Gabrielle Roy: Creation and Memory, Linda and Bill Clemente

I suppose once you have exhausted all of an author's works, it is natural want to find out more about her life. In Gabrielle Roy's case, I have always been sorry that she died before completing all the volumes of her autobiography, so Enchantment and Sorrow only covers the years before she became a published writer. Reading Gabrielle Roy has always been an inspiration to me, and this tale of her life has made me rethink and reaffirm so many feelings I have had over the past months, faults I have struggled with all my life, perhaps. In terms of how it has affected me and can change me, it may be the most important book I have read these months.

A good biography, I believe, makes you relate to the life described. Like with Maud in The Gift of Wings and Looking for Anne, I became convinced that I am very much like Gabrielle, and began to hope that I would attain a measure of success like hers. Clemente writes in the same delicate and compassionate style as Gabrielle herself, so reading the biography was like treading on familiar ground, almost as good as reading one of Gabrielle's books. That is one thing I find a little amiss in L. M. Montgomery biographies: aside from Mollie Gillen, whose The Wheel of Things breathes with Montgomery's own poetic writing style, many biographers have been very objective, and as a result the text is sensitive and tactful (all very understandable given the complexity of Montgomery's life) but a little dry.

Creation and Memory is not chronological: rather, it begins with the epoch of Roy's life in Europe, where she was "endlessly and aimlessly walking, walking, walking, upbraiding herself, wallowing in indecision and, doubtless, self-pity."(18) How familiar I am with this sort of constant self-berating! "Supposedly trying to uncover her destiny, and, like most of us, she still felt accountable for her actions."(19) I feel as Gabrielle does that, in my present confusion, I am trying to "break free" in some way: "Her actual motivation, however, she simply could not articulate at this juncture in her life: 'I had no definite ideas in mind,' she would say to an interviewer almost fifty years later... this brave woman [was] driven by something ill-defined to search for something unknown."(12) Upon her return to Canada, Gabrielle remained on her own in Montreal instead of returning to live with her mother, perhaps to "stay free" (14): "In her mind, going farther west from Montreal would now mean a surrender to all she had sought to escape. A return to St. Boniface would demote those two years in Europe to the status of a fling, and it would also preclude the possibility of further personal and professional growth."(51) This was "one of the most anguished, selfish, and painfully ambivalent decisions of her life, as decisions based largely on one's personal desires and welfare must be."(52) And like Gabrielle, I write best from a distance... I can recall so clearly those hours in my Crouch End attic, when inspiration seemed to spark from homesickness and isolation, and despite my surface melancholy I was perfectly content with my work. "Before discovering new shores, we must be content to lose sight of land completely." (Fragile 186)

THERE is the conflict of my heart of late: that on one hand, I am duty-bound to remain at home, that permanently moving out would be the selfish act of abandoning my parents. Besides, I love my home dearly. It is a veritable paradise to me, with its blossoming pear trees, the shy, secretive star-lilies down by the gate, the great "watching pine" outside my window, the "little half chick" weathervane on the garage roof, and my very own, maple-flanked "bend in the road" beyond. Inside, there are low, wide windows inside, gossamer curtains, and a stained-glass lamp that gleams at sunset. I am grateful that my parents have kept such a haven for me, and I am afraid that if I were to leave, I would sever it from my life forever: my parents would sell the house, and I could never truly come "home" again. That is how my romantic notions run; on the other hand I cannot reconcile myself to the picture of living as a dependent, and working and saving towards a future that to me is entirely undefined, but promises little more than a parent's conventional expectations of stability and marriage. I need to be on my own and to run my own life, but to anyone's mind that is an incredibly lonely and pitiful existence.

I was surprised that Gabrielle's ambition to be an actress during her European years was so strong; most true writers know from childhood that they must write. (I did find out, later in the biography, and also from recollections of her writings, that she did write avidly as a child despite her mother's disapproval.) Then, too, I felt a little alienated by her dramatic abilities: I could certainly never breathe fire into a performance, nor can I lay any claims to sparkling wit and powers of mimicry... but haven't there been points in my life when I too am full of vivacity and life? Despite her outbursts of animated feeling, Gabrielle was by nature reclusive, "I never knew a person more secretive or more of an enemy to herself."(16) That is exactly how I am. I share Gabrielle's fragile self-confidence, her perfectionist tendencies (best exemplified by her scholastic achievements and how she would stay up late to study until her mother cut the fuse), and her tendency to block time out by projects and accomplishments rather than by a regular schedule. "Given the teenager who was so ardent in her studies that her mother unscrewed fuses to force her to get sufficient sleep, empathetic readers who feel equally driven will easily understand the anxiety that interruptions provoke in those who work not over the course of a day with frequent breaks, but who labour intensely for hours at a time with no breaks... For a writer of Gabrielle Roy's ilk, an interruption could change the course of her novel."(163-164) After all, I was not so foolish when I protested in first year that the calibre of my drawing would change if I took a dinner break, and had to be bodily carried away from my desk.

I am, too, heavily affected by my mother's tendency to view life as a tragedy; and my mother's many sisters are in turn the product of my grandmother's incredible will and sorrow. As Gabrielle writes of her own siblings, "All of us - all Melina's children - have a tendency to live too much on our nerves. It makes the fire burn bright, true enough, but later we pay for it dearly, don't we?" (94)

What I dislike most in biography literature is the finality of reality, in which some lives are irretrievably damned. Her sister Adele is the black sheep of the story, unsuccessful, spiteful, laughed at and pitied by her family. I can't help studying others' lives as if to seeking for a formula that will tell me that outcome of my own. How do I know if I am really like Adele, whose "constant shifting indicated serious problems," who "would stay for a year or two until life became a little easier, and then, perhaps fearful or feeling herself undeserving of peace or happiness, would move again, farther north, farther away" (102)? Gabrielle herself wandered aimlessly, and these were to her immensely valuable experiences: "writers should seek experience actively in their youth, should travel as much as they could geographically and emotionally; then at about the age of forty, they could, as she put it, 'draw in.' "(156) What did Adele do wrong that Gabrielle did right, and how do you know which you are doing?

The years that fascinate me most are those just after Enchantment and Sorrow ended: the seven years before she "arrived" with the publication of The Tin Flute. She determined to throw away her stable career as a teacher, to live on her own, and to write, and she did. She managed to support herself in a lifestyle of her choosing. She became an excellent journalist, and was so in her element was she that her natural shyness must have vanished by necessity, even if she were to return to great privacy in later life. "Almost as though life had finally given her the go-ahead signal, Roy gathered momentum and was not to be stopped. The adventurer out for a good time in Provence turned into the adventurer who had found her calling. All her endurance, initiative, temerity, capacity for hard work and intellectual brilliance she now channelled into what she did best: writing. She wrote, more over, about what interested her most: human relationships. And she wrote using the method that was her forte: close, analytical observation. By all accounts she had a wonderful time honing her talent." (143)

There are several particular episodes in this biography that are a bright beacon of hope to me: one, that Gabrielle was to revisit her beloved haunts in Europe with success on her brow. I have been so heartbroken over saying goodbye to those cities where I have loved being me, that it embitters me to think that if I ever went back things would never be the same. Two, that if Gabrielle's perfectionism and drive (and her great dread of failure) brought into life a multiple-prize winning novel, won't I do something worthwhile someday? (Part of my reason for not beginning grad school right off, I think, is a vague fear of failure, or in otherwords of mediocrity, in which my sense of self would be reduced to nothing.) Three, that this period of pursuing writing as a career presents an appealing alternative life-path to me: it seems very unattainable, for there are thousands of people who long to be published, but though I enjoy the work, I have never felt a true calling to be a designer, whereas I have always longed to write. I would write no matter what, and it is immensely satisfying to me to produce a good piece of writing, and no other achievement brings me such exultation. Yet I know the little stories I spin in spare moments are lacking - lacking life experience, lacking dedication, lacking true training for a discerning eye? I come to wonder: isn't true writing a full-time job? I would be dreadfully afraid to take the plunge of such a commitment on such a precarious path: but this what Roy did, what Harper Lee did. Doesn't it make sense that I should develop my craft through more than my sporadic and highly emotional stories? But how do you find an opening into such a world?