In her memory of the meeting, recorded in American Notebooks, Blais compares Wilson to the “powerful (and avuncular)” Winston Churchill, but reserves her lyrical attention for the “stunningly beautiful” Elena, noting her strong, irregular features; her high cheekbones that seem permanently flushed by cold; her smile, etc., etc.
A huge fan of La belle bête, Wilson had promoted the author for a Guggenheim Fellowship and offered an open invitation to visit his grandiose home in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, at the time the hub of a lively artistic circle that included poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, and novelists Mary McCarthy (Wilson’s ex-wife) and Philip Roth. The Ritz encounter, as they say, changed her life. She rented a basement apartment in Cambridge, and during a fiercely lonely first year, surrounded by a language she barely spoke, struggled through what many consider the best of her early novels: Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.
The sixteenth child of an impoverished rural Quebec family, Emmanuel is born on a winter morning, handed over to his grandmother so his mother can return to work that day. A breathless, Dickensian plot, Günter Grass without the war, the story careens in and out of various characters’ heads, presaging Blais’s penchant for multiple points of view. Published in 1965, the novel won the Prix Médicis in France and was translated into thirteen languages. Wilson wrote a laudatory introduction to the American edition. The novel still seems audacious, presenting candid descriptions of adolescent sexuality in religious schools, and a central female character who ends up happily supporting her rural family by working at the village bordello.
With the exception of one extended return to Quebec in the late ’70s and several summer visits, Marie-Claire Blais has spent most of her writing life in the United States and France. Begun as a mind-broadening experience, her American sojourn soon turned personal. Through the Wilsons, she met Mary Meigs, a wealthy New England painter, and her partner, political activist Barbara Deming, both a good twenty years older, who shared a house in Wellfleet. One day, while Meigs and Blais were walking in the woods, a tree branch snapped back and hit Blais in the eye. Blinded and unable to work, she moved in with Meigs, who took care of her. At the time, Deming was in jail in Georgia for her involvement in a civil rights protest. Upon her return, the three lived in a ménage à trois for a while, until Deming withdrew. Meigs and Blais formed an enduring if rocky alliance, the details of which fuelled the novelist, prompting Meigs to write three fascinating volumes of autobiography, politely pointed efforts to set the record straight.
Edmund Wilson’s early book Axel’s Castle had solidified his association with modernism, but his patience with experimentation didn’t last. By the time he met Marie-Claire Blais, he wanted fiction that reflected the times and incited readers to take up arms. He scorned Blais’s experiments, advising her to read Walter de la Mare. Physical love between women, he lectured, was like “a glove made for the left hand worn on the right.” In her diaries, she agonized over whether she could continue to respect a man who did not adore Kafka.
The mentor-acolyte relationship stalled on aesthetic grounds, but it failed elsewhere, too. Wilson harboured a protective passion for Meigs. He was furious when “the little bitch” fell in love with a French author (believed to be Irène Monesi), and convinced Meigs to sell her Cape Cod property and move with them to Brittany. He warned Meigs to nail down her fortune and keep a close eye on the spendthrift Canadian. (Of the three books to result from that drama, Meigs’ memoir, The Medusa Head, is the most interesting.)
Since the ’80s, Marie-Claire Blais has lived in Key West, the geographical if not the spiritual setting of her magnum opus. A social animal who keeps up many friendships in far corners, she dragged her friend Michel Tremblay down for a visit in the early ’90s. He ended up buying a house there, although they travel in different worlds. Tremblay brings friends from Quebec; Blais is ensconced in the local nightlife and arts scene.
The lush coastal landscape of Key West is sensuously evoked in Soifs and the novels that follow. I finally found my way into that symphonic universe, where water metaphors dominate, the prose style an ocean of worlds with many plot tributaries, nothing solid, nowhere to touch bottom. Yet in many ways, the community presented evokes the one first encountered by a high-strung young provincial who was thrust up against the New England intelligentsia of the ’60s. Political activism versus art is the central conflict facing the main characters, some of whom are based on people Blais has identified from her life. Far from Emmanuel’s squalour, theirs is an often-festive occasion teeming with ideas, theories, observations, descriptions — the heady dinner table conversation of erudite, creative people.
On one of her visits to Montreal, Marie-Claire Blais chooses the time and place to meet. It is late afternoon in the grandiose, ultra-trendy Sofitel Hotel bar on Sherbrooke Street West. A tiny woman with thick, dark hair threatening to hide her face, she is perched on the edge of her chair. She has ordered a glass of Chardonnay and will swallow less than an ounce while we talk, her voice so soft I’m sure the tape recorder will be useless, her gaze so intense I’ll be unable to read my scribbled notes.
“Personally, I don’t like suffering. I prefer serenity. I am not at all a dark person; in fact, I love it when friends drag me away from writing and out to a bar, although sometimes I write in bars, too. It’s just that so many of my friends seem to have an aptitude for suffering. You know, Sylvia Plath — really, it could happen to anyone. The world is a terrible place, but we have the tools to change. We have just to wake up. Yes, Obama, but I would really have loved to see Clinton. It’s good to know she’s still there.”
