I don’t really know what to think of Saint-Denys Garneau (1912-1943). I love his poems, animated by a striking simplicity shrouded in mystery. They unfold like little abstract but familiar canvases, drawn by a young man who is both impulsive and strange, even, at times, disturbing. Along with Nelligan and Miron, Saint-Denys Garneau belongs to the elite trio of Quebec poetry. There is a before and an after each of them, and their words, unlike those of most of their contemporaries, still resonate today.
I love the poet who crosses the torrent by leaping from one rock to another and who finds balance in the middle of the jump, the poet who “walks beside a joy” while waiting to join it, the poet with a fragile heart threatened by a cooing bird. However, when I read the letters he sent to his friends, I tell myself that I would not have wanted to be one of those.
“Exasperating is the word that suits me,” he wrote to a friend in 1935. I can only agree with him. The young man, painter and poet, is certainly brilliant, but God he is hard to follow in his convolutions around his “me”, the only real subject of his diary and his letters.
In March 1937, Saint-Denys Garneau, thanks to his mother’s money, published his only and famous collection Regards and games in space, warmly received by critics and sold little (in poetry, it is the norm, even today). The following month, dejected, he burns a good part of the unsold and then declares to his friends that he does not want to hear any more about it.
In December of the same year, he confided to the novelist Robert Élie that he “no longer likes to write”. One can even wonder if he ever liked it, since, in 1934, he affirmed to another friend that he wanted to flee the temptation of serious writing, which was too exhausting for him. But what was going on in the soul “of this brilliant, handsome, joking boy, who seemed to be launched at full speed into a strictly natural life”, to use the words of Gilles Marcotte in A literature that is made (BQ, 1994)?
Author of a biography of the poet, in 2015, at Boréal, the professor and critic Michel Biron tries to answer the question in The letter as self-fiction (PUM, 2022, 184 pages), a careful analysis of the 460 letters known to Garneau. A fine reader, Biron seeks the common thread of a work and a character that is disconcerting to say the least.
I have always been uncomfortable with medical interpretations of disturbing works. Respect for art requires, it seems to me, the suspension of these categories as keys to understanding. It is too easy, in fact, to apply diagnostic grids relating to mental health to what escapes us.
Faced with Garneau’s neurasthenia and social phobia, however, faced with his bipolar attitudes, I admit I was tempted, especially because the physical vulnerability of the poet is proven, by this expedient, which Biron has the wisdom to avoid in favor of a more appropriate and, above all, richer literary interpretation.
Garneau, who “was not a real diligent reader”, notes Gilles Marcotte, nevertheless had “two bedside readings”, specifies Biron: The evil flowersBaudelaire, and The imitation of Jesus Christan anonymous work of Christian piety from the 15the century, extremely popular in Catholic circles. These two works, continues Biron, “correspond to his experience of the world, his refusal to believe in worldly things, his distrust of love, his passion for solitude, his ideal of purity, to his taste for mysticism […]. » Mystical, Garneau, yes, but half mystical, held back from going all out in the spiritual and artistic adventure by a burning lucidity which makes him constantly doubt the authenticity of his approach.
Great-grandson of historian François-Xavier Garneau, grandson of poet Alfred Garneau, a young bourgeois educated in the most renowned classical colleges in Quebec, Saint-Denys Garneau pushes himself to his limits through his obsession authenticity, through his desire to “reach the music of his being”, writes Biron, which constantly eludes him.
Feeling dead to himself, as he confides to a correspondent, he continues to write, in private, to fight “against his own unreality or against the reality of this dead ‘I’, having to justify himself in the face of alive,” explains Biron. His exacerbated religious sensitivity feeds “his impression of never existing enough”, rightly notes the essayist.
In a resounding 1960 essay, the anti-nationalist essayist Jean Le Moyne, a great friend of Garneau, attributed the poet’s early death to the narrow French-Canadian religious mentality. It was nonsense. Clearly, Garneau didn’t need others to torture himself.