Back
in '78, fed up with New York, I spent three months in Montréal, that
self-styled Paris of North America, hoping for cultural epiphany, but through
all my rambles up and down the boulevards of St. Denis and Outremont and
Sherbrooke and Côte des Neiges, I found none. The city and the province of
Quebec, being simultaneously North American and French-speaking, could have
been a happy marriage of my own personal cultures, but I never adjusted to the
odd bastardy of the place, and the prickly cultural self-consciousness of the
French-Canadians reminded, and reminds, me of the schizoid tribalism of Ulster.
At the time, in 1978, this tendency was accentuated by the election campaign
taking place, in which a diminutive French-Canadian named René Lévesque was
beating the tribal drums for independence. He won, but the province stayed
Canadian. The campaign itself was decorous and sober in the Canadian way, but
on election night another spirit (the Gallic? the alcoholic?) took over and the
streets were full of supporters of the victorious pro-independence Parti Québécois,
all free-love leftish neo-romantics of the May 68 school, many drunk, and
almost all dressed in the scruffy jeans-and-corduroy uniforms of the breed, the
men as extensively bearded as possible, the women free and easy, in jeans or
loose skirts. The high spirits were infectious, especially after a few Molsons,
but the more radical specimens of the PQ were motivated by a sour hatred of the
Commonwealth and the United States and, inevitably, the whole Western system
(all anti-globalists now) and, especially, a dislike of the English language.
And, as much of a Francophile as I always have been and ever will be, my first
love—indeed my only real nationality, like Elias Canetti’s—is my native tongue;
so its devaluation, as in pop misuse, or the false equality of bilingual
education, is anathema to me. In Quebec I saw such absurdities as “chien chaud” for ”hot dog” and “gourmandise rapide” for “fast food” and “Arrêt” on stop signs (where in France
they say “hot dog” and “fast-food” and “Stop”) all wrapped up in the neat
ribbons of nationalism, i.e. the ancien régime
blue-and-white of the long-suffering Belle Province—stirring stuff, in a way,
but apart from the silliness isn’t there an element of the most appalling
kitsch in all such puny nationalisms? Don’t they all come prepackaged with
their own versions of Arno Breker’s blondies, or New Soviet Man, or the Chinese
Red Guards? Serbian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Ulsterish, Quebecois, Scottish…?
Mind you, election night in
Montreal was great fun, as essentially benign mass celebrations can be, if you’re
tipsy enough and there’s no threat of retaliation from the police. I recall a
Parti Québécois victory party on the Rue St. Denis that went on for two days,
with time off for sleeping it off, then it was back to the bars and poutine (French fries in mayonnaise)
stands and dance clubs and, like so many of my life’s mad episodes, it was all
staged in the false sunlight of youth, where springtime springs anew every
hungover day.
But apart from the fêtes foraines of the Parti Québécois, I
found Canada to be a pleasantly dull place, a kind of oversized Scandinavia, a
cozy sideshow….and at the same time a wilderness,
and that reminds me. Before I left I drove up the Laurentian Expressway
along the St. Lawrence past dozing burgs with Old French names like Trois-Rivières
and Ste. Marie-des-Anges to Quebec City, a walled medieval fortress in the
southern wastes of the Greater North Pole, and from the battlements of the
Chateau Frontenac, that wedding cake of a hotel, I looked toward the North,
where poor Admiral Franklin’s men had died their agonizing deaths in 1845; and
I sensed the wilderness, as vividly as I’d done in Tunisia and Crete, but here
it was the frozen tundra of Algernon Blackwood’s howling Wendigo sprawled
across Canada’s giant, useless expanse, under the merciless Arctic sky: a
wilderness, but a different kind, truly. North of Quebec there’s nothing, whereas
south of Sousse, on the rim of the desert at the center of the world, there was
nothingness, in which men might live
for a time, and had. And in Crete the wilderness was devoid of humans but
scarily dense with the spirits of the old bygone gods. But here on the edge of
the Great Nowhere where nothing had ever been created was the cold breath of
outer space, withering all. I was dumfounded by the thought of those valiant
Frenchmen of the sixteenth century who left behind their verdant and familial
land to forage and die horribly in the hostile wilds of “new France,” of which
there remains little but the language and that fierce but obscure object of
desire: the redemption of the North, bringing Latin sunshine to the eternal
winter of the land and the heart. As the Quebec balladeer Gilles Vigneault had
it: “Mon pays n’est pas un pays / Mon
pays, c’est l’Hiver.”
