The Quebec Anthology: 1830-1990

"Happiness" 1946

Ringuet Translated by Wayne Grady HAPPINESS Philippe Panneton, who wrote under the pseudonym Ringuet, was born in Trois-Rivieres on April 30, 1895, to a family that had first settled in the region in 1640. At the age of eighteen, he went to Montreal to work as a reporter, then one year later enrolled at the Universite de Montreal to study medicine. In 1920 he went to Paris to specializein ear-nose-and-throat disorders, later returning to Quebec to set up eye clinics in Montreal and Joliette. Under his real name, publishing in several leading periodicals, newspapers, and medical journals,he quickly became famous in Quebec as an iconoclastic thinker and physician.Also under his own name he published in 1925, in collaboration with Louis Francoeur, Litteratures. . . a la maniere de, a satiricalspoof on many of the period's leading literarylights,including Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx, and Camille Roy. His first novel, Trente arpents (Thirty Acres), published in 1938 in Paris under the nom-de-plume Ringuet, was a brilliant but controversial twist on the traditional Quebec novel ofterroir, or the homestead, whose assumptions , perpetrated for the most part by the clergy, were that adamantine faithfulness to the land, the family, and religion was rural Quebec's only defence against encroachment from outside the province. Ringuet, who refused to idealize or romanticize life on the land, suggested that traditional attitudes merely guaranteed that Quebec would be left behind in a future of rapid change and growinginternationalism. Ringuet's later novels, Fausse monnaie (1947), Le Poids dujour (1949) and UAmiral et le Facteur (1954), are less known and, according to Gerard Bessette,"far from possessing the vision of his first book." "Le bonheur," translated here as "Happiness" by Wayne Grady, is a tale of urban despair,taken from 172 RINGUET Ringuet's only book of short stories, UHeritage (1946). The story suggests that the only route to happiness in workingclass Montreal was through madness and delusion. In some ways, it justifies several of Ringuet's severest critics, who accused him of a bitter and fruitless pessimism. But "Happiness" also reveals the author's gift for exact observation , meticulous writing, and his delight in a subtle, black humour. Panneton died in Montreal in December 1960, on the eve of a literary and social revolution he would greatly have enjoyed. "Happiness" is a translation of "Le bonheur" published in L'he'ritage etautres contes (Montreal: les Editions Varietes, 1946). HAPPINESS 173 FI irst there was marriage, then fifteen years of hardship with his wife, a tall, thin, bony woman with a sharp tongue and a pallid face, as though she'd been blanched by a lifetime in the kitchen over tubs full of hot water. They'd had eleven children, five of whom survived, miraculously . That year they were all living in four rooms on the second floor of a tenement on Labrecque; he often wondered what kept the building from collapsing into its own cluttered yard, not that he cared. They were moving in May anyway, throwing together their few belongings, their three-legged chairs, their sunken mattresses, looking for a new place to stay as they did every year. It was more than an annual habit: it was a necessity. They hadn't paid the rent on this hovel. His wife had quarrelled with everyone within earshot. His children had broken three windows in two weeks. Every February the search began again. His wife didn't seem to mind. It gave her an excuse to stick her nose into some other family's dirty linen, under the pretext of inspecting their apartment. For a while he kept track of their years together by recalling their addresses; lately, he was beginning to forget some of them. His whole life revolved around the textile plant, where for ten hours a day he took his part in the thunderous ballet of bobbins and spools. Every night he walked home with his ears still throbbing with the machine's deafening drone. He ate his dinner, read his newspaper, heard the doors slam as his daughters went out on their nightly prowls. Then he went to bed and slept like a dead man until morning, when he got up and left for work. And yet he wouldn't say he was unhappy. Nothing in the world existed for him except his vertiginous machine and the safe harbour of his kitchen, where he sat...