Joual de vivre

Over a career spanning seven decades, Michel Tremblay has often turned to his past for inspiration. Novels and plays set in the Plateau Mont-Royal or depicting French Canadian migration from the prairies to Montreal are loosely based on his own family’s history. Except for a few works of non-fiction, which are more explicitly autobiographical, such as Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle (A horned angel with wings of sheet-metal), from 1994, Tremblay has largely drawn upon material at hand to create his works of fiction and theatre. Recently, however, we see a shift in the way he contemplates his past. The non-fictional Paris en vrac (Paris in bulk) and the play Hosanna ou La Shéhérazade des pauvres (Hosanna or the Scheherazade of the poor) give the impression that Tremblay, born in 1942, is reviewing what he has written, whom he has interacted with, and the trajectory that has led him to become one of Quebec’s foremost cultural icons.

The play is actually a fusion of Hosanna, from 1973, and the 2022 novel La Shéhérazade des pauvres, in which a young journalist writing for an LGBTQ+ magazine interviews the elderly Hosanna, a central figure in Tremblay’s oeuvre, asking him what it was like to break ground on the Montreal nightclub scene as a transvestite in the 1970s. This play shows how Tremblay is looking back on some of his characters — and on how they pushed the boundaries around homosexuality and cross-dressing.

In Paris en vrac, which the title page describes as a collection of souvenirs, or memories, Tremblay relates a series of trips to Paris over the years. He reflects on the plays he saw and the people who attended with him, as well as those he simply ran into during his stays in the City of Light. He came to know his way around Paris: theatres, cinemas, restaurants, neighbourhoods, and metro stations. It’s a far cry from the 1984 novel Des nouvelles d’Édouard (News from Édouard), in which the eponymous character takes an ocean liner to France but finds himself so out of place that he’s soon back on a ship to Montreal. In typical Tremblay fashion, the reminiscences in this latest book are at times bittersweet and humorous — and riddled with literary references. He recalls a performance of Macbeth at the Comédie-Française, stays in Montmartre that remind him of Zola’s character Gervaise, and an appearance on the popular literary TV show Apostrophes, hosted by Bernard Pivot.

One particularly moving episode from the early ’70s, “Le jour où j’ai dit non à Michel Cacoyannis” (The day when I said no to Michael Cacoyannis), evokes a meeting with the Greek director, filmmaker, and playwright who is best known for writing and directing Zorba the Greek. After seeing Tremblay’s already famous Les Belles-Soeurs, Cacoyannis wanted to discuss the possibility of translating and staging it in Greece. Tremblay’s emotions and excitement at this chance are palpable, but in the end, he turned down the proposition out of loyalty to André Brassard, his friend and long-time collaborator:

I couldn’t do that to André, I couldn’t leave him behind in Montreal to swagger through Greece after all the dreams we’d built! So I took my courage in both hands and jumped right in, knowing what I was putting at risk: I dared to speak to Mr. Cacoyannis about André, about our friendship, about the work we had been doing together since 1966, about our semi-professional years, about our rather spectacular official debut with Les Belles-Soeurs, and, above all, about our dream of crossing the Atlantic ourselves with the play to come here to Paris, to risk our burgeoning reputation.

Tremblay’s loyalty to friends and collaborators and his refusal to abandon them, even if it meant missing out on opportunities, are striking throughout many of these anecdotes.

In another rather amusing chapter, “Moi vs Jack Lang,” Tremblay relates his humbling encounter with the French minister of culture, soon after he was made Officier des Arts et des Lettres de France, an honour akin to being named an officer of the Order of Canada. Having just taken a bite of an hors d’oeuvre before shaking Lang’s hand, Tremblay found himself in an embarrassing situation that only got worse.

“Moi vs Jack Lang” previously appeared in Vingt-trois secrets bien gardés (Twenty-three well-kept secrets), a collection of short pieces originally from 2018 and now reissued as a livre de poche edition. Like those found in Paris en vrac, these stories evoke episodes of Tremblay’s life, from his earliest impressions as a toddler in a high chair to his surgery for a brain tumour in 1998. They appear to be autobiographical, but the third-person narration is somewhat disruptive, as Tremblay distances himself from the memories of the subject who lived them. It probably wouldn’t be right to classify the book as a memoir, given that its episodes are not presented in any particular order and seem somewhat random.

Many of the tales really do read like secrets, even if they’re anecdotes that for the most part would not have made headlines. In one, young Michel dreams of what he’d do if his mother gave him a whole dollar. If it was a Saturday, he’d spend ten cents on a movie; he’d buy an ice cream cone, a bag of chips, and renew his public library subscription for twenty-five cents. But in this dream, he never succeeds in spending an entire dollar. Of greater significance is the time when Marcelle Ferron, the Québécoise painter of Refus global fame, telephoned Tremblay in the late ’80s, informing him that the archbishop of Quebec City had opposed his nomination to the Ordre du Québec and that Robert Bourassa used his veto as premier to prevent him from being granted the high honour, even though all the other votes were in favour. This reminds us how powerful the clergy continued to be three decades after the Quiet Revolution. Never mind, as only a few years later, Tremblay was inducted into the Ordre du Québec.

Both short volumes avoid being self-indulgent or sentimental. Together they offer a delightful look into a groundbreaking author’s life — and some memorable moments spent away from the limelight.