A quick shout out for St. Patrick’s Day. I’m trying to call to mind to whom Mavis Gallant (MG) said in an interview that she’d been mistaken for Irish in Ireland. I think it was to Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction Magazine, 1977. The subject of her accent had come up and as I remember — I would check this but where I am most of my books are not — MG’s take on her own hard-to-place, mid-Atlantic inflection was not so different from the way she wrote about Raymond in “From Cloud to Cloud.”
In those days he spoke French and English, too, with a crack in each. His English belonged to a subdivision of Catholic Montreal — a bit Irish sounding but thinner than any tone you might hear in Dublin.
Irish mothers, a bit offbeat, are a minor recurring theme in MG’s stories. Among them is Jack’s mother in “The Moslem Wife.”
They sat on the balcony for much of one long night and he told her about his Irish mother. His mother’s eccentricity — “Vera’s dottiness,” where the family was concerned — had kept Jack from taking anything seriously. He had been afraid of pulling her mad attention in his direction. Countless times she had faked tuberculosis and cancer and announced her own imminent death. A telephone call from the hospital once declared her lost in car crash. “It’s a new life, a new life,” her husband had babbled, coming away from the phone. Jack saw his father then as beautiful. … That same incandescence… continued to shine until a taxi deposited dotty Vera with her cheerful announcement that she had certainly brought off a successful April Fool.
MG told another interviewer, Marta Dvorak, that aspects of her own mother suffused the character of the seemingly flighty but watchfully opportunistic widow-in-waiting, Barbara, in “The Remission.” Barbara often invokes a claim to Irishness, including here:
Alec was leaving no money and three children — four, if you counted his wife. Barbara often said she had no use for money, no head for it. “Thank God I’m Irish,” she said. “I haven’t got rates of interest on the brain.” She read Irishness into her nature as an explanation for it, the way some people attributed their gifts and failings to a sign of the zodiac. Anything natively Irish had dissolved long before, leaving only a family custom of Catholicism and another habit, fervent in Barbara’s case, of anticlerical passion. Alec supposed she was getting her own back, for a mysterious reason, on ancestors she would not have recognized in Heaven. Her family, the Laceys, had been in Wales for generations. Her brothers considered themselves Welsh.
Jack’s mother Vera and Barbara are both south-of-France characters. Irish wives and mothers — the child represented by a proxy, in this case a dog — also occur in the Montreal stories, such as here, in “1933.” I’d name the last line cited as among the funniest in all MG’s writing.
Downstairs lived M. Grosjean, with his Irish wife and an Airedale named Arno. Arno understood English. She loved Arno and was afraid he would run away. He was a restless dog who liked to be doing something all the time. Sometimes M. Grosjean took him to Parc Lafontaine and they played at retrieving a collapsed and bitten tennis ball. Arno was trained to obey both “Cherchez!” and “Go fetch it!” but he paid attention to neither. He ran with the ball and Mme. Grosjean had to chase him. …
Mme. Grosjean and Mme. Carette were the same age, but they never became friends. Mme. Carette would say no more than a few negative things in English (“No, thank you” and “I don’t know” and “I don’t understand”) and Mme. Grosjean could not work up the conversation. Mme. Carette had a word with Berthe about Irish marriages: an Irish marriage, while not to be sought, need not be scorned. The Irish were not English. God had sent them to Canada to keep people from marrying Protestants.
We shouldn’t overlook “Between Zero and One,” one of the Montreal-based “Linnet Muir” stories where MG’s fictional alter-ego takes an office job and runs afoul of Mrs. Ireland — whose national origin may or may not align with her name — a brainy accountant whose lot at work is a hard one: she’s despised by the men whose primacy she threatens, and she in turn despises the other women, her inefficient, bird-brained subalterns. She and Linnet reach an uneasy understanding when Mrs. Ireland accepts that Linnet isn’t equipped to be her right-hand girl, and that she, Linnet, has no intention of staying in the office longer than need be.
In the long interview MG gave to the Christines Evain and Bertail, published as Mavis Gallant On Her Work, she spoke about the woman on whom Mrs. Ireland was based. They worked together in 1942 for the Canadian National Railway, in the office of industrial development.
Mrs. Ireland was a real person. She was the one who said, “You’re crazy to get married. Don’t get married.” She was one of the few women actuaries, highly qualified in algebra and math, brought in to make an outline of the first pension system, because the railway didn’t have one. She handed me a page with x, y, z equals et cetera and I had to tell her, “It’s Greek to me, I can’t read it.” I told her I had put in an application at the National Film Board of Canada where they made documentary films, and if I was accepted, I’d be leaving. I asked her not to give me away. … She never told that I knew nothing, and she taught me how to use the big calculating machine. She liked me, but she had a bad life. I remember her very well, her name was Agnes.”
I don’t know if Agnes was a card-carrying actuary, or if she was a mathematician or accountant working with calculations that were actuarial in their application. Perhaps someone more curious than I can track her down. (As near as I can work out, the only woman actuary — the field is still testosteronic — in Canada in the early years of the war was Miss Muriel Mudie, who was attached to the insurance industry in Toronto. Which was also the home base of Mrs. Ireland.) It wouldn’t be out of line, I don’t think, to speculate that the hardworking, under-appreciated woman office worker in the story that came long twenty years later, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” Saskatchewan’s own Agnes Brusen, transplanted to Geneva, was a salute in the direction of the woman who became Mrs. Ireland.
And finally, because I was writing yesterday about my collection of quotes about pockets and what we put into them, and because today is what today is, I offer you this, from Hans Christian Andersen’s odd, very odd story “‘The Will-o’-the-Wisp Is In Town,’ Says the Moor-Woman.”
As he came nearer, he noticed a living butterfly sitting on the forehead of the sculptured councillor. The butterfly flapped its wings, and flew a little bit farther, and then returned fatigued to sit upon the grave-stone, as if to point out what grew there. Four-leaved shamrocks grew there; there were seven specimens close to each other. When fortune comes, it comes in a heap. He plucked the shamrocks and put them in his pocket.