Source Material

Contemporary writers may be naturally curious about their predecessors, the lucky and talented who managed to pen works that resonate after their deaths. More questionable is whether the lives of canon creators make for good material. The last few years have seen a surprising number of prominent Quebec authors publish books about friendships among the icons of American letters. Like highbrow versions of Marvel adaptations, such projects have the advantage of familiarity, appealing to established audiences who will pick up on the allusions. And like one Avengers movie too many, they run the risk of being derivative, veering into the territory of self-indulgent fan fiction.

Thankfully, recent books by Louis Hamelin, Dominique Fortier, and Mélikah Abdelmoumen all have something going for them, even if their strengths and motives vary. Hamelin narrates Henry David Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond and his relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson to investigate the creative potential of nature writing. Fortier’s take on Herman Melville’s attachment to Nathaniel Hawthorne showcases the potential for obsession in connections that never become physical. Abdelmoumen’s main concern is cultural appropriation. She returns to the controversy around William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the white Virginian adopted the perspective of a slave, but she filters her reading through Styron’s friendship with James Baldwin to ask questions about art, loyalty, and identity. All three authors integrate aspects of their own lives, linking past to present and francophone literary traditions to those of their English-speaking neighbours.

Within Quebec, Hamelin has some claim to canonical status himself. In 1989, he won a Governor General’s Award for his code-switching debut, La rage, and he further cemented his status in 2010 with his sprawling, polyphonic take on the October Crisis, La constellation du lynx (published in translation as October 1970). Before becoming a writer, Hamelin trained in environmental biology, and his scientific background has lately been on full display. Un lac le matin (A lake one morning) is the middle book in a planned trilogy on naturalists; the first, on the French American ornithologist John James Audubon, appeared in 2020, and the third is to focus on Grey Owl, the conservationist who faked Indigenous identity. This second entry revolves around Thoreau’s decision to relocate to a cabin on Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, and his slow realization that his lifestyle choice merited recording.

Like Thoreau’s Walden, from 1854, or Helen Humphreys’s Followed by the Lark, another recent take on the transcendentalist that appeared a few months after Hamelin’s novel, Un lac le matin is not overly concerned with plot. The main source of tension is Thoreau’s complex connection with Emerson, who literally owned the land beneath the younger writer’s hut. Drawing on Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey and, delightfully, Star Wars, Hamelin presents the older essayist as an Obi‑Wan Kenobi figure, a mentor who must be surpassed, all while weaving in a thread of sexual tension between Thoreau and Emerson’s perceptive wife, Lidian.

The star of this book, however, is the environment. Thoreau muses on the importance of familiarity with the natural world: “Isn’t the true owner of the forest the one who can name its plants and taste its fruits? The one who frequents its wildflowers, visits its trees as if they were old friends, and knows how to recognize the birdsong rising from the land over which he walks, enamoured?” This perspective infuses Hamelin’s prose. His sentences bristle with species, such that “the groves of buttonbrush and willow that hugged the riverbanks came to life under the vibrant accents of blackbirds and bobolinks.” Nor is his affection reserved for grand landscapes and remote wilderness. In a personal thread, Hamelin describes his own transition from a remote cabin in Abitibi to a suburb of Sherbrooke, where he marvels at the arrival of a merlin falcon in his backyard and the return of deer to urban parks during the pandemic.

Such descriptions are balanced by an awareness of social complexity, channelled first and foremost through Alex Therrien. A rustic lumberjack who labours near Thoreau’s cabin, Therrien appears as a forerunner for the mass migration of French Canadians to New England factories. In Walden, Thoreau dedicated a few pages to the man, unable to decide whether he was “as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child.” Hamelin reuses most of Thoreau’s account, including Therrien’s affection for woodchuck meat and dismay over the idea of writing himself: “How would I know what to put first? And to think about spelling at the same time? I think it would kill me. . . .” There is, of course, a delightful irony in revisiting this figure through the prism of Hamelin’s accomplished prose, as he implicitly critiques Thoreau’s condescension while commemorating the history of French Canadians serving as cheap labour. Likewise, Hamelin includes a conversation between Thoreau and an enslaved man fleeing north and details his interactions with some Penobscot men on his quest to summit Mount Katahdin, episodes that add welcome texture to the surrounding social world.

Fortier’s approach to Melville is more invested in metaphor than in such specificities. La part de l’océan (The ocean’s share) chronicles the author’s struggle to finish Moby-Dick, published in 1851, while drawing on his impassioned letters to Hawthorne to suggest that his primary motivation is to secure the latter’s approval. “You don’t fall into friendship,” Fortier observes, only to insist that writers most definitely can.

Melville first meets the more established writer on a hike and is invited to make a social call. Awestruck, Melville dives into Hawthorne’s prose, observing that the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse is “a continent that will forever change the map of his internal world.” Such poetic language is Fortier’s stock-in-trade. Melville, in writing an anonymous review of Hawthorne’s work, “opened his heart like one opens an orange, like one opens a wound,” and later observes that his friend “cannot love the ocean; you are the ocean.” Fortier deployed a similar style in her elegant long essay on Emily Dickinson, Les villes de papier (The paper cities), which won the Prix Renaudot in 2020. Its effectiveness in this case depends on whether readers are willing to plunge with Melville into his obsession. For all the reality of their intense emotions, the infatuated tend to appear melodramatic from the outside.

Whether Hawthorne reciprocated his friend’s feelings is uncertain; his replies to Melville’s effusive missives have, evocatively, been lost. Fortier allows for ambiguity here while injecting a satisfying dose of feminism through the perspective of both men’s wives. Lizzie Melville, who transcribes her husband’s work, considers his neglect in a series of punctuation-free passages, observing of Moby-Dick that “nowhere in this novel are there women if I pointed it out to him he’d get mad and yet it’s the universe he wants to live in he already lives there as much as among us it’s doubtless his real country.” Meanwhile, Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, rightly suspects a rival in Melville and burns one of his letters, even as she paints Lizzie’s portrait in a declaration of her own artistic autonomy. Similar points of reference would have been helpful for Fortier’s parallel narrative, which traces her bond with a poet named Simon. The two swap books, traipse through antique stores, and obsessively text in what is not quite a love affair; intriguingly, both sometimes switch to English, “as if to manage to say certain things to each other, we needed a language that was half-foreign.” But Fortier withholds key details: How old is she during this episode? Is she single, dating, married? How are those around her reacting? Unmoored from her overall life, the friendship floats untethered, leaving it unclear whether her passion is understandable or unhealthy.

The personal is far more concrete in Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me, first published in French in 2022. In the most straightforwardly essayistic of these texts, Abdelmoumen begins by describing her upbringing. She was born in Saguenay to a white Québécoise mother and a father from Tunisia. Raised in Montreal, she has “no childhood memory of asking myself about my identity, my last name, or my nose — my Arab schnoz.” Matters became more complicated with age, as she dealt with the exclusionary nationalism of some of her mother’s sovereignist friends and spent twelve years in Lyon, France, when anti-immigrant sentiment was becoming increasingly mainstream.

Abdelmoumen’s own political awakening led her to the work of James Baldwin, who lived for years as a gay Black man in Paris and referenced anti-Arab discrimination in his short stories. Through Baldwin, Abdelmoumen discovered William Styron (perhaps best remembered as the author of Sophie’s Choice) and a controversy that still echoes in many contemporary debates. In the 1960s, Baldwin encouraged his friend, the grandson of Virginia slave owners, to write a novel from the perspective of an enslaved Black man who led a rebellion in 1831. The Confessions of Nat Turner won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and triggered a firestorm of polemics, with one African American writer describing Styron’s Nat as “a neurasthenic, Hamlet-like white intellectual in blackface.”

Recent parallels are easy to find; indeed, Abdelmoumen’s book began as an article for a special issue of Spirale on cultural appropriation following the 2018 scandals surrounding Robert Lepage’s plays SLĀV, which cast a white woman as Harriet Tubman, and Kanata, which dealt with Indigenous history but had no Indigenous actors. Abdelmoumen is more interested in posing questions than in answering them, and she offers additional examples that blur the border between interracial solidarity and co-optation. What about the Jewish American Abel Meeropol, who penned the lyrics to “Strange Fruit”? Or John Howard Griffin’s 1961 treatise, Black Like Me, in which the white journalist donned blackface to expose racism? The gesture may be offensive by contemporary standards, but Griffin had to take his family into hiding and was nearly beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan.

In the case of Styron, Abdelmoumen acknowledges the author’s commitment to creating a tragic hero and takes his lesser-known critics seriously. And she keeps one eye trained on Baldwin, particularly on his role as moderator of a discussion between Styron and the actor Ossie Davis, who insisted on the Black community’s right to represent itself. In this nuanced dialogue, Baldwin refused to take a side, leading Abdelmoumen to observe that “sometimes we have no other choice but to simply maintain our equilibrium between two opposite positions — as if we were on a tightrope, in a perpetual and vital balancing act.”

Abdelmoumen exercises this role herself, as a “frontier-dweller” who has now become an authority within Quebec literary circles. The former editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, she has published nine other books, including, most recently, the thriller Petite-Ville and an essay on feminist activism, Les engagements ordinaires (Ordinary commitments). Baldwin, Styron et moi won the Prix Pierre-Vadeboncoeur in 2022; now it is her first text to appear in English, and Catherine Khordoc, her translator, should be applauded for initiating the project. Too often, in the anglophone media, the anti-immigrant discourse of François Legault’s government appears as representative of the province. Abdelmoumen’s work, by contrast, demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.

These works are not necessarily masterpieces, nor are they purely dependent on their sources. Hamelin’s and Fortier’s novels are sufficiently poetic and immersive to require of readers only a passing interest in Thoreau or Melville, whereas the political stakes of Abdelmoumen’s volume are sharp enough to leave one with a desire to rediscover the originals. Above all, these books demonstrate that writing about authors should not always be left to the academics. Less concerned with breaking new ground, Hamelin, Fortier, and Abdelmoumen can instead concentrate on humanizing their subjects, even as they display the act of reading as an emotional and intellectual journey in its own right. In their best moments, the three authors combine the personal with the traces of the past and show how we continue to make meaning in dialogue with one another.