I have long thought that Michel Tremblay had a difficult youth. I only knew, then, his first plays and The real world? (1987). The tragic characters in these works led me to believe that the playwright had not had it easy. In front of the despair of Sisters-in-law (1968), in front of the darkness ofYours, forever, your Marie-Lou (1971), one of Tremblay’s most moving pieces, given the murky and tense atmosphere that reigns in The real world?, I concluded that the writer, who had discovered himself homosexual at a time when things were not going well, was a wounded person. I found his work strong, but too depressing to be assiduously patronized. Without moderation, tragedy undermines the taste for life.
In 1998, at the Théâtre du Rideau vert, I discovered another Tremblay in the play Again, if you allow. On stage, Rita Lafontaine played Nana, the playwright’s storyteller mother, and André Brassard, the director, played Tremblay himself. A little gem of tenderness and filial love, the work revealed a happy Tremblay, the son of an exuberant mother who had illuminated his childhood. The tragedian, I learned that evening to my astonishment, was a happy man.
Less known and less praised than his darker theater, the luminous side of Tremblay’s work, mainly published in prose, is my favorite. Assorted candies (2002), a modest masterpiece of humor and sensitivity, recounts with contagious energy scenes from childhood experienced in the Plateau Mont-Royal apartment, where Tremblay and his extended family live. It’s Pagnol à la Québécoise, that is to say more comical.
Twenty-three well-kept secrets (2018) belongs to the same vein, that of the intimate memorialist. Tremblay, in short impromptus in a simple, lively and controlled style, returns to small episodes of his life. We laugh when he ejects a lump of puff pastry on the tie of Jack Lang, then French Minister of Culture who has just awarded him an important distinction, but we are moved when he describes his father in tears, at the airport , worried about seeing her 25-year-old son fly for the first time.
In the same book, Tremblay strongly evokes his love of music, classical in particular, his almost regret at not having become a musician and his choice, since then, to cherish this art, “sometimes a refuge against the sufferings of the world. “existence, sometimes a lever of sublime exaltations which leave him exhausted with happiness”, as an amateur, that is to say without understanding it, to preserve its power and its mystery.
This passion of Tremblay is fully expressed in Musical offerings (Leméac / Actes Sud, 2021, 168 pages), his new collection of memories narrated with the same youthful energy, mixed with a subtle wisdom.
The almost eighty-year-old writer keeps in him traces of the tragedian he was, that he may still be, and does not ignore the tragedies of existence. Here he relates with emotion the death of Bernard, his favorite brother, and his subsequent sadness, drowned in a flood of tears nourished by listening to the Trio in the minor by Tchaikovsky. Age, however, seems to have instilled in him a desire for gentleness and kindness. He confides, for example, to feel remorse for fifty years when he thinks of that evening of 1969 when he made fun of a Luis Mariano on the decline, struggling to sing correctly. Mexico at Place des Arts.
At fourteen, Tremblay already loved opera. With his meager salary as a barbecue chicken walker and above all thanks to the generous tips given to him by the “guidounes” of the neighborhood brothel, he gets himself Swan Lake of Tchaikovsky, who turned his life upside down. “It was there,” he wrote, “the panacea, the great consolation that the lonely complexed fourteen-year-old girl was looking for, stuck in his shameful secret and not seeing the outcome. Music might be the confidante I was waiting for. “
And it will be, thanks to Puccini, Verdi and Brahms, as well as thanks to Barbara, whom Tremblay initially hated because of “his vampire airs on vacation” before succumbing to his “genius”, and to Piaf, which the Duchess of Langeais, famous character of the writer, nicknames “Edith-the-blow-of-poing”.
Both implacable critic and fervent music lover, Tremblay says here, with humor and depth, that music soothes distress and gives a taste for life. He loves her and owes her so much that, even having become almost deaf, today he continues, failing to listen to her, to watch her, on DVD, to maintain the joy. Reading Tremblay in the fall, when he delivers his annual offering, gives me a similar delight.