Collected Later Novels Read online

  Anne Hébert

  COLLECTED LATER NOVELS

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  Introduction by Mavis Gallant

  Individual books copyright © 1992, 1995, 1998, 1999 Éditions du Seuil

  English translations copyright © 1994, 1996, 1999 House of Anansi Press;

  2000 Sheila Fischman

  Introduction copyright © 2003 Mavis Gallant

  Copyright this edition © 2012 House of Anansi Press Inc.

  These books were first published by Éditions du Seuil as L’enfant chargé

  de songes (1992), Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle et le Lieutenant anglais (1995),

  Est-ce que je te dérange? (1998), and Un Habit de lumière (1999).

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  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Hébert, Anne, 1916–2000.

  [Novels. Selections]

  Collected later novels

  Translation of: Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle et le Lieutenant anglais, Un habit de lumière, Est-ce que je te dérange? and L’enfant chargé de songes.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-119-7 (ePub)

  I. Fischman, Sheila II. Title.

  PS8515.E16A24 2001 C843’.54 C2001-901822-3

  PQ3919.H37A24 2001

  Cover Design: Angel Guerra

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Introduction

  by

  Mavis Gallant

  The French author Marguerite Yourcenar believed it was impossible to write anything about women, because their lives were so full of secrets. A woman’s life, she said, was like one of those old-fashioned sewing machines with a multitude of small drawers meant to hold thread and buttons and miniature scissors. Every drawer contains a different secret. Yourcenar said nothing about men and their secrets or about artists in general or writers in particular or the profound split between life imagined and lives lived. All this is to say that a friend may be allowed a glimpse of a drawer opened and feel entitled to suppose it reveals an autobiography. Years later it can turn out that the revelations were elements of a creation, or of things that actually happened, but to different people. In short, the writer is quite correctly taking for granted that the work produced out of these fragments is a whole continent while daily life is a piece of land so small one could drive past it in a minute. If real life has any meaning or even makes any sense, it is because the artist’s view of it is reality in essence and a plain truth undimmed.

  I met Anne Hébert in 1955, in Menton, a large town on the Mediterranean coast, the last train stop before the border between France and Italy. I knew only that she had moved to Paris from Quebec to live and write. All I had read of hers was a short volume of poetry, Le Tombeau des rois, which a friend had sent me from Montreal. It was elegant, haunting, and filled with death — the Quebec imagination of that period — and composed with calm self-assurance, well beyond the tone of a beginning poet. Jean Paul Lemieux, the Quebec painter, and his wife Madeleine Desrosiers, also a painter, had asked me to call on Anne at her hotel, the Aiglon. I had rented a small house in Menton. Anne knew no one.

  They forgot to tell me that she was paralyzingly shy and suffered from acute myopia. We remained standing at that first meeting in the lobby of Hôtel Aiglon, because she was too diffident to ask me to sit down. I wondered why she wore blue-tinted glasses indoors, unaware that her eyes were painfully sensitive to light. When, groping for conversation, I asked if she was missing Quebec, she said yes, she missed the smell of breakfast toast. I thought she was dismissing the question or perhaps Quebec itself. Years later, I discovered it was all she could think of to say. An invitation to come and see my rented house, with its garden and the olive trees and wide view over the sea, and stay to lunch, produced a long silence I took to mean no.

  In fact, she was silenced by the tumult of possibilities that can assail someone in a strange place, confronted with a strange person, offered an invitation that seemed dangerous in itself. What if she couldn’t find the house? How was she supposed to get there? What if I invited the British neighbours I had mentioned, and all conversation turned to English? What if I served food that didn’t agree with her? (Raised by devoted but anxious parents, she had grown up believing that harm was generated by quite ordinary meals — a fear that would evaporate as she continued to live in France.) Moreover, what could she possibly have in common with me?

  As it turned out, there was a great deal. We were both from Quebec, though from dissimilar backgrounds, hers in Quebec City, mine in Montreal. We had been to convent schools run by the same order of nuns. We had both worked at the National Film Board, when it was still in Ottawa. We had both moved to Paris to live and to write. We had both decided to live for and on our writing, and we did. As a result, we both got to know what it was like to be broke in postwar Europe. We both survived. (She was a few months short of her eighty-fourth birthday when she died, in Montreal, in January 2000.) For some forty-odd years after that odd meeting we talked, on and off, sometimes with long gaps between conversations. I spent half the year in Menton; she went often to Quebec. One or the other might be immersed in work and not seeing anybody. We discussed our work, which is something writers don’t often do — at least, in my experience. The fact that we did not write in the same language somehow made us feel free. We could pick up a broken-off conversation almost in mid-sentence. I remember a lunch in a restaurant called La Bûcherie where we talked on and on, sharing a bottle and a half of champagne, until a waiter asked if we were keeping the table for dinner. It was now half-past eight and we had not noticed the restaurant had emptied and was now filling up again and that outside it was night.

  I have a record of one of those long meals. It was in Montparnasse, at a small fish place, Le Bistrot du Dôme, in rue Delambre. It belongs to the more famous Dôme but is less formal and less expensive. The novel Anne describes and is working on is Am I disturbing you?

  13 January 1996

  It is just past eight and the place has already filled with noise and people and a thin blue haze of smoke. Anne doesn’t seem to mind. Looking around at the tiled walls and cheerful lights she says, “Il y a tellement longtemps que je ne suis pas allée au restaurant…” (It has been such a long time since I’ve been in a restaurant…) She does nothing but work on the novel she began last summer; months of writing by hand, pages and pages covered with the back-slanted script that looks like a shower of rain, typed and corrected and typed again on the rackety manual machine.

  She went all over Paris, she tells me, looking at places she lived in in the fifties. Says that at one point, when she was living in a shabby hotel on rue Jules Chaplain, three minutes from where we are this minute, but miles away in time, she had bronch
itis and a badly sprained ankle, and the hotel would not bring food up to her room, “not even a piece of bread.” She depended on friends, but most of them were out of town. It must have been summer, probably August. There were visitors from Canada, who brought her the only thing she wanted, a thin slice of lean ham, which she ate from the paper it had been wrapped in. Finally one of the visitors [Jeanne Lapointe, professor of contemporary literature at Université Laval] found her a room in a hotel catering to the elderly. (A. must have been in her late thirties, early forties at most.) It was very cheap but she had to pay a whole month in advance. She recalls it with horror. During that month her sheets and the one towel they gave her were never changed and the room was never cleaned. But there was room service. Three times a day the only maid — the only one she ever saw — staggered upstairs with a heavy tray holding more food than A. was ever likely to eat.

  When her bronchitis cleared up and when she could walk she had her meals downstairs in the dining room, and she tried to clean the room. She found an old broom and a decayed-looking sponge, but the only thing that seemed like scouring powder turned out to be DDT — the flea-and-louse killer of postwar Paris, liberally sprinkled in restaurant kitchens and in theatres and bought by flea-ridden tourists in pharmacies. The hotel owner, Anne says, was an elderly woman who seemed never to leave her office between the lobby and the dining room. Anne saw her just once. The door was ajar. Anne was on her way to lunch or dinner. The old woman was screaming at the maid. The maid suddenly screamed back, and was instantly fired. Anne never saw her again.

  Something about the place, as Anne describes it — above all the mysterious owner — makes me think of Hotel Savoy but Anne has never heard of the novel or even of Joseph Roth. When she went back to look at the street and the hotel last year she was surprised to find an attractive building on a pretty street and Parc de Monceau nearby, all in bloom and very green. The hotel quite obviously had changed hands and there was nothing to show it ever had been a hotel at all. She did not try to find out what it had become or to go inside, for she needed to keep her memories intact for the novel.

  She seems to think this may be her last book. She will be eighty this summer. Her sight is failing fast. She says quite casually that she is “nearly blind.” Her hands are knotted with writers’ rheumatism. Says the novel is important to her, about something she wants to set down before it is too late, i.e. before she dies. Works all day, every day. Never leaves her apartment except to shop for food for herself and the cat. Says the thick wild carpet of ivy that covered the ground in that sinister courtyard behind her apartment building has been cleaned out. The rat colonies that lived under the ivy have been chased away. (I say “sinister,” but I should say “sinister to me,” not to Anne.) I always contrive to sit with my back to the window when I visit. Whereas she writes all her first drafts — novels, poems — facing the big window, sometimes at the big round table, sometimes in the chintz armchair, with her feet on the hassock.

  Now that the rats have left she no longer speaks of trying to find another place. I notice she says nothing about the new idea of moving to Montreal. I’m just as glad, for all we do (about Montreal) is weigh up the arguments, for or against — yes, no, yes, no.

  A year later she no longer mentioned Am I disturbing you? or indeed any work at all. Her mind was on the move to Montreal: it seemed still to be yes, no, yes, no. In fact, she must have begun her final work, A Suit of Light, the essence of her particular Paris, and my favourite of her novels. But she said nothing about it and, of course, I didn’t ask.

  3 January 1997

  Yesterday tea with Anne, whose apartment is ice cold. There’s been a flood in the kitchen. The plumber says he can do nothing until he gets a green light from the building management. He has with him a little boy, to whom he hands the tip Anne has given him. Then the husband of the concierge arrives, Portuguese, looks so young I think he must be the concierge’s son. He says nothing can be done about her cold stopped-up radiators unless…I forget what.

  Her eyes are painful to see, the skin around them thick and red. She has been told there is nothing to be done about that either. No wonder she thinks she’d be better off in Montreal.

  She tells me about a dream she had the night before. She is a patient in a French hospital, so inefficient and overcrowded that she has to share a bed with another patient, a large stout woman who seems to be important and takes up most of the bed. She turns out to be Simone Veil. [A well-known and very popular political figure, a former Cabinet minister and president of the European Parliament.] Simone Veil has a great number of visitors who swarm all over the room and the bed. Some climb over A. in order to see the famous Mme. Veil. One is a priest wearing a soutane and carrying a bowl filled with champagne. In the dream, A. tells herself that this is what French hospitals are like.

  I say that the dream is an argument in the Paris vs. Montreal debate, with A.’s sleeping mind taking sides. She brings up another argument, not out of a dream: the absurdly high rent she pays and the exorbitant utility charges that come due at the end of every year. For years now she has been soaked for things that do not work or do not even exist.

  It is now pitch dark outside. I wish A. would draw the curtains. Light from windows on that side of the house shines on the courtyard. It looks more than ever like an abandoned graveyard. I wonder if she has finished last year’s novel. [Am I disturbing you? would be published in France one year later, in 1998.] All our conversation now is about apartments and catastrophes and the comparative cost of living here and in Montreal, with plenty of black marks against Paris. I have not lived in Montreal, except in hotels, for forty-seven years, so I have nothing to say. If she goes it will be this spring. If she stays she will have to find a new apartment. This one has become unliveable. To find a place in Paris now is about as it was in Montreal during the war. One has to “know someone,” and I’m not sure whether or not she does.

  There was another reason I had decided not to interfere, or even to have an opinion. I had believed her to be happy in Paris. I had never known her to say anything else — at least, not in my hearing. It had been a shock to discover, the previous year, that she had been dissatisfied and thinking of leaving for a long time. All our conversations now were about nothing much. I had been shown the wrong drawer of the sewing machine or hadn’t known how to draw the right conclusion about what was on display. Probably I should have taken as definite her announcement just two months before that she had actually found an apartment in Montreal.

  13 November 1996

  Anne calls in the afternoon and says straight off, “Ça y est! Je retourne au Canada!” She has informed her friends in Canada. She will finish her novel this winter, in Paris, and leave next April. It is true that 1996 has been a wretched year. The courtyard is filled with garbage the tenants on that side throw out their kitchen windows now. There was her accident, the broken shoulder bone [owing to her worsening eyesight, she had failed to notice a tree root jutting above ground in her own street, rue de Pontoise, and had tripped and fallen, fracturing a bone in her right shoulder], her need to depend on other people, the breaking off of her novel, and her feelings of solitude.

  Rather, an unexpected attitude to solitude. It was something she liked and wanted and even cherished. So I thought. So I believed. What happened? She tells me that last summer she visited an apartment in Montreal and took an option on sight. It is on the seventh floor, very bright, in the Côte des Neiges–Queen Mary area, with a vue sur la montagne, two bathrooms and an extra bedroom. There is a swimming pool in the building and everything she needs at hand: a restaurant, a salon de coiffure.

  I say, “C’est la fin de toute une vie,” meaning the end of her long Paris adventure.

  She says, “C’est la fin de LA vie,” meaning that she is eighty and that life has to stop.

  She tells me that her accident (when she fell in the street) made her realize
she was alone in Paris. In Montreal she has deep, old friendships. I am too shocked to reply. She was alone because she wanted to be. Could I have misheard her for decades on end? Did she say one thing and mean another? A writer’s need for solitude was something we often talked about. Perhaps I didn’t know how to listen. Once she said, “I don’t know if I’d want the same life again. A writer’s life is marginal.” I said, “What else did you expect?” We left it there. It was unmapped territory. I didn’t know if I wanted to explore it much. I think I didn’t even bother to make a note of it. Probably I couldn’t take it seriously. I should have been more careful. She must have thought I was being impatient. I was worse than impatient. I was disappointed and I think it showed.

  Something else: the Montreal apartment will cost exactly half the amount she has been paying in Paris. With her savings, she says, she will spend every winter in Menton, in her room — always the same one — at Hôtel Aiglon. She thinks it unlikely she will ever come back to Paris again.

  A Suit of Light appeared, in French, in the spring of 1999, and the splendid English translation by Sheila Fischman a year later. Anne Hébert had died that January. In the last conversation we were able to have, Montreal-Paris, she said, “I have a new novel in mind. I hope they’ll let me up soon, so that I can work.”

  — Mavis Gallant

  Paris, January 2003

  BURDEN OF DREAMS

  I

  At the end of his first day in Paris, his large frame still swaying from the rolling of the ship, an exhausted Julien gave in almost at once to the apparitions of night.

  Suddenly she was there, in the darkness of his room, becoming clearer and more precise as he realized who she was. Soon the unmoving, weighty giant began to radiate bad temper, and Julien knew his mother had not forgiven him for crossing the Atlantic and leaving his native land.

  She was seated on her immense rump as on a throne, her presence spreading into the untidy room. Tufts of short hair were sticking up on her head, giving her the prickly look of a pale Venetian thistle. Her turned-up nose, the extreme pallor that made her brownish freckles seem even darker, a pair of men’s trousers cinched at the waist by a metal-buckled leather belt, the lighted cigarette held awkwardly in nicotine-stained fingers — everything was there to identify her to the eyes of her son.