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.

Related post:

A Father's Love on Father's Day

Quebec Gothic

The Temple on the River [Les Écœurants]
Jacques Hébert [trans. Gerald Taaffe]
Montreal: Harvest House, 1967

More novella than novel, I first read The Temple on the River a couple of hours before meeting the author. Picking it up twenty-eight years later later, I remembered little. A coming of age story, right?

Why The Temple on the River didn't stay with me must have to do with the speed at which it was read. A very entertaining story, it's infused with brilliant humour of the blackest sort.

The narrator and protagonist is François Sigouin of the Quebec City Sigouins. His father is a Superior Court judge, as was his father before him… that is until grand-père raped the niece of a Dominican father on the Plains of Abraham. The flames of scandal are quickly extinguished, but not before they kill proper, pearl-wearing grand-mère. The newly widowed judge retires to the village of La Malbaie, "where they can't believe that one of the Sigouins could be a dirty old man", never mind a rapist.

Young François is summoned to keep his exiled grandfather company, but spends most of his time in the company of housekeeper Sévérine, an elderly spinster:

She was still in the Legion of Mary at sixty-five, the kind of old woman that hangs around the sacristy, on the prier's skirts, all year round, a frog boiled to death in holy water. At her age she kept suing that she was a virgin and pure, though she didn't take two baths a year.

Under Sévérine's guidance François becomes an enthusiastic churchgoer, but this has everything to do with pretty Mireille, the beer-drinking labourer's daughter, who seems always to be sitting beneath a statue of St Anthony.

The Temple on the River is indeed a coming of age novel. Returning to it all these years later I was surprised to find that it takes place decades after the author's own youth. François watches television, dreams of destinations depicted in Air France travel posters and later, as a student at the Collège des Jésuits, listens jazz and bad poetry at a Quebec City beatnik club. His adolescence leads to the Quiet Revolution, when it could be argued Quebec itself came of age.

Hébert himself played a liberating role during those years. He was an old man of forty-three when the story of François Sigouin was first published, yet it demonstrates a true understanding of the younger generation.

That would be the generation before mine. I could be wrong.

Object: A 175-page paperback in Penguin orange, slightly wider than a typical mass market. It features ten full-page illustrations by Pierre Lusier. In 1985, I purchased my copy – then not inscribed – from a Montreal bookseller for 25 cents.

Access: The Temple on the River was published simultaneously in paper and cloth – then never again. Two paperback copies are currently list online – $9.99 and $19.95 – but I recommend the uncommon cloth. Both have dust jackets, both are inscribed, and at US$33.75 and US$39.00 aren't too far apart in terms of price.

The original French, Les Écœurants, was published in 1966 by Éditions du Jour. I've never seen a copy, so shamefully present this image (right), lifted from a Gatineau bookseller. He's asking only $10.00, which seems a very good deal. It was last reissued in 1987 by Stanké.

Most universities have a copy, as does Bibliothèque et Archives nationals du Québec, but Library and Archives Canada fails. The only public library that serves is that of the City of Vancouver. Curiously, the French-language original is much more common in English-language institutions.

Ignoble Pornographie - Translated!

Bitter Bread [La Scouine]

Albert Laberge [Conrad Dion, trans.]

[Montreal]: Harvest House, 1977

A portrait of the artist as a glum man. And why not? Here we have one of the country's first Naturalist writers, a member of the École littéraire de Montréal, yet during his lifetime Albert Laberge's sales were measured not in thousands or hundreds, but in dozens.

La Scouine was nearly two decades in the making. Its title, which has 'no particular meaning, except that it was a vague phrase dating back to the first origins of the language itself', is the nickname of smelly Paulima Deschamps, the youngest member of a farming family. She's a dislikable character, but then so are her siblings... and their parents... and their neighbours... and the local clergy. All live in a rural landscape entirely at odds with the idealized roman de la terre that had for so long dominated French Canadian literature:

The harvest had been underway for a month, but hardly any work had been accomplished due to the continuous rain. The storms recurred every few hours, after brief appearances of a ghostly sun. The sky would suddenly become dark and threatening, and huge, hearse-like clouds would pursue one another on the horizon, explode over the flat, green country, to spill a flood of water that drowned the land.

These words – translated here by Conrad Dion – form the beginning of the novel's twentieth chapter. First published in the 24 July 1909 issue of la Semaine, it attracted the attention of Mgr Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, who condemned the excerpt as 'ignoble pornographie'. This wasn't the first time Laberge had displeased the Church. As a student he'd been expelled from Montreal's Collège Sainte-Marie after confessing that he'd been reading the works of Zola, Balzac and de Maupassant.

The offending excerpt relates an episode in which Charlot, la Scouine's crippled brother, is seduced by a gin-loving, Irish farmworker:

His thirty-five years of chaste life, his solitary nights on the yellow sofa, lit up his insides at this moment with lustful, urgent desire. This man who had never known a woman felt an imperative, crying hunger that had to be appeased. The whole concantenation of bad dreams, of libidinous visions besieged him, invaded him.

...

Charlot then threw himself on her.

And they made love.

This was his only love experience.

'Il faut couper le mal dans sa racine', wrote the archbishop.

Seven years passed before the reading public was again treated to excerpts. Not until 1918 did La Scouine appear in its entirety – and then only in an edition numbering sixty copies.

Laberge published all fourteen of his books himself: collections of short stories, essays, literary criticism and this, his only novel. Signed editions, not one had a print-run of more than 140 copies. They sell today in the US$200 range, though patient purchasers should be able to grab the less desirable titles for under US$100. Sadly, nearly half a century after his death, most of those currently on offer are uncut, unread.

Object (and a mystery): Issued in both cloth and paper as part of the Harvest House French Writers of Canada series, Bitter Bread is cursed with a horrible cover illustration (first used on the 1972 L'actuelle edition of La Scouine). Dated, yes, and like the 1970 Feast Of Stephen and the 1974 Four Jameses it references the wrong decade. The inside back cover lists as forthcoming Growing Up Barefoot, 'a novel by Félix LecLerc'. To date, no such title has materialized. I'm guessing that the 'novel' was a planned translation of Pieds nus dans l'aube (1946), the chansonnier's memoir of his La Tuque childhood.

Access: Typical. Bitter Bread can be found in academic universities across the country, but public library users are limited to Toronto and Vancouver. Library and Archives Canada holds no copy, nor do the public libraries of Montreal, the city in which it was published. The paper edition shouldn't cost more than C$10 – double that for the cloth. Those interested in the original French are advised to cast aside all dreams of purchasing the sixty copy first edition. Collectors may be drawn to the 1968 facsimile or the 1970 pirated edition; at US$40, I prefer the 1986 critical edition published by the Université de Montréal.