Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: September 18, 2024

A romping nature

A very quick hello, and mostly by way of sharing something Mavis Gallant (MG) adjacent that made me laugh out loud. Not much does that any more, although I remember when I was always snorting and whinnying audibly at something. What changed? Did I just grow old and jaded? Well. Yes, I did, but would that necessarily result in the tamping down of the impulse to giggle? The world is no less risible; but is it differently risible? I’ll spare you my ruminations on the question. Some cuds are best chewed in private.

I think it was Stephen Henighan who first wrote, perhaps ten years ago, about MG’s colourful mother, Benedictine, and excavated the story of how, in the summer of 1913, she ran away from home and lived in Toronto disguised as a boy, and was eventually found and returned to her parents, Rose and Solomon Wiseman, in Montreal. I’ve added a few details as I’ve found them — others may well have done so, too — and published them here. Benedictine — I believe she died in 1963 — was a fascinating character, and I can well imagine that she must have been a maddening mother.

The contemporary accounts of her 1913 discovery, apprehension, and return were many and varied and full of errors and innuendo. A number of them allude to “earlier reports” of her disappearance, and of police involvement in the search for the missing girl. I’ve looked high and low to find these stories of her vanishing and have been unable to until, lo and behold, out of the blue, this surfaced in (I’m tempted to say “of all places”) the Hamilton Spectator. It was there all along, hiding in plain sight, obscured only because of the variant spelling of “Wiseman.” I’m posting it here now not because it adds anything material to her story, but only because I was so delighted by the prose, and I hope it might make one or two of you laugh out loud, too.

Was a finer phrase ever constructed in English than “always of a romping nature and ever-ready for tomboyish larks?” The question is rhetorical.

I’ll mention again that Montreal Standard Time, the selection of MG’s early journalism edited by Neil Besner and Marta Dvorak and me, will be come out next month from Montreal’s Vehicule Press. My job was to provide some annotations, and to this end I sometimes tried to track down bits of biography that seemed germane to whatever the subject at hand. I was probably not the best candidate for this assignment, since my research skills are a long way from anything anyone would call nonpareil. I was, for instance, defeated in my efforts to find the beginning and end dates of MG’s marriage to John Gallant, the Winnipeg-born pianist and arranger who was a staple of Montreal’s jazz scene for over 20 years. Why this clipping, from the Winnipeg Tribune, evaded my net I can’t say. Now, too late to make any difference to the book, it has surfaced. So, for the record, here it is, the one that got away, dated May 11, 1949. (The wedding took place in Ottawa, you’ll note, presumably during MG’s short tenure, pre-Standard, at the National Film Board.)

Cheers, all best, BR