With Good does not make noiseher seventh novel, Monique Proulx plunges us into the heart of a territory where “capital beauty” reigns, where women, men and nature coexist in an age-old and uncertain balance, both fragile and merciless.
In 1994, when she met the famous writer Margaret Myre, whose friend she would be for 30 years, Flora Ste-Marie was a 47-year-old “old maid”. A character of a handywoman and a sort of secular saint in the service of others: a seriously ill sister, her brother’s little boy, her father – who affectionately calls her “my little guy” -, the cats, the chickens, the trees and the plants. And all the visitors to whom the family rents the chalets built on her large property in Mont Venteux, a sort of paradise located on the edge of a lake in the Laurentians, threatened with expropriation. Sculpting the wood, she gives shape to her solitude.
Dédié à Berthe Simard (1916-2015), « l’oiseleuse, l’amoureuse, la servante », Good does not make noise is a tribute to this valiant and modest woman who was the neighbor and friend of the writer Gabrielle Roy in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, a small village located between river and mountain in Charlevoix, where the author of Second-hand happiness spent all his summers from 1956 until his death in 1983.
A woman, writes François Ricard in his biography of Gabrielle Roy, “energetic and delicate, graceful and lively like a bird” (Gabrielle Roy. A lifeBoréal, 1996), driven by love of nature and self-sacrifice. Monique Proulx, who met Berthe Simard during a writing residency in Gabrielle Roy’s chalet during the summer of 2000, confirms this portrait.
At the time, upon her arrival in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, she went to greet the neighbor, with the impression of accomplishing a chore. “The meeting was dull,” she said in an interview. An old lady, in an old lady’s house, who had closed all the curtains even though it was still light outside. We couldn’t see the river. But when I came to leave, she took my hands and put them on her forehead, and she said to me: “Come back and see me.†That completely threw me to the ground. It was like a prayer, but it was also like an order.”
A debt to repay
It was as if this woman, who had given her whole life to others, including Gabrielle Roy – cleaning her house, cooking her meals, keeping her company – was asking him in turn to give her something. Monique Proulx will therefore return to see her every day that summer, then visit her twice a year for 15 years. “She had become a bit like my adopted daughter,” she said, laughing. Even though she was strong, she was vulnerable and I felt like I was giving her a little something back. He was someone extremely touching. Someone both self-effacing and luminous.” A being who accepted his role in the universe: that of being at the service of others.
And like all books, all stories, this one has its source, says the writer, in a sort of little thought that has become obsessive.
By publishing today Good makes no noise, Monique Proulx believes in a certain way that she is paying off a debt of memory. “But it was also a way of repaying a debt to all the Berthe Simards of this world, to all these non-characters”, confides Monique Proulx, aware of having often as a novelist “given in to the call of the sirens”, the spectacular, created “fiery” characters: a transsexual (The sex of the stars), a paraplegic painter (Homme invisible à la fenêtre), a Hasidic Jew leaving his community (Enlève la nuit). She’s the writer, in Good does not make noisewhich becomes a showcase for the self-effacing, the humble.
But it remains that Good does not make noise is above all a novel, with its invented share of characters, actions and thoughts. If Monique Proulx moves away from her models at times, she believes she has preserved their spirit. She swapped Charlevoix for the Laurentians, a territory she knows well, where she now lives a large part of the year and which has sometimes served as a literary setting. As was the case for Champagne (Boréal, 2008), a novel with which she said at the time that she wanted to “fight for the beauty of the world, against ignorance”.
A place of one’s own
The setting, the place, the nature, the houses (given, promised or lost) also occupy a central place in the novel, just as in the hearts of the characters. And the stories of all the houses that “slide under Flora’s feet” are authentic, assures Monique Proulx, including the one about Margaret Myre/Gabrielle Roy’s chalet – that’s what that Berthe Simard told her one day. A house, in his eyes, is both an anchor and “a symbol of our presence on earth. It’s a bit like an extension of the body, it’s what shelters your deep being. Without that, how can you avoid spreading outside?
Flora, we quickly understand, is someone who does not choose – we most often choose for her – who accepts reality as it is. Quite the opposite, basically, of an artist, of a writer, for whom reality is not enough. Because writing, writing fiction in particular, means extracting oneself from reality and having to constantly make choices.
We will thus find in Good does not make noise a beautiful underground reflection on creation. “I don’t give anything, I have a dry heart,” Margaret said to Flora one day. In this sense, are creating and writing selfish gestures? “I am obliged to say yes,” replies Monique Proulx, a writer who is becoming rare and for whom life is the first obligation. While we write, there must be nothing else that exists. In this sense, it is selfish. But at the same time, why do we write? like a kind of duty: that’s what I do best, that’s what I can give, because I really don’t know how to do anything else.”
But writing, as Monique Proulx envisages it, is above all wanting to change reality. “When I started to write, it was really to modify the universe, to give it other avenues, other insights. Being able to interpret the world in another way. And the more it goes on, the more I persist in saying: let’s not despair. Beauty exists, that’s all I can say. We are constantly witnessing it. And the book and the writing serve that purpose. To communicate beauty. Even speaking of horrors.”
“I also believe something a little crazy, but it’s really a deep conviction,” she adds. I think that human beings are fundamentally good. This is what speaks in me too when I write, even if I have lots of faults, darkness, and the universe, the beings around me have them too. There is still this space of clarity within us, which is too often veiled. Writing, for me, also serves to reveal that.”
