5 Belief and Doubt in Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater”

The French Style

“The Hockey Sweater” is set in Ste. Justine, Québec, in the winter of 1946. The date is made explicit in the English children’s book version, but is implicit in the original, in which Mrs. Carrier refers to her son as being “ten years old”—Carrier was born in 1937 (Carrier 1979b, 78). Despite the hockey myth’s assertion about the timelessness of hockey, the passion for the game in Québec in 1946 was still a relatively recent phenomenon.

Let me explain. As I wrote during the analysis of Two Solitudes, modern hockey started out as the preserve of Montreal anglophones. A key date was the first indoor game organized by James Creighton in 1875. Though hockey quickly took hold in Canada after that, the English dominance of Montreal’s main sports organizations, combined with the resistance of the Catholic Church, meant that francophones came later to the game. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were still relatively few francophones in the leagues that had sprung up in and around Montreal.

The Montreal Canadiens were founded by an anglophone businessman, J. Ambrose O’Brien, in 1909, with the idea of using French Canadian players (and, ultimately, French Canadian ownership) to attract French-speaking fans to the new National Hockey Association (Harvey 2006, 35). In the early years, the Canadiens had an anglophone rival in Montreal, the Montreal Wanderers, who joined the National Hockey League with the Canadiens in 1917. When the Wanderers’ arena burned down four games into its first NHL season, the team was disbanded, and a few years later a new anglophone team, the Montreal Maroons, was formed. From 1924 to 1938 the Maroons were the main rival to the Canadiens. The Maroons, like a number of other NHL teams, went out of business during the Depression as the league contracted from the ten teams it had in the 1920s to the so-called Original Six in 1942 (McKinley 2000, 170–71).

A Toronto team was organized as part of the NHL in 1917. After a couple of name changes, the team was renamed the Maple Leafs by its owner, Conn Smythe, in 1927. The logo Smythe chose for his team was modeled on the maple leaf shoulder patch worn by Canadian soldiers during the First World War (McKinley 2000, 198). This branding was designed to position the Maple Leafs as Canada’s Team, a branding that was helped by the popularity of Hockey Night in Canada radio broadcasts during the 1930s. By 1931, Smythe had contracted with Foster Hewitt for regular Saturday night broadcasts of Maple Leafs games, and by 1933, these broadcasts could be heard on a patchwork of stations from coast to coast (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 100). A comparable set of broadcasts were established in Québec by 1934, in English for the Maroons and French for the Canadiens, and by the end of the 1930s Hockey Night in Canada attracted two million listeners a week (Gruneau and Whitson 1993, 101). To put this in context: the Canadian census of 1941 put the total population of the country at the time at only slightly over eleven-and-a-half million people (Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1950, 6, and see also Table 2).

Within Québec, hockey became associated at this time with the expression of a specifically French Canadian identity, embodied on the ice by the so-called “French style” of play, in which the players were smaller but also faster and more skilled than their anglo counterparts (McKinley 2000, 171). The elevation of Maurice Richard to mythic status was not only because of his success but because he was a relatively small player (about five-ten and 180 pounds) who overcame his physical disadvantages with his uncanny strength, speed, and determination. Richard’s overcoming became a metaphor for the small but determined Québécois people. That Richard was doubted early in his career for being too “fragile” only added to his mystique. Richard played his first full season in the NHL in 1943–44, a season in which the Montreal Canadiens made a remarkable turnaround after more than a decade of bad results (their last Stanley Cup was in 1931), which supercharged the hold of the team on the French Canadian imagination.

Hockey, in this environment, became a symbolic acting out of the English-French conflict that was such an important feature of Canadian life in the mid-twentieth century (as evidenced by Two Solitudes). This is the environment in which “The Hockey Sweater” takes places. Young Roch ends up having to wear the Toronto Maple Leafs sweater because of a botched order sent to Eaton’s, a bastion of anglophone dominance, and because his mother will not return it for fear of Mr. Eaton’s retaliation. “Monsieur Eaton’s an Anglais; he’ll be insulted because he likes the Maple Leafs,” Mrs. Carrier explains (Carrier 1979b, 80). The priest’s accusation about young Roch assuming anglophone privilege at the end also evokes English-French conflict; it makes clear that, within the world of the story, allegiance to the Canadiens is a way of championing francophone and Catholic identity against the anglophone and Protestant identity associated with the Maple Leafs.

Le jeu innocent

Although “The Hockey Sweater” relates the sweater mix up to English-French conflict, the form of the story tends to limit consideration of this issue. It is significant, for example, that the conflict is introduced by Mrs. Carrier. Roch’s mother is a Québécois version of a Victorian angel in the house—a comic version of Mrs. Gordon in Scrubs on Skates. She is the guardian of the domestic sphere but ignorant about the world outside. The story exaggerates her stereotypically feminine ignorance about male domains. When she writes her order letter to Mr. Eaton, she overshares, explaining that her son is “ten years old and a little too tall for his age and Docteur Robitaille thinks he’s a little too thin” (Carrier 1979b, 78). Mrs. Carrier’s ignorance extends to the male domain at the centre of the story: hockey. Notice how the bungled sweater order only has the effect it does because the order is managed by Mrs. Carrier. Mrs. Carrier, because she is a stereotypical mother, doesn’t appreciate the importance of her son’s allegiance to the Montreal Canadiens. To her mind, since the blue sweater fits “like a glove,” he should just wear it; when young Roch replies that Maurice Richard would never put such a sweater on his back, she replies—realistically and also missing the point—that he is not Maurice Richard (78). A father, within the traditional gender norms implied by the story, would not make this mistake.

Mrs. Carrier’s typecasting undermines her authority to speak about issues outside the home. This mutes her introduction of the English-French conflict. Because the conflict is introduced by Mrs. Carrier, readers are invited to be more amused by her naïve political analysis than motivated to explore the real issues behind it.

In a similar way, the story (at least in the way it is usually read) doesn’t invite much consideration of the priest’s actions at the end. The priest’s accusation that young Roch is acting superior is a classic ironic reversal: the boy who hates the Toronto Maple Leafs, and who is mortified at having to wear a Maple Leafs sweater, is accused of acting superior because he is wearing that same hated sweater. This reversal arrives like the punchline of a joke, and, indeed, the story is structured like an extended joke. After the first reversal there is a second. The priest sends young Roch to church to ask God for forgiveness. Instead of doing so, however, the boy prays to God “to send, as quickly as possible, moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs sweater” (Carrier 1979b, 81). The comic reversals tend to deflect attention from the serious issues raised by the ending.

The limiting of issues in “The Hockey Sweater” contributes to a portrait of hockey that is innocent. There is an interesting echo and reversal of Connors’s “The Hockey Song” in this. In Connors, the foreground portrayal is a professional game that seems to channel the innocence of children on a corner rink; in Carrier, the foreground portrayal is of a children’s game that seems to embody something essential about professional hockey (the Québécois version of the hockey myth).

Various other elements in “The Hockey Sweater” reinforce its innocent version of hockey. The small town setting creates a picture of a simpler and more innocent time. Take the famous opening lines: “The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places—the school, the church and the skating-rink—but our real life was on the skating-rink” (Carrier 1979b, 77). The mention of long winters situates the story in a northern climate. The description of Ste. Justine implies not only its smallness but the tight-knit quality of life there. The listing of the church emphasizes how this is a traditional, morally conservative community. The time of the story—1946—reinforces the nostalgia evoked by this setting. So does the evocation of the Original Six era of the NHL. The rivalry between the Canadiens and the Maple Leafs was a defining feature of this era, which ran from 1942 to 1967, with one or the other winning the Stanley Cup seventeen times over the twenty-five years. The nostalgic effect of this evocation would have been particularly strong when the “The Hockey Sweater” first appeared, since the 1970s was a decade of rapid and—for many people—unsettling change not only in hockey but in the Canadian nation more generally.

The child-centred quality of the story also reinforces the innocent portrayal of hockey. I mentioned James Smith’s (1967) definition of children’s literature in the last chapter. The key element is that such literature should be “suitable for children”—a recurring phrase in criticism of the genre. What makes stories suitable is the limiting and shaping of content to protect the child reader from being too shocked or scared. As Hamida Bosmajian puts it in her remarkable study of holocaust children’s literature, serious matters in children’s literature are conveyed without “the critical gaze of the adult reader.” Instead, a “protective censoring and intentional limiting” of material is used in order to “spare the child” (Bosmajian 2002, xiv).

The point of view of “The Hockey Sweater” fits the children’s literature model very well. A common device in coming-of-age stories is retrospective narration, with a doubled point of view, so that the narrator sometimes recounts events as the child he or she once was but at other times as the adult looking back. The result is a dramatic irony in which the older self knows more than the younger self, with the reader sharing in the older self’s greater understanding. In adult coming-of-age stories, this irony tends to be quite harsh, as the voice of the older self indicates the bitter lessons he or she has had to learn in growing up. Children’s literature, however, as Bosmajian points out in the quote above, minimizes the critical gaze of the adult. Consistent with this idea, the dramatic irony in “The Hockey Sweater” is gentle. The opening lines are a good example. These lines are told in the voice of the older Carrier, but the obsession with hockey is clearly childlike. Was Carrier’s “real life” as a boy really on the skating-rink? The older Carrier, looking back from 1979, knows that real life is more complicated than a child’s love for hockey. Yet the voice of the older Carrier does not make critical judgments about the boy’s obsession with hockey.

All of these elements limit consideration of potentially disturbing issues, and contribute to an innocent portrait of hockey that, read in the way “The Hockey Sweater” is usually read, remains largely unchallenged.

Lost in Translation

How is the story usually read? In isolation. Often in the children’s book version. And, more often than not, in English. If you read the story in French, in its original context, a different story emerges.

Let me start with the title. Le chandail de hockey was not the story’s original title. This title, used on the French version of the children’s book and elsewhere, is a French translation of Sheila Fischman’s English translation of the original title. The story’s original title was “Une abominable feuille d’érable sur la glace.” A literal translation of this would be “An Abominable Maple Leaf on the Ice.” Fischman’s translation has a universal—even mythic—quality to it that no doubt contributed to the success of the story in English Canada. Lost, however, is historical context implied by the original title.

Fischman also changed the title of the collection in which the story came. Her title is The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories even though the original collection was titled Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune (The Children of the Man in the Moon). The effect of this change is to exaggerate the importance of “The Hockey Sweater” within the collection and to lose more context. The English edition of the collection also has a photograph of an old Toronto Maple Leafs sweater on the cover. Without the original title, most English-speaking readers, I suspect, would pick up this edition of the book with no idea that the sweater on the cover is supposed to be “abominable.” Talk about appealing to an anglophone audience!

Lost in Fischman’s English book title is the imaginative framework Carrier intended for the collection. The 1983 second French edition contains an afterword, “Comment j’ai écrit Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune,” in which Carrier explains the significance of the title. He chose the title, he explains, because the book is about his childhood, and he was of the generation of children who still believed in a man in the moon: “j’appartenais à la génération de ceux qui avaient cru à un bonhomme dans la lune” (Carrier 1983, 167). He laments the loss of such beliefs for their imaginative power, but also recognizes something inevitable, even necessary, in their passing. After he points out the man in the moon to his daughters, for example, they laugh at him, which demonstrates how children inevitably demolish (“démolissent”) the myths of their parents (166).

Carrier’s attitude towards the myth of the man in the moon sets the pattern for the book as a whole. Indeed, each of the twenty stories in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune explores some naïve belief, superstition, or prejudice that Carrier held as a child. There is a nostalgic tone to these explorations, but also a recurring sense that the beliefs had to be overcome for Carrier to grow into the adult he now is. Young Roch believes in ghosts, in the magic of Catholic saints’ medals, and in the demonic otherness of Protestants, Communists, Blacks, and Jews. All of these have to be overcome. Though not explicitly criticized within the story itself, Young Roch’s identification with Maurice Richard and the Montreal Canadiens in “Une abominable feuille d’érable sur la glace” appears within the sequence of other naïve beliefs needing to be overcome, which implies, by context, the need for skepticism towards it.

Les maudits Anglais sur la glace

The harsher edge of the original French story title implies that there is more to English-French conflict than the limited mention of it within the story might suggest. This will not be a surprise to those familiar with Québec history—or with Carrier’s other writings. French-English conflict—or, rather, the oppression of French Canadians by les maudits Anglais—is a constant theme in Carrier’s work. Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune is no exception. Though the seriousness of the conflict tends to be downplayed within “Une abominable feuille d’érable sur la glace” itself, this is not the case elsewhere in the collection.

Let me give just a few examples. “Grand-père n’avait peur de rien ni de personne” (“Grandfather wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone”—“Grandfather’s Fear” in Fischman’s translation) tells of how Carrier’s grandfather was so afraid of Protestants that he took detours to avoid a Protestant village during the courtship of his wife. “La machine à détecter tout ce qui est américain” (“The Machine for Detecting Everything That’s American”) and “Une cheminée d’usine à la place de chaque arbre” (literally “A Factory Chimney in Place of Each Tree,” but translated as “Industry in our Village”) stress the economic vulnerability of Ste. Justine, in which natural resources have been bought up by anglophone outsiders and there is a lack of capital for economic development. And “Il se pourrait bien que les arbres voyagent” (“Perhaps the Trees do Travel”) tells of an old man who has never left the village and whose son insists on driving him to see the Plains of Abraham. The son is a young Québécois nationalist; he has returned to Ste. Justine from the city to show his father that he has made good and to challenge his father to broaden his nationalist awareness.

The portrayal of French-English conflict in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune directly echoes Carrier’s 1977 novel Il n’y a pas de pays sans grand-père. This novel, published just before the story collection, features a larger-than-life, seventy-plus-year-old protagonist, Vieux-Thomas, who, despite his physical strength, has a superstitious fear of the Anglais. As a young man, Thomas avoided an Anglais village just as the grandfather does in “Grand-père n’avait peur de rien ni de personne” (Carrier 1977, 74). Vieux-Thomas’s story dramatizes how the English-speaking elites have used the Québécois as labourers while claiming ownership of the resources of Québec (50). For a long time, Thomas worked as a lumberjack, suffering the abuse of English-speaking bosses, until one winter he showed up and was informed that the company had enough workers—after which he and his family almost starved (81). His son, Dieudonné, performs a quixotic act of resistance, dumping a load of logs in a boss’s swimming pool, only to lose everything (59–60).

A recurring theme in Carrier has to do with how the irrational fear of the Anglais among French Canadians has led to irrational—and ineffective—acts of resistance. Real hope for a better future requires a more educated response. In Il n’y a pas de pays sans grand-père, this is embodied in the grandson, Jean-Thomas, who, in the present of the novel, is imprisoned for participating in a demonstration during a visit of Queen Elizabeth. Though the novel does not specify the date of the demonstration, Gilles Dorion writes that it was the “samedi de la matraque”—the Saturday of the batons—of October 10, 1964, in which a nationalist protest march was violently put down by the police (2004, 109). The relationship of Vieux-Thomas and Jean-Thomas is reminiscent of the father and son in “Il se pourrait bien que les arbres voyagent.” Jean-Thomas is always reading—especially about the history of Québec—and his searing account of the horrors inflicted by the English from the time of the Plains of Abraham is obviously intended not just for Vieux-Thomas but for the reader of the novel. Vieux-Thomas realizes at the end that educated young people like Jean-Thomas, who seem weak because they have “les bras de petites filles,” are in fact the inheritors of “la force des Ancêtres” (111). From such young people, the text argues, a more effective national resistance might emerge.

Is young Roch’s emotional attachment to hockey in “The Hockey Sweater” an irrational response to English-French conflict? Two other famous portrayals of hockey in Carrier’s work suggest that this might be so.

The first occurs in Carrier’s first and best known novel, La guerre, yes sir!, which was published in 1968. La guerre, yes sir! is a dark comedy about the divide between Québec and the rest of Canada over participation in the Second World War. The novel opens with a lumberjack named Joseph who is so terrified that the Anglais will drag him off to “their goddamn war” that he chops off his own hand with an axe to render himself unfit for service. Later, his wife makes her way through the Ste. Justine-like village, where she encounters a group of boys playing street hockey. The boys block her way and try to look up her skirts. In her fury, Madame Joseph grabs a hockey stick and chases them away. She is about to continue her journey when she sees the puck the boys had been using. She picks it up. It turns out to be her husband’s frozen, chopped-off hand (Carrier 1970, 25–26).

The hockey game in La guerre, yes sir! should serve as a warning that Carrier’s view of hockey is not as simple and innocent as an isolated reading of “The Hockey Sweater” might suggest. Joseph’s self-mutilation fits the pattern in Carrier in which francophone characters have irrational fears of the Anglais and react to these fears in irrational ways. That the response of the boys in the town to Joseph’s self-mutilation is to play hockey with his chopped-off hand raises many questions. Is the game a product of the boys’ innocence? Of their ignorance? Or is it an act of resistance? Could the game be an example of the resilience of the Québécois people—who are capable of turning even such a macabre act as Joseph’s self-mutilation into a source of play? Or does the game point to a disconnect between hockey and the real-world political issues that the village cannot escape? It seems to me that there is a little bit of each of these possibilities in the game.

An even more telling example occurs in the second sequel to La guerre, yes sir!, Il est par là, le soleil (Is it the Sun, Philibert?), which was published in 1970. Il est par là, le soleil follows a young character, Philibert, from the community described in the first novel, as he tries to escape his narrow provincial upbringing and abusive father. Philibert goes to Montreal where, among other things, he attends a Canadiens game at the Montreal Forum and sees “the great Maurice Richard” in action. The description that follows is surreal. As Philibert watches, Richard crosses into the territory of the “maudits Anglais from Toronto.” Richard has superhuman strength and no Toronto player can stop him, until a Leafs player savagely trips him from behind, because the Anglais “couldn’t take it when a little French Canadian like Richard was better than them.” The referees do nothing; so Philibert jumps the boards and punches the offending Toronto player himself, knocking him out cold on the ice, and then returns to his seat to the applause of the crowd. Philibert feels a great camaraderie from his fellow French Canadians. Back on the ice, however, an injured Maurice Richard is in tears and moving “with unbearable awkwardness” (Carrier 1979a, 137–38).

Philibert is a tragic figure. His small town upbringing has not equipped him to succeed in a large modern city like Montreal. Instead, he lurches from one disaster to another, until, in the last scene of the novel, he crashes his car and bleeds to death. In his final moments, Philibert thinks he sees the sun, but what he sees is only a hallucination or the lights of an approaching vehicle coming too late to rescue him. This harshly ironic ending emphasizes the limitations of Philibert’s attempt to better his life. A similar limitation is evident in the portrayal of the hockey game. Philibert’s spontaneous act of resistance on behalf of Maurice Richard has no effect on his real life or the lives of anyone else (including Richard). The act—like hockey itself—simply disappears from his life afterwards. In this way, the hockey game in Il est par là, le soleil becomes a parable for the limitations of using hockey allegiance as a form of political action. Philibert’s punching of the Toronto Maple Leafs player is emotionally satisfying for him and his fellow Montreal Canadiens fans, but it is, in the end, an empty gesture.

A key lesson in Carrier’s work is that history dwarfs the seemingly nationalistic gesture of identifying with, or cheering for, a hockey team. This is made explicit in Carrier’s 2001 memoir, Le Rocket (Our Life with the Rocket), which, among other things, illustrates how Carrier’s growth from childhood to adulthood happened in tandem with a lessening of his identification with Maurice Richard. After the so-called Richard Riot in 1955, for example, Carrier portrays himself as less interested in local news than “the French novels that are on the list of books forbidden by the church” (Carrier 2001, 219). When he and his compatriots graduate from boarding school, he writes: “We’ve become men. There’s not one of us who still believes he’s Maurice Richard” (251). In Montreal in the late-1950s, he has a chance, like his character Philibert, to see Richard play live, but, unlike Philibert, he declines to go. Instead, he goes to see Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in Swedish without subtitles, with a girl named Marie (269).

Confess and Repent

A particularly troubling aspect of “The Hockey Sweater” has to do with the role of the priest. Think again about how the priest appears in the story. Why is the priest refereeing a pickup hockey game between children? Why does he not intervene to protect young Roch from the bullying of the other boys? When young Roch tries to get into the game, why is he so mean to him? And perhaps most disturbing of all: How does he get away with his behaviour?

Like the portrayal of French-English conflict, the implications of the priest’s role tend to be downplayed when “The Hockey Sweater” is read in isolation. Read in the context of Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune, however, the story takes on a different character. Almost every story in the collection has some reference to the Catholic church, and the stories make clear that the church dominated every aspect of life in Ste. Justine during Carrier’s childhood. More tellingly, the church was the source of most of the naïve beliefs that Carrier needed to overcome.

According to Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune, Carrier’s childhood was deeply marked by church-related supernatural beliefs. “La bombe atomique m’est-elle tombée sur la tête” (“The Shoemaker”), for example, tells of how Carrier as an eight-year-old was so obsessed with the idea that his home was haunted by the spirit of its former occupant, a shoemaker, that he has no memory of the end of the Second World War. Similarly, “Les fantômes du temps des feuilles mortes” (“The Month of the Dead”) describes how every November 2nd the nun-teacher would lead the children through the graveyard to remind them of death. Every night of November the townspeople would go to the church to pray “to keep the souls of the dead from getting out of their coffins” (Carrier 1979b, 49). So intense was the focus on death that every gust of wind seemed “caused by the souls of the dead” and the village seemed taken over at night by wandering ghosts (50). Finally, most comically, “Le jour où je devins un apostat” (“The Day I Became an Apostate”) tells of how young Roch, in a fit of devotion, decided he wanted to go to Rome to see the Pope. He learns that no bells ring in the parish over Easter because the bells fly to Rome on Good Friday and only return when the Pope has blessed them and sent them back on Easter Morning to mark Christ’s resurrection. With this knowledge, Roch and his friend sneak into the church on Good Friday and tie themselves to the bells for a free trip to Rome to meet the Pope (43).

Each of these stories ends with Carrier overcoming his childhood naïveté. In the first, he reflects, as an adult, on the true horror of war. In the second, he reveals himself to be now living in Montreal where the November ghosts “no longer come to frighten children” (50). And in the third, when the bells stay in place, his youthful self is forced to return home, humiliated, where he renounces his Catholic faith—a precursor to Carrier’s more skeptical attitude in adult life.

More sinister are the political beliefs promoted by the church. Never far below the surface in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune is the alliance between Maurice Duplessis, the premier of Québec, and the Catholic church. Duplessis was first elected in 1936 and remained premier, except for one term at the beginning of the Second World War, until his death in 1959. This era was later labeled La Grande Noirceur (The Great Darkness) because of the social conservativism, repression, and corruption that defined the Duplessis government. Duplessis was a strict Catholic and supported Catholic education and social services in the province, and in return, the church offered its support for him. Like the church, Duplessis held himself up as a protector of the traditional way of life of French Canadians, which meant French Canadians should remain farmers, working the land, and having lots of children (what the church called “la revanche des berceaux”—the revenge of the cradles). Charles Foran, in his 2011 biography of Maurice Richard, sums up the era like this: “Fiercely anti-Communist and sympathetic to fascism, the premier envisioned a French Canada for les habitants—knowing their place, and happy with it” (Foran 2011, 31).

The effect on young Roch of the Duplessis-Catholic church alliance is most evident in the story “Les bons and les méchants” (“The Good People and the Bad People”). In this story, Carrier, who is now twelve, idolizes Duplessis as the protector of the French Canadian people. This leads him to adopt the anti-Communism promoted by the premier and further promoted by the church. It also leads him, through other church-sponsored writings, to antisemitism. Because there are no Communists in Ste. Justine for young Roch to vanquish, he and a friend go looking for a Jew. They find one in a Jewish tailor in town. The story ends with Carrier and his friend going into the tailor’s shop to “contemplate the enemy” (Carrier 1979b, 134). They buy and return a jacket as an act of resistance. The ridiculousness of this act works, by comic inversion, to expose one of the most sinister beliefs from the church that Carrier had to overcome.

Skepticism about the Catholic church’s use of hockey, as well as of the alliance between Duplessis and the church, is hinted at in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune but is made explicit in Our Life with the Rocket. Certain passages in this book directly revisit the imaginative terrain of “The Hockey Sweater.” For example, the book reveals that the rink in the story is in fact the second rink constructed in Ste. Justine. The first was shut down by the local curate because he determined that it was encouraging lascivious behaviour between boys and girls. The girls would watch the boys play hockey. Sometimes boys and girls would skate around the ice together! (Carrier 2001, 6).

A key chapter in Our Life with the Rocket for Carrier’s mature view of hockey is entitled “Can hockey remain the same when the landscape is changing?” This chapter describes the tensions in Québec during the postwar period culminating in the Asbestos Strike of 1949. This strike—often cited as a key inspiration for the Quiet Revolution in Québec in the 1960s—takes place at the same time as the events of “Les bons and les méchants” in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune; the details echoed in the memoir suggest that the strike was probably the trigger for Carrier’s boyish anti-communism. As reported in Our Life with the Rocket, when news of the strike arrived at the boarding school Carrier was attending, his teacher, a priest, explained to the class that the strike “is inspired by Communist agitators in the pay of Moscow who are sabotaging the religion of the French Canadians,” but, fortunately, “Duplessis will protect us” (Carrier 2001, 150). A key insight Carrier has at this point is that all the parties to the strike—the workers, Duplessis, and the priests of the church who controlled Carrier’s education and supported Duplessis—were Montreal Canadiens fans. Duplessis even had season tickets and paraded Maurice Richard around with him at election time. Hockey, he learns, is not the social unifier it might at first glance appear to be, but rather a passionate recreation that can be mobilized for various ends by various social factions.

When read in context, then, the priest’s involvement with the boys’ game in “The Hockey Sweater” becomes an episode in a larger narrative about the dominance of the Catholic church in Québec when Carrier was a child. This narrative reveals that the church’s concern for French culture was also (perhaps mainly) about maintaining its own power. So too was the church’s involvement in hockey. In the story, the priest’s cruel treatment of young Roch appears, on the surface, to be about protecting French Canadian identity. By enforcing allegiance to the Montreal Canadiens over the Toronto Maple Leafs, the priest seems to champion an identity that is French and Catholic over one that is English and Protestant. But there is a darker side to this. When the priest punishes young Roch for assuming the traditional privileges of an anglophone, the implication is that the boy has failed to know his place and to be happy with it. This, however, raises a question: Why is it wrong for a young French Canadian boy to seek to be the one who “makes the laws” rather than the one who must obey?

Just a Hockey Player?

The myth of the Rocket is a good example of how fantasy and reality combine in sports. Rocket Richard, the mythic hero who redresses the historical suffering of French Canadians, is an obvious fantasy projection. Yet the myth of the Rocket was not just conjured out of thin air; it required certain historical realities. If Richard had been a great athlete in another sport, he would not have attained the same status. Hockey was ripe for nationalist projection because of the identification French Canadians already had with the game. Richard’s style of play was also important. It wasn’t only that Richard had great success, but that his success was achieved with characteristics that French Canadians liked to see in themselves. The fact that Richard burst onto the hockey scene in the middle of the Second World War also contributed. As Benoît Melançon points out, not only were French Canadians at that time struggling with increased feelings of threat caused by the war, but the Montreal Canadiens were at a low point in their history and in need of a saviour, preferably a francophone one, after the death of Howie Morenz in 1937 (2006, 186).

Carrier himself tends to downplay any larger social or political significance to “The Hockey Sweater.” His interview at St. Andrew’s College in 2012 is a good example:

I just tried to tell … a true little story that happened to a little boy in his little limited world dreaming of being in a bigger world than he knew at the time—and hockey was the vehicle to be bigger than he was. I wanted to be Superman, it didn’t work. I wanted to be Brit Bradford, it didn’t work. But hockey player, yes I could play hockey on the ice, so I was bigger than I was. I was feeling bigger than I was. (Carrier 2012, 3:45)

In downplaying the larger significance, Carrier follows the lead of Maurice Richard himself, who—despite being paraded about by Duplessis and having Union Nationale sympathies in the 1950s—tended to downplay any political intentions on his part. Richard’s comment, reported by Ken Dryden in his preface to Rick Salutin’s Les Canadiens, and quoted as the second epigraph to this chapter, is a characteristic disavowal.

Les Canadiens is worth a brief discussion here. Salutin’s play was commissioned for the 1976–77 season of the Centaur Theatre in Montreal. The idea was to write about how the Canadiens were “more than just a team”—that they were, in fact, the “virtual embodiment of Quebec” (Salutin 1977, 11). Salutin originally thought to write about the long line of great Canadiens players, but, as he researched, he realized that “the Rocket was sui generis. He was the Canadiens in some unique way” (18). The play, then, became about how French Canadians had used hockey—and especially the figure of Rocket Richard—as a way of dealing with their sense of being a conquered people. A key inspiration was a comment made to Salutin by a woman in a Québec City bar: “The Canadiens—they’re us. Every winter they go south and in the spring they come home conquerors!” (14).

Then came November 15, 1976. On this day the first Parti Québécois government was elected in Québec, with a mandate to hold a referendum about separating Québec from Canada. Such a direct nationalist expression made Salutin rethink how the Canadiens did or did not embody the aspirations of French Canadiens. He was also stunned by what happened in the Montreal Forum that same night, as reported to him by Ken Dryden. “The crowd,” Dryden reported, “was dead.… They seemed uninterested in the game. So, for that matter, did most of the Canadiens” (Salutin 1977, 18). When election results were flashed on the message board, however, “the crowd awoke,” and “[the] surer the success of the PQ … the less they cared about the game taking place before them” (19). What Salutin found that night (besides the ending of his play, which is based on this event) was that the Canadiens had become “just another hockey team” (20).

Did the Canadiens become “just another hockey team” with the election of the PQ in 1976? Or were they just one all along? Both are true, I think. Dramatic changes occurred in Québec between the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 and the election of René Lévesque. The French Canadian version of the hockey myth was fueled, in part, by the limited options for political action and nationalist expression in Québec before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. As times changed, so did the place of hockey. As Salutin puts it, “the more Quebec expressed its national feelings [in other ways], the less it had to channel so much of its feeling through its hockey team” (1977, 20). Yet it is also true that the mythic status of the Canadiens, like the myth of the Rocket, was always an imaginary projection, and never really “real.”

Much of this chapter—and this book so far—has attempted to show how mythic responses to hockey depend upon a downplaying or elision of history. The nostalgic evocation of the Original Six era is a case in point. There is an irony in this nostalgia, since the “Golden Age” of hockey was anything but a golden age from the point of view of the players. In the early days, professional hockey players had some freedom of movement and were sometimes the beneficiaries of bidding wars for their services. By the time of the Original Six, however, the NHL had monopoly control of the highest level of the game, and the owners used this monopoly to their own advantage. Whole books have been written about the NHL’s exploitation of players during this era—most famously, David Cruise and Alison Griffiths’ Net Worth. The response to the attempt by Ted Lindsay and Doug Harvey to organize a players’ association in 1957 is a telling example. Despite introducing their association with an announcement so uncontentious that “it could have been Lord Baden-Powell outlining the formation of the Boy Scouts,” Lindsay and Harvey were vilified (Cruise and Griffiths 1991, 92). Conn Smythe called the organizers traitors and communists and lamented “the intrusion of ‘New York lawyers’ and ‘Jews’ ” into the game (Cruise and Griffiths 1991, 95). Eventually, the association was crushed, setting back the quest for a more balanced relationship between owners and players for decades. The crushing of the association reflected the owners’ attitude to players. According to Michael McKinley, the owners during this time treated the players “like idiot servants, who should know enough to be grateful for their bounty” (2000, 228). The echo of Maurice Duplessis’s view that French Canadians should “know their place and be happy with it” is not an accident: the paternalistic attitude is the same.

Two aspects of the internal organization of the league have particular relevance for the Québécois version of the hockey myth. This first is that, by the time the league shrank to six teams in 1942, the league “had granted each franchise the right to own all players who lived within a 50-mile radius of the team’s home rink” (McKinley 2000, 148). This rule allowed the Montreal Canadiens first dibs on most of the best young French Canadian players—which contributed, in a big way, to both the team’s excellence and its francophone identity. The second aspect is that once a player was signed by a team (often as a junior), he remained the property of the team for life. As a result, the only leverage a player could exercise in contract negotiations was to withhold services.

These aspects of the NHL organization reveal a painful irony: the mythic status of Maurice Richard and the Montreal Canadiens, as “the ‘porte-étendards’ of the embattled Québécois nation,” was a product, in part, of structures that severely limited the rights and opportunities of the players. Despite the nationalist aspirations projected upon the team, the Montreal Canadiens was (also) a business that exploited its players to profit its owners; and Maurice Richard, despite the aura of invincibility projected upon him by people like ten-year-old Roch Carrier, was (also) a worker with almost no workers’ rights, who was paid much less than his work was worth. As Richard’s body gave out and his career wound down, you have to wonder if he didn’t have a moment like the player in Al Purdy’s “Hockey Players,” in which he “stretched on the rubbing table / thinking of money in owners’ pockets” (Purdy 1996, 25).

Saint Maurice and the Pencil

By the time he published “The Hockey Sweater,” Roch Carrier knew the full arc of Maurice Richard’s career. He had also lived through the transformation of Québec after the election of Jean Lesage in 1960, the reduction of influence by the Catholic church, and the steps taken by his compatriots to become “maîtres chez nous.” He witnessed the election of the PQ in 1976. None of this knowledge, though, intrudes on the story. This is not a criticism of a story. Excluding this knowledge is how the story produces its nostalgic and traditional (conservative) portrait of hockey.

In Our Life with the Rocket, Carrier shows himself to be self-aware about the act of imagination involved in creating such a portrait. There is a telling passage in Our Life with the Rocket when Carrier admits that, despite what he believed about the invincibility of Maurice Richard and the Montreal Canadiens when he was a boy, the dominant team of his childhood was, objectively, the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs, in fact, were a dynasty team in the late 1940s; they won five Stanley Cups in the seven years between 1945 and 1951. The Canadiens, by contrast, went through the six consecutive years from 1947 to 1952 without winning a single championship. Despite this, Carrier wrote in “The Hockey Sweater” that “the Toronto team was regularly trounced by the triumphant Canadiens” (Carrier 1979b, 79). In Our Life with the Rocket, he says that when he wrote the story, he believed this claim to be true, so much so that he “didn’t even think of checking the facts.” Even now, he writes, as an old man who knows the historical record, it “hurts” to accept the facts (Carrier 2001, 156).

The significance of this historical discrepancy is spelled out in an important passage: “Such was the power of the Rocket: he captivated our childhood. We invented that Rocket, our dauntless and irreproachable hero. That’s what all the peoples of the earth do when they feel small in the face of a world that’s too big” (Carrier 2001, 156). In other words, the Rocket is an imaginary creation. Carrier the adult, as opposed to Carrier the child, understands the difference between the truths of imagination and the truths of history. Both have their uses. Which is why, for Carrier, overcoming his childhood identification with Maurice Richard does not diminish the inspirational value of the Rocket as myth. The Rocket is akin to a mortal who stormed Olympus, he writes, and his strength is “in the same category as that which drove Icarus to fly [and] Jules Verne to invent his moon rocket” (258). For that reason, despite having to recognize ultimately that Richard was only a man, Carrier ends his book by saying that he and his friends “will be better men because the Rocket crossed through our childhood” (292).

One last point about “The Hockey Sweater” and imagination. Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune is not just the portrait of a Québécois childhood but the portrait of a future writer—Roch Carrier. Indeed, the book reveals the imaginative source material for many of Carrier’s later works. The afterword to the second French edition makes the connection between writing and the collection’s original title explicit. How Carrier learned to write, he recalls, is that his teacher wrote “i” on the blackboard and explained the sound the letter made like this: “c’est le bruit que fait la souris grise qui rit en voyant la scie du bonhomme dan la lune qui scie du bois: i-i-i-i-i.” That night from his window, young Roch examined the moon. He saw the face and was sure he could hear the sound of the laughing mouse as the man up there sawed away: i-i-i-i-i (Carrier 1983, 166).

The final stories in Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune emphasize Carrier’s later vocation as a writer. A good example is “Les médailles flottent-elles sur la mer?” (“Do Medals Float on the Ocean?”). In this story, Carrier is now a young adult heading to France to go to school. For protection his mother sews saints’ medals into the lining of his coat. This makes him remember a debate he had overheard once about religion and education. Which was more important for the Québécois? One of Carrier’s father’s friends gives the example of two men, one with “a load of medals around his neck,” and the other with “a pencil.” The two men fall down a well. The man with the medals sinks to the bottom and is lost. The pencil, however, floats. When people see it, they think, “Arthur fell down the well”—and rescue him. This helps Carrier decide his future: “If all the saints on the medals my mother had sewn inside my jacket were powerless,” he writes, “from now on I could count on my pencil” (Carrier 1979b, 140).

Carrier’s childhood belief in Maurice Richard is akin to his childhood belief in the magic of saints’ medals. Both have to be left behind for him to grow into the man he becomes. But because Carrier is a writer, he doesn’t entirely leave such beliefs behind, just as he never entirely leaves behind his childhood. Years later, Carrier picks up his pencil and writes the story “The Hockey Sweater.”

Works Cited