The Town Below. Roger Lemelin

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      The dust jacket of the Reynal & Hitchcock edition of The Town Below (1948). Note the tenements in the foreground and the looming heights of Quebec City overshadowing them.

      Viewed in retrospect now, we see an almost unbelievable run of good fortune that went on bringing Lemelin wealth and prestige until at the age of fifty-two he was made president and editor-in-chief of the Montreal newspaper La Presse, the biggest and most distinguished French-language newspaper outside of France. It was a position in which he served for nine years.

      Lemelin’s inspired creation of the Plouffe family became the centre of his creative and published life and, with its successful move into the entertainment world, assured the author considerable financial well-being. It was as if he had come to realize in the events of his own life the aspirations of his alter ego, the ambitious Denis Boucher. But Lemelin’s success was not only one of popularity and financial reward. There were numerous accolades and distinctions from literary prizes and medals, to an honorary doctorate and, eventually, to being named to the Order of Canada and the National Order of Quebec.

      Lemelin was also politically outspoken and courageous in expressing his views about Quebec nationalism, which sought to separate Quebec from Canada. This position earned him the enmity of separatist intellectuals, which manifested itself in the disparagement of his work or in dismissive criticism. However, it is interesting to note that those critics who were not radically parti pris admitted the importance of the breakthrough that Lemelin had achieved with his pioneering novel Au pied de la pente douce/The Town Below. Together with Trente Arpents/Thirty Acres by Ringuet and the equally bold and contemporaneous effort of Gabrielle Roy with her novels of working-class francophone Montreal, Au pied de la pente douce established social realism and helped to push French fiction in Quebec more decisively into the twentieth century and away from its traditional terroir roots.

      Analysis and interpretation by literary critics and historians notwithstanding, we have Lemelin’s own words loosely translated to tell us how it was in the beginning:

      One day when I was making my way down the gentle slope, my eye fell distractedly on the jumble of little houses which made up the neighbourhood of Saint-Sauveur. I had been thinking and looking for a subject for a novel. I stopped suddenly, happy and surprised. The idea for what would become Au pied de la pente douce hit me like a bolt of lightning. A ball of fire. The neighbourhood revealed itself to me in a new light. It was now a huge encampment. A whole class of people that was besieging what was an impregnable citadel: the rise to social betterment. With what fury and with what enthusiasm I now took up my task.

      As president and editor-in-chief of the important French newspaper La Presse, Lemelin had reached the pinnacle of his prestige, doubly so if we bear in mind that, after all, he was a self-educated grade eight dropout who had successfully achieved what he had hoped for in charting the lives and social ambitions of the grimpeurs or “climbers” of his earliest literary effort. In addition there was the very considerable reputation he enjoyed as creator and principal scriptwriter of Les Plouffes, an almost archetypal lower-middle-class/working-class French-Canadian family.

      Prosperous, well-established, and always sartorially well turned out, Lemelin had a splendid residence built on a promontory in Cap Rouge outside Quebec City, which he named Villa Capricorn in honour of his wife. Having taken on the presidency of La Presse in 1972, Lemelin divested himself of his food business, which he sold to a large corporate conglomerate. He stayed on at La Presse for almost ten years, a period that was also abundantly rewarding for his creative life.

      In addition to various translations of the Plouffe family saga (there was even one in Spanish in which the family was purportedly Mexican!), Lemelin continued to write and to publish and to win acclaim and distinction as an author. In 1974 he was elected (the first Canadian) a member of the Académie Goncourt in France. In 1979 he published Les voies de l’espérance, a collection of speeches as well as an account of his semi-official visit to the Soviet Union. In 1980 he published La culotte d’or, a collection of stories and recollections. In 1984 came the English edition of The Crime of Ovide Plouffe, which was also made into a film, Les Plouffes, having also been made into a film in 1981. Books and television movies followed in the mid-1980s. Fond of tobacco, he published Autopsie d’un fumeur in 1988, a somewhat wry reflection on his own habit. France named him to its Légion d’honneur in 1990.

      Lemelin died in 1992, a shade over the biblical three score and ten. There were posthumous honours, as well. The sloping street known as Côte Franklin was renamed La Pente Douce. In 1994 Roger Lemelin Square was inaugurated in his old neighbourhood of Saint-Sauveur, and in 1995 a library was also named in his honour in Cap Rouge.

      Now, read the novel.