Malcolm Reid recalls the bohemian Association espagnole
Image: Poster advertising a book launch at l’Association espagnole, 1970. Séguin (artist). Gaétan Dostie collection. Courtesy of Gaétan Dostie
Transcription: Les poubelles et mangeoires célestes/Un Antipoème de Claude Grenier/Les éditions du Cri/Lancement à l’Association espagnole 485 Ouest, rue Sherbrooke/Le 9 décembre 1970 à compter de 20 heures/1.50$/Séguin
Credit: ARCMTL collection. Interview was conducted in Montreal on March 26, 2021 with Malcolm Reid by Louis Rastelli, Director of ARCMTL.
Duration: 1:43 min
Malcolm Reid is a historian, journalist, essayist, poet and illustrator who contributed through the years to publications about Québécois society and francophone revolutionary writers. In the 1960s, he was in his twenties, roaming in the streets of Montreal and mingling with the francophone bohemia and nationalists who gathered regularly in places like l’Association espagnole (also called Asociación española or Casa española, in Spanish), on Sherbrooke Street.
Transcription:
Malcolm Reid: Just perhaps a couple of blocks east of Royal Victoria College. You’ve been hearing about this place. It certainly was a contemporary place of The New Penelope. And it lasted for a fairly long time. Maybe it lasted 20 years. It had been founded quite a handful of years before The New Penelope, and it was still going strong when the day The New Penelope closed, and went on for a while after that.
And in that period, though the owner might’ve set it up as a Spanish hangout and called it the Asociación española for that reason, it became a landmark of French language bohemia in the course of its opening its doors. It was upstairs, that was the particular thing, you couldn’t walk in the door and sit down right away. You, you went in the door and then you went upstairs and there was the café. It wasn’t very big! But it was always crowded, it was always…
Its clientele was never overwhelmingly either Anglophone or Francophone, it was always a meeting point, a crossroads. And I think both ethnies would have ENJOYED the fact that it’s official banner that (laughs) it raised wasn’t French, wasn’t English, was “La Asociación española”, with the tiret on the N.