Tales of Terror, Torment, and... Charm?

The Torrent [Le torrent]
Anne Hébert [trans Gwendolyn Moore]
Montreal: Harvest House, 1973
141 pages

Anne Hébert completed Le torrent in 1945, but it didn't reach bookstores until five years later. No Quebec publisher would touch the work, which explains how it is that the first edition was printed privately. A slim collection of five short stories, it was considered too dark, too disturbing and, according to the author, too violent. That's the story anyway. The truth is much more complicated, as detailed in Marie-Andrée Lamontagne's brilliant, exhaustive biography Anne Hébert, vivre pour écrire. (Montreal: Boréal, 2019).

When Le torrent was reissued in 1963, the Quiet Revolution was well underway, which may explain why Éditions Hurtubise took it on, adding two stories. The Torrent was released ten years after that as the fifth title in the all-too-brief Harvest House French Writers of Canada series.

 

Remarkably, Le torrent, was the first Anne Hébert title to be translated. By the time The Torrent was published, she her bibliography consisted of Les songes en equilibre (1942), Le torrent (1950), Le tombeau des rois (1953), Poèmes (1960), and Kamouraska (1970), her masterpiece.

Growing up in Montreal, the 1973 film adaptation of Kamouraska was everywhere.

As a result, I knew Anne Hébert's name at age ten, though another eight years passed before I read anything she'd written. My introduction was 'The House on the Esplanade' ('La maison de l'Esplanade'), the fifth of the seven stories in The Torrent.

The titular house belongs to elderly spinster Stéphanie de Bichette, "a curious little creature [...] with limbs that were poorly formed, and too thin." It dates from the time of New France: "You  know them, those narrow houses with their steep roofs and their rows of gabled windows, the upper ones about as large as a swallows nest." Stéphanie de Bichette lives there with her chambermaid Géraldine, occupying no more than one or two rooms on each floor. The other rooms – there are many – have been gradually been closed off. The two belonging to her younger brothers, who'd both died of scarlet fever when Mlle de Bichette was ten, were the first. Her mother died shortly thereafter. Irénée, the older brother was killed in a hunting accident, and so his room was shut off. Once sister Desneiges entered the Ursuline convent, her room was also sealed. And then there's Charles... Charles was disowned for marrying a girl from the Lower Town. His former room is treated like all the others. When Géraldine enters to clean, she makes certain to place each item in the very same place as when the room was vacated. The chambermaid looks to the day she will be able to do the same with her mistress's room.

I've reviewed two other French Writers of Canada books over the years: The Temple on the River (Les Écœurants) by Jacques Hébert and Bitter-Bread (La Scouine) by Albert Laberge. Both were dark, but not nearly so dark as The Torrent, which has me wondering about its peculiar back cover copy: 

The titular story does indeed "strike with devastating impact." François, the narrator, grows up on a small remote farm, cut off from the rest of the world. It begins:  

As a child, I was dispossessed of the world. By decree of a will higher than my own, I had to renounce all passion in this life. I related to the world by fragments, only at those points which were immediately and strictly necessary , and which were removed from me as soon as their usefulness had ended.

François knows only his mother, a threatening figure. He dares not look at her face; it is unlikely that he would recognize her on the street.

But there is no street. The boy's early years are spent on the farm, and the farm alone. There is such a sense of foreboding in the early pages that nothing is spoiled in revealing that the story features child abuse, animal abuse,  nd almost certainly murder.

Returning to the cover copy, this sentence stands out: "The background of course [emphasis mine], is a small Quebec community with its morally repressive environment."

In fact, The story features no Quebec community of any size. The morally repressive environment is the sole creation of the boy's mother, who keeps a ledger detailing "the wages of sin."

What strikes even more is this: "Included under the title The Torrent, are a group of stories that are charming, except for 'The Torrent' itself..."

There is not one charming story in The Torrent.

'Springtime for Catherine' is set in wartime. A population is forced to flee, discarding the elderly, infirm, and pregnant to fend for themselves in the face of the approaching enemy. Catherine, a servant girl, is awkward and unattractive, but is able to keep up. Endless years of toil with little sleep have prepared her for such a challenge. She is a "foundling," a "dirty little beast," a "Child of Sin;" Catherine is her name, but she's referred to as "The Flea." 

Having taken refuge in a barn, one night the girl is discovered by a drunken soldier. His clumsy hands undress her and for "one spark of time" she is a princess, she feels loved. In the light of the early dawn, she considers the youth and beauty of the sleeping soldier. How much ridicule might he receive for having slept with her? He would soon awaken and discover his mistake: "He must never know that he had made love to the Flea, the servant girl death's head, the joke and scorn of everyone."

And so, Catherine plunges a knife into his throat.

Have I spoiled 'Springtime for Catherine?' Trust me, there's so much more to the story. My intention was to show the absurdity of the cover copy. Were it not for the fact that the same text continues to be used to sell copies today, I wouldn't have bothered.

Besides, I haven't even touched upon 'A Grand Marriage' ('Un grand mariage') which is Anne Hébert's very best short story.

Wish I'd found it at eighteen.

Object: A mass market paperback printed on paper that is far superior to that typically used in that format, fifty-three years later there's not a hint of yellowing. The cover design is by Robert Reid. The cover illustration is by Gilberte Christin de Cardaillac. I purchased my copy this past autumn at the Merrickville Book Emporium. Price: $2.00.

Access: Though Harvest House is long out-of-business, copies are available through the University of Ottawa Press at $14.95 (plus shipping).

Le torrent is currently available from Bibliothèque Québécoise. Two editions are available. I recommend the most recent, published just last year, for its inclusion of an introduction by Natalie Watteyne. Priced at $10.95, you can purchase it by way of Jeff Bezos, but wouldn't you rather going directly to the publisher? Here's the link.

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Bad News for Modern Man

The Cashier [Alexandre Chenevert]
Gabrielle Roy [trans. Harry Binsse]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1955

I wonder how much sleep Gabrielle Roy lost over this novel. It was conceived as the follow-up to Bonheur d'occassion, her bestselling debut, but ended up being published third. The author struggled with it for years, only to be awarded with weak sales. Criticism tended to be positive, save in Quebec where she received some of the most merciless reviews of her career.

How appropriate then that Alexandre Chenevert – The Cashier, in translation – opens on the title character suffering a bout of insomnia. He worries about recent acts of terrorism, tensions in the Middle East, the Chinese, the Russians, weapons of mass destruction, and the flood of cheap Asian imports. Just the other day, Alexandre read an alarming article that warned the planet is warming.

Roy's novel was completed in 1953 and is set six years earlier.

The author loved Alexandre Chenevert, even if readers did not. Truth be told, he's not the most attractive figure. Sour, dour, short, balding and skeletal, he stands slightly stooped at his wicket in Branch J of the Savings Bank of the City and Island of Montreal. The suits he wears have seen better days.

Alexandre's fight for sleep has been going on for years. The medicine cabinet he shares with his wife Eugénie holds something that might help. Alexandre bought it, but can't bring himself to take it: "But were he to at last savor sleep, how could he do without it afterward? The drug that conferred this boon he would long for, no matter what the price, and he would lack the will to give it up." Besides, the medication will only muddle his mind; it would only be a matter of time before he would make a mistake.

Alexandre forgoes the pills, and yet makes an error in doling out an extra hundred dollars to a client the very next workday. Lack of sleep, you understand. This, not the deaths of two infant daughters, is the crise that disrupts his life. He consults his branch manager's doctor, a fine fellow named Hudon, who advises Alexandre to not think so much. "You let things weigh too much on your mind. For heaven's sake... you carry the whole world on your shoulders!"

And yet, even when giving his diagnosis, Hudon recognizes something of himself in Alexandre. Exhausted by the steady stream of patients required to maintain his lifestyle, the doctor considers letting some go. But which to cast off? They've come to rely on him. A good man, Hudon can't help but worry about their wellbeing, as his patient is subsumed on a streetcar by calls for his help from Friendless Youth, the Salvation Army and the Jewish Federation of Charities:

Are you, Alexandre? Are you?.

Roy's bank teller is a man of modest means who must deal with a terrible inheritance:

Modern man was the heir to such a mountain of knowledge. Even had he limited his curiosity to that which was published in his own day, he could never have succeeded in absorbing it all. And where did truth lie in all this mass of writing? Alexandre lived in the age of propaganda.

The Cashier was never suppressed, nor is it forgotten, but it was ignored by me. I found my copy, a first edition, in the summer of 1985 at a bookstore on St-Laurent, a street on which Alexandre Chenevert walks. I'd been meaning to read it for three decades, taking care to ship the book in moves from Montreal to Vancouver, Vancouver to Toronto, Toronto to Vancouver, Vancouver to Ottawa and Ottawa to St Marys. I was twenty-two when I bought it. I'm fifty-three today, one year older than Alexandre Chenevert.

At twenty-two, under Mulroney, Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, the world weighed heavy.

It's weighing heavier this summer.

I'll never be able to absorb it all.

A Bonus:

The Gazette, 15 October 1955

Object: An attractive hardcover in green boards. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited. My copy set me back $5.00... but remember, those are 1985 dollars.

Access: Binsse's translation was commissioned by Harcourt, Brace, its American publisher. The Cashier was also published in the United Kingdom by Heinemann (above). In 1963, the novel followed Brian Moore's Judith Hearne as the fortieth title in the New Canadian Library. Miraculously, it survives as part of the series today.

The original French was first published in 1954 by Beauchemin. That same year, it appeared from Parisian publisher Flammarion as Alexandre Chenevert, cassier. It remains in print to this day. The current edition, published by Boreal, follows the 'nineties NCL design in using Adrien Hébert's Rue St-Denis, 1927 on its cover. A bit off for a novel that takes place two decades later, but I like the painting so much that I don't care.

Nearly all of our university libraries hold French or English-language, often both, while our public libraries generally fail. editions are common in our university

The novel was published in German as Gott geht weiter als wir Menschen (Munich: List, 1956), which Google translates as God Goes Further Than We Humans.

I've never seen a copy.

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