Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, 13
More Joyous Travels
April 26
It was on this day, in 2016, that the New York Review of Books re-issued, in their handsome series devoted to her work, Mavis Gallant’s novel A Fairly Good Time, along with Green Water, Green Sky. It was my day off from the store, so I woke late, and decided to have a fairly good time by being at home and also domestically regenerative. Spent a fairly happy few minutes removing a fairly thick layer of grime from the top of the baseboards. This is a chore I undertake from time to time — from grime to grime — and it’s disgonishing — a neologism, freshly coined, a hybridization of “disgusting” and “astonishing,” please feel free to circulate it abroad, at will, without need of attribution — how much schmutz manages to accumulate on those long but narrow surfaces in so short a temporal space. SO satisfying to remove it, though, a generous spritz of whatever fragrant disinfecting agent (smells like a Florida orange grove, like a Provence lavender field!) and then the long, steady swipe, like ploughing a furrow, and with almost as much filthy residue. It’s as invigorating as it is simple, life-affirming even: dust is what we’ll come to, and there’s no easier way to renew your membership in the Club of the Quick than to demonstrate that we still have it in us to care about dust before we become it, and to purge it while we have the chance: an act of simple defiance, existentialism at work. (It is owing to statements like the one I’ve just laid before you that my inbox is loud with the clamour of editors, desperate to gather my aphorisms into a single volume, all my gilded pensées, jostling for space on the page, but then I would have to contend with the responsibility of being known as the Pascal of the Pembina Valley, and that is more, believe me, than I could handle at this juncture.)
The truth is — he wrote, portentously — that we don’t have to die to become dust. I live alone, my windows are rarely open, there’s not a lot of foot traffic through my small apartment. Most of the excrescence that thickens on all the surfaces begins with me: I am, as we all are, my very own dust factory, its original sin.
This building, an 11-storey mid-rise, is about 50 years old. You can take it as a given, in a stack-o-flesh of this vintage, that there will be vermin. There’s no mansion so fine that a rat won’t find its way in: which, as I write it, I see to be a minor variation on the major theme of Genesis: I mean the book of the Bible, not the band; but probably you, as a Reader of Quality and Friend of Mavis (FOM), understood that. In the case of The Palasades — as this building is charmingly named, presumably because the fairy in charge of spelling wasn’t invited to its christening — the plague is of silverfish. This might not be true of every apartment, but it is of mine. They come in their invasive waves, breaching every bulkhead, up via the drains, in through the hair-width fissures in the plaster, or materialize via spooky osmosis for all I know, and whenever they appear it is a sign that I needs must amend my slatternly ways, especially in the bathroom, where hang the towels I employ — for this, oh best beloved, is the towel’s raison d’être — for dabbing dry my old and unappealing flesh. Bits of dermal residue — no flake shaped like any other! — fall to the ceramic tiles and, over the course of the day, as the towel dries, those sloughed-off bits of me that adhere to its terry piling are also released, just as a cherry tree discards its fragrant blossoms. I do not know if silverfish find Billskin tastier that other mortal morsels, but if word gets out, in their circle, that there’s a smorgasbord of the stuff available, farm to table, they come a-callin’. It’s like the run on the liquor stores when the Beaujolais Nouveau turns up — November 17, fix your agenda now — or on the seafood markets during the heady few days of the spot prawn season. I have found over time — and it is for tidbits like this that you will be glad you have read this far, and encourage all your friends to do the same — that the best way to dispatch the little fuckers (as my mother used to call them, the cigarette that adhered to her lower lip bobbing like a Geiger counter measuring her radioactive discontent) is to have at the ready, in all the places they, the silverfish, are likely to appear, a bottle of spray cleanser: any scent will do. One quick squirt is all it takes of Agent Orange Blossom, and it’s game over. Then you can wipe up the corpse AND clean the floor or counter, which is the most effective preventative against future unwanted visits, at the same time: two bugs with one stone. This has worked brilliantly for me, and I like to think that those silverfish who were just peering over the edges of the drains and who saw me thus dispatch, with no trace of compassion, their unfortunate fellow travellers, scampered back to their encampments, and told the tale, and that my name is spoken with fear and reverence as they gather round their campfires and hoist their flagons of grog.
Were I to index (as opposed to Windex) what I've written so far, here’s what we’d find, under the G.
Grime (does not pay)
Grime (the scene of the)
Grime (and punishment)
Grime (waits for no man)
Grime (of the ancient mariner)
Etc.
Grimes has likewise been on my mind: she’s an artist I admire — the music is really original, really good, and I’m sure my approval will mean the world to her — and she has family here — in Vancouver, not in my apartment, her mother is a big noise pundit, I know her not at all, and I assume there must be a prohibition against naming her in this regard — and, of course, there’s the gothic oddity of her connection — on again, as I gather — to Dr. Tesla, Warlord of Mars. I devoted some part of my day off from the store to panning my shallows looking for anything that might resemble a nugget of response to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which has elicited so much shouting. I couldn’t come up with even the fool’s gold version, not so much as a pebble, and cannot make the leap, whether imaginative or intellectual, to really understand — I mean, beyond the most superficial reach exceeding grasp response — why so very many people seem to care so very deeply about this. Likewise, and this is that song’s B-side, I can’t actually understand why so relatively few people care — in a meaningful way, by which I mean, hers are the books they’d save in the event of a fire — about our girl Mavis Gallant. MG. (The observant reader — that’s you! — will have noted that I’m trying out a new title for this exercise, see above, owing to how Malcolm Gladwell, foreseeing my eventual need of it, jumped in early and made off with Oh, MG. Bastard. The trial title is lifted from MG’s story “The Moslem Wife,” and I’ve alluded to it in an earlier entry.)
If someone asks what I’m working on, and if I mention MG and this diary, the look that comes back tends — typically, not universally — to be more blank than charged. “She lived in Paris, right?” is the standard reply. That’s where knowledge begins and ends. If I start to explain her importance, a task to which I warm, and which I personalize, whoever my interlocutor and I quickly enter territory where a photographer could capture an image for a visual dictionary under the heading of “Eyes, Glazed Over.”
Only rarely am I allowed to press the conversation to the point that I get to rattle on about how I’ve started to collect Gallantiana: not just her books, and writing about her, and anecdotes shared by her friends — I wish I could remember who told me the one about a neighbour in her building, MG’s I mean, 14 rue Jean Ferrandi, who was eccentric and disinclined to clean and brought on the place a plague of cockroaches — but also associated tchotchkes. There’s a story MG told — I relate this from memory, not from one of the several written sources — about how, at age 4, when she was deposited by her mother at a strict Jansenist-style convent as a boarder, she had a book with her — MG read from an early age — called The Joyous Travellers. (Or “Travelers,” one finds both.) A nun held it up for the other little girls, all French speaking, to see, and told them the title was Les Joyeux Travailleurs. A few years down the road, when MG had steeped herself in the stuff of socialism, and was leafleting on street corners and petitioning on behalf of the disaffected, she would probably have welcomed a book called The Joyous Workers, but as an abandoned and precise and possibly truculent and precociously bilingual 4-year old, she knew very well that Sister had misspoken. She told her so, then and there. There’s some sad ending to the tale, something to do with how MG’s punishment was going without food until she agreed with the nun’s version of the truth. Starvation is a powerful incentive, especially when you’re four.
(When I first read that story, in whatever the source — it comes up in a few interviews she gave, and I believe reference is made to it in Marta Dvorak’s really excellent Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear — I got in my Tardis, not in my Tesla, and zipped back to 1961, to my Grade Two class, our teacher Miss Quintaine, who was drilling us on our letters. We were asked to name words beginning with C. “Compost,” I said, when it came my turn. I knew “compost” because my father had built a composting box in our back yard, would add grass clipping and sundry other parings to it, and I loved the smell of it, can conjure it still. Miss Quintaine — whose parents may not have been so ecologically minded, and who was probably 20, and who might be excused for not knowing, you know, everything — had never heard of compost. She denied that such a word, such a thing existed. I insisted that it did. There was a tense standoff. I can’t recall how it was resolved, but 60 years on, I can still feel the after-burn ache of injustice bestowed. Cruel. Crass. Callous. Craven.)
Quintaine is a short phonetic hop to “queynte,” which is how Chaucer spelled the C-word; Canterbury could also have been named, in that misbegotten exercise, in that over-heated, vomit-scented grade 2 classroom at Strathmillan Elementary, and the book that got mini-Mavis into such hot water — I suspect the convent (C word!) was more of an ice bath establishment — was a Canterbury Tales knockoff, see table of contents, reproduced above.
Published first in 1919 — various editions followed through 1935 — it was the work of Maud McKnight Lindsay, 1874 - 1941, the founder of the first free kindergarten in the state of Alabama. Maud was a busy author — authoress, as she would have been known — and also the childhood playmate of Helen Keller; both were daughters of Tuscumbia. This morning, having purged my place of grime, and then having invited Grimes in, by way of Elon and his Twitter grab, I ordered up a battered copy of the 1925 edition of The Joyous Travellers from some online source, and then thought to inquire of the oracle Google whether MG had any connection to Helen Keller. Lo and behold, I was linked to her brilliant, long account — published in two successive edition of The New Yorker — of the student riots in Paris in 1968. These are, essentially, detailed diary entries, and the Keller reference comes up on June 1, just as things were settling down, at least insofar as life on the street was concerned; the reverberations would go on for years, are still being felt, perhaps. Here’s what she wrote, and note, once again, the appearance of her avatar, Katherine Mansfield.
At 1:30 a.m., heard persistent fire siren nearby, so went out. Fire truck, noisy, parked in front of hotel on the Rue Blaise-Desgoffe. Hotel where K. Mansfield lived when she was having that useless treatment, irradiation of the spleen. Small delivery truck, not much larger than a station wagon, burning outside the Monoprix. Man in dressing gown; a few neighbors, dressed. Man says to me, “Ils ont foutu le feu.” Woman says, “La police a évacué les piquets de grève, de force. Ce sont les conséquences.” Acutely miserable. Messy, smoldering (rubber-smelling) little truck winds up the month of May. Come in, turn on radio to B.B.C. 2 a.m. news, hear that Helen Keller has died and “The world’s walking record has been broken by a man named John Sinclair. He walked a hundred and seventy-six times around an aerodrome.” Don’t even try to sleep. Try to answer “Quest-ce que nous avions voulu?”
Qu’est-ce que nous avions voulu? What was it all for, what were we after? And what do we want, still? The question is not foreign to me. Why on earth am I doing this, chasing traces of Mavis? Just the usual reasons. It’s a path. A direction. A map. It’s what any traveler needs, if he wants some joy along the way. I ordered The Joyous Travelers — there’s a companion volume, The Joyous Guests that I’ll have to get now, too — and when it arrives I’ll add it to my growing pile of material evidence, all the stuff I’m collecting the better to prosecute my case, which I can’t even really name, about which very few care. That done, and having satisfied my curiosity about MG and Helen Keller, I went for a walk, to clear my head, to escape the unsettling vortex in which I find myself so often caught these days. In the alley out back of The Palasades, which is where I shop for most of my furniture and a good deal of my dinnerware, I found a soup bowl, quite pretty, quite old. One minor chip, a bit grubby from its vagrant life, but grime, as we know, can be handily dispersed. It’s Woods Ivory Ware, the Buckingham line, gold and blue embossing, which they manufactured circa 1921 - 22, just as MG was making her advent and preparing to walk among us. Just one bowl from a set of God knows how many. I did what I had to do. I brought it home. Invited it in. Now, I have to collect them all. Thanks for reading. xo. B