Gaston Miron: La vie d’un homme by Pierre Nepveu (review)

Gaston Miron’s L’Homme rappaillé is the great prophetic, nationalist and modernist text of the Québécois poetic canon. As such, its author performs at once in his virtual nation the role that Blake plays in England, that Whitman has in the United States and that Baudelaire enjoys in France. In the nine-hundred page Gaston Miron: la vie d’un homme, Pierre Nepveu has adopted the conquering general strategy of biographical writing. Marshalling a lifelong interest, acquaintance with the subject, interviews, archival research and analysis, he has produced a text in front of which any reviewer will just have to lay down their arms. There’s no arguing with it. Not since François Ricard’s Gabrielle Roy in 1996 has a Québécois literary figure received such an authoritative biographical treatment.

Miron organised L’Homme rappaillé into suites of poems on the French language, Quebec and love. The great merit of Nepveu’s biography is that it reveals how the poet transformed his obsessions with his people’s speech, society and women into works of art. He traces the composition of La Batêche, Miron’s great depiction of Québécois French, throughout the 1950s until the crucial formulation of the character the ‘Damn Canuck de pea soup’, the French Canadian everyman. The many classics of La Vie Agonique – especially Monologues de l’aliénation délirante – were written in a feverish secrecy that defies Nepveu’s research; symptomatic poems that emerge from a sort of pained Jungian collective unconscious, they continue to evoke strong responses from sympathetic readers but resist simple explanation as to each one’s particular aetiology. Miron’s tortured romances with a series of women from the ‘legendary’ Isabelle in 1952 to psychologist Sandrine Berthiaume in the late 1970s who, one by one, inspired the beautiful suite La Marche à l’amour and its sequel L’Amour et le militant make for compelling if harrowing reading. The poet had great affective needs but pursued women with an embarrassing clumsiness redeemed only by the transformation of his neurotic behaviour into powerful erotic poetry. Nepveu’s revelations concerning Miron’s difficult composition and reworking of his texts owe a debt to the numerous theses and dissertations about his life and work that have increased our knowledge since his death in December 1996. In particular, the scholarship produced by the students of Miron’s last compagne, Marie-Andrée Beaudet, a professor at Laval University, has been put to good use. Nepveu’s co-editor on books that collected Miron’s miscellaneous verse, prose and interviews, Beaudet has been an extraordinary literary widow, easily the equal or more of a figure like Dostoyevsky’s Anna Snitkina.

Like Paul-Émile Borduas, a crucial figure in freeing its visual arts, and René Lévesque, the nation’s great political liberator, Miron helped create the new Québécois identity. He will continue to shape its thoughts and feelings in the future. What all three of these men shared was the enormous curiosity of their people. Nepveu – poet, essayist, novelist – may himself one day be the subject of a biography, and he will be lucky if his life story finds a writer as talented and devoted as he to tell it.