Once a month, Le Devoir de literature, under the pen of Quebec writers, proposes to revisit in the light of current events in the works of the pancient and recent asse of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
The United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the judgment Roe v. wade sent a shock wave this summer to our neighbors to the south, but not only: in Canada and in several other countries as well. How far could we go? To what extent could we slash the rights acquired by women at the cost of fierce struggles? Thanks to the suffragette movement, Canadian women won the right to vote in 1918, two years before their counterparts in the United States. In Quebec, however, we will have to wait until 1940.
But already, during the 1920s and 1930s, many Quebec women were no longer satisfied with the traditional models reserved for women: they dreamed of emancipation, wanted to develop their intellectual abilities, practice an art. Some, like Jovette Bernier, Éva Senécal and Medjé Vézina, became journalists, worked for daily newspapers and magazines:The Event, The Tribune, Canada, The Modern Review Where The People’s Review, for example. And they engage in poetic or romantic writing.
Poet Simone Routier is no exception. She wanted to free herself from the bourgeois family of Quebec into which she was born in 1901. This great-niece of the historian François-Xavier Garneau studied at the École normale des Ursulines and entered the École des beaux-arts to learn modeling. A violinist, she also takes part in concerts. While leading the social life of the young girls of her milieu, she was interested in literature. In 1920, she met Alain Grandbois, whom she began to date, but she broke off her engagement in 1923, sensing that he would not be the desired husband. And then, even if she dreams of true love, is she sure that marriage suits her desire for freedom?
Because she is very critical of the condition of a housewife. In his correspondence with the writer Harry Bernard, edited by Guy Gaudreau and Micheline Tremblay under the title I would like to be a man, she affirms in fact: “I have a free and sometimes bohemian mentality and I lead the most bourgeois and virtuous life that can be imagined. It becomes tiring in the long run, I would like to be a man, I would travel and live elsewhere. »
In fact, Simone Routier wanted to go to Paris and in 1929 signed a poem with a very significant title: I leave. But how to subsidize his stay there? If she published a collection of poetry and won the David Prize, she would receive a scholarship of $1,700, a pretty sum for the time, and she could leave. Determined, she works hard and asks the poet Paul Morin, whom she meets at a ball, to read some of her texts. The author of enamel peacock encourages her and gives her comments that move her forward.
Noteworthy literary debut
Simone Routier publishes The teenage immortal in 1928. A revised and expanded reissue appeared in 1929. The poetic collection was hailed by critics such as Louis Dantin, Alfred DesRochers and Camille Roy. The young poet does not yet know how to choose among her influences, she tries out various forms and tones, even including haikus. She is looking for herself, but we already recognize a personal voice and we say that the book has undeniable qualities despite its clumsiness. Today, some of these blunders seem to us inadmissible daring at a time when the rules of versification were very strict.
Simon Routier has guts: she submits her book to the David Prize and she will get it, but tied with Alice Lemieux, which will earn her half of the desired sum, ie $850. You can imagine his disappointment. More than five decades later, she will return to this fact in the magazine The writings of French Canada. ” […] I thus received only the half amount, a certain member of the jury, it was entrusted to me, having insisted that I share it with another woman. So it took, our feminists would say today, two women to make one man! recalls Marie-Claude Brosseau in Three women writers from the interwar period.
In 1930, Simone Routier nevertheless boarded the liner France. She tells herself that by leading the life of a student, she will be able to last a year in Paris. But she liked it: she studied French literature at the Sorbonne, found work as a cartoonist-cartographer at the Public Archives of Canada, became a correspondent for the newspaper The Event de Québec while contributing to other newspapers and magazines. She participates in French literary life, which allows her to make connections. And above all, she continues to write.
His big theme? Love. But it would be wrong to consider Simone Routier as a sentimental writer. Melancholy, like the romantic poets, she practices lyrical poetry. However, she is not the type to attach herself to literary schools. Whether The teenage immortal already testified to a modernity, his two following collections, Those who will be lovedpublished in 1931, and temptationsin 1934, distanced themselves from the romantic spirit while showing a more assured pen.
A forced return
Fate will cruelly change the life of Simone Routier. In August 1939, she lost her French fiancé, Louis Corty, in an automobile accident, three days before their wedding. In September 1939, France declared war on Germany and, in June 1940, Simone Routier had to return home: the Canadian government decided to repatriate its citizens. If the Second World War had not taken place, would she have prolonged her stay on the Old Continent, as Anne Hébert would later do, who would spend more than 30 years in France? Maybe…
We find Simone Routier in 1941 at the Ottawa Archives and, the same year, she publishes Farewell, Paris! Diary of a Canadian evacuee, which will be very successful. A twist, however: she then decided to devote herself to monastic life. In December, she entered the Dominican monastery of Berthierville, but lived there only 10 months: this life did not suit her. A woman of action, she returned to Ottawa, resumed her activities, resumed writing and published in France, in 1947, two other collections of poetry, Psalms of the enclosed garden and The long journey.
Very different from previous collections, his last two books always talk about love. But human love has found an outlet in the love of God, which allows her to overcome the death of her fiancé. And yet, the presence of the beloved is still significant in these verses of the poem I ask “He was a perishable man; but with a plenitude of gifts which was a kind of challenge. // It was an oversight of the law of exile on earth that this meeting was a double communion that was too perfect. »
The poet will add in the following stanza: “It is a happiness that taught me both discovery and uprooting and whose soul I remain forever enriched”. Simone Routier is not a mystic: if she finds in spirituality the strength necessary to transcend pain, she recognizes that “even chaste, the flesh cannot forget everything”.
In 1947, Simone Routier was admitted to the Académie canadienne-française, and it was the poet Rina Lasnier who delivered the introductory speech. In 1950, Routier was assigned to the embassy in Brussels, which gave him the opportunity to participate in several international literary meetings in Europe. In 1955, we find her in Boston, at the Canadian consulate where, in 1957, she is named vice-consul. The following year, she married Fortunat Drouin, a doctor, and returned to Montreal. She will not publish any more books until her death in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, in 1987, at the age of 86. But she will have published five collections of poetry in about twenty years, which was a lot at the time!
Avant-garde, Simone Routier had an extraordinary destiny and remains an exceptional literary figure today. Despite outdated features, her poetry with strongly autobiographical accents announces the writing of the intimate that women will practice from the 1980s. “Very up to date, steeped in two modernities, American and French”, underlines the critic Louis Dantin in his preface to Those who will be lovedthe poet accurately paints the feeling of love, reports on the emotions of the body, shows herself to be a keen observer of everyday life and, in her latest collections, delicately addresses the need for spirituality that human beings feel.
To read Simone Routier is to enter into a poetry of interiority which, far from sentimentality, shows itself capable of distancing and humor: “The bruised face which does not know how to smile // is a bad face and which we must forget”, she writes in the poem Wisdom. With her, emotion is inconceivable without reason, nor introspection without constant attention to the work of writing. His poetry deserves to be better known.