To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

esting on the frail shoulders of a poet who
wrote only from the age of 16 to 19 (1895-
1899) and spent over 40 years in an asylum,
two speculative narratives based on his
poems based on his poems have appeared.
Alongside scholary studies, Nelligan has
inspired such speculative works—on his
madness (see Bernard Courteau, Nelligan
n'était pas fou), and now, on his love life.
Pierre Lemieux's Nelligan amoureux is a
scholarly investigation of Nelligan in love,
an appealing but obviously elusive subject
for we lack concrete biographical information.
Lemieux speculates on Nelligan's
unrequited love for a "Gretchen", "la vierge
blonde," and proceeds through three amatory
periods—contestation, conversion,
and alienation to link Nelligan's poems and
love life. Drawing upon evidence from the
poems themselves and relying on
Lacourcière's 1952 edition and Wyczynski's
1987 Biographie, Lemieux describes the
period of contestation (October 1895 to
Autumn 1897) as one influenced by pagan
mythology and poetic landscapes and a
longing for a "vierge blanche et rose!'
From autumn 1897 to spring 1899 occurs
the period of conversion during which the
poet's passion for Gretchen, la vierge blonde
is aroused, particulary in what Lemieux
calls "cycle of Gretchen," a group of fifteen
poems. During this period, Nelligan seems
to retreat to Catholicism, possibly caused,
claims Lemieux, by "un événement majeur
et tragique de l'été 1989, quelque chose
comme une grande déception amoureuse
qui se répercuterait dans Vaisseau d'Or!'
The third period, centred on Nelligan's
friend, Françoise, signals severe alienation,
characterized by hallucinatory poems
haunted by Poe-like spectres, skeletons,
phantoms, black cats, and is dominated by
a vierge noire.
Although a reader and devotee of
Nelligan will be rewarded by Lemieux's
painstaking dating, positioning and exegesis
of Nelligan's poems, this reader will
unfortunately also fall upon two problems.
First, since the Oeuvres complètes, was published
in 1991, Lemieux's information is
based upon the now outdated 1952 edition.
Second, can we really create a biography
based on a reading of the poems themselves.
Aware of this biographical fallacy,
Lemieux defends himself:
Le récit que nous présentons, bâti a
même les textes poétiques, n'est
généralement pas l'histoire réelle de la
vie de Nelligan, mais bien plutôt une
transposition littéraire ou une reconstitution
due à la plume du poète, dont on
peut dire seulement qu'elle offre une
vraisemblance suffisante.
Nevertheless, at the end of the book we
wonder at the thinness of the evidence for
Nelligan's love life. After all, Nelligan was a
young poet who relied on poetic conventions
and forefathers (Rodenbach, Verlaine,
Baudelaire etc), and whose turn of phrase
was often derived more from literature and
literary posing than from lived experience.
This is not to deny Nelligan's poems their
moments of breath-taking beauty and
poignancy. Think only of the closing of
Vaisseau d'or :
Qu'est devenu mon coeur, navire
déserté?
Hélas! Il a sombré dans l'abîme du Rêve!
or the terror of the later poems:
II a hanté mon noir taudis
Et ses soliloques maudits de fantôme
("Le spectre")
or the longing in Soir d'hiver:
Ah! comme la neige a neigé!
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre.
Godin does something both more dangerous
and more compelling with Nelligan's
poems. In his short collection of musings
on Nelligan, Godin who had worked on a
proposed film script on Nelligan to be shot
by the late Claude Jutra, offers his reflections
on the poet's life. Here we learn more
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