The First Garden

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

In his book Memorias inmemoriales, the Spanish critic Azorнn tells of a
retired professor who returns to the city of his youth to retrace his
roots. But afraid that those roots are now effaced, he dies never having
left his hotel room. In The First Garden (Fischman’s translation of Le
Premier jardin), Hébert tells of an actress who returns to the city of
her youth, but is terrified of encountering her own roots: childhood in
an orphanage, a terrible fire that still haunts her sleep, and an
adoptive family that tried to make her a “lady.”

Having escaped the narrow Quebec of her youth, Flora Fontanges has long
been a successful actress in France. Now an older woman, she returns to
Quebec City to play Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, and to face her
own estranged daughter Maud.

But Maud has run away one more time, leaving her lover Raphael to greet
Flora. As they wait for Maud’s return, Raphael and Flora explore the
city, imagining its past of wealth and mansions, its servants, its first
settlers, its first garden in which the seeds of France were planted in
the New World. Unlike the professor in Spain, Flora sees all—except
the street of the raging fire that marked her for life, that set her on
a path of new identity, new roles, and theatre. This new life will soon
culminate in a vision of herself on stage as the aging Winnie buried in
sand—a metaphor of her own reality.

This book is many things: a feminist deconstruction of a city and its
social classes, an exposé of religious hypocrisy, a documentary of
hippies and their lives (the action occurs in 1977), a disquisition on
aging, and—despite the plot’s dark beginnings—a love letter to
Quebec City, which Hébert herself left for Paris decades ago. It is
also a poem: the power of Hébert’s emotion and of her poet’s vision
breaks through incessantly in passages of beauty and poignancy, rendered
well by Fischman’s translation.

Whatever it is, The First Garden is not a novel. It is too
miscellaneous and too loosely integrated, lacking the intense focus of
Hébert’s 1970 masterpiece Kamouraska or of her 1982 novel In the
Shadow of the Wind. The First Garden may be a less-fully-realized work,
but any book by Anne Hébert is a major publishing event.