She lives on the edge of precipices, writing on the thin line between life and death. She follows in the footsteps of suicide poets, then she takes up again, alone, the path of trees and life.
With his latest collection of poetry, The apple trees were everywhere overhanging the fencesthe poet Tania Langlais plays Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet of the Soviet revolution, who died of shooting himself in the heart, devoured with love for his Lili Brik, in 1930. Lili Brik will be kidnapped life also in 1978, 48 years later, at the age of 86.
Tania Langlais is troubled by tragic characters. In 2020, she published While Percival fell, which won him the Governor General’s Award, and which addressed the suicide of Virginia Woolf, who died of drowning with stones in her pockets. If she “counts her deaths”, she admits. This is what keeps him alive. “I will not die again,” she writes here, like a promise.
Staged suicide
“It’s a staging of suicide that calms me down,” she reveals in an interview, reached in Outaouais, where she lives. It calms me down, so I won’t do it. It’s a complete catharsis. It’s as if I was letting go of my own “suicidality”. »
Poetry is the hidden melancholy of Tania Langlais, the notes that she throws by hand, in a notebook that she then forgets in a cupboard. “I pretend I don’t write,” she says. In the meantime, she raises a child, she works elsewhere, outside of forbidden sadness. Then, one day, a collection is finished. In it, she says, a line reflects her state well: “it is so cold / in this room / often I sit / next to my pain / often I whisper to it / a farewell”.
Here, it is through Vladimir Mayakovsky, a mad poet, a great child, that she expresses herself, in the love that overcomes all excesses, love to death.
“It’s a gifted love, it’s an adolescent love,” she adds. Mayakovsky is a colossus, he is a giant. »
It is Elsa Triolet, the future muse of Aragon and sister of Lili Brik, who introduces them to each other in a literary salon. Lili Brik, who is married to Ossip Brik and who will remain so, takes full charge of Mayakovsky “She picks him up there, in this living room. She has to dress him, take him to choose clothes. She has his teeth fixed. » Mayakovsky loves him with a mad love. “He was someone who was on fire, who, for example, played Russian roulette quite frequently,” they say. He had other girlfriends elsewhere. […] At one point, he had a loaded gun on him. […] This love is so violent, so hard that it is beautiful. […] One day he had a caged bird delivered to her and he said to her: “Look what you’re doing to me.” » It is “irrevocable” love: a love of cries, of poems, of supplications, of reproaches, the love from which one cannot escape alive.
The apple trees were everywhere overhanging the fences is divided into three elegies: the elegy of the abyss, or “Lili, love me”, the elegy of fear, “The heart aspires to the revolver”, which is also that of death, and the elegy of absence, “I may never have anything to say again”, where we find Lili Brik after the poet’s death. Three songs of sadness, three songs of pain, three songs of love.
It was when she was in her twenties that Tania Langlais encountered the work of Mayakovsky, essentially his Letters to Lili Brik, through which his passion is consumed. The poet had, at that time, taken Russian language courses.
“About the theme of suicide,” she says, “I don’t know if I’m fascinated or obsessed. I’m inhabited, in any case. I am very, very, inhabited by certain figures who had a profound impact on me in my twenties, when I started writing, and these figures have accompanied me ever since. »
Her twenties are also the time when Tania Langlais made her entry into the literary world, she who was the youngest winner of the Émile-Nelligan Prize for her first collection, Twelve beasts in man’s shirts.
It was at this age that she was lastingly marked by the literature she read, and that she experienced this “affective shock” of the writers that Virginia Woolf describes.
“Virginia Woolf said that you recognize a writer by his capacity to take emotional shocks in a day. I think my emotional shocks occurred in my twenties,” she says.
Final words
From her words, she seems to want to reach the end. “Listen to my heart,” she writes, embodying Mayakovsky in his last moments, “it is going to break. » Perhaps this is why she says that all books are failures.
However, beyond the deaths and suicides, the apple trees continue to bloom in Tania Langlais’ books. Hence the title, The apple trees were everywhere overhanging the fencesand the end:
“Here are the remains of the lace / before your shirt / kills us / before we take your body / here are the branches of the apple trees / I have nothing to say / more. »
“In fact, it’s a part of me, and it’s a black part, the one that writes. But the rest of the time, life wants to live and then I want to live it. So that’s a choice that is conscious at the same time. I have the impression that counting my deaths and waltzing with my suicides keeps me on the side of life,” she says.
The impression of having nothing more to say returns throughout the text. After each book, Tania Langlais needs at least two years of complete silence. “I say to myself: “It’s over, I’m not writing anymore.” And I’m not anxious, I’m not distressed about that. I just feel like I have nothing left to say. And then, all of a sudden, something shows up. I hope it won’t be the same thing again, we’re going to hope that to everyone, because at some point…”
“The next book will be necessary,” she writes again, “or it will not be / it will have to be written on water / it will have to be drowned immediately. » Unless you catch it before the end.