bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 40–41
The French Quarter by Ron Graham,
MacFarlane, Walter & Ross, 313 pp., $27.50.
Reviewed by David Anido
Ron Graham is one of Canada’s most literate political journalists and The French Quarter is a political book with, literally, blood on the table.
As someone who attended Lennoxville’s Bishop’s College School in his boyhood, Ron Graham strikes one as being quintessentially English-Canadian — a son of Westmount from the top of the famous Montreal hill. What a surprise it was personally to him to discover that his maternal grandfather, who spoke in English, was actually French-Canadian descended from master carpenter Zacherie Cloutier who came to Canada in 1634.
Such an appropriate epiphany for an author with strong federal instincts provided an opportunity for a syncretic transformation in Ron Graham’s life. The discovery of his ancien canadien inheritance now gave these instincts the ammunition to deal both personally and authoritatively with the “to be, or not to be,” the yin and the yang, of Canada’s most recurrent debate of unity over dissolution.
For those of us who might call ourselves “Saxophones” — Anglos, like the author, for whom an upbringing in Quebec has given a permanent empathy for latinity through fluency in the French language — Ron Graham personifies in bloodline what others have tried to absorb through culture. Je me souviens (the ambiguous phrase which replaced la belle province on Quebec’s licence plates) becomes meaningful in The French Quarter because it recalls the culture and lineage of Quebec — not merely the political recollection of the Plains of Abraham or the indifferent racism of the Durham Report.
The author, without patronizing, can now write on both sides of the “fence” to champion the context of Canada as a nation of cultural mixtures whose destiny can lead to an harmonious sum of many proud and legitimate parts. Certainly Ron Graham can write with as much authority on the “sum” of the Confederation as someone like tribal witch doctor and Parti québécois psychiatrist Camille Laurin can write on the “part.”
Of the quiet anglo-patrician life of Westmount and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where Anglo wealth was once evident in stately country homes with French- Canadian nannies and thoroughbred horses; boarding schools with imported British masters and chaplains; and baronic names like Molson, Redpath, Webster and Price; Ron Graham recalls his times in the company of the great Canadian legal intellectual and poet, Frank Scott.
“(Frank and Marian Scott) had introduced me to another sort of wealth, based upon intelligent friends, frequent laughter, lethal martinis, sagging shelves of books, Marian’s paintings, and big ideas.”
It has been the practice of many of Quebec’s Anglo and Jewish writers and academics — Ralph Gustafson, Mordecai Richler, Ronald Sutherland, Morley Callahan, Hugh Maclennan — to articulate the “big idea” of the positive aspects of Canadian Confederation from home bases in Quebec (Montreal, North Hatley, Sherbrooke). Such “intellectual diplomacy” has usually taken the empassioned view (often only in unilingual terms) that Canada is not Canada without Quebec and vice-versa.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, the “other solitude” dreams of greener pastures led by the undemocratic false prophets of the Front de libération québécois, and by the legitimate democratic commitment of many artists, academics, intellectuals, le Parti québécois and le Bloc québécois. Ron Graham, with the newly discovered power of his bicultural advocacy, leaves no doubt as to his vision of a united Canada. His advocacy is to be more than windmill-tilting; it is to be a Vraclav Havelesque belief in the unity of a Canadian dichotomy — whatever may happen…
On the subject of the language law Bill 101 the author states that “intellectually and emotionally I felt a profound sense of betrayal.” The preposterous invention of Quebec’s “language police”, which developed from the Laurin-inspired Bill 101, and the use of the collective word “allophone” (“other” in Greek) for non-anglo, nonfranco, inhabitants of Quebec enables the author to argue towards a resolution of relationships instead of the creation of a third or more solitudes in Canada.
“Bill 101 demonstrated an authoritarian, even totalitarian disregard for individual freedoms and minority rights.”
But bicultural advocacy in Quebec must take into account the very real pride in being francophone and québécois, and legitimate fears for the future of le peuple. History has been a guide —je me souviens. French patricians had forsaken les anciens canadiens when British power reigned supreme. Lord Durham, perhaps the second maudit anglais (after General Wolfe), had triggered the ultimate defiant response to denigrating a culture — the testament of François Xavier Garneau (Histoire du Canada). For some, the Roman Catholic Church’s paternal protection led to agrarian cud-chewing while the mercantile Anglais pulled the switches of power. For others, the roi nègre policies of British rule were part of the protective foundations of modern Quebec giving illusions of liberty of language, culture, religion and the Napoleonic code that duped Georges Étienne Cartier to accept Confederation as a step forward — but which were, in reality, a cultural Trojan Horse.
So how does Ron Graham deal with the issue of the cultural threat to notre pays surrounded by a sea of anglo/allophones? Is not the independence of Quebec, in a world of many states with “protected” national cultures (Japan, France, Scotland, Israel), the answer to an inevitable dilution of la francophonie in a plural, English-speaking North America — despite growing Hispanic influences? Even la revanche du berceau is now the mandate of others — immigrants from many distant shores speaking English for communication and livelihood, if not for love.
In answer, Ron Graham provides an honest assertion of his anglo-federalism with the equally honest plea that Québécois frustration with a crypto-colonial past and the clumsy present of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords should lead to a real federal conciliation.
“My federalism… is not the prejudice of those who hate the sight of French on cereal boxes or long for the much-delayed assimilation of French Canadians. Nor is it the weakness of those who preach concession after concession in the hope of appeasing the nationalist beast… I do not want Quebeckers to leave Canada, and I do not think they must.”
As Canada’s soul lies temporarily in the ditch at the exit from a recession; a decade of a government’s rule that has sacrificed the cultural dimensions of the arts and humanities on the one-dimensional altar of deficit reduction at all costs; and a fear of a changing world leaving Canada on the periphery of a new global market economy; Ron Graham’s French Quarter is a personal testimony to how blood-lines interact positively with upbringing and environment. His personal discovery of a “remembered past” gives stimulus to advocate a “conciliatory future.”
In August, 1992, from Way’s Mills (an eponymous hamlet of 19th century anglo-mercantile history in Quebec’s Eastern Townships) he writes of the foi et hommage he owes his French Canadian ancestors — albeit in “an English accent.” “Now I, too, had a family duty.” His advocacy of a proud and modern “French Quarter” within the Canadian family (which is only Canadian because of the French Quarter) is Ron Graham’s positive testimonial.
The book must be read to see how deeply personal and political is its author’s timely advocacy of faith amid the temporary confusion, mediocrity and spiritlessness — yet evident promise and overdue reenlightenment — of Canada today. Je me souviendrai.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 40–41. Read the rest of this issue →
