Flame Out

By Michael Delisle and Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo

A portrait of a violent father and an homage to poetry.

When Michael Delisle was a boy growing up in Montreal’s South Shore neighbourhood of Ville Jacques-Cartier, his "uncles" – in other words, his father's friends – never said "gun" but rather "piece" or "rod" or more metonymically, "heater." In Flame Out, the poet remembers his father, a crook turned Charismatic Christian, the violent man who came to speak only of Jesus, the hated man whom he had no choice but to love, in spite of it all. Delisle writes that “reading and writing poetry helped me stay the course.” Writing was the weapon he used do deal with a childhood that was difficult, to say the least, and to combat a father that he has called his Waterloo. But this novel is more than just about a settling of accounts between a parent and his offspring; Michael Delisle manages, through his writing, to grow into a love-hate relationship without destroying the father figure. This novel is thus both highly personal and an acknowledgement of the power found in the act of writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica Editions
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771837026

Book preview

FLAME OUT

Ê

Original title: Feu de mon père (2014)

Copyright © 2014, Les Éditions Boréal.

Translation copyright © 2021 Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo and Guernica Editions Inc.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored

in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher

is an infringement of the copyright law.

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Michael Mirolla, editor

David Moratto, cover and interior design

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First edition.

Legal Deposit—First Quarter

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2021946986 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Flame out / Michael Delisle ; translated by Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo.

Other titles: Feu de mon père. English

Names: Delisle, Michael, author. | Gabinet-Kroo, Kathryn, 1953- translator.

Series: Essential translations series ; 53.

Description: Series statement: Essential translations series ; 53. |

Translation of: Feu de mon père.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210316268 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210316306 |

ISBN 9781771837019 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771837026 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Delisle, Michael—Family. | LCSH: Fathers and sons.

Classification: LCC PS8557.E4455 Z465 2022 | DDC C848/.5409—dc23

Table of Contents

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Elements of Poetry

Fathers

A Bump in the Road

End of the Line

Translator’s Notes

About the Author

About the Translator

Elements of Poetry

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I have not found an exergue for this book. An image that sets the tone, a phrase that draws the first line, a proper name to situate its gravity. A sentence to unlock the door.

I search to no avail. My disillusionment resembles a dereliction: I feel abandoned by literature, just as a drug addict feels abandoned by God. It seems that no one is willing to give me the pitch-perfect A so that I can move on to the suite of compositions that await me.

I am alone with the pages that follow.

Finding a book’s incipit is cause for jubilation. Finding the one sentence that serves as both armature and abstract requires a hectic search. The exergue is there to provide a guarantee, to borrow Papa’s hallmark—men quote other men—but it remains strictly decorative. It is a textually useless stepping-stone whereas the dedication expresses appreciation for deserving friends or hints at a secret mission that excludes the reader. You only truly take the plunge with the incipit.

Mine could read as follows: I do not remember ever being light-hearted.

It’s true. I’ve always had, at least as far back as I can remember, death in my soul. This encumbrance, this obstacle to insouciance, is so much a part of me that I ended up seeing in it a kind of lucidity. This realization led me to the following belief: My consciousness is inseparable from my sadness. Added to this sadness is, of course, a feeling of foreboding. I put on a brave face with a kind of composure, but it seems to me that it has always been there. Even as a young man reading the positive reviews of my first collection of poems; even discovering, during a trip to Paris, the existence of Vouvray wine in a restaurant in the Marais; even as a six-year-old under a radiant sun, chasing after Diane C. so that I could unclothe her; even as a kid laughing myself silly while my father pretended to be a big bad wolf and slobbered as he nipped my ear, there had always been in my heart of hearts these two poisons: the desire to seize to the moment and the eagerness for life to end.

Reading and writing poetry have helped me stay the course.

In a man’s life, repetition is both the mystery and the key to unlock it. I don’t know if it holds true for women, but for men, the same can be said of poetry, which is founded on the repetition necessary to the rhythm and on nothing else. We savour the poem with attention paid to the sounds that return. We understand the meaning of a life by lingering over the repetitions.

My first experience of repetition dates back to the winter of 1959. I’m referring here to a repetition that relates to rhythm.

Outside, the densely packed snow carpeted Rue Fontainebleau in the town of Jacques-Cartier. The night was calm and the dry cold muted all sounds. The neighbours heard the slamming of a taxi’s door, the squeaking of stilettos in the snow, halting footsteps, the reedy sneeze of a young woman who had been out celebrating and was coming home late. Her stifled laughter before opening the door. It was not yet midnight; it was eleven fifteen. Sharp.

Inside, my father was waiting for her. At the sound of the taxi door, he flew into one of the dark rages that turned his heart to stone, flung the ladder under the trapdoor to the attic, and climbed up to look for a gun. He had stashed a number of them there, on the day he had decided to stop doing stickups. He climbed back down with a shotgun, which he loaded with two cartridges in front of my mother who stood, wobbling in her high heels, at the other end of the hallway. Without hesitating, she went to get me out of bed and returned to face him, holding me out at arm’s length. Papa aimed at her while she gripped my torso and matched the movement of the barrel so that I shielded her. I was a few months old. My bum diapered, my