Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 27

Poodle love

3.21 a.m. Spent a happy few hours after work yesterday sorting through the eclectic assortment of books I’ve ordered up, all pertaining in some way to Mavis Gallant (MG) in this, her Centennial Year, some more tangential than others. Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, The Joyous Travellers, The Peep of Day, the several Margaret Crosland titles, many others. To each of them I could assign a reason, a place in the choir, but could not for the life of me think of why I’d tracked down Dog Shows and Doggy People, by Charles Henry Lane, F.Z.S. There’s no biographical note about him in the book; my rudimentary research suggests his main claim to fame was that he established the breed standards for the Manx cat. Thereby hangs no tail.

The signature on the inside front cover attests to the book’s — at least, to this particular copy’s — distinguished pedigree.

The broad strokes of J. Aubrey Ireland are easy enough to find. A physician, he knew as much about heeling as he did about healing, was often called upon, for many, many years, to arbitrate at dog shows all over the United Kingdom. I believe he was born in the mid-1870’s and he remained active on that strange, even unsavoury, circuit of, well, doggy people, as late as 1954. He slips from the public record — that is, the one I’m able to access — round about the time he accepted an invitation to travel to Singapore and / or Hong Kong to officiate at a Far East hound-dog shindig. Perhaps kennel cough carried him off. I’m not planning to devote any more time to his excavation; my interest in J. Aubrey Ireland, likewise in Charles Henry Lane, doesn’t extend beyond how they might pertain to MG which, as near as I can determine, they don’t, neither one of them. And yet, it’s owing to her that they’ve come to live with me, Charles and Aubrey; it’s because of MG that Dog Shows and Doggy People has come to dwell here on Barclay Street, to clamour after its share of the dust. It’s because of MG — but why, exactly?

You might suspect that a book called Dog Shows and Doggy People would prove a tad odd and in this estimation you’d be spot on. It’s a biographical directory of dog fanciers — Doggy People, as Charles Henry Lane calls them, over and over and over again, always with great fondness and never with anything that smells like irony — along with a detailed history of British dog shows from — don’t ask me why — 1861 - 1878. I examined its pages carefully, trying to discern if MG might have anything to do with Dr. Wheeler-O’Bryen —

— whose “well-marked and well-shaped Florrie (was) one of the best bitches of the day,” or Mrs. Claude Hay, whose poodle, Cello, would run to fetch the hat of a gentleman visitor was was preparing to depart —

— or Mrs. W. J. Hughes, who, supported by her two charming sisters who were her aides-de-camp, “made herself a power in the land with her team of Skye Terriers —”

— or the spectral Miss Mackenzie, shown below with her puppy Vino, “which won first prize at the Alexandra Palace in the Puppy Class, and is a descendant of some of its owner’s prize stock.” Charles Henry Lane goes on to add, “I am sure all have admired the pluck and determination with which Miss Mackenzie has kept pegging away at her breeding…” Who could doubt this is so?

But there was, alas, no link between MG and these late Victorian poodle, and Dalmatian, and Italian greyhound aficionados. I had to leaf through the entire volume until I found the gentleman pictured below, beyond a doubt the forgotten connection, plainly the name the oracle Google disgorged from its depths and whispered in my ear. He is the link between MG and Dog Shows and Doggy People.

“De Trafford” had been the search term that led me here. Albert Stewart Roy De Trafford Young was MG’s father, the remittance man, the painter, who vanished from her life on her 10th birthday. How could it not have been a defining moment, a border drawn on the map of her life? At some point, when it seemed to matter more than now it does for whatever it is I’m playing at here, I’d been trying to locate him, to see where he was suspended on the De Trafford family tree. (Surely someone, somewhere, must already have done this; if so, I would love to know.) My own efforts were without success, unless you count the acquisition of Dog Shows and Doggy People as a triumph; in fact, I might. The De Traffords are an old, old clan, deep-rooted and many-branched. That Sir Humphrey might have been kin to MG seems not unlikely, but lord knows at how many removes. The point is that he turned up on the tremendously small island of Dog Shows and Doggy People, which was washed by the currents of a minor tributary down which I paddled in my undisciplined, not even Boolean google search for De Trafford intelligence. I mean to say I found that his name was mentioned in the book and I found the book available through an online source and, on impulse, I bought it. As it turned out, Charles Henry Lane, F.Z.S., had NOTHING revealing to disclose about Sir Humphrey De Trafford, apart from acknowledging — and this he does, it seems to me, a little grudgingly — that MG’s maybe or maybe not forebear was a dab hand when it came to the breeding, handling and showing of Fox Terriers.

However diluted and diverted the bloodline, however mixed the pedigree, MG, whether through nature or nurture, had a soft spot for dogs. In one of her earliest stories, “The picnic”, published in the The New Yorker on August 9, 1952, 2 days before her 30th birthday, she writes of Old Madame Pegurin, who treasures a seed-pearl surrounded brooch that contains a photograph of a poodle called Youckie “who had died of influenza shortly before the war.”

“When the children came in, she would feed them sugared almonds and pistachio creams and sponge cakes soaked in rum, which she kept in a tin box by her bedside, and as they stood lined up rather comically, she would tell them about little dead Youckie, and about her own children, all of whom had married worthless, ordinary, social-climbing men and women. ‘In the end,’ she would say, sighing, ‘there is nothing to replace the love one can bear a cat or a poodle.’”

Also, a dog named Sylvestre is a minor character — as much as any character is allowed to be minor in a Gallant story, which is to say not at all — in Luc and his Father. Sylvestre was acquired by Luc’s parents, the better to give their son a sense of responsibility. As so often happens when animals are kidnapped and held against their will for therapeutic reasons, the parents wind up paying the ransom. It’s no spoiler to say that this is how the story ends:

“He tried, now, to think of something important to say to Luc, as if the essence of his own life could be bottled in words and handed over. Sylvestre, wakened by a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, “Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.”

“Luc and his Father,” was published in 1982. A similar sentiment to the one voiced in that last line came up in 2009, by which time MG’s story production had ground to a halt, when Jhumpa Lahiri interviewed her for Granta. This detail emerges from their discussion of her story, “Virus X.”

“I was in Strasbourg in a little hotel and at that point I had complicated my life with a dog. I was very very sick, had a very high temperature. There was a man in the next room, an elderly French man who lived there, and I was delirious. I thought I saw him walking through the wall. He used to say, ‘Ma voisine, ma voisine!’ and he’d take my dog out.”

The poodle pictured above — what year? late 50’s? — must have been that dog. Does anyone know her name? I think it may have been Dinah. After Dinah Washington? MG was a fan. Someone in a position to know told me the creature was, like MG, perfectly bilingual. MG’s companion is the journalist Doyle Klyn, another of her Winnipeg connections, like her by-then ex-husband John Gallant, like her good friend Barbara Kilvert. It’s to Doyle that MG dedicated her 1970 novel A Fairly Good Time. Doyle was a devoted friend to Sinclair Ross, for whom MG also had fond feelings. Here’s something odd I found online, posted on a blog called “To Thine Own Self Be True,” a few weeks after MG’s death in 2014, almost 20 years after the passing of Doyle Klyn. How did this private correspondence come into the hands of rdavies?

Thinking about MG, about her poodle, and about Dog Shows and Doggy People, my thoughts turn to Esther, my poodle, a standard, and a beauty. Of all my dogs, and there have been a few, she’s the one who was truly meant for me. Yesterday, June 26, was the fourth anniversary of her death. A country vet came to my country house. There was no question that Esther’s time had come. I made a little shrine in the living room with the ball she loved to chase, and her squeaky toys, and I had it in my head that she would lie there surrounded by the things she loved or that I loved to think she loved and that it would be like a Viking ship or a Pharaoh’s tomb, that she would journey to the afterlife buoyed by the sight, the smell, the future promise of her treasured objects. I had a candle ready to light, too. There was a playlist. But no. Early that morning, as if she knew what was about to happen, after she had gone out to pee, Esther settled down in the kitchen, not on a blanket like the special one I’d laid out for her, but on the linoleum, and would not move or lift her head, except to accept little bits of chicken sausage I kept cooking up and foisting on her. 11.00 was the appointed hour. The vet was prompt. She was as gentle as she was efficient. At 11.20 she kindly helped me load Esther into the back seat of my 1994 Volvo. Morden, the nearest town with facilities for cremation, was an hour away. I talked to Esther the whole way there, told her stories about how she came to live with me, and how she loved the other Bill, and how important she had been to me, to us both, and how badly I felt that I hadn’t understood how sick she had become, the usual litany of sorrow and guilt. I talked to her about the root of the word “dismal,” dies mali, a cursed day, which seemed apt because my father had died on June 26 four years earlier. I must have bored her stiff, because by the time we reached our designation, rigor had settled in. I was surprised at how quickly that happened. Another kind woman, a veterinary assistant, helped me extract her from the car, which required a lot of angling and shoving. Her legs were long. The doors were small. I was beginning to wonder if the jaws of life might be required, if the volunteer fire department had access to such gear. Hard work and good will prevailed. They put her in a freezer, and promised her a fire. I went home, walked through the door, and knew I was done with that house. I loved it, but I had to leave it. It was a big place, and for the first time since I’d moved there, it felt empty. The last meaningful thing I did in that village was to scatter Esther’s ashes along the mile of the gravel-paved cemetery road we’d so often walked. God, I miss that dog. Old Madame Pegurin was right. There’s nothing like the love you give, the love you receive from a poodle.

Here’s to the dogs we love and lose, to Esther, to Dinah, or whatever her name might have been. Enough, now. Work calls, with all its useful distractions. Thanks for reading, xo, B