Marie-Claire Blais or the death of a queen

I thought she was going to write until she was 100, at least. Or until the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Every year, I got ready for this announcement, in wild hope, because it met all the criteria. In particular for what Alfred Nobel said about this prize which should reward a work rendering service to humanity and “which demonstrates a powerful ideal”.

The work of Marie-Claire Blais embraced all of humanity in what is most beautiful and ugliest, and carried within it a form of unshakeable faith in art and love. We can say without exaggerating that it was of the caliber of Marcel Proust. As recently as this year, an article by Quill & Quire pointed out that if we had to nominate another Canadian writer for the Nobel after Alice Munro, there was Margaret Atwood and Marie-Claire Blais, which was also recalled by a magnificent portrait of her published in 2019 in the New Yorker, entitled Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais ? Writing in French in the United States, when you’re not French in France, put it in a strange box for the Nobel, which often rewards a writer and a country, that’s my impression.

Marie-Claire emailed me articles about her in the United States, as well as photos of her beloved cats, asking me to return photos of my dog ​​to her.

We both shared in this love of animals; I understood her and she understood me when we were devastated to lose them, and that’s kind of how I effortlessly pierced the huge shell of her legendary shyness. So with each hurricane that hit Key West, I worried about her, knowing that she couldn’t leave her cats in peril.

She was supported by a small circle of tireless admirers, in Paris, Quebec and the United States, very grateful to them, since it was through one of them, Edmund Wilson, that she obtained in 1963 the Guggenheim scholarship which would change its destiny and anchor it definitively on American soil.

She knew what she had escaped. Born into a working-class family in Quebec in 1939, her first novel, The beautiful beast, published in 1959 when she was only 20 years old, had been rather poorly received in the Great Darkness. We have no idea what it was like to be born poor, woman, gay and the soul of a writer in the Quebec of those years. We really have no idea. “A young girl who wrote books, we mistreated her, we didn’t like her, we didn’t welcome her well,” Marie-Claire told me in 2018, recalling that, like Anne Hébert, she too had preferred to live elsewhere to write.

It is something that she could not forget, and the most magnificent thing about this exceptional being is that she did not forget anyone behind her. For 60 years of writing, she has put her pen to the service of the poor of the earth, the marginalized and minorities, not limiting herself to national borders. It was a work of great violence, because it did not ignore the injustices and cruelties of this world, but it naturally sided with those who struggle and aspire to live in spite of everything. Even the executioners were entitled to his compassionate gaze. And the animals that inhabit his novels were not to be outdone. Such a look is absolutely rare, I swear.

I will forever remember her appearance at dusk in Key West, the first time I visited her magical island, which she shares with another monument of letters, Michel Tremblay. An interview with Marie-Claire Blais did not take place in the morning, it was a nocturnal one. She was very frail, but had the look of a rock star, almost the look of a Keith Richards, with her eternal bangs on smoky eyes, overly painted cheeks and her leather coat. As if she had never left the rebellious and protesting spirit of the 1960s, which she says very well in her essays American crossings (2012) and Inside the threat (2019), which are manuals of courage. At the forefront of progressive struggles, she was convinced that they were lasting changes in our societies. Today’s turmoil reminded him of yesterday, like an uninterrupted fight, an indefatigable resistance against conformism. As long as it brews, there is hope, I understand.

The most important thing I took away from our discussions over the past 20 years is how optimistic she was and believed in the evolution of human beings, however desperation may seize us, and did she portray the torments and the dangers of our time. I was galvanized each time by his confidence, when so many others of his generation think that there is only the flood after them. In 2012, in the midst of the student crisis in Quebec, when she published The young man without a future, she recognized in the youth her own anger, and the importance of the revolt, for a refreshment of this feverish planet. “These young people are all over the world,” she told me. We see them, and they watch us live. Despite everything, I believe there is something very positive at the moment. It is a bit like the beginning of this new beginning. This revolt is very healthy. It is all these movements that we try to translate in books, the return to a kind of joy, of beauty. ”

Marie-Claire Blais was thinking the same thing the last time we spoke, in October, for the release ofA heart inhabited by a thousand voices, in which the writer took up the characters of Nights of the underground and of The angel of loneliness, revisiting LGBTQ + struggles. She refused to dwell on the setbacks, she recalled the advances, while observing, alert, a rise in homophobia and violence in particular against trans people. “We cannot be indifferent, we must denounce this, it is a duty,” said the one who remained marked by the hecatomb of AIDS, which has mown so many of her friends. “It’s another racism, which has a taboo form. A double racism, because very often, it is young blacks, Asians or Latinos who are killed. ”

She had left me with inspiring words, predicting that the women of this world were not going to let go, and win.

My heart sinks, and tears flow by themselves when I thinkA heart inhabited by a thousand voices was the last book published during his lifetime. And I can’t help but find that this title describes her perfectly. She was really that, a heart inhabited by a thousand voices, the voices of the voiceless, as the editions of Le Boréal have rightly pointed out.

I received as a shock the news of his death, Tuesday evening, very late, on vacation in the countryside, while all my books by Marie-Claire Blais, at least thirty, are in Montreal. It doesn’t matter, since his work has been with me for so long. Since A season in the life of Emmanuel, which I read at 16, one of the first Quebec novels that dazzled me. I was definitely marked by the terrible grandmother Antoinette and Jean Le Maigre. It was just a start – and what a start! – rewarded with the Prix Médicis in 1966, to which we often wanted to reduce it, while he opened the way not only to his own vocation, but also to all the Quebec writers who were to follow. Marie-Claire Blais knew right down to her flesh what requirements literature demanded – loneliness, precariousness, hard work – and throughout her life, she never ceased to encourage young feathers who sought her advice. Without Blais, there would be no Kevin Lambert, Audrée Wilhelmy or Heather O’Neill. It’s not for nothing that his equally brilliant brother Réjean Ducharme dedicated to him L’Océantume in 1968, “respectfully, like a princess”. She eventually became a queen, and I was not ashamed to bow down at her feet.

I could have lost sight of Marie-Claire Blais if my profession had not relaunched me in its immense romantic cycle Thirsts, a masterpiece of contemporary literature, an unparalleled project that crushes almost everything that came before it. Marie-Claire Blais refused to be a dusty classic in a must-read list in school, and that’s good. I would like to remind, once again if you will allow me, that in the media whim of the primorancers, less intimidating to read than the writers who have an imposing work, Marie-Claire Blais offered a masterful lesson in literature and proved that age has nothing to do with relevance, when you’re a writer and you refuse to sit on your laurels. She was not stimulated by ambition, fame or prices, but by an inner fire that can never be extinguished, since it fed on the embers of what makes you want to live.

Thank you, Marie-Claire, for the whirlwind of dotless sentences that made me walk in Key West and the souls of Petites Cendres, Fleur, Daniel, Mai or Rebecca, and hundreds of others, which made me understand that we move forward together even if we sometimes have the impression of going in circles in the solitude of our head or our little island.

No one is an island, we are the world.

And I sincerely hope that your friends take care of your orphan cats.