Ricard up for award

DANIEL McCABE | "It's a form of torture," says French language and literature professor François Ricard. Next Sunday, a federal civil servant will be making a handful of phone calls to a group of writers that may or may not include Ricard. The calls will be to inform the authors that they are among the winners of the Governor General's Literary Awards  the country's most prestigious prize for books. If you don't get a call, you know you haven't won.

What Ricard does know is that he's in the running for the top prize for a work of non-fiction in French. The finalists for the award were announced last week and Ricard's Gabrielle Roy: Une vie is one of five books nominated.

His department has an amazing track record in the competition. Three professors from French language and literature  Yvan Lamonde, Yvon Rivard and Ricard  have all won Governor General's Literary Awards in the past. Ricard earned the prize in 1985 for La littérature contre elle même.

Gabrielle Roy: Une vie is a literary biography of one of Canada's most beloved writers. A French-Canadian who grew up in Manitoba, Roy settled in Quebec just before World War II. A one-time schoolteacher, she turned her energies to writing and produced Bonheur d'Occasion (The Tin Flute in English) in 1947. It became an international best-seller and was translated into 10 languages.

Ricard isn't just interested in Roy as a scholar. He was a friend and a trusted adviser to the famous writer. They met in 1973, 10 years before her death. "Prior to meeting her, I had been reading, studying and teaching about her work. I've been immersed in her world for 25 years.

"She's probably the only real Canadian author in the federal sense of the word. By that I mean both French and English Canadians claimed her as their own. There were schoolchildren who read her Street of Riches who never knew she had actually written the book in French."

A year before her death, Roy got together with Ricard to make a special request. She presented her friend with a manuscript she had written about her own life. "Use this to write my life," she told the stunned Ricard.

"I didn't say yes, but I didn't say no," says Ricard. His reluctance stemmed from his own belief that literary biographies aren't generally worthwhile. They either portray their subjects "as if they were saints" or they "tell you how a great artist was really a terrible person  a bandit and a wife-beater."

Still, after Ricard had Roy's autobiography published as Enchantment and Sorrow, he decided to go ahead with the book Roy asked him to write.

He's still not a big fan of most biographies of writers, "but in her case, it really made sense. In her works, she tends to transform her life into literature. She uses it as the main matter of her books. She was a person to whom writing was not simply a profession, it was her life."

He earned a Killam Fellowship from the Canada Council in 1988 to work on the project. In all, the book took seven years to research and three more to write.

"It's the first [biography] I've ever written and it's the last I'll ever do," says Ricard.

The book is candid about its subject. Many critics expected a fawning tribute, but Ricard says, "I didn't hide anything. I surprised a lot of people." The book chronicles Roy's bouts with depression, her strained relationship with her mother and reveals that her husband was gay.

Would Roy have been pleased with the final result?

"I wouldn't have written this book if she and her husband were still alive," answers Ricard. "I hope she would have sensed how my admiration and love for her hadn't changed. To the contrary, now that I have a better sense of the difficulties she faced in her life, I have a deeper appreciation for her."

The book has already won a top prize, the Prix Jean Éthier-Blais (named after Ricard's one-time departmental colleague who died in 1995) as the best work of literary criticism published in Quebec.

Working with French language and literature professor Jane Everett and a team of graduate students, Ricard has prepared a new collection of Roy's correspondence and writings that will be published this week. An English version of Gabrielle Roy: Une vie will be in bookstores next year, published by McClelland and Stewart.

And as for that Sunday call about the Governor General's Literary Award, Ricard says he doesn't plan to sacrifice half his weekend sitting nervously by the phone. "I'm going to go out. If I win, they can call me Monday."