Alfred DesRochers (1901-1978) is a forgotten giant of our letters. We know him a little, today, as the father of our national Clémence, who sings him prettily as “the man of [sa] life”, and as the author of these striking verses, taken from his collection HAS The shadow of Orford (1929): “I am a fallen son of a superhuman race, / A race of violent, strong, hazardous people, / And I am sick of the new country, which I get from them, / When the gray days come that September brings back. »
We notice, in the choice of the very “Canadian” theme, as they said at the time, the influence of regionalism, but in an epic and adventurous register. It is not the peasant that DesRochers glorifies, but the runner of the woods: “And I dream of going as the ancestors went; / I hear the great white spaces crying within me, / Which they traversed, shrouded in the breath of hurricanes, / And I abhor, like them, the constraint of the masters. » It is the praise of the free man of the woods, therefore, but versified in a scholarly and dazzling form.
Now, surprise, DesRochers is an autodidact in poetry. He left school after three years of classical lessons, that is to say the equivalent of a fourth secondary education. Critics of his work are unanimous in praising the quality of his style. “His excellent mastery of prosody, whether the sonnet, the alexandrine or the septain, and the rhythm that he knows how to infuse into his texts are quite remarkable,” wrote Professor Roger Chamberland in 1997.
Not content with being a poet and journalist The gallery from Sherbrooke, DesRochers also practiced literary criticism with brio and originality. In Paragraphs (Boréal, 2024, 152 pages), a 1931 book republished for the first time this season, he skillfully engages in an astonishing exercise by offering interviews with books.
The process looks like this. DesRochers is at home and, suddenly, the books in his library want to chat with him. The journalist, who asks for nothing better, therefore eagerly lends himself to the game and lets the books speak in an exchange that amounts to literary criticism, often quite high-level.
The books in question — collections of poetry, novels and critical essays — date from the 1920s and are mostly forgotten today, unjustly in some cases. DesRochers, this is one of its particularities, makes a lot of room for women, a rarity at the time. He thus throws flowers to poets like Alice Lemieux, Jovette Bernier, Éva Senécal and especially Simone Routier.
Through a commentary on a collection of short stories by Jean-Charles Harvey, he sets out his point of view on the place of women in literature. “The maintenance of life is impossible without women and we cannot attempt, in painting, sculpture or literature, to reproduce life as a whole, without women playing a leading role. If our literature is mediocre, as some critics like to assert — perhaps rightly — it is because Woman is almost absent from it. » He then rejoiced at the fact that “woman, not only passively, but actively, invaded the literary domain of French Canada”.
DesRochers multiplies the brilliant considerations on classicism, which is intelligent because it “forces interior reading”, and on verse, which “was developed by instinct, in all languages”, because it corresponds to the inner human faculties. For him, the critic must judge a work taking into account the environment in which it was born, but also in the light of universal sensitivity – “beauty, wherever it is found” – and national tradition.
He adds that a work must be evaluated according to the rules of the game it gives itself, which I do not completely agree with. Of course, we will not judge a comedy with the criteria of tragedy, but the critic, it is my conviction, has the right to challenge everything, even an author’s project. Criticism, notes DesRochers, is “as subjective as any literary work” and essentially contains “the reactions of a temperament”.
A resolute supporter of the Americanness of French-Canadian literature, DesRochers is convinced that we have nothing to offer the world by aping European culture and that we must instead “decide once and for all to live on American soil and seek salvation only in ourselves”, in French, obviously.
The spirit of North America, he wrote, is “discontent and the search for the best.” We must therefore write, like the “rough colonists” from whom we descend, with intrepidity, in our own way, without excessive concern for perfection. Like fallen sons and daughters of a superhuman race!
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.