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Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
Robert W. Service: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited, selected, and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-938-9
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
FORTHCOMING
Duncan Campbell Scott: Selected Writings, edited, selected, and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-144-1
The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life by Charles G.D. Roberts, introduced by James Polk 978-1-45970-147-2
THE TOWN BELOW
A NOVEL
ROGER LEMELIN
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI
INTRODUCTION
BEING WORDS FOR THE READER
BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI
It is not likely that Roger Lemelin, an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, saw his first novel, Au pied de la pente douce, as a milestone work in the unfolding process of francophone (mostly Quebec) writing in Canada. What was more probable and likely is that Lemelin wanted to tell the story of a neighbourhood and its people not unlike the working-class milieu from which he himself came. The eldest of eleven children (only one girl!) of Florida and Joseph Lemelin, the latter a work-worn member of the urban underclass eking out an existence through part-time manual labour in order to support his family, Roger, from all accounts a bright and promising student, had to drop out in grade eight to go to work in his early teens and help support his siblings.
Any prospect of classical college (the usual route for ambitious young students) was beyond the Lemelin family’s means, so Roger enrolled in the equivalent of a trade school to study stenography, a skill that he acquired and put to good use in the early years of his employment. Intelligent and ambitious, it is no small wonder that the gaze of this young man, a product of the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur[1] of Quebec City, the basse-ville as it was called, should fix itself on the heights of the “Rock” on which stood all its history in walled stone, and on which had perched, sometimes only symbolically, the elites of New France, and now in Lemelin’s time, the new elites of church, state, and commerce.
For most visitors to Quebec City, it is the “Upper Town” of the ancient capital (la vieille capitale and today the capital-nationale) that offers itself as the premium experience of historic buildings, convents, and churches redolent of French architecture. The great gates of Saint-Jean and Saint-Louis so reminiscent of medieval France as well as surviving portions of the old city walls, and the towering, iconic Château Frontenac, queen of hotels in that city, overawe the tourist. There are chic shopping and gastronomic delights with a choice of fine wines and elegant phrasing on restaurant menus. It is there at the old hotel Château Montcalm (now demolished), in its more than adequate restaurant the Marquis de Montcalm, known for its bonne cuisine, that one learned to order cuisses de nymphes, translated as “thighs of nymphs,” but also known as frogs’ legs to a less imaginative sensibility. There one also acquired a taste for Digby scallops, meilleurs au monde, said the waiter, as well as the occasional bit of sturgeon from the Gaspé. They did have a bonne cuisine, perhaps not as refined as at the old Restaurant Kerhulu, a short walk from Quebec’s finest bookshop, the Librarie Garneau, with its dark ceiling-high bookshelves, and where the clerks wore sleeve coverings and tucked pencils behind their ears. It is to the Librarie Garneau that Roger Lemelin rushed in anxious anticipation to look for copies of his just-released novel. And it is at the Garneau that he was told that Monsieur Lemelin was a good writer but that it would be better to read Lionel Groulx, the arch traditionalist, whose L’appel de la race (1922), published pseudonymously, is a touchstone of Franco-Canadian linguistic tensions.
In 1940, a nattily dressed and well-pressed Roger Lemelin, was twenty-one.
All of these upper reaches of the Rock were essentially alien territory to the likes of the Lemelins who, as a matter of fact, were known to refer to their fellow citizens of Upper Town as les étrangers, or “the