Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 21

Chill and stupor

3.02 a.m. Had something else in mind for this space today, but need more time to work it through than presently available. Should be able to spill it out, can’t. Too many component parts, too many links to make, a missing piece or two, can’t find the manual, or the Allen key. It’s like the Thursday after a Wednesday trip to Ikea. Oh, well. This is why God gave us Friday.

Feeling my age, my dears. Cut me open and count the rings and you might reasonably conclude what nature has in mind for a man so coarsened or tenderized by time is a zephyr-caressed oasis, a shade-dappled retreat that serves as a stage for the playing out of the fifth act: dull, predictable, and, ideally, short. There, under the palms — here I remember a poem by Paul Valéry, “calme, calme, reste calme, connais le poids d’une palme portant sa profusion —I should recline upon a deck chair, my lard-coloured legs concealed by a warming blanket, as though aboard the Queen Mary, possibly the Titanic — here I remember the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “We were very tired, we were very merry, we’d gone back and forth all night on the ferry,” — and study the various brochures from the various companies who have access to the toniest of the ice-floes to which I might be translated, hopefully in a sedan chair, and deposited, and left to commune with the walruses and seals and narwhals, pending the slow anaesthesia of the cold — here I remember a poem by Emily Dickinson, “This is the Hour of Lead – / Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –/ First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –”

What I need is a Marie Kondo for the brain, someone to sort through the flotsam and discard what isn’t truly required, which would amount to a wholesale purge. It’s ill-advised, at this age, to keep the hours I keep and to do the work I do. Oh, the work. The job. It’s indecorous, really. Any competent high school kid could do it as well or better than I. I’ve been engaged at the store rather than an age-appropriate worker because the kids have loftier goals in mind; as properly they should, why not? A few weeks ago I ran into a young fellow — I think he’d just completed twelfth grade — who'd been a colleague until recently but who’d finally had his fill of slinging lettuce — he was in Produce — and quit, quite operatically. Nice kid, given to drama, no judgment here. Been there. Get it. He was, I have to say, looking prosperous and well-turned out and when I inquired what he was up to he said he was making a bundle “trading NFT’s.” My first thought was that this what we used to do in our licentious undergraduate days with the full confidence that penicillin would fix it all up, but I soon gathered whatever it is he’s up to has to do with crypto, so I didn’t inquire deeply; why ask questions if you won’t understand the answers? I contented myself with wishing him well and saying I’d give his best regards to everyone at the store, to which he replied, practically and genially, “Don’t bother.”

I owe the store a lot, apart from the biweekly cheque, but I can’t deny that, whatever its advantages, it’s also been an excuse, too, like having a dog, the way you it affords you a means for avoidance, not to go out, or to have to leave early. The diary — and what a cheek it is, really — is what I cram into the few minutes I make available at an absurd hour, it’s easy for me to shrug and say, “Oh, well, the mistakes are the mistakes, the lapses are the lapses, they’re circumstantial, can’t be helped, fol-de-rol, it’s a hymn to human error.” Which is true; but is also a necessity born of circumstances which are of my own choosing and making. Look closely at my head and you’ll find no little round depressions marking the place where someone put the gun and said, “Thou shalt.”

“I wanted to live in Paris, I wanted to write fiction. And I wanted to live on it and in it.” So said Mavis Gallant (MG) when asked, late in her life, to sum up her project. Simple to write it out, but the enactment required such courage. My God. One wonders how many others have been similarly moved, have tried and never been heard from — the proverbial broken heart for every light on Broadway. MG was determined to call herself a writer, to have the proof of it, before she was 30. I remember that same feeling, not an ambition specifically attached to being a writer but the young person’s certainty of how, when you came to one score and ten, your fate is sealed, you’d been given all the bricks and mortar you would ever have to build with, the rest will be a test of how well you use them. What will you build? A palace? A bungalow? A ramshackle shed? Or will they all just lie around in the yard, those bricks, covered in pigeon shit and with the weeds growing up around them? At a given age it’s not just unrealistic or delusional, it’s certifiably pathetic to think you still might make something of it all, even a cairn. There’s nothing like getting up early, looking out at the neighbouring apartments, seeing a few lights still on, that early can also be late. Maybe this grim requirement for an aerial view is inevitable. Even someone as accomplished as MG wondered about what might have been her missteps, especially as early and late began to elide.

In In Italy, one of her early stories in which MG writes about the loony colony of English expats living in the south of France, Stella — a young woman married to a much older man, a man with a daughter born before Stella — wants to make a proper English garden, wants to remove the native palm trees, messy and full of rats, and put in roses, lilacs. She’s been consulting a book called Gardening in Happy Lands. Reading that I set aside the text, went online to look for a copy, only to discover — surprise! — that MG had made it up. My God! Fiction! There’s no such book. Imagine! August 11 will come and go, this will end, there’ll be a void to fill; maybe that will be my project. Maybe I’ll write Gardening in Happy Lands. Oh, Bill. No you won’t. Just what you need. Another entry in your very long list of projects you might undertake. “I wanted to make a garden… Other people have gardens here,” says Stella, plaintively, and her much older husband, Henry, sets her straight on what is and what isn’t realistic, given the environment, given the time. I need to have that same talk with myself, I think. I need to be my own Henry.

Having dumped this load of fragrant cheer on your stoop and left it for you to spread upon the lawn, let me just say that if you want to read something more restorative and redemptory than what I’ve written here about MG, and about reading her in sunny climes, track down Lisa Moore's great piece that appeared in Brick Magazine in 2014, about reading MG in Malibu. (Not sure the link works — which would be typical of the day — but I’m sure you can find it, and it’s very worthwhile.)

4.06. The robins who began their singing at 3.57 on June 21 are just starting in. They’re probably raising their second families by now, have no idea that it’s too late to start, and so early, too. Gotta go. I’ll be well and truly late to my post. Commerce loses to art, again. Thanks for reading, xo, B