The Tin Flute Read online

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  To Mélina Roy

  INTRODUCTION

  Like any first novel, The Tin Flute began from a welter of experience, observation, and insight. In 1941, when she started Bonheur d'occasion, Gabrielle Roy had just returned from two years in Europe where she had gone to study acting. Settling in Montreal in 1939, she had worked as a free-lance journalist, discovering at first-hand her parents' native province. She herself was born and grew up in St. Boniface, Manitoba, and had taught in that province for eight years before going abroad. Now, at thirty-two, she turned a keen and sympathetic eye on the new life around her. In her articles for Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs and other journals, she described not only traditional rural Quebec but also the life of the urban poor. She lived on the border of St. Henri and walked its grimy streets, soaking up detail and atmosphere. Then, guided by her reading of great nineteenth-century French and Russian novelists, she began her own book.

  At first The Tin Flute was to have been a story of the younger generation, of waitress Florentine Lacasse and machinist Jean Levesque, of their attempts to escape the grinding poverty of St. Henri and their bitter, abortive romance. Then, Gabrielle Roy tells us, a secondary character, Florentine's mother Rose-Anna, took the forestage. "She almost forced her way into my story," writes Roy, "and completely upset my plan for it." Indeed, Rose-Anna became the centre of the novel. Trudging through the slushy streets looking for yet another cheaper cold-water flat for her large family, she became the symbol for the monotonous, dispiriting round of the inhabitants, the economic prisoners of St. Henri. As a character, she developed much more than symbolic power. Her tenderness, her courage, her long-suffering as she tried to keep her family together against heavy odds, made her one of the great mater dolorosa figures of Quebec fiction.

  With Rose-Anna as centre, the story became one of the play of forces on the Lacasse family, a microcosm of St. Henri and in a larger sense of the working-class poor in Quebec society. Seeing in her mother an image of the life she is determined to avoid, Florentine is drawn by the glitter of St. Catherine Street and the strength and ambition of Jean Levesque. When Jean disappears, leaving her pregnant, she turns to gentle Emmanuel Letourneau for security as father for her child. Her own father, weak and vainglorious Azarius Lacasse, all sentiment and no sense, goes from one empty scheme to another, trying to cheer his family since he is incapable of supporting them. Bearing her yearly child, scraping and patching, Rose-Anna is condemned to see her children disappear into the army, the church, the hospital. The most touching separation is from dying little Daniel who in his last days transfers his affection from his mother to the English nurse, Jenny; the most ironic is the case of both her eldest son, Eugene, and her husband, who finally find a way to help the family but only at the price of leaving it as volunteers for overseas service.

  It is Gabrielle Roy's special gift to enter the lives of her characters with compelling understanding and compassion, even to such minor figures as plaintive young Pitou and garrulous, good-natured Sam Latour, members of the restaurant choruses at Ma Philibert's and The Two Records cafe.

  Because of the unique place the novel holds in the history of Quebec literature, The Tin Flute stands today as a modern classic. What do we mean when we say that a striking contemporary novel has become a classic? First, that it has stood the test of time; second, that it has come to be recognized as an important cultural artifact, one that has proved a source of inspiration and recognition for many succeeding generations; third, that it contains artistic or poetic quality - a blend of accurate observation and individual vision - that makes it outstanding in its own right.

  The Tin Flute has now reached that status and this new translation points up the fact. Thirty-five years have passed since the novel's first publication in French and the international acclaim it received as winner in Paris of the prestigious Prix Femina in 1947. The same year, in the translation by Hannah Josephson, the book won American recognition when it was chosen as a Literary Guild selection and sold over 750,000 copies. At home the novel, ironically in its English version, won a Governor General's Award in 1947 and Roy was elected first woman member of the Royal Society of Canada. This initial success launched her on a long and distinguished literary career. She has published a dozen books since and, translation aiding, has become one of the most widely read Canadian novelists. Despite the artistry and continued popularity of such works as Where Nests the Water Hen, The Cashier, The Road Past Alta-mont, and Children of My Heart, this first novel remains her chef d'oeuvre.

  To be called a classic a book cannot ride on the reputation of its first reception. It must invite and reward many rereadings. This has been the case with The Tin Flute. From the French side come Gilles Marcotte's early but penetrating appraisals, Albert LeGrand's and G.-A. Vachon's interpretations of the book as cultural history, Gerard Bessette's psychological probings, Francois Ricard's biography, Andre Brochu's and Jacques Blais's structuralist readings. On the English side, among others, Hugo McPherson has studied the novel's themes, Ben-Z. Shek has examined its social realism, and Paul Socken has subjected it to linguistic analysis. For over three decades The Tin Flute has stimulated a variety of interesting critical reactions, each in its own way illuminating some aspect of that third component of greatness, the poetic quality of the work.

  After thirty years the rather old-fashioned version of The Tin Flute by Hannah Josephson has become dated. It reads like a mid-forties film. The present translation is by Alan Brown, translator of many major Quebecois writers, including Aquin, Godbout, Hebert, Langevin, as well as three other books by Gabrielle Roy. He has restyled the novel and created a distinguished period remake of the original. His dialogue is an authentic reconstruction of wartime slang and working-class speech; his narrative style is as clear and elegant in English as Roy's is in French. He meets the challenge that every great book presents a translator - to remain true to the spirit and letter of the original while at the same time being stimulated to exercise one's own best inventive powers and creative instincts. Alan Brown has given us a classic translation. It is one that will let English readers appreciate to the full those enduring poetic qualities that make The Tin Flute one of the prime works of French-Canadian fiction.

  Philip Stratford

  ONE

  Toward noon, Florentine had taken to watching out for the young man who, yesterday, while seeming to joke around, had let her know he found her pretty.

  The fever of the bazaar rose in her blood, a kind of jangled nervousness mingled with the vague feeling that one day in this teeming store things would come to a halt and her life would find its goal. It never occurred to her to think she could meet her destiny anywhere but here, in the overpowering smell of caramel, before the great mirrors hung on the wall with their narrow strips of gummed paper announcing the day's menu, to the summary clacking of the cash register, the very voice of her impatience. Everything in the place summed up for her the hasty, hectic poverty of her whole life here in St. Henri.

  Over the shoulders of her half-dozen customers, her glance fled toward the counters of the store. The restaurant was at the back of the Five and Ten. In the glitter of the glassware, the chromed panels, the pots and pans, her empty, morose and expressionless ghost of a smile caught aimlessly on one glowing object after another.

  Her task of waiting on the counter left her few moments in which she could return to the exciting, disturbing recollections of yesterday, except for tiny shards of time, just enough to glimpse the unknown young man's face in her mind's eye. The customers' orders and the rattling of dishes didn't always break into her reverie, which, for a second, would cause a brief tremor in her features.

  Suddenly she was disconcerted,
vaguely humiliated.

  While she had been keeping an eye on the crowd entering the store through the glass swing-doors, the young stranger had taken a place at the imitation-marble counter and was calling her over with an impatient gesture. She went toward him, her lips slightly open, in a pout rather than a smile. How maddening that he should catch her just at the moment when she was trying to remember how he looked and sounded!

  "What's your name?" he asked abruptly.

  She was irritated, less by the question than by his way of asking: familiar, bantering, almost insolent.

  "What a question!" she said contemptuously, though not really as if she wanted to end the conversation. On the contrary, her voice was inviting.

  "Come on," said the young man, smiling. "Mine's Jean. Jean Lévesque. And I know for a start yours is Florentine. Florentine this, Florentine that, Florentine's in bad humour today, got a smile for me, Florentine? Oh, I know your first name all right. I even like it."

  He changed tone imperceptibly, his eyes hardened.

  "But if I call you miss, miss who? Won't you tell little old me?" he insisted with mock seriousness.

  He leaned toward her and looked up with eyes whose impudence was apparent in a flash. It was his tough, strong-willed chin and the unbearable mockery of his dark eyes that she noticed most today, and this made her furious. How could she have spent so much time in the last few days thinking about this boy? She straightened up with a jerk that made her little amber necklace rattle.

  "And I guess after that you'll want to know where I live and what I'm doing tonight," she said. "I know you guys."

  "You guys? What do you mean, you guys?" he mocked, looking over his shoulder as if there were someone behind him.

  "Just . . . you guys!" she said, half exasperated.

  His familiar, slightly vulgar tone, which put him on her level, displeased her less than his usual behaviour and speech. Her smile returned, irritated but provocative.

  "Okay, now!" she said. "What do you want today?"

  Once again his look had that brutal familiarity.

  "I hadn't got around to asking what you're doing tonight," he said. "I wasn't in that big a hurry. Normally I'd take another three days at least. But now you mention it. . . . "

  He leaned back a little on the stool and weaved gently from side to side. As he stared at her, his eyes narrowed.

  "Now then! Florentine, what're you doing tonight?"

  He saw that she was upset. Her lower lip was trembling, and she held it with her teeth. Then she busied herself pulling a paper napkin from a chrome box, unfolded it and spread it on the counter.

  Her face was thin, delicate, almost childish. The effort she was making to control herself caused the small, blue veins on her temples to swell and knot, and her almost diaphanous nostrils, closing, pulled tight the skin of her cheeks, as smooth and delicate as silk. Her lips were still uncertain, still threatening to tremble, but Jean, looking in her eyes, was suddenly struck by their expression. Under the arched line of her plucked eyebrows, extended by a little streak of makeup, her lowered lids could not hide the thin bronze ray of a glance, cautious, attentive and extraordinarily eager. Then she blinked, and the whole pupil showed with a sudden gleam. Over her shoulders fell a mass of light-brown hair.

  With no particular purpose the young man was watching her intently. She astonished more than she attracted him. And even this phrase he had just uttered, "What are you doing tonight?" . . . had been unexpected. It had taken shape in his mind without his knowing; he had tossed it out as one drops a pebble to test an unknown depth. But her reaction encouraged him to try again. Would I be ashamed to go out with her? he wondered. And then the idea that such a thought could intervene after he had gone this far pushed him on to greater daring. Elbows on the counter, eyes staring into Florentine's, he was waiting, as if in a cruel game, for a move from her to which he could react.

  She stiffened under his brutal scrutiny, and he was able to see her better. He saw her upper body reflected in the wall mirror, and he was struck by her thinness. She had pulled the belt of her green uniform as tight as it would go around her waist, but you could see that her clothing barely clung to her slender body. And the young man had a sudden glimpse of what her life must be like, in the rush and bustle of St. Henri, that life of spruce young girls with rouged cheeks reading fifteen-cent serial novels and burning their fingers at the wretched little fires of what they took for love.

  His voice grew incisive, almost cutting.

  "You're from here? From St. Henri?" he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders, and her only reply was a vexed, ironical smile, again more like a pout.

  "Me too," he went on, with mocking condescension. "So we can be friends, eh?"

  He saw how her hands shook, frail as a child's; he saw her collar-bones stand out in the open neck of her dress. A moment later she forgot herself so far as to rest one thrust-out hip, hiding her nervousness in a sulk. But he was no longer seeing her as she was before him. He saw her dressed up, ready to go out in the evening, with plenty of rouge to hide the pallor of her cheeks, costume jewels rattling all over her thin body, a ridiculous little hat, perhaps even a small veil behind which her eyes would shine, emphasized by eye shadow: a girl in a funny get-up, flighty, but all in a fuss in her desire to please him. Something arose in him like a gust of a destroying wind.

  "Will you come to a show with me tonight?"

  He felt her hesitate. No doubt his invitation, if he took the trouble to make it sound more friendly, would meet consent. But he preferred it this way, hard and direct, as if he wanted her to refuse.

  "All right, then, it's a deal," he said. "Now bring me your famous special."

  Then he took a book from the pocket of his overcoat, opened it, and was absorbed at once.

  Florentine's cheeks had flushed red. That was what she hated about this guy: the ability he had, after dragging her out of her depth, to banish her from his mind, leaving her like an object of no interest. Yet it was he who had, for the last few days, been making the advances. She hadn't made the first move. It was he who had wakened her from that heavy sleep in which she had lain huddled, on the margin of life, with her complaints and resentments, alone with those undefined dreams which she saw with so little clarity. He was the one who had given a focus to her hopes, which now were as sharp and torturing as desire itself.

  She gazed at him a moment in silence and her heart felt a pang. She liked the boy a lot, already. He seemed elegant to her. So different from the young men she served in the store, boring little clerks, or workers with greasy sleeves and collars; and even much superior to the youths she met in neighbourhood cafes in the evening, when she'd go with Pauline and Marguerite to dance a turn to nickelodeon music and munch chocolate bars or simply sit for hours in the refuge of a booth peeking at the boys who came in, and laughing at them. Yes, he was very different from all those she had glimpsed by chance in her empty, busy life. She liked the way his thick, dark hair stood up straight and bristling. Sometimes she felt she would like to grab fistfuls of that strong, unruly hair.

  The first time he'd come to the Five and Ten she had noticed him at once and managed to be the one who served him. Now she felt like running away, but also like standing up to him, to prove she didn't care. "He'll ask me out some day. He will," she had said to herself with a strange sensation of power in the hollow of her chest. Then, immediately uneasy, "Then what'll I say?"

  Her companions at work — Louise, Pauline, Marguerite, all except Eveline, the "manager" — now and then accepted an invitation made during the joking and teasing over lunch. Pauline said these connections weren't dangerous as long as the fellow came to get you at home and you only went to a movie. That gave you a good chance to have a look at him and decide whether you wanted to see him again. Louise was even engaged to a young soldier she had first met in the restaurant. Since there was a war, and the newly enlisted young men felt the urge for an attachment before they left for traini
ng camp, friendships were quickly made, and under very new conditions. Some ended in marriage. Florentine didn't dare follow her thought to the end.

  Even as the young man read, his lips kept something of that scoffing expression that so disconcerted her.

  I'm goin' to show him, she thought, tight-lipped, I'll show him I don't care a darn about him anyway. But her curiosity to find out what he was reading was stronger than her spite. She leaned daringly over the open book. It was a trigonometry text. The rhombic forms, the triangles, the black print of the equations, made her smile to herself in total incomprehension. "No wonder you talk like a big book, reading stuff like that."

  And she went off toward the order microphone, putting on a mocking, piping voice: "One thirty-cent spec:

  Her sharp voice carried the length of the restaurant and Jean Lévesque felt his forehead turn a stupid red. His eye followed her with a dark flame of resentment. He pulled his book in front of him and leaned over it, both elbows on the table, his head resting on his tanned, strong hands.

  New customers were crowding toward the counter. It rhe usual rush between twelve and one: a few neighbourhood working men in heavy drill; store clerks from Notre Dame Street with white collars and small felt hats which they tossed on the counter; two social service nuns in grey cloaks; and a taxi-driver and several housewives who, between shopping trips, came to perk themselves up with a cup of scalding coffee or a plate of French fries. The five young waitresses bustled back and forth, bumping into each other on the way. From time to time there was the tinkle of a spoon falling on the tile floor. A waitress would pick it up swiftly and toss it in the sink, then rush off, bending slightly forward so as to gain more speed. They were all in a hurry. Their quick footsteps, their sudden comings and goings, the rustling of their blouses, stiff with starch, the click of the toaster when the bread jumped up, the purring of the coffee pots on their electric plates, the crackling of the kitchen loud-speaker, combined in a continuous sound like the hum of a warm summer day, with the added charm of strong odours of vanilla and sweets. You could always hear the muffled rumbling of milk-shake mixers in tall chromed containers, like the interminable buzzing of flies caught in sticky paper; and then the ring of a coin on the counter, and, at intervals, the bell of the cash register like the period of a senten^ small, high-speed knell, tireless and shrill. Though the frost had painted its arabesques on the glass doors at the front, here in the back of the store the air was torrid.