Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning.

10 years

There’s no rational reason — I’ve thought and said it before — that a tenth anniversary more merits marking than number nine or eleven. Nonetheless, for reasons traditional or numerological or cabalistic, we’ve always accorded greater weight and importance to the decennial milestones. Hence, my probably unwelcome meddling with your Sunday in-box on this 18th day of February, 2024.

First, a brief review. I started this blog — is that what it is? — as a way of paying personal tribute to Mavis Gallant (MG) on the occasion of her centennial year, 2022. I worked hard and happily on it from mid-April through mid-August —August 11, her birthday, and mine — then let it go, adding occasional notes over succeeding months as it seemed timely or appropriate. At the time, I had a job in a grocery store that required a 4 a.m. start. I got up at 2.40, swilled a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette on my balcony (strictly forbidden by the building bylaws, but 3 in the morning excuses many sins; I’ve stopped smoking, btw, so no need to tsk tsk, though lord knows I must have inflicted a lot of grievous harm on my system) and then sat down and wrote whatever the hell I wanted to, however I wanted to, hit the “publish” button and went to work. I’ve never looked back at what I wrote, and never would or will. It would be like cleaning up the sick and broken glass from the previous night’s bender. Probably a lot of it was nonsense, crap; I’m sure it was. Juvenile. Ill-wrought. Embarrassing. That said, I remember that weird season of three in the morning fondly, for the work, for the unexpected connection I forged with the natural world, the changing light, the arrival of the birds, the dawn chorus, its dispersal. It was the last time in my life I felt young; to be clear, I was then 66 and however foolish a long way from delusional. Young I was not; what I mean is that I found a source of energy I’d forgotten I had, and I took such delight in having this specific focus, this mission, and that I found such freedom in it despite the fact that it was rule bound by time, if nothing else. I had four months, and I had 45 minutes to get it all done, I was beholden to no one, I was saying what I thought about someone about whose writing I cared. Care. It was a good time, and I felt not a twinge of sentimentality or regret when I put not quite a period but a non-committal ellipsis at the not quite end of it.

I haven’t been posting actively or routinely here for well over a year, but since this day is this day — I mean, since it’s been ten years since MG died in Paris, April 18, 2014, age 91 — me voici de nouveau. Is that even proper French? Once I would have known, and my acuity, never well-honed, is particularly dull at the moment. I happen to have Covid just now, my first real bout with it; nasty. It wasn’t my intention to be up this early, but sleep is very fractured what with the barking and the sniffing and the aching and the (in my case, and apparently this is not uncommon) frequent urination. Too much information! I was staring into the air at 2.30, and turning these things over in my mind, and I thought, well, why not? I waited till 3 a.m. and began. Hello. Here we are again. Without the cigarette.

AI image of MG walking in the snow in Montreal in the late 1940’s in the style of Philip Surrey.

I wanted, back in 2022, to do something celebratory and ritualistic to mark MG’s centennial day, and also to mark the end of my project. I don’t know why I settled on the idea of something church-related, exactly. I’m not religious, nor was she, but questions of faith were part of my inquiry, and part of her mystery. With her mother, Benedictine, she had a difficult relationship. MG said that her parents were Anglican, and no doubt they were; but Benedictine’s was a classic European mix (German, Romanian, the borders always shifting) of Jewish bloodline. MG’s circle in Paris included many Jewish emigres, writers, artists, gallerists, and a major thrust of her work was to grapple with what had made possible the maelstrom of Europe after 1933. Understanding it, she reasonably said, was key to ensuring it never happened again. Nowhere, though, in any of her writing, or in any of her interviews —- at least, not that I’ve seen — did she ever address her own claim, however fractional it might have been, to Jewishness. I wondered why, that’s all. As time went by, as I read and wrote more, it seemed less important, if only for its unanswerability. In 1965, in the interview she gave to Fletcher Markle for the CBC Television programme Telescope, the camera crew accompanies MG to Chartre, to the cathedral, a favourite day trip from Paris. She speaks, I thought quite movingly, about how the deep mystery of the place touched her, about how lighting candles and saying a prayer —- however she understood that — was a kind of white magic. So, it was with these things in mind, that I met with Father Kevin Hunt, the archdeacon of Burred and rector of St. James Anglican Church here in Vancouver. I’ve now and again been a congregant there, have always felt at home in its austere, incense-fragrant sanctuary. It’s on Cordova Street, in the downtown east-side of the city, which is, and has been for many years, a place where you can find both regenerative liveliness and great human misery. I told Father Kevin that I wanted to formally honour the birth a hundred years prior of one of the world’s great writers in English; that I wondered about something like a memorial mass. He listened, understood, and replied that what would be more appropriate, both for my purposes, and for what the church could accommodate, would be a service of compline. It would allow for the inclusions of music and text, both liturgical and secular, and that was pretty much what I had in mind. St. James has a very strong musical tradition, and while the whole choir wasn’t available, a quartet composed of the professional soloists could be on hand. Perfect. We settled on the evening of August 10, 2022. I asked some friends to participate, put together a programme, put out the word, and then the day came. I think about 80 people attended, more than I’d anticipated. It was a hot night, and the atmosphere in the neighbourhood was particularly charged. A tent city had overtaken the sidewalks on E. Hastings street, a stone’s throw from the church, and the police, with civic workers, were removing it. There had been protests, some violence: the difficult life of a city, going on. I’m sure MG, who wrote so memorably about the student riots in Paris in 1968, would have been fascinated by it. (That long diary entry, btw, about the events in May, has been recently republished in The Paris Notebooks, by Godine Nonpareil.)

Photo by Nancy Baele

I’d asked Grant Rowledge, a sound engineer with whom I’d worked at CBC Radio, to record the evening, and I posted it here the next day, the 11th. Or was it the 12th? Not sure. I append that recording again this morning, because I happen to be up, and to mark the 10th anniversary of MG’s passage into mystery. You’ll hear Father Kevin, the quartet of singers, the organist P J Janson, Gabrielle Rose, Shefa Siegel, and Veda Hille, who set to music a kind of collage of questions I’d gathered from MG’s stories. A strange thing happened towards the end. I’d lifted from MG’s Telescope interview a few relevant words to the church setting. At the moment in the programme when they were played, an ambulance, sirens blaring went screaming by — a very usual thing in the downtown east-side of this city.

It’s 4.17 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. In the old days, I’d have finished this and been at work already. I’m out of practice, and also, well, Covid. Here’s to happy healthy times for us all. Here’s to Mavis.