Hubert Aquin (; 24 October 1929 – 15 March 1977) was a Quebec writer, filmmaker and intellectual. He is particularly known for his novel Next Episode. He is also an important figure in the history of the Quebec independence movement, to which he contributed both as an activist and as an essayist. Tempted by suicide for a great part of his existence, he ended his life in 1977 in the gardens of Villa Maria College.
Biography
Genealogy
Hubert Aquin was born on 24 October 1929, at 4037 St-André Street, in Montreal. His family is mainly of French Canadian origin, but also of Irish origin through his great-grandmother, Helen McCardon. He is the son of a Montreal sporting goods merchant.
Studies
Aquin entered the Collège Sainte-Marie, a Jesuit school, in September 1946 and left in June 1948. He obtained remarkable results there, according to Guylaine Massoutre. It was there that he met Louis-Georges Carrier, who would be a great friend of Aquin all his life. He also did theatre there, which helped him to overcome his great shyness as a child. He enrolled in the philosophy faculty of Université de Montréal in September 1948, and received a degree in 1951, at the age of 21. During his time at Université de Montréal, he directed the student newspaper Le Quartier latin. He was then offered a job as a teacher at the university, but he turned it down, preferring to prepare for a career in journalism. He then went to study at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris from 1951 to 1954. According to Aquin, every trip to Europe is a moment of "emotional shock" for him, a theme that would later recur in his work.
Professional life
thumbnail|As part of his professional activities, Aquin formed a friendship with [[Albert Memmi, a Tunisian decolonization intellectual.]]
Upon his return to Montreal in 1954, he was hired as a director and scriptwriter for Radio-Canada (from 1954 to 1959). Then, from 1959 to 1963, he was a director, producer and screenwriter at the National Film Board (NFB). For the NFB, he notably worked on the film The Hour of Independence (À l'heure de la décolonisation), directed by Monique Fortier, which led Aquin to interview in 1962 figures of decolonization such as Albert Memmi (with whom he formed a friendship), Messali Hadj, Octave Mannoni and Olympe Bhêly-Quenum. of whom he was a great reader. Aquin then made a film on Simenon, which never saw the light of day.
Aquin worked at the Montreal Stock Exchange from 1960 to 1964. In 1967, he began teaching literature at Collège Sainte-Marie. In 1969, he was hired by the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), but he resigned in 1970, saying he disagreed with the policy of Rector Léo A. Dorais. Carleton University, in Ottawa, hired him in 1974 as a visiting professor, but did not renew his contract.
In 1975, Aquin was appointed literary director of Éditions La Presse. He lost his job in August 1976: he was fired following the publication of an open letter denouncing the cultural policies of Éditions La Presse towards Quebec works. He then accused his superior officer, Roger Lemelin, of "colonizing Quebec from the inside". After the victory of the Parti Québécois in 1976, Aquin hoped to obtain a position within the government, such as Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs, which did not come to fruition.
Personal life
In 1958, Aquin discovered car racing, a passion that led him to work towards holding an auto racing Grand Prix on Île Sainte-Hélène. To do this, he founded his own car racing company in 1960, "Le Grand Prix de Montréal Inc.". He also included car racing in a film he made in 1961, Le Sport et les Hommes (on which Roland Barthes collaborated), and the novel Next Episode. He dreamed of becoming a driver, but considered himself too old to think about it seriously. He married her in 1955. In 1963, he met Andrée Yanacopoulo. Born in Tunis to a half-Sicilian, half-Greek father and a French mother, Yanacopoulo graduated in medicine and sociology. She then prepared a thesis on suicide and researched "Depression among French Canadians in Montreal", supervised by Guy Rocher, a sociologist, and Camille Laurin, a psychiatrist and future pro-independence minister under René Lévesque. Yanacopoulo would be Aquin's lover until his death. As for his wife Thérèse Larouche, they began divorce proceedings in 1966. The seizures of Aquin's income that followed contributed to his financial troubles.
Political involvement
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police visited his office in 1958. They confiscated works by authors such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A secret trial in Ottawa followed, lasting three or four days. He was questioned about his friendships during his university years, presumably because they were trying to track down communist activists. According to Guylaine Massoutre, these events "precipitated his political awareness and gave rise to his adherence to separatist ideology". Having become an activist for Quebec independence, he was an executive member of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale (RIN) from 1960 to 1968. In 1962, in the magazine Liberté, he published his most famous political text, "The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada" ("La fatigue culturelle du Canada français"), responding to an article published in Cité libre by Pierre Elliott Trudeau on the subject of independence: La nouvelle trahison des clercs.
On 19 June 1964, he publicly announced in a letter to the newspapers Le Devoir and Montréal-Matin that he was going "undercover" and becoming "commander of the Special Organization" with the aim of joining forces with the Front de libération du Québec. He then took refuge at Louis-Georges Carrier's dwelling, then at Andrée Yanacopoulo's. On 5 July, Aquin is arrested by a plainclothes police officer in a stolen car, in possession of a revolver, in a parking lot behind the Saint Joseph's Oratory.
During his incarceration, he declares that his profession is: "revolutionary". Two charges were brought against him: "theft and possession of stolen goods" and "possession of an offensive weapon for a dangerous purpose". He was then interned for two months in a psychiatric hospital, the Albert-Prévost Institute, in the maximum security wing. It was during this stay that he began writing his novel Next Episode,
Around May 1966, Aquin left Quebec to live in Switzerland. There he became interested in the "Jura question", and tried to make contact with autonomists in the Bernese Jura. On 29 August, he was questioned by the police of the canton of Vaud about his membership in the RIN, and his imprisonment. He was then suspected of collusion with the Front de libération jurassien. Aquin then moved to Paris, and remained there until 21 March 1967. During 1969, he denounced the decision to dissolve the RIN in favor of René Lévesque's Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, and left the party. His texts appeared in various magazines, starting in 1959, including in Parti pris, Le Magazine Maclean, Voix et images du pays, Écrits du Canada français and the literary magazine Liberté, of which he was director from 1961 Next Episode, In Paris, the critical reception was however more mixed.
In 1969, he was the first Quebec writer to refuse the Governor General's Literary Award which was awarded to him for his novel Trou de mémoire, from 1968.
Suicide
Suicide was an idea that haunted Aquin for many years, and he often joked about it with his friends. On 29 March 1971, he failed a suicide attempt in a room of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel by swallowing barbiturates. He was hospitalized at the Sacré-Cœur Hospital until 4 April. At the hotel, he had registered under the name of his character from his novel The Antiphonary, J. W. Forrestier. On 15 March 1977, he attempted suicide again, this time with a firearm in the gardens of the Villa Maria College in Montreal, leaving his partner Andrée Yanacopoulo a final note: