In December 1965, doctoral student at McGill University, Jean Marcel, pen name of the medievalist, essayist and novelist Jean-Marcel Paquette (1941-2019), wished to dedicate a book to the author of Tales from the Uncertain Landtakes the liberty of writing to Jacques Ferron in the name of their common friendship with André Major.
Seduced by the verve as much as by the humor, fine and fierce, of his young correspondent, the writer-doctor will quickly be “shoed”. In his own way, despite his “twenty-four years and almost as many illusions”, Jean Marcel was already a character and could have been the product of Ferron’s imagination. They’ll take another twenty years to realize it, but these two had just found each other.
This is how a high-level literary correspondence will begin (“one of the most beautiful that has been established in Quebec, all periods combined,” the editors rightly believe). A friendship that only ended with Ferron’s death on April 22, 1985. Today’s letters collected in The country is always right. Correspondence 1, 1965-1968. An edition prepared by Marcel Olscamp and Lucie Joubert, which will ultimately include three volumes (1965-1968, 1969-1972 and 1973-1985).
The two men, who are twenty years apart, get along like thieves at a fair. Jean Marcel knows how to fool the creator of the Rhinoceros Party. “What I like about you is that you think as you want and that I hardly succeed in changing you,” Ferron wrote to him.
Very few subjects will scare them. They tackle pell-mell History, the Counter-Reformation, Jansenism (one of Jean Marcel’s hobbies), the Jesuits (“I owe them a lot”, admits Ferron), the Quebec linguistic question, medicine and, of course, literature. They also sometimes complain — already! — against the literary supplement of Duty.
A frenzied ping-pong, virtuoso back and forth heated by the flame of incarnate erudition, never above ground. And books shipped on both sides of the Atlantic (in 1966, Jean Marcel moved to Poitiers, France, with his small family, to continue his studies). “Erudition, you see,” wrote Jean Marcel to Ferron, “is in no way a value in itself, nor even a positive value, only if I maintain it in myself in this way, it is because it has the advantage on the invention, that she avoids talking nonsense. »
Ferron, for his part, always a little elusive, master of irony, indulges in it like never before, agreeing to address the question of his influences or directly evoking the women in his life. A few years later, numerous extracts from Ferron’s letters were found unchanged in the Jacques Ferron despite himself (Éditions du Jour, 1970) by Jean Marcel, in the form of a false “interview”.
They also have a long tooth and some of their contemporaries occasionally pay the price. Jean Le Moyne, the critic Jean Éthier-Blais, the novelist Claire Martin and Pierre Elliott Trudeau thus take a few hits. Just like the poet Saint-Denys Garneau, little appreciated by Jacques Ferron and weakly defended by Jean Marcel.
It’s rich, deep, vivid, difficult to summarize and superbly written. There we find the best of what correspondence can be among writers: a laboratory, “a way of thinking” and snapshots of autobiography. We are waiting for the sequel.