail, May 18, 1985, and the National Film Board documentary by Robert Duncan: Hugh MacLennan, Portrait of a Writer, 1982.
11. Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, p. 91.
13. Mordecai Richler, “INSIDE/OUTSIDE,” The New Yorker, September 23, 1991, p. 46.
14. Luc Chartrand, ”L’affaire Roux,” in L’Actualité, Vol. 21 No. 18, November 15, 1996, p. 17.
15. Although doing so was an act of defiance against conscription, not a gesture of Nazi solidarity.
16. The section on Mordecai Richler is taken from Sorry I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian crisis that won’t go away, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2006, pp. 139-143. For a response, see Noah Richler, This is my Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2006.
17. Rawi Hage, Cockroach, Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 2008, p. 228.
