Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau
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| Born | June 13, 1912 Montreal, Canada |
| Died | October 24, 1943 (aged 31) Canada |
| Language | French |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Notable works | Regards et jeux dans l'espace (1937), Œuvres (1971), Œuvres en prose (1995), Journal 1929–1939 (2012), Lettres (2020) |
Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (born June 13, 1912, in Montreal – died October 24, 1943, in Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier) was a Canadian poet and writer. He also wrote many letters and essays. After he passed away, people recognized him as a very important figure in Quebec literature, especially for the literary movement of the 1950s. He is best known for his writing, especially his only book published during his lifetime, called Regards et Jeux dans l'espace (published in 1937). But he was also a talented painter. Most of his writings, about 2600 pages, were published between 1970 and 2020.
Contents
His Life Story
Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau came from a family of writers. His grandfather was the poet Alfred Garneau, and his great-grandfather was the historian Francois-Xavier Garneau. Hector spent his early years at his family's old home in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Quebec. His cousin, Anne Hébert, who also became a famous writer, was born there in 1916.
In 1923, Hector moved to Montréal with his parents. There, he studied classic subjects at three Jesuit schools: Sainte-Marie, Jean de Brebeuf, and Loyola.
Hector also loved art. In 1925, he studied painting at Montreal's Collège des beaux-arts. He learned alongside other artists like Paul-Emile Borduas and Jean-Paul Lemieux. He even won a bronze medal and a second prize for one of his artworks. Later, in 1934, he showed some of his paintings at the Galerie des Arts in Montréal. In 1937, his painting "Sky Fall" was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts.
When he was still young, Hector and his friends Paul Beaulieu, Robert Charbonneau, Robert Élie, and Jean Le Moyne started a monthly magazine called La relève.
In 1934, Hector developed a heart problem called rheumatic heart disease. Because of this, he had to stop his studies. He then spent his time writing poems, painting, and making music. In 1937, his collection of poems, Regards et jeux dans l'espace, was published. He sadly passed away in 1943 from a heart attack, after going canoeing by himself.
His Poetry
Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau first gained attention as a poet when he was just 13 years old. His poem "Le dinosaure" won first prize in a competition across the province. Two years later, he received another award from the Canadian Authors' Association for his poem "L'automne."
He wrote a lot of poetry between 1934 and 1937. It's said that on one day, October 22, 1937, he wrote 13 poems! However, during his lifetime, he only published one small book. This book, Regards et jeux dans l'espace, contained 28 poems. It was quite new and different for its time, with lines that didn't rhyme, no punctuation, and unusual sentence structures.
About Looks and Plays in space
Regards et Jeux dans l'espace was published in March 1937. Critics didn't give it a very warm welcome. Many people thought this made the author very sad. However, some say that Garneau was not discouraged by the critics. He wrote, What is to be feared here is the silence. A month after the book came out, he even tried to promote it himself, which was surprising for him. He didn't expect any big problems with how critics would receive it.
De Saint-Denys Garneau planned his book very carefully. The way the titles and sections were laid out didn't always match the order of the poems. To find the titles or order of the poems, you often had to look at the table of contents. Some poems had titles in the text, others didn't. These choices were not random; Garneau himself carefully prepared the table of contents for the first edition. Looks and Plays in space has twenty-eight poems. They are divided into seven sections, plus an unnumbered poem called "Accompaniment" at the end of the seventh section, which is titled "Untitled." As Romain Légaré points out, "the book is held together by a strong idea: the unity of opposites."
For a long time, people thought the "I" (the speaker) in the poems was always the poet himself. But the poems are full of mystery. François Hébert described the original style of this poetry:
"Garneau used very simple language, but it had many different layers if you listened closely. He added many surprises: unexpected rhymes or similar sounds, unusual sentences, playful sounds, and sudden changes in meaning. The lines of his poems were often odd and irregular, even whimsical. They had gaps and variations. They were laid out strangely on the page, like a staircase, with uneven spacing. The verses were full of unexpected rhymes and clever alliterations, placed as if by chance."
Alain Grandbois summarized it by saying, "Garneau's poetry... seems to me to show the most perfect expression of the most amazing freedom. It breaks free and reaches complete independence." Even if de Saint-Denys Garneau himself was disappointed with how it was received, Regards et Jeux dans l'espace is now seen as one of the most important books in Quebec poetry.
Works Published After His Death
His Letters
Many of Garneau's letters that were not published during his lifetime have recently been made public. This means we can now read all his letters, which are a huge part of his work (about 920 pages). Garneau loved to write long letters, sometimes until he was physically tired. In his letters, he talked about what he was reading, compared different music composers, commented on art shows, shared stories, described people, and painted pictures of landscapes with words. He was always exploring who he was in relation to the world around him. His stories in these letters unfold like a simple comic strip. He often described moments with a strong, playful sense, showing that he enjoyed feeling things that might usually cause dislike. His stories often changed what people expected or thought about his unusual life, which was sometimes seen as almost horrible. In his private letters, where he felt free to express himself without worrying about publishing, De Saint-Denys Garneau openly discussed the main question in all his writings: how to truly exist?
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His letters are almost like a novel, where the main character is an "I" who constantly questions his place in the world, his relationships with others, and his own self. It's as if he was never sure if he truly existed. We often forget the immediate purpose of his letters because their deeper meaning is so strong. While they offer valuable information, their main purpose is to explore the idea of "being." When you read his letters as one continuous story, you can see how consistent this character was. For him, "being was a made-up activity," and writing was everything. In his letters, Garneau gave himself completely, always wondering about the value of this "gift" of himself, which was his writing.
“The letters of the poet de Saint-Denys Garneau are truly unique. If we compare them to letters from other writers, it's hard to find any that are truly similar.” — Michel Biron, 2022
Michel Biron, who edited the Lettres, believes that "de Saint-Denys Garneau was a remarkable letter-writer, both in how good his letters were and how many he wrote in just about twelve years." In 2020, Biron wrote that we discovered "a fascinating letter writer who put his best self into his letters. He was also a complex, funny, and lovable person." This was "so different from the image of a sad victim that people had given him." His letters are "both like a novel... and a type of essay." They tell "the story of a life with an intensity, clarity, and sharpness better than anything Garneau's friends or people who studied his work have tried to do." And this life, "is full of energy everywhere."
His Prose Writings
De Saint-Denys Garneau lived very intensely, especially between 1929 and 1938, when he focused deeply on writing. Even though his short studies in philosophy influenced his articles and essays (collected in Œuvres en prose), his Journal 1929–1939, and his many Letters, the editor of Works in prose, Giselle Huot, writes: "all his studies would mean nothing if de Saint-Denys Garneau hadn't done his own personal learning. For him, the search for knowledge was based on a 'search for being,' which included his spiritual and artistic journey." So, "his work cannot be 'understood' or 'explained' without giving a lot of importance to this search for being, which was the beginning and end of everything for de Saint-Denys Garneau."
It's hard to separate Garneau's writings meant for the public from his private writings. For example, the Works collected in a first edition of 1,320 pages in 1971 had not been published during his lifetime. This included his "found" poems, his Journal, and his Letters. Biron notes, "Almost all of Garneau's writings, which is rare in modern literature, stayed out of the public eye." François Hébert says that de Saint-Denys Garneau "could say the most important things in a few words, with amazing honesty," and then "keep quiet, so we could discover it again."
Yvon Rivard observed: "De Saint-Denys Garneau died at the age of thirty-one, in 1943. Since his death, he has been slowly gaining recognition for several years." Many Quebec writers preferred works about rebellion, freedom, and self-expression over de Saint-Denys Garneau's "bad poor" (from Œuvres in prose, p. 623). "It's understandable that many turned away from this poet who refused all the tricks and comforts that literature, religion, or his country offered him." De Saint-Denys Garneau didn't write to show how unique he was. He wrote to try and find an answer to the only question that mattered. "When he stopped publishing, it wasn't out of anger or disappointment. It was because silence seemed to him the only way to truly exist."
His Diary 1929–1939
Between 1929 and 1939, and maybe even later, de Saint-Denys Garneau kept a "Journal" in about seven notebooks. According to François Dumont, "The full edition of the Journal 1929–1939 faced challenges until 2012. These included censorship and friends wanting to cut and organize the texts based on their own ideas of beauty." However, de Saint-Denys Garneau himself might have preferred a less organized style in his texts. Dumont adds that "The variety of writing styles and the literary quality of many parts mean that the word 'diary' doesn't fully capture its special nature." When looking at the different forms de Saint-Denys Garneau used in his notebooks – from self-reflection, fiction, and letters, to thoughts on art and poetry – it becomes clear: "Garneau gradually combined thoughtful discussions with the possibilities offered by poetry and fiction. A lively connection developed between life summaries and sketches, leading to a form of writing that included various parts of his Diary."
“I would have liked to say: I am not a person who speaks to you, not a person, this messy, scattered being, without a real center. But I hope you would not be wrong in believing that you can still address the center at some point, a small flame perhaps which persists, a remnant of what was destroyed [...], where perhaps persists the place of a possible hope of not being rejected from the Be-ing itself.” — Journal 1929–1939, January 21, 1939
You can see a common theme in the many different forms de Saint-Denys Garneau used. "By the end of his journey, de Saint-Denys Garneau managed to break free from traditional writing rules. He found a complete (but still broken) form where poetry and fiction were connected to life itself." Dumont notes that while showing "parts of his notebook writing that changed the usual goals of a diary," the notebooks are "a wandering and exploring form. This is probably closer to what Montaigne meant by 'essay' than what the word 'essay' means today."
How He Was Recognized
After Garneau's death, his poems that had not been published were collected by Élie. They were titled Les Solitudes and published in 1949 along with Regards... as Poésies complètes: Regards et jeux dans l'espace, Les solitudes. The Dictionary of Literary Biography says that Garneau's "influence only became clear after his Poésies complètes were published in 1949." Since then, many more studies have been done on his life and work. No other writer in Quebec has been the subject of so many publications. Today, Garneau is seen as a pioneer of modern French-Canadian literature.
Garneau's diary from 1935–39 was published in Montréal in 1954. It was called Journal, edited by Élie and Le Moyne, with a foreword by Gilles Marcotte. Glassco published his English translation, The Journal of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, in 1962.
Also in 1962, the Canadian poet F. R. Scott translated ten of Garneau's poems into English for his book, Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hebert. Glassco published his translated Complete Poems of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau in 1975. Glassco's book won the Canada Council Award for translation that year.
Some of Garneau's poetry has also been translated into Spanish by Luis Vicente de Aguinaga. This was published in 2007 as Todos y cada uno.
Some of Garneau's poems have been turned into music by the Canadian contemporary classical composer Bruce Mather, and by the Quebec folk group Villeray.
Awards He Received
- Maison Henry Morgan (1926)
- Association des auteurs Canadiens / Canadian Authors Association (1928)
- Canada Council Award (for English translations) (1975)
Commemorative Postage Stamp
On September 8, 2003, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Library of Canada, Canada Post released a special series of stamps called "The Writers of Canada." The design was by Katalina Kovats. It featured two English-Canadian and two French-Canadian stamps. Three million stamps were made. The two French-Canadian authors chosen were De Saint-Denys Garneau and his cousin, Anne Hébert.
Public Art Honoring Him
De Saint-Denys Garneau, along with Octave Crémazie and Émile Nelligan, is honored by a large ceramic mural. It was created by Georges Lauda, Paul Pannier, and Gérald Cordeau at Crémazie metro station in Montréal. The artwork is called Le Poète dans l'univers (The Poet in the Universe), and it includes a part of his poem "Faction."
See also
- Quebec literature
- List of Canadian writers
