Gilles Hénault

Gilles Hénault
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Born	(1920-08-01) August 1, 1920 Saint-Majorique-de-Grantham (Quebec)
Died	October 6, 1996(1996-10-06) (aged 76) Montreal
Nationality	Canada
Occupation	Journalist Quebec art critic Poet Translator

Gilles Hénault (August 1, 1920 in Saint-Majorique-de-Grantham (Quebec) - October 6, 1996 in Montreal) is a journalist, Quebec art critic, poet and translator. He was director of the arts section of Le Devoir from 1959 to 1961,director of the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1966 to 1971, director of the Department of Visual Arts at UQAM in 1984-1985 and president of the standing committee of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Quebec for the integration of the arts into architecture in 1985 -1986. He is ideologically close to the signatories of the Global Refusal.

Biography

Gilles Hénault was born in 1920, in a house on the 4th row of the river in Saint-Majorique. His father, Octavien, was a farmer who worked with his wife Édouardina Joyal, on arid land before moving to Montreal in 1922. Gilles Hénault's childhood was accompanied with poverty and another tragedy. In 1926, as he began his first year at Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle school, two of his brothers afflicted to diphtheria while he survived, becoming ipso facto the eldest child of the family. From 1929 to 1931, he accompanied his father one evening a week to Saint-Vincent-de-Paul to look for food.

In 1934, he finished his 8th grade and his father wanted him to work but he could not find any work,. He continued his studies at Collège Chomedey-de-Maisonneuve where, at 16, he discovered Epicure and his main theories on atoms and the void. This reading had a great importance in the life and work of Hénault. He therefore chose materialist philosophy and became an unbeliever, but not anticlerical. The important thing, for him, was not to deny religion but the social conditions which enslave and make religion necessary.

During these years, he spent the summer in Saint-Majorique, with his grandfather. At the age of 11, he discovered poetry, after writing a poem about Le Blond, the old horse that his grandfather refused to have slaughtered to sell the meat to fox breeders.

In 1937, due to lack of money to pay for his tram and his meals, Hénault could no longer continue his studies, despite the scholarship that the Brothers of the Christian Schools had granted him, based on his grades, so that he could enter Mont Saint-Louis.

Childhood and adolescence

From June 1937 until he started working for the newspaper Le Jour in August 1939, Gilles Hénault was unemployed, except for a few months when, with the help of his parents, he was able to work as a clerk at the La famille cooperative, founded by Victor Barbeau who became the founding president of the Académie canadienne française and in 1962, received the second prize of the Jury of Letters for his collection Sémaphore.

Gilles Hénault published his first poems in April 1939, under the pseudonym G. Rèvay, texts immediately noticed by the poet Clément Marchand who, under his pseudonym Le Censeur, wrote: “This is surely a young person who promises and who perhaps carries the seeds of inspiration and the power to express them in a way that is extremely rare to find among us”.»

Encouraged by this welcome, Hénault immediately sent more of his poets, an exercise, as he would say later, in homage to Francis James. And again, the Censor writes: “One day we will undoubtedly hear about the poet who signs G. Rêvai here.”

Journal Le Jour

In August 1939, Jean-Charles Harvey hired Gilles Hénault as a contributor to Le Jour, a newspaper he founded after being fired from the newspaper Le Soleil due to the publication of his novel Les Demi-civilisés. The team was made up of bookseller Henri-Tranquille, Jean-Jules Richard, Berthelot Brunet and Jean-Aubert Loranger. The editor-in-chief was Émile-Charles Hamel, who introduced him to Mallarmé, Saint-Denys Garneau6. Gilles Hénault earned $2.50 per article. There he wrote stories of the day and comments on various political and cultural activities.

Poem, The Invention of the Wheel (1939)

This poem written in Alexandrines was published in 1941, in La Nouvelle Relève . The poem is divided into five parts:

1. The first song expresses the optimism of those who see technical progress as the most precious contribution to the liberation of man;

2. The first meditation opposes technical progress to human values. Hénault plays with the word Revolution, alluding at the same time to the movement specific to the wheel, to the industrial revolution and to the social and political revolutions generated by an inhuman universe;

3. The second song takes up the hymn to science and Hénault compares the strength of the scientific spirit to that of the sea;

4. The second meditation deepens the importance of human values and shows that science has often been nothing more than a form of slavery for man;

5. The Dialogue is a dialogue of the deaf between the champion of science and the champion of humanity.

1946-1956

1946 marks the time of choice for Gilles Hénault. Two choices were available to him: to never again experience poverty and misery and to try to get rich at all costs; or never again say poverty, but collectively, by establishing a society where poverty would be abolished. It was the victory of the first 1946 Montreal Cottons strike in Valleyfield that would determine his decision.

In 1947 when the newspaper he was writing for, was closed down, it seemed that it was the end of journalism for him , but he continued publishing some of his poets.

From the 1950s, at the Editions de l'Hexagone and the Liberté magazine, then in the 1960s, around the movement of the Parti pris magazine, poets defined Quebec, its language and its culture against alienation and colonialism. Literary history has remembered the poems of Gilles Hénault, Roland Giguère, Jacques Brault, Paul Chamberland and Gaston Miron, among others. Gilles Hénault was among those poets who after 1950s were in favor of Quebec nationalism.

For his later works some even call him the father of modern Quebec poetry.

1956-1972

Returning to Montreal in the spring of 1956, Rémy Le Poitevin hired Hénault at Journal des Vedettes as a TV columnist, making him the first French-speaking television critic. Then began an intense period of journalism coupled with literary creation.

1973-1993

During these years, Gilles Hénault turned to teaching and gradually returned to the arts, without however abandoning poetry. In 1974-75, he was a writer in residence at the University of Ottawa and from 1976 to 1980, he taught prose and poetry workshops at UQAM, while being, in 1978, a member of the board of directors of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In 1979, at the request of Gilles Corbeil, he became the first president of the Prix Émile-Nelligan. In 1983-194, he was appointed interim director of the department (then under supervision) of visual arts at UQAM and, from 1984 to the end of December 1986, president of the Standing Committee of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs for the integration of the arts to architecture.

Honors

• Second in the Letters Jury Prize in 1962 for the collection Sémaphore

• Governor General's Award in 1972 for the retrospective Signals for the Psychics

• Honorary diploma from the Canadian Conference of the Arts in 1984

• Prix Athanase-David in 1993

• Grand Artisan de la Révolution tranquille en 2011.

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