The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
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very modest level indeed. As an adolescent, Roger picked wild berries, raided orchards, and fished in the St. Charles River to help with the family’s larder. For many of the residents of those working-class districts, life, especially in the years of the Great Depression, the years that shaped Roger Lemelin, was frequently lived on the edge of survival. Men, like Lemelin’s father, worked on the grain elevators and on the docks, scooping up spilt grain from the road and bringing it home to feed the chickens that families kept in their backyards. It is this worker underclass that supplied the manpower for the dockyards, paper mills, shoe factories, lumber yards, and all the other industries that employed the Lemelins and their neighbours, and about whom not much had hitherto been written. The story of these lives, always hard and frequently tragic, was waiting to take its rightful place in the literature of Quebec. Of this class and its cast of characters, Roger Lemelin and Gabrielle Roy would weave great if disturbing tapestries of social aspiration and the pain of failure, thereby wrenching Quebec fiction out of its long and deeply rooted tradition of land, religion, and language, and set it on the course of urban realism.
For Roger Lemelin the clear intention was to tell the story of a protagonist, Denis Boucher, who, like himself, yearns to improve his lot and make something of himself. At least one francophone critic, Antoine Sirois, writing in the Spring 1977 issue of Canadian Literature, has drawn an interesting parallel between Denis Boucher and Duddy Kravitz, the protagonist of Mordecai Richler’s near-classic study of lower-class Jewish life in Montreal. Sirois has noted about Richler’s and Lemelin’s novels that they “illustrent une conquête sur le plan horizontal, où les ambitions des protagonistes tendent vers les valeurs plus matérielles et extérieures …” As Duddy’s grandfather had pointed out that a man without land is a nobody, so Denis Boucher (who, by the way, is given roles of varying importance in other novels of Lemelin) should be seen as the authorial alter ego who yearns to climb that deceptively gentle slope to the upper levels of achievement and status.
It is not surprising therefore that the first and unpublished version of Au pied de la pente douce was called Les grimpeurs (loosely translated as The Climbers) before it was reworked with the help of Lemelin’s friend Albert Pelletier and published in 1944. The novel reportedly inspired a short-lived radio drama that was withdrawn because of objections by the public, although one senses that this was an indicator pointing to Lemelin’s future successes in radio and television, the two media that would become the principal sources of entertainment for the public from the later 1940s onward.
Lemelin looks splendidly bourgeois in front of his family home in 1941.
A year after the publication of Au pied de la pente douce, Lemelin, still plying his stenographic and accounting skills and beginning to display a good deal of business acumen, married Valeda Lavigueur. He was twenty-six years old and had already been noticed by Radio-Canada, which had invited him to give a series of talks. Lemelin also started revising his next novel, Les Plouffes, a work that would lead him more firmly into the media and, to a considerable extent, bring him fame and fortune
Cover of the first edition of Au pied de la pente douce (1944) — an understated, typographical design typical of French publishing.
as a novelist, scriptwriter, and creator of extremely successful television drama. It should also be noted that his good business sense involved Lemelin in the food business where he became the owner of a popular brand of delicatessen products. That, too, contributed significantly to his financial success. However, it is surprising how quickly and how definitively luck, good fortune, and success had all turned his way.
Inscribed and signed copy of Au pied de la pente douce. The inscription, translated, reads: “To Monsieur Wilfrid Gauthier [unidentified] with my sincerest admiration, Roger Lemelin. September 21, 1945. On the occasion of our lunch at the [restaurant] Kerhulu.”
To be sure the generous reception by reviewers that was accorded Lemelin’s first novel helped immeasurably to establish his young reputation on a solid footing. Although some critics were initially hesitant,[2] the overall critical climate surrounding the novel was positive, and signalled the opportunities and good fortune that were about to descend on a young writer with seemingly limited literary credentials. This good fortune began to unfold in 1946 first in the form of the Prix David, French Canada’s distinguished award for a writer, followed by the medal of the Académie française and a Guggenheim Fellowship. It is not only that Lemelin was awarded distinctions and prizes, but it is also that the critics and reviewers had singled out Au pied de la pente douce as a breath of fresh air that by its directness and its welcome “insolence” of youth was proof that French Canada was not dying of senility, while an anonymous reviewer writing in Le Devoir in 1951 compared Lemelin to a kind of Bernard Shaw pulling the beards of “solemn old fogeys.” For Marcel Rioux, destined to become a distinguished sociologist, the novel was a striking and unique example of the younger generation turning on its fathers: “Poor you Jos, your son will achieve that at which you failed.”
It is small wonder therefore that Lemelin’s novel was noticed and, curiously enough, was picked up by a short-lived New York publisher with a noteworthy if slightly curious list. Reynal & Hitchcock had been founded in 1933 and was absorbed by a much larger and established publisher in 1948. In the course of its publishing history it featured the work of major writers such as Pearl S. Buck, Malcolm Lowry, and Arthur Miller, to name a few of the better known authors. But the name that jumps out at us today is that of Adolf Hitler,[3] the English translation of whose Mein Kampf[4] was published under licence by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1939. It may be said that the young Lemelin was in strange and good company indeed.
In addition, Reynal & Hitchcock engaged a well-known name of the left-wing American avant-garde as the translator of Lemelin’s novel. He was Samuel Putnam (1892–1950), a prominent figure on the cultural scene of the time. A committed francophile and scholar of Romance languages (his translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a classic), he took on the challenge of a French-Canadian text for which he felt the need to write his own “Translator’s Note” to help guide the American reader through “certain [Canadian] allusions.” Putnam modestly acknowledges the help of Lemelin with what he described as “the peculiarities of Canadian French and the abundance of local argot ... [and] also the frequent psychological subtleties of the narrative.” Understandably, for Samuel Putnam, an American with a love of cosmopolitan Europe, much of the French-Canadian flavour of Au pied de la pente douce would have felt strange.
In any case, the novel, newly minted in its Anglo-American translation, appeared in 1948. It would later (1961) find its way into McClelland & Stewart’s signature series — the New Canadian Library — as would the other three novels by Lemelin. In the meantime the distinguished French publisher Flammarion brought out its own edition in France. Au pied de la pente douce/The Town Below had moved from the rather modest embrace of a small literary publisher, Les Éditions de l’Arbre, into the big leagues of New York and Paris. The previous year, 1947, Lemelin had the added distinction of being awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, which made it possible for him to gain the experience of American life, and very likely opened doors into the world of U.S journalism.
Since 1945, Lemelin had been at work on an idea that became Les Plouffes (1948), translated as The Plouffe Family (1951), a novel of working-class French-Canadian family life that, in turn, became a popular television series on both the French and English networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is an irony that, initially, Lemelin had had to publish Les Plouffes at his own expense with another small literary press, Les Éditions Belisle. In general, 1948 can be seen as a year of auspicious developments in the life of Roger Lemelin, the most significant being his having been hired as a reporter