Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what remains? In his monthly series Should I re-read…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Today, Christian Mistral (1964–2020), the first Quebec author to make his debut there, his own was sensational in the world of letters, in the middle of a gloomy decade.
He knew book fairs and prison cells (those of Parthenais and Bordeaux); the intoxication of success and the headaches of tomorrow; the label of enfant terrible then that of wife beater. He was also recognized by his dandy looks, his eternal hat firmly riveted on his head, having made rue Saint-Denis his kingdom, and certain bars, including Les Beaux Esprits, his headquarters.
Christian Mistral never wanted to go unnoticed, at least in his glory days when he published Vamp, in 1988. This first novel, written by a 23-year-old young man who had hardly wandered around the school benches and was already fueled by alcohol, was received as much as a bombshell as a manifesto, that of Generation X with which Mistral totally identified. Not to mention his descriptions of Montreal which, under his gaze, overflowed with sensuality, but also oozed despair.
The writer, it must be said, was precocious in many areas, he who had self-published his first collection of poetry at the age of 14 – a gesture of love for a girl who preferred to burn his copy… —, married at 16, divorced two years later, and became a father in between. Mistral was also very fond of Montreal nights, and his drug addiction was no secret. If his consumption posed a problem (including financially!), his mood swings took on a sadly legendary dimension long before his death. Indeed, there are countless testimonies describing him both with unfailing loyalty in friendship and devastating arrogance in his worst days.
I loved Montreal, I was crazy about it. I kissed her insolently on all her metro entrances; we were tens of thousands to impregnate her entrails from one dawn to another and the beauty was humming with pleasure.
Some have also seen in Vampand all subsequent books (Vulture, Vacuum, Valium, Leon, Coco and Mulligan) disguised autobiographies written with a sometimes exceptional romantic breath. Before things got out of hand and justice caught up with him once again in the 1990s, his flamboyant personality added a grid of analysis to a personal and abundant work. Jean-Roch Boivin, former literary critic at the Duty and at See recently deceased, said of him “that he behaves in life like a reincarnation of [Jean-Paul] Sartre “. Nothing less.
A family affair
Aged 81 and now retired, André Vanasse vividly remembers his meeting with Christian Mistral. Then literary director at Quebec America, he had not finished the manuscript of Vamp that he was already urging its author to publish it under his sign. With the success that we know, and the excesses that followed.
Because the one who was also a professor of literature at UQAM and a novelist (The Lagacé saga, Life backwards, Rafi’s flute) recognizes that he had “a sort of father-son relationship with Mistral”. Indeed, the lyricist of Scotch nights, the great success of the singer Luce Dufault, often drowned her sorrow for not having known her biological father, one of the many wounds that Mistral hid somehow. And that his erratic behavior often betrayed.
“I have never been afraid of the Christian Mistrals of this world! proclaims André Vanasse, admitting all the same that at the time of Quebec America as at XYZ, where he will continue his work as an editor from the 1990s, he made him see all the colors. This is corroborated by his son, Alexandre Vanasse, publisher of Quebec letters, involved very early alongside his father in the literary world. “I still remember a call from the secretary at XYZ, completely panicked, asking me to intervene as quickly as possible between Christian and André: they weren’t fighting, but they were shouting merrily! remembers the one who quickly became Mistral’s adoptive brother. As for the surrogate father, he remains convinced that Mistral would never have hit him, while admitting that “in truth, what killed him was his violence”.
After three liters of white wine and sixty cigarettes, we have wood in our bones. It’s dangerous what you can do in those moments. You can kill someone just like that, for reasons that seem excellent, and the worst thing when you think about it, is that you risk not remembering it the next day, neither how nor why. Twenty-five years in the penitentiary for a crime that we no longer remember is hard time.
While he was more in the legal than literary headlines in the 1990s, Christian Mistral already knew the mysteries of justice, convicted of fraud in 1984, of obstruction and intrusion in 1989. Feats that Louis Hamelin was unaware, he who knew him well at the time of his meteoric rise… which coincided with his. Her first novel, Rabiespublished in 1989 by XYZ, earned him the Governor General’s Award… and the respect of the man with whom he shared the same literary director, André Vanasse.
At that time, the two writers from the same generation, who had quickly become his disenchanted champions, would occasionally see each other, to the point where Mistral said of Hamelin that he, too, was his brother. “He was looking for his father, he was looking for a family, and envied mine a lot, says the one who is also a columnist at the Duty. But he took up a lot of space, moved a lot of air, and we didn’t have the same vision of what a writer is: me recluse in his cabin in the woods, he fascinated by cursed writers like Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller. At some point, it was no longer sustainable. I had to move away to preserve my health, both physical and mental. Basically, he was a rather unhappy person: that doesn’t excuse anything, but it explains certain things…”
Legend or shooting star?
Hamelin recognizes, however, that we can never take away from Mistral her rare talent, dazzling in Vampwell stated in Vulturealthough the author of The Lynx Constellationrecognizes that there are two entrenched camps: some revere the first book, others the second. “I reread pages of Vamp before our interview. Whatever one thinks of the character and his life, it is a classic of Quebec literature. At the time, this book was a shock to me, and shaped the writer I have become. »
This dazzling pen and the concerts of praise it aroused ended up, without pun intended, intoxicating Christian Mistral. His alliance with André Vanasse lasted a while, the two men having distanced themselves. As for Alexandre Vanasse, he had never completely cut ties with him, visiting him on occasion in his small apartment on rue Rachel where he would end his days. Remembering both a being “definitely smarter than the average” and a guy who could show up at his house “at 3 a.m. after a fight in a bar”, he would have liked to reconnect with him on the professional plan. “I offered him a column in Quebec letters. The first, on Gilles Vigneault, was magnificent, but afterwards, he gave us his funds, constantly asking for advances, it couldn’t go on. “A casualness to which his father was also confronted: “A striking figure in Quebec literature, certainly, but a striking figure, it must work. Yes, he became someone, but it was still not Jesus Christ! »
In interview at The Press in 1995, Christian Mistral already sensed the ambiguous relationship that we will have with his work, and that his death has not completely erased. “This is perhaps my only object of sadness: I have always wanted my books to defend themselves, to be read outside of the knowledge that we believe we have of the author. Will this always be possible?