SUZANNE’S REAL-LIFE LUMINARIES

The heroine of Anaïs BarbeauLavalette’s Suzanne crosses paths with an array of public figures, both famous and infamous. Here are some of them.

Marcel Barbeau: Suzanne’s erstwhile husband, and the author’s maternal grandfather, went on to a long and varied career and had won virtually every existing honour available to a Quebec artist by the time he died, aged 90, in 2016.

Paul-Émile Borduas: The StHilaire-born artist was leader of the avant-garde Automatist movement and the main author of the 1948 Refus Global manifesto, an iconoclastic document that has had an impact incalculably broader than the few hundred copies sold at the time. He spent much of his subsequent life ostracized from the Quebec establishment and died of a heart attack in France in 1960, aged just 55. A space adjacent to La grande bibliothèque in downtown Montreal is named in his honour.

Claude Gauvreau: Gauvreau achieved in the realms of poetry, sound poetry and drama what his fellow Refus Global signees achieved in the visual arts, bringing Quebec into full participation with cutting-edge international currents. He died in 1971 at 45 after struggling with mental illness.

Jackson Pollock: The conflicted titan of modern art, revered/reviled as a pioneer of abstract expressionism, makes a non-speaking appearance in the novel, playing a small but significant part in Suzanne’s fitful progress as a painter.

Jean-Paul Riopelle: Part of Suzanne’s bohemian social circle on her arrival in postwar Montreal, Riopelle helped her out during hard times in New York in the 1960s and went on to be arguably the most important Quebec artist of the 20th century. Stella Walsh: Née Stanisława Walasiewicz, the Polish-born, Cleveland-raised athlete was the subject of probably the first gender controversy in modern Olympic history: after she won the 100-metre dash at the 1932 games in Los Angeles, it was questioned whether she was really a woman. (She was later found to have had male sex organs.) One of her competitors was Hilda Strike, a childhood idol and passing acquaintance of Suzanne’s.