Writing Lesson
3
They
may think you’re funny for the wrong reasons
“When drunk, papa
often struck maman . . . And he would swear and push furniture around, and want
to fight everybody,” Angéline Hango tells us in the opening pages of her 1949 Leacock Medal winner, Truthfully Yours.
In this book, a memoir, Hango
describes the childhood embarrassments, hurts, and instability flowing from her
father’s alcoholism and her mother’s struggle to cope in small-town Quebec.
I wasn’t shocked to learn that the
author first submitted the book to publishers under a pseudonym and that she didn’t consider
it to be particularly funny when she wrote it in 1948. She penned it as
catharsis, and the award for humour that came a year later surprised her. Hango
was forty-four at that time. Researching my book, I contacted her son Roy in
Vermont, and he told me that his mother appreciated the Leacock honour, but did
not regard herself as a humorist or a professional writer of any kind. Though
she lived to the age of ninety,[1]
Hango never wrote anything for publication after the Leacock Medal.[2]
In fact, two decades passed before she would even look at her medal-winning
book again, reread it, and, for the first time, laugh.[3]
The “Truthfully” in the book’s title
refers to Hango’s pledge to break from her lifelong habit of “fibbing” about
her family, a practice she refines in school, social settings, and eventually the
workplace.
Although a capable chef and salesman
when sober, her father keeps his income on a soft footing and destabilizes the
family with his drinking. Hango and her younger sister go off to a convent
school for protection from the disturbances at home. Maman works tirelessly and
thanklessly as a seamstress to finance their education and board.
At the nunnery school, the two girls
learn English, music, and more, but feel out of place among the better-dressed,
upper-class students. They lie in order to fit in. Later, the book tells of
unwanted advances from older men and more “fibs.”
“So, where was the humour?” you ask.
Some commentators suggest that 1940s
readers found their amusement in material that is
"a touch politically incorrect by today’s standards,”[4] this being the 1940s stereotype of alcoholic, illiterate, and superstitious backwoods French Canadians, and, more generally, the seemingly comic presentation of an abusive circumstance.
"a touch politically incorrect by today’s standards,”[4] this being the 1940s stereotype of alcoholic, illiterate, and superstitious backwoods French Canadians, and, more generally, the seemingly comic presentation of an abusive circumstance.
For this distortion, the publisher,
Oxford University Press, bears some responsibility. It sprinkled cheery
cartoons throughout the book and branded the story as a “riotous” and “revealing”
picture of “life in rural French Canada,” with characters of unsurpassed
ignorance in “the business world.” As for the bumpy parts of Hango’s early
life, the original book jacket makes only light and vague mention of the author’s
“odd” and embarrassing relatives.
Oxford took other liberties, saying,
without any stipulation, that Truthfully
Yours described “many, many love affairs involving every man she [Hango]
met from the doorman at the department store to each and every one of her
sister’s beaux”[5]
when those “love affairs” are, in the actual text, clearly awkward encounters
or imagined events presented by Hango to show her susceptibility to
infatuation.
Hango may have unintentionally
contributed to this portrayal of French Canadian life by intertwining the
edgier elements of her story with reminiscences on her ancestry, her religion,
and traditions such as Christmas Eve réveillon.
She also slips into caricature when talking of life as an unmarried “old maid”
at the age of twenty-one and in describing her very Québécoise mother.
“Whenever we made her try to pronounce
words in English, she would twist her face all up, as if a person had to wear a
different face to speak a different tongue,” the author says. “The sounds that
came out did not resemble any language.”
Okay. That and some other parts might
be funny.
Hango tells us that her convent cohorts
“had a vague notion that anybody that lived in the States was fabulously rich
or immensely interesting.” With this presumption, she cites “the States” as her
home to ensure that her schoolyard tormentors are “simply awed into silence.”
Pondering the art of fibbing, Hango says when a man catches you in a lie, he “would
just take it for granted that he misunderstood . . . or that he remembered
incorrectly” but “not a female, she will pin you down.”
If the task of the humorist
is to tell the truth with affection, Hango makes a creditable
addition to the list of Leacock medallists because of her sense of irony,
forgiving take on her family, and decision to speak truthfully. I liked Truthfully Yours, but I’m amused most
because the book was mistakenly celebrated as a comic take on French Canadian
life when first published and now it can be regarded as politically incorrect
by those who wrongly assume that intention.[6]
It illustrates the limitations of
literary criticism,[7]
and that makes me laugh.
Writing Exercise
In five hundred
words, explain why children must always tell the truth and adults must lie.
[1] Roy A. Hango, email to DBD April
17, 2013.
[2] She was, however, working on a manuscript about travel in Morocco at the
time of her death from a stroke in 1995.
[3] Sheila McCook, “Optimism Helps
Writers,” Ottawa Citizen, Jan. 21, 1970, p.45
[4] AbeBooks, book description written by bookseller
(Finefinds Collection Management, Kaslo, BC, Canada), http://www.abebooks.com
(accessed October 15, 2012).
[5] Angéline Hango, Truthfully Yours (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1948)--from the book jacket.
[6] Angéline Hango was born on
February 2, 1905, and baptized Marie Rose Angéline Roy in Quebec. She first
distributed the manuscript for Truthfully Yours under the pseudonym
Angéline Bleuets and won the $500 Oxford–Crowell Award with this name. She had
married John Raymond Hango in 1932 in Arvida. After his death, she remarried,
assuming the surname Hango–Burke. She died on November 9, 1995, in Montreal.
[7] For a thoughtful and
interesting examination of the book in isolation of those perceptions, read
Bina Freiwald, “The
Interpellated Subject Lies Back: Angéline Hango’s Truthfully Yours,” Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (1996):
36–59. In an email to DBD, October 10, 2012, Bina Freiwald stated, “my essay .
. . was part of my research on Canadian women’s autobiographical writing, with
the emphasis on the text.”