Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, July 10
If a great box were to fall on your head
A hasty note. Work beckons, wearily but insistently, like the worn-out whore of Babylon. Sundays, back in the store after my two days off, I pay special attention to the bulk bins, order up whatever grains or beans or pulses have been depleted. It’s a good chore for the Sabbath, calling to mind as it does the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the grain of wheat, also the wheat and the tares, also the one that pertains to the sower and the sad business of the rocky ground. Or am I mixing that up with the cautionary tale of Onan? Religion. It’s so confusing, no wonder we go to war over it. (Was it Dorothy Parker who called her canary Onan, owing to the spilled seed? Probably. Move along, Bill. Unsavoury thoughts on a holy day.)
The bulk bins stir in me a righteous fury; not the bins themselves, rigid exempla of moral neutrality, but the clientele they sometimes attract. Far too many are the miscreants who fill their sacks, note the identifying number required by the cashiers on the broad twist ties provided, and then have a change of mind or heart and just abandon the bulgar or the buckwheat or the barley or whatever on some nearby shelf. “None of you bastards deserves nice things,” is my coarse chant as I collect their spilled seed and return it not to the bin whence it came, that it might be there, in this time of gathering scarcity, for the future use of a more committed or rational customer, but to the compost. This is done in the name of food safety and security. Once the bulk is out of the bin, it either goes home with whoever pulled the handle and filled the bag, or it gets mulched. There’s nothing else to be done, given that there’s no way to ensure it hasn’t been tampered with, contaminated, spat in, or meddled with by some devious son of Onan. I have to weigh the waste, make a note, duly report it; to what end, I’m not sure. A few grains of basmati, an almond or two: this is bearable, well within reason, accidents happen. But seven pounds of pumpkin seeds? Thirteen pounds of white jasmine rice? Macadamia nuts in a poundage with a street value of something like five hundred bucks? This I’ve seen, and dealt with in the prescribed manner. A lot — I mean A LOT — of food that needs to be discarded is diverted to the food bank. But for the forsaken bulk, there’s no option other than the one described. Not even the gulls and crows who hang around the loading dock can benefit from it. Maddening. Immoral.
Sunday morning. I wonder how many childhood Sabbaths were spent at Sunday School, in the basement of Silver Heights United Church? I remember none of the names of our teachers, and nothing substantial about what I learned, although certain sensory impressions remain, some olfactory. Why did it smell so much like bleach and vomit and flatulence? Cub scout gatherings were held there during the week — this may be the explanation for the mystery of the odour — and the totemic wolf that was intended to superintend those proceedings was a coyote head someone had taxidermed and placed atop a pole. It was stored in plain view, in a convenient corner, and it looked out upon us when we gathered as a junior congregation to sing hymns, its unblinking, pitiless, glass-eyed regard as we stumbled through Jesus Bids Us Shine, or (my favourite still) God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall. I remember the taste — peppermint — of the adhesive on the envelopes into which we put whatever coins we were consigning to the collection plate. Those envelopes were divided in two, and you, the mini-parishioner, obedient to the imperative of the tithe, could choose whether you wanted your quarter to go to “The work of the church at home,” or “The work of our missionaries abroad.” This was the United Church, and I don’t think it was particularly evangelical; certainly we never received visits from returning missionaries who had succeeded in bringing the savages to Jesus but, as an avid reader of the books by Dr. Tom Dooley, who was one of my pre-pubescent avatars, it pleased me to think I was contributing in even a small way to mitigating the lot of someone in Africa or India or one of the other disadvantaged precincts so often spoken of by the weirdly uniformed Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova in television commercials touting the good work of the Unitarian Service Committee, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4.
I also remember that somewhere along the six blocks that stretched between the church and home, there was a basset hound — I think his name was Fred, or Duncan, or it may have been Onan — who would lie in wait, concealed behind a snow drift or hedge, depending on the season, and would chase after us, wrap himself around our chubby and washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb gams, and hump madly. We would haul him along for a short distance, laughing and laughing. He meant no harm. He was just being true to his nature, which happened to be perverse.
In my last entry in this diary I erred — my mistakes are frequent and I’m grateful to everyone who corrects me — in saying that Mavis Gallant’s (MG) short story “In Transit” is thematically linked to her novel Green Sky, Green Water. It is, in fact, a companion piece to her novel A Fairly Good Time. When Shirley Perrigny, whose marriage to a journalist named Philippe is foundering, goes for lunch with her mother’s friend, Mrs. Castle — she’s a Canadian on the grand tour — Mrs. Castle deeds Shirley with a book that has been in her family for ninety years.
The Peep of Day, or, A Series of the Earliest Religious Instructions the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving. With Verses Illustrative of the Subject.
The author’s name doesn’t appear on the title page; it was the deeply felt work of Favell Lee Bevan Mortimer, July 14, 1822 - August 22, 1878. Mrs. Mortimer’s father was a co-founder of the Barclay Bank. Born to immense privilege, her career as an early childhood educator was well told by Todd Pruzan in The New Yorker, April 11, 2005.
I won’t summarize any of the events of her life here, the bulk and the care it requires leaves no time to even scratch the surface of her strange, sad life; suffice it to say that it bears investigation, and that if you can lay hands on a copy of The Peep of Day, a Bible primer by the author of Reading Without Tears and many other improving texts, a mega-bestseller that was a cherished favourite in millions of Victorian households, all over the world, translated into many different tongues, some of them heathen, you will gulp it down with the same appalled amazement as did Todd Pruzan when he first discovered it, as does Shirley Perrigny in A Fairly Good Time, and as did, I’m quite sure, MG.
“How easy it would be to hurt your poor little body! If it were to fall into the fire, it would be burned up. If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run through your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out the window, your neck would be broken…”
On and on it goes in this vein, a gushing geyser of sadistic observance meant to instil in young minds the reverence and fear that are the solid foundation upon which one might build a life of faith and rectitude. You roar with laughter, but at the same time you can’t help but wonder, “How was this possible?”
Another valuable gloss on Mrs. Mortimer, also in The New Yorker, can be found in the issue of March 4, 1950. The author is Rosalind Constable, 1907 - 1995, the English writer, art critic, and collector. She was — not to sum her up by association — the great-niece of Mrs. Mortimer — she speaks of this in the article cited — and was an Andy Warhol intimate, and was also someone whose centrality to the life of Patricia Highsmith can be clearly seen in the index to a book I’ve been enjoying, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, edited by Anna Von Planta.
In his introduction to Paris Stories, one of the MG collections published by The New York Review of Books, Michael Ondaatje writes, “Many stories suggest a mask or portrait of the artist, or a persona active in the world out there, somewhat the way a writer like Patricia Highsmith invented the amoral Ripley and allowed him action (deceit, bribery, murder, forgery, good restaurant behaviour, casual sex), while she herself resided in her small house in Switzerland.”
Highsmith, born 1921, and MG, 1922, were exact contemporaries, North Americans who fled to Europe and made their lives there. They were both students at the Julia Richman High School in New York City at the same time, round about 1936. At the time, it was a girls’ school, with a vast student population of 8,000. Mavis Young and Pat Highsmith might well never have met. On the other hand, they might well have done. The possibility exerts on me a sickly fascination. I imagine them playing truant together, testing their imaginations one against the other, hanging out in some automat, smoking cigarettes, planning a perfect murder, maybe sticking pins in an effigy of Lauren Bacall, also a student at the school. Well. This is how fiction is born.
I wonder whatever happened to MG’s copy of The Peep of Day? Perhaps it’s floating around out there, waiting to land. Such things happen. My thanks to Rhonda Batchelor Lillard, who sent an email which I quote here in part, with her kind permission.
“I honestly don't recall how I came to possess this 1934 first U.S. edition of Ulysses. It was possibly in my late husband's hoard or perhaps I came upon it in my years of working in the secondhand book trade. It's a worn copy but treasured for the signature of a previous owner. 1944. Mavis would have still been in Montreal I suppose? When and why she discarded this volume is anyone's guess, let alone how it made its way to Victoria. Anyway, since this year also marks the centennial of the original publication of Ulysses, I just wanted to share my little treasure with you.”
These are the photos Rhonda appended.
MG’s copy of Ulysses — think of it, she would have been 21, 22 — also bears this intriguing mark of bibliographic interest.
Who was John Kelly? An interim owner? An MG friend with a sense of humour and a pencil? Many are the mysteries. My thanks to Rhonda for sharing this treasure, it left me slack-jawed. I look forward to reading her collection, Allow Me: Poems, 2000-2020, recently published by Ekstasis Edition.
It is Sunday, it’s 4.18 a.m., I have to hie myself to the store where the bulk needs my tender care. I have just enough time left, speaking of poetry, to transcribe this glorious verse from The Peep of Day. It’s a good one to bear in mind when you’re hoisting up the 50 pound bag of buckwheat groats.
My little body’s made by God
Of soft warm flesh and crimson blood;
The slender bones are placed within
And over all is laid the skin.
My little body’s very weak;
A fall or blow my bones might break:
The water soon might stop my breath;
The fire might close my eyes in death.
But God can keep me by His care;
To Him I say this little pray’r:
“O God! from harm my body keep,
Both when I wake and when I sleep.”
Thanks for reading, xo, B
I absolutely remember the two-sided United Church envelopes for the collection plates! Do you remember "The Upper Room", a small monthly magazine with a daily Bible verse and homily and, if I recall, a painting of an appropriate Bible scene, to be read aloud at the table before lunch?
(That's a very cool copy of Ulysses.)