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

Saturday's child works hard for a living

May 7, 3.10 a.m.

“He lolls on a garden chair, rereading his boyhood books - the Kipling, the bound albums of Chums.”

This is how Walter, in Mavis Gallant’s (MG) “An Unmarried Man’s Summer” — referred to earlier this week — whittles away the waning, still oppressively hot days of summer in his borrowed house in the south of France. Reading that line administered a pleasant shock of recognition. We had few numbers of Chums around the house when I was growing up, ditto The Boys’ Own Annual, both replete with rugby and cricket and punting on the Cam and boarding school adventuring. There were also a few other oddities on the shelves that had been part of my father’s boyhood library and had come down to us. Biggles Defies the Swastika is one I recall, though only by title; I never read it, think it may not have come from my dad, but from some other source, it would never have been his kind of thing.

As for Kipling, I’m persuaded the edition MG held in memory as she wrote her story, the one Walter knew as a lad and revisits — Kim, Just So Stories — would have been the one we had in our Hearne Avenue house in Winnipeg. (I think it originated with my mother, and it occurs to me it may have entered her girlhood home as a mail-order set, or something pressed on her family by a traveling salesman who peddled enlightening and improving books no home should be without. It was a set of about 20 slender volumes, bound in red or blue buckram, the titles gold embossed, and — Biggles, nota bene! — something that impressed and actually worried us as children, which was what looked, at first glance, to be a swastika as part of the spine’s decoration. We learned that it was an ancient Sanskrit symbol, a conduit for good luck, not the Nazi symbol, merely its inspiration, which still gave us a turn.

Most of my books are in Manitoba. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them. I hope they’re bearing up, shoulder to shoulder, chatting amongst themselves, telling their same old stories, there in the small house where I intended to live, for part of the year, but which I’ve hardly seen in the last two years, and has become a storage depot for my chattels, for family stuff, the Kipling set included: The Museum of Bill is what it is, and no one visits. Among the many remnants of a past that is personal but seems ever more remote is a book I recall receiving as a gift in 1977. It was A Writer’s Diary, Leonard Woolf’s selection of entries from Virgina’s journals, which would eventually appear in five hefty volumes. I read it compulsively, and the last lines, written a few days before she took her stick and stuffed her pockets with stones and walked to the River Ouse, branded themselves on my brain.

And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner, Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Sometimes, I wonder if the act of writing does create an energy that, if it doesn’t influence what happens in the material realm, makes you, the writer, more attuned to your environment, and more inclined to notice similarities between what happened on, say, Thursay’s page in Friday’s world. Yesterday, Friday, I wrote here about a man, 40-ish, and a young boy, 8 or so, in the store, looking for pizza dough, a very particular pizza dough, none other would do. I assumed they were father and son — they may not have been — and let my imagination construct a story around them: that this was a divorced dad, that this was their special time, that making pizza was what they did together. I wrote that down. I went to the store. My mind went elsewhere. Shortly after we opened, a woman, 30-something, and her daughter, about age 8, came into the store. They were looking for pizza dough, and not just any old pizza dough, it had to be ancient grain pizza dough. This time, unlike the Thursday episode where the little boy was so crestfallen, there was a happy ending. It was in stock, and I was able to locate it. At last! A satisfied customer.

In the world there are fathers and sons, there are mothers and daughters, there is pizza dough. In the grand Venn diagram of the everyday, they surely intersect with some regularity, though most often without an objective third party auditing the accounts. It would be a mistake to make too much, to make anything of it, this flimsy coincidence, to try to make it fit into a pattern, a thesis, a plan. This was nothing I conjured, and I would never suggest it might be. However, it’s also true that I’ve worked thousands of hours in that place and until yesterday, I’d never been asked by a parent-child team for pizza dough, both requests to which some more than usual urgency attached. I didn’t make it happen by writing it down; possibly, though, by formalizing the story, I set myself up to be more receptive to its sequel. Likewise, yesterday, when I came home from work, I was interested to find a father and son duo — or so I suppose, and of the same vintage as the pair in the store — in the parking lot, playing ball hockey. I didn’t recognize them from the building or the neighbourhood, which didn’t matter. They were having fun, and building a bond, which was what the pizza-making dad had in mind; at least, in the story I invented about him. They’d improvised goals, and were taking shots, one after the other. The boy was standing directly in front of the gas meter at the base of which, in a hole in the asphalt, lives our resident skunk. I thought it would be a kindness to all concerned, most especially the skunk, who was probably napping, to let them know about the den.

“Cool!” said the boy, and spun around and made for the cavity with dentist-like alacrity. His dad and I, having been boys ourselves, understood he was about to take his stick and effect a home invasion, just to see what would happen next: the same impulse that seized my brothers and me to take liquids from a bathroom cabinet, mix them in a jam jar, and pour them down anthills. It’s an unfortunate human impulse, one that should be controlled, to make things scurry, just for scurrying’s sake. Luckily, when cautioned against this, the boy stood down without complaint. They wrapped up their game soon after. The skunk did not emerge to call foul.

The only smell in the air was the whiff of metaphor. I can see how poking with a stick at something that would rather be left undisturbed is more or less what I’m doing to MG when I write about her, even in this small circulation, amateur way, even as someone with no credentials and no possibility of effecting an outcome. The stories are her legacy. The stories are enough. But I confess to a fascination with her life, too, with what made the brain that powered the eyes and the hands that made the writing.

When she tells an interviewer, Geoff Hancock, about how she sat for a portrait in Yugolsavia and looked out at the harbour and wondered why the artist didn’t want just to paint the harbour, I want to know more. Who was the painter? What was their relationship? What harbour? What date? Where is the portrait now, whatever happened to it? In 2009, she sat for a long time with Christine Evain and Christine Bertail and spoke about individual stories, her impressions of them, years after their writing, and what she remembered about the time of their composition: which was a lot. MG had great powers of recall. Speaking about Walter in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” she says, “He’s gay,” and then adds,

“I get letter from strangers, and a few years ago I got a letter from a young Canadian man who wrote on the stationery of the firm he was working for in Paris. He was a lawyer for an international bank. And he wrote, ‘My partner and I…” and I wasn’t used to the term “my partner” and I thought it was someone who worked at the same bank. And he wrote, “We’re both Canadians and we love your work. We looked you up on the map and you don’t live far from us, and we’d like to invite you to dinner.” And I thought, Why not? And when I phoned, and his partner answered the phone, it became apparent that they both lived there, and it all fell into place. And when I went, I discovered a lovely apartment, and the partner cooked an absolutely sublime meal, and I never again refused an invitation from them!”

My response to this is not to call for the shredder, and forget all about it. I want to know — who, and how often, and where are they now, and what was she like, and on and on. It’s impure, it’s not proper, it’s invasive — it’s human. It’s not dissimilar, I don’t think, from what MG must have felt when she was immersed in her long, absorbing study of the Dreyfus case, spending her time not with the many books already written on the subject, but on as many primary sources and original documents as she could. Someone who spent as much time as she did talking to interviewers, both for the popular press and the academics who wrote their dissertations about her, must have cared, to some degree at least, about how her life would held and regarded, about posterity. You don’t mark trees and you don’t scatter stones behind you if you’re not interested in the basic work of pathfinding.

What does it mean that when you do a search for “mother” in her Selected Stories — published in the States as Collected Stories, a serious, misleading misnomer, it’s not even half of them — you find 749 instances of the word? Does it mean anything at all? For me, for now, it only means that this is Saturday, and I thought to do a word count because I’ve been reading her short story “Saturday,” which appeared in The New Yorker at the beginning of June, 1968: published just as the events in Paris of May ‘68 were settling down, the events that she closely and personally documented in her diary, and then published, in two long instalments, a few months later, in The New Yorker. The matriarch in “Saturday,” is one of the fantastic monster mothers which were a Gallant specialty; an excellent way to mark Mother’s Day, tomorrow, if what you’re after is an antidote to Hallmark treacle, would be to read it.

Monday and Tuesday are my days off, so Saturday is my Thursday. I like working weekends: civilian weekends, I mean. They have a particular rhythm. Both Saturday and Sunday tend to be pokey till about 11. Then, steam gathers. By the time all hell is breaking loose my shift is done. Today will almost certainly be busier than usual, given that tomorrow is what tomorrow is. We’ve stocked up on strawberries and flowers and other symbols of filial affection. There’ll be first-time customers coming through, lots of directional questions to answer. The Saturday regulars will be there, for sure, most of whom are men who shop alone. None is young. They all have lists — not on their phones, hand-written on notepad paper — even though — I know this because I observe it — they buy EXACTLY the same things, follow the same path through the store Saturday after Saturday after Saturday, like ants sniffing out formic traces. There’s one fellow who interests me particularly. Everything about him suggests the fastidious. He’s neatly dressed, well put together, looks quite fit, in his mid-70’s, I’d guess. He may be ex-military. He’s got discipline, he’s punctual, he knows the value of a minute, of a plan. He walks quickly, his posture is terrific, he’s about 5’6'“, compact, not an extra pound on him. You just know that he’s the sort of person who does his taxes on time and provides receipts that he’s ironed. I’ve never seen him — 8.20 arrival, set your watch by it, if you have watch that needs setting — shop in company, and over the last number of months I’ve built up a whole story about him, his past, his reasons, his solitude, his remedies for loneliness. I can’t tell you how angry it made me to see him on the street the other day walking arm in arm with a woman who was entirely age-appropriate, and just a few inches taller.
”No!” I said, I hope in my head, “that’s wrong, just wrong!” It was a good lesson about the unreliability of intuition, the perils of guesswork, but not one I took absolutely to heart.

Mother’s Day weekend and no doubt those who have the option of getting out of town will do so, will head to one of the islands, or up to Whistler. I’m surprised, always, at just how many people have managed to organize their lives and plan their finances in a way that makes this possible. Even on a busy weekend, even in a neighbourhood like the one in which I live, which is very mixed-income, you get the feeling of an emptying-out. By way of closing then, and with this idea of the empty city in mind, here’s MG, writing on a Saturday, August 16, in 1997: one of the diary entries she published in Slate.

It bothers people–friends, I mean–that I spend every August in Paris. They think it is unhealthy, surely lonely, probably eccentric. The truth is that I prefer being in a city, all the time, more and more, and “city” means Paris. I am frequently offered an airy room in a country house, in Normandy, in Brittany, and sometimes the house itself. I am assured that I would be able to work in peace, that no one would ever bother me, that I could just turn up for meals. Thank you, no. If I were to exchange my August life for another, it would be for more of the same, an urban center, a city I like, such as Rome, Vienna. It would be every bit as polluted and just as empty. The bakery and grocery down the street would be closed, as in Paris, and I would not be able to arrange things as I want them, chez moi. Chez moi: Is that the key? I’m not sure. I used to live half the year in the South of France, but I always came up to Paris for August. I was sometimes the only person in my apartment house, the same house, and I would take the plastic dust covers off the furniture and go straight out and find a florist still open, so that I could get that dead look, that abandoned look, out of rooms where no one had played music, cooked, taken a book off a shelf for a few months. Paris, quiet, gave one a sense of anonymity and freedom. It still does.

“Chez moi. Is that the key?” I keep on looking for it, the key, under the mat, the potted plant, atop the lintel, marked by the blood of the lamb. I just can’t pass over. Thanks for reading. xo, B

PS My father could quote long passages from Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” and I thought to post it here. But, no. It’s for private consumption, if at all. Instead, here’s Morgan Freeman reading “If,” the video drippy with Hallmark syrup appropriate to the day.