Thirty Acres, page 28
For the first time in his life he was aware of the burden of his frail body and no longer felt indignant when he heard people calling him “the old man,” as his daughter-in-law Elsie did.
He’d never be able to plough a field again. He felt he hadn’t strength enough any more to lift a bundle of hay on the end of a pitchfork, right up above his head, level with the top of the loaded hay-cart, as they used to have to do before loaders were invented. Now that he had lost contact with the soil, he seemed to have been drained of all his vigour.
What did the future hold for him? A useless existence: sitting beside the stove in the winter and on the porch in summer, smoking his pipe while the others went off to work in the fields – the fields which had been his and now belonged to someone else – and chewing over the bitterness of his ruined life and the injustice of other people and the land. When he gave these folks his farm he gave them everything that was his; he had given himself to the land, body and soul, without holding anything back.
What was the use!
He lit the little stove in the garage office, for the nights were getting chilly already. He huddled close to it. Isn’t that just what he would be doing if he were back home?
The snow came; it wasn’t like real snow, white and firm and crisp, but almost like rain, and it no sooner touched the ground than it turned into puddles of muddy water or became a sodden grey slush.
So this was the States – the States that have beckoned to so many, many farmer’s sons like a mirage. Beginning with his own son Ephrem. Towns full of houses coated with soot and shops that now stood empty, and dirty streets where haggard men wandered with trays of five-cent apples they tried to peddle to the occasional passer-by.
And back home? If what Etienne said was true, things weren’t much better there. The paper too …
In the city, winter held sway once more with all its train: a coating of ice on the trees that broke down the branches, a north wind that cut right through you, cold that froze everything solid.
All he had to do was to sit there and warm himself at the stove; they gave him all the coal he needed. The trucks were asleep out in the garage and their guardian didn’t have to look after them.
Big, ugly, tame animals.
All he had to do was to sit and wait for the pale dawn and for it to be time to go home and sleep and eat.
Christmas came and went. He had a specially good lunch on Christmas Eve: chicken sandwiches and a bottle of beer, which made him sleep better than usual. The thread that bound him to his Laurentian days was becoming more and more frayed. On Christmas Day, Ephrem and his family went to Grandfather Phillimore’s.
In February a shop opposite the garage was destroyed by an explosion.
The birds came back in April. At dawn they twittered loudly in the branches of a solitary ash tree in the yard. And every night old Moisan saved his crusts of bread, which he fed to them in little pellets as they fluttered timidly at his feet.
In June he got the news that Marie-Louise had died of consumption. Like Oguinase …
The days got shorter with the last hot breath of August.
One evening – “Wonder what they’re doing right now, back at Etienne’s. Talking about me maybe?”
Back home at Etienne’s, father and son were sitting in the warm kitchen. Outside, the night was gradually cooling down.
Etienne knocked out his pipe carefully on the edge of the spittoon.
“Say, Pa,” suggested Hormisdas, “did you hear about the Scotchman down in the Eastern Townships who’s making big money out of growing mushrooms?”
“Growing … what? Mushrooms?”
“Yeah! Mushrooms. Maybe we could try something like that right here.”
“Why, what a crazy idea! Got any more like that? … Listen, son, I’ve always been in favour of progress. But let me tell you, there’s a gol-darn limit to everything. My farm don’t need any of that kind of truck.”
“Oh, well, Pa. I just thought I’d tell you about it.”
But he said it with a slight shrug of his shoulders.
There was a moment’s silence.
“’Midas, we’ll be cutting the field at the bottom of the hill tomorrow,” said Etienne.
“All right.”
Euchariste Moisan – old man Moisan – sat smoking and coughing in his garage at White Falls.
His sight had been getting worse for some time now, and his hearing too. But it was his legs that had begun to fail him more than anything. So now he could no longer go to visit the little wood right down at the end of Jefferson Street.
He hadn’t given up hope of going back home to Saint-Jacques; giving up hope would mean he had made up his mind about it and that was something he hadn’t done and probably never would do, would never have to do.
Circumstances had decided matters for him, that and people ruled by circumstance.
With November the rains came again and he lit a fire in the stove.
Every year brought spring …
… and every year the valley of the St. Lawrence, which had lain asleep under the snow for four months, offered men its fields to plough and harrow and fertilize and seed and harvest …;
… different men …
… but always the same land.
AFTERWORD
BY ANTOINE SIROIS
Immediately upon its publication in 1938, Thirty Acres was recognized as a major novel, and it rapidly acquired its present reputation as a classic of French-Canadian literature. It did not emerge, however, from a vacuum. It is, rather, in the long tradition of the rural terroir novel, which began with Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle in 1846. Until the appearance of Thirty Acres, this genre had been idyllic and didactic. Ringuet was the first novelist to present a tragic hero and to resist the temptation to polemic.
The rural terroir novel had long served as an instrument of propaganda for the agriculturist ideology that proclaimed that only fidelity to the soil held out any hope of future happiness to French Canadians. In the literature of English Canada of the same period, the idyllic novel had also waxed lyrical on country life and sowed suspicion of the city; it did not, of course, propound the nationalist ideas common to its French-Canadian counterpart.
Like Robert J.C. Stead in 1926 with his novel Grain and Frederick Philip Grove in 1933 with his novel Fruits of the Earth, Ringuet offers a realistic portrait of a society undergoing the changes imposed by industrialization and urbanization in the years preceding and following the First World War. Technology gradually invaded the countryside; farm incomes, greatly increased by the demands of the war economy, created new consumer needs, and the bright lights of the cities attracted more and more of the young rural generation. Stead, Grove, and Ringuet had the courage to depict the disintegration of rural space and family life.
Thirty Acres is a carefully structured novel. One immediately notices that it is divided into four seasons, which correspond not to the seasons of the year but to the stages in the life of the protagonist, Euchariste Moisan. They mark the two periods in his life: his ascension (Spring and Summer) and his decline (Autumn and Winter). The rise encompasses Euchariste’s taking over the thirty acres of land, their successful cultivation, and his growing social status; his fall includes his gradual loss of wealth, of reputation, and, finally, of the land itself, which he cedes to his son Etienne. Generational conflict, which was a frequent theme in the rural novel, is here taken to the final degree when Etienne completely supplants his father and sends him into permanent exile in a foreign land. At the end of the novel the conflict between the generations reappears, this time between Etienne and his own son.
This same tension is evident in the forms in which time appears in the novel. Cyclical time, the endless beginnings of new days and new seasons, imposes periods of specific activity on the habitant from ploughing to harvest. The author presents it in a classical image: “The thread of days is wound onto the distaff of the years with an even continuous motion, each today enveloping a yesterday. When the skein is finished the spinning-wheel of time at once begins another.” This time, which matches the cycles of nature, creates in the farmer a respect for the past as a paradigm for the future and a resistance to progress that increases with age. Euchariste, who welcomed innovations in his youth, in the end rejects tractors: “Machines that cost a small fortune and did no better work than the horses they used in the good old days.” The laws of progress introduce into the cycles of nature a linear time of change, which brings with it not only more concerted mechanization on the farms but also a growing desire in the young for money and the comforts it buys, comforts often associated with the city. Several of the characters add to this awakening desire for change: the foreigner, Albert, a French hired hand who has moved around too much “for the future to have any certainty” and who passes on to Euchariste’s son, Ephrem, a longing for faraway places; the cousin from the States who arrives with his big shiny car and seductive American wife, flashing rolls of big-city money.
Progress not only overthrows the traditional sense of time but also breaks down the sense of rural spaces; enclosed and concentric. First is the parish, “that tightly knit, closed community,” “the little parochial fatherland which is the only one country folk recognize.” Then comes the farm: for Euchariste, “His universe did not extend beyond this patch of ground and this little cluster of humanity, that were linked together by strong mutual attractions.” On the farm there are three important structures: the barn, the stable, and the family home, and in the home the centre is the kitchen, the mother’s domain, with the stove in turn at its centre: “At the Branchauds’, as in all the other farm-houses, the whole family was gathered in the kitchen round the stove, which was heated red-hot and roaring away at full blast.” Here the maternal bosom offers shelter, safety, and warmth. Throughout the novel it is presented as life-giving and is contrasted with cold, which is associated with death.
Whereas the mother reigns indoors, the father reigns outdoors, though his dominance is only partial. Ringuet recalls the traditional image of the farmer in the earlier rural novel when Euchariste remembers what the bishop said to him: “Didn’t he say it was us, the people in the country, who are the real Canadians, the real folks? … And he said if you desert the land you’re practically headed straight for hell.” Despite his attachment and his fidelity to the soil, Euchariste is eventually forced to cede everything to his son, Etienne, to leave his beloved farm, and to finish his days as nightwatchman in a garage in the United States. His fate is thus diametrically opposed to the earlier idealist tradition of the novel.
In his narrative, Ringuet personifies the earth: Euchariste has a vague sense that it is “the beneficent and fruitful goddess to whom one offers the first-born of the flock and the first fruits of the harvest.” Earth is not only mother and spouse whom man must make fertile and fruitful; she is also a demanding and unrelenting mistress. From the very beginning the narrator describes her relationship with the farmers: “The unfeeling and imperious land was the lordly suzerain whose serfs they were, paying their dues to the inclement weather in the form of ruined harvests, subjected to the forced labour of digging ditches and clearing away the forests, compelled the whole year round to pay their tithe in sweat.” She rejects the aging Euchariste, taking in his place his strong young son. She is eternal, and the novel ends with the words, “different men … but always the same land.”
As in earlier novels, urban space is set in opposition to rural space. Euchariste is made to live in the city against his wishes, but several of his children do so by choice. The narrator’s distress is nonetheless evident: “Here was another one going off to answer the call of the city, dazzled by the winking lights of the electric signs, by easy money easily earned and easily spent. Napoléon had chosen the daily round of factory life with its humdrum safe security.” Even though, with Ringuet’s more modern attitude, he who deserts the sacred soil does not suffer divine wrath, the depiction of the city, be it Montreal or White Falls, is still decidedly negative – ugly, dirty, smelly.
In addition to his individual point of view, Ringuet brings to his work an acute consciousness of stylistic values. He presents his hero’s fall, and the trials that he must undergo, in violent urban images: the noise, the smells, flashing neon signs, and imprisonment within the walls of the labyrinth. In particular, there are frequent symbols suggesting drowning in slime. For example, on the train taking Euchariste away to the United States, when his son has given him a one-way ticket, “He didn’t budge until they got to Montreal and sat hunched up in his ’coon coat, with his fur cap pulled down over his eyes, on the greasy wicker seat of a second-class coach, which stank of the fumes from the engine and the smoke from the passengers’ pipes and was filthy with melted snow and spittle…. he was alone now, more alone than he had ever been, adrift on the ocean of the city, whose waves he could hear beating close at hand.” The imagery of slime continues after his arrival in White Falls, when Euchariste’s son drives him along a street “which unemptied garbage-cans, newspapers of the evening before, and sweepings from front doorsteps – all the offscourings of a crowded urban centre – had turned into a sort of long sewer. It had been cold that night and the rivulets of filth had frozen along the edges of the sidewalks.”
Ringuet is known for his masterful skill in language, his rich and precise vocabulary, and his expressive style, as well as the realism with which he stamped it by adapting it to the needs of his characters. The narrator uses standard French with occasional Canadianisms. The farmers use a phonetic, lexical, and syntactic transcription of turn-of-the-century country speech. The Franco-Americans speak franglais. Until Ringuet’s time, few French-Canadian authors had dared go so far in their use of language.
In his search for realism, Ringuet – like Zola, whom he greatly admired – brings his hero to a tragic fate. In the idyllic novels, by contrast, the will of the heroic characters overcame every obstacle. Euchariste’s destiny is to measure himself against the elements, which he cannot control, and to find that the feebleness of his efforts is inevitable. As the novel closes, the narrator reflects, “Circumstances had decided matters for him, that and people ruled by circumstance.”
This sense of loss is the same one felt by Gander Stake in Grain and Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth, and it is caused by the characters’ excessive attachment to the soil, which, in the end, defeats them. Their loss touches their emotions rather than their possessions. And the tragic destiny of the man of the earth around the time of the First World War, which increased the rate of industrialization and urbanization, is no better in an urban setting. Like Stead and Grove, Ringuet sees no happier lot for those who move to town, and he seeks to transcend regionalism and the particular situation of the farmer to speak of the human condition in a time of inevitable change.
BY RINGUET
FICTION
Trente arpents [Thirty Acres] (1938)
Un Monde était leur empire [Their Empire was a World] (1943)
L’Héritage et autres contes [The Legacy and Other Stories] (1946)
Fausse Monnaie [Counterfeit] (1947)
Le Poids du jour [The Burden of the Day] (1949)
HISTORY
L’Amiral et le Facteur ou Comment l’Amérique ne fut pas
découverte [The Admiral and the Factor or How America Was
Not Discovered] (1954)
PARODY
(with Louis Francoeur) Littératures … à la manière de …
[Writing … in the Style of …] (1924)
RECOLLECTIONS
Confidences [Confidings] (1965)
Copyright, Canada, 1940
The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited
Translated by Felix and Dorothea Walter
Afterword copyright © 1989 by Antoine Sirois
Translated by E.A. Walker
First New Canadian Library edition published 1960 by arrangement with
the Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
This New Canadian Library edition 2009.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system,
without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of
photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the
Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement
of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ringuet
[Trente arpents. English]
Thirty acres / Ringuet ; with an afterword by Antoine Sirois ;
translated by Felix and Dorothea Walter.
(New Canadian library)
Translation of: Trente arpents.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-379-9
I. Walter, Felix, 1902- II. Walter, Dorothea III. Title. IV. Title:
Trente arpents. English. V. Series.
PS8531.A48T713 2009 C843′.52 C2008-906473-9
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Ringuet, Thirty Acres
