Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 11

yesterday, continued -- which, now that i think of it, is as good a definition of life as ever i've read. congratulations, bill, well done, what a way you have with words.

7.30 a.m.

The dreaming brain shifts silts and sediments;

Sadly, sleep knows many impediments.

— William James Richardson, 1955 -

Day off, anticipated a nice little lie in. Not to be.

2.15 a.m. Recycling professional busy on the graveyard shift — glass blue bin positioned directly beneath my window — scavenging cashable bottles. It doesn’t matter how courteous the binner — most are considerate — sorting discarded pickle jars is a clattery business, all the good intentions in the world can never make it sound like a delicate wind chime in a Zen garden.

4.15 a.m. One of the most gifted of our town criers made his way down our Alley of Lost Souls, roostering us all awake with his particular cock-a-doodle-doo: FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLLL!

5.10 a.m. A major fracas in the ongoing war between the gulls and the crows, this time over a discarded bag of chips — presumably enough left within it make it worth squabbling over, all very Battle of Britain, mid-air skirmishes and so on, Allies vs. Axis, Spitfire vs. Messerschmitt, one gull seemed victorious, flew off with bag in beak, was attacked from below, a sneaky move, dropped the prize, squawk, squawk, caw, caw, and then everyone just forgot about it. Apparently, it wasn’t really about the chips, just had to do with making a point. About what? The victor — I guess he / she could claim the title, an unclaimed, half-eaten bag of chips the middle of the alley is ambiguous as trophies go — is the companion of a crow gone wrong. It looks weakened, mottled, mangey, stumbles when it walks, doesn’t caw, mews. Can’t be long for this world. The crow that keeps the poor thing company does so from a distance, watches out of the corner of its eye, as if it fears contagion by association.

Nature is a bitch, have you noticed? Walking with Billy P the other day, late afternoon, came upon a squirrel, middle of the sidewalk, on its side, unseamed, spillage of innards, still more crows on the scene, playing coroner. Remembered a visit with BP, perhaps 10 or 12 years back, to one of the Gulf Islands, forget which one, Denman, maybe, walking in the woods, came upon the body of a fawn. Very strange, the last thing we had in mind. Nothing to indicate cause of death, no visible wound and anything to implicate hunter or cougar or other predator. It was simply there, the fawn, inanimate and beautiful, Bambi in the dappled glade, a few birds going about their usual business, no ants at the eyes, no carrion insects, no smell of corruption, it was a death of that day, recent, new. I remember wondered if there was someone we should call, if we should make a report. But who? Why? Whatever happened had happened. The result was unequivocal, beyond alteration. We didn’t stay long staring, it would have felt like a violation of something sacred and private. We let nature get on with what it does best, which is being nature. The fawn, akimbo in the path as we rounded a curve, for all its exoticism and rarity (to urbanites) was less upsetting than the squirrel, utterly run-of-the-mill, one of many. The fawn’s death had about it a sweetness, a sad benignity. It felt natural, was almost as though it had made a decision and acted on it. The squirrel showed clear signs of violence — a car, almost certainly. It was dead, as so much is, because of us, and the crows became the beneficiaries.

Thought of crows, too, last night when we went to a restaurant a few blocks away, in the downtown core. Their second night of operation, not exactly a well-oiled instrument, but also not without charm. Wait staff all very young, had the sense that most of them were transient, kids passing through with short-term work visas. The young woman who’d hired on as the hostess was Irish, from Cork, told us she’d been here for all of two weeks. She’ll head home at the end of the summer, go back to Med School. I told her I was glad to know there was someone nearby who could perform a tracheotomy with a steak knife if required but she looked at me gravely and said that was a procedure they had yet to cover in Cork. I said there were sure to be YouTube instructional videos she could consult, but she answered with a deadpan look and a slight movement of the lips that might been that Irish blessing one finds on tea towels, or perhaps the Lord’s Prayer, or maybe the Hippocratic oath. I resolved to chew well. All the servers, median age 7 as near as I could guess, the bartender was hardly old enough to operate a Slinky let alone mix a cocktail, were dressed in black, head to toe — crows — and I’m pretty sure they’d been pushed from the nest with only the most cursory instructions about how to proceed in the wild. There was a definite quality of LARPing attending the proceedings, a bit like they were auditioning for the role of waiter and wondering how close they were coming to getting it right.

At the bar sat a customer, 20-ish, an astonishing confection, all done up in prom girl pink taffeta, a frock that shrieked bridesmaid gone wrong, very wrong, she looked like a strawberry tart or a cone of candy floss some good fairy had given the gift of life, time-restricted, good for the hours between 5 p.m. and sundown. She was madly instagramming away; must have been an influencer. I was full of rue that I didn’t have on hand a copy of some Mavis Gallant (MG) text that I could have bandied about while photobombing her session, thus expanding my own sphere of influence and calling wider attention to the work and the life of this remarkable writer. Which is why I’m here, after all.

Please take a moment now and join me in congratulating me, myself, in having made it this far along in this diary, however many entries there are, I’ve stopped counting, without once having used the horrible phrase, so often applied to MG, “a writer’s writer.” What does that even mean? I guess it suggests someone whose marqueterie is so fine, so rigorous, so next-level it can only be appreciated by those who are similarly steeped in joinery’s arcane traditions, but who lack either the tools or insights that might permit them a similar application. What it really means is, the writer is difficult, hard to read, but somehow also good for you. Horsefeathers and applesauce, that’s all I can say. An MG short story is always a pleasurable — which is not necessarily to say comfortable — immersion. What is to like? The usual. What she says. How she says it. The only difficulty in reading Mavis Gallant, in the horrible here and now we inhabit where any and all palliatives should be readily available, is that it’s a challenge to actually get the damn books. You probably won’t find the few collections still in print in a major bookstore, among the potpourri and velour throws and World’s Best Dad mugs. And if you find a copy of what, in the United States, was published in 1996 as the Collected Stories, you’re buying a lie. Not even half are contained therein; in Canada, Selected Stories was the accurate title. If you do want all the stories, all 120 of them — probably slightly more, 116 published in The New Yorker, a handful elsewhere — you’re going to have to put up with duplication. The stories, as they were published, especially from 1980 on, tended to be thematically arranged. They were Paris stories, or Montreal stories, or Canadiana stories, or stories about exiles, or early stories, or stories that didn’t quite fit into one category or another, so let’s put them all together here stories. With this there’s nothing wrong, such a grouping makes perfect sense. But, of course, some stories can be accommodated under several aegises. Then, there were variations between same-titled collections, depending on editorial decisions made in the UK, in Canada, or the U.S.

It’s all a bit of a mess, which is unfortunate and, to be frank, doesn’t accord sufficient respect, not in her homeland, to a Canadian writer of international reputation. We don’t have many of those. About a centennial year there is, of course, something kitschy and arbitrary, maybe even cringe-worthy. There’s no reason why 100 should be more noteworthy than 99 or 101, it’s just using base 10 counting in the service of Hallmark platitudes; it makes one rather want to look away. That said, the tradition of marking such an occasion, especially when it attaches to a person of demonstrable importance, with something commemorative and monumental, is well-established. It is a usual thing to do. It is expected. It is a sign of respect, and also a demonstration of foresight. It would have been a wonderful thing for someone, somewhere, to have done what is obvious, and to have made possible, or at least looked into, the publication a real Collected Stories. Three, possibly four, handsome volumes. An authoritative text. Everything, all together in one place. Annotations. These could possibly be derived, in part, from the diaries MG kept from 1951 through 2000. Her journals from the 50’s and 60’s, selected and edited with MG’s participation, were acquired for publication by Knopf in the States, McClelland and Stewart in Canada, and Bloomsbury in the U.K. There was a big announcement of this deal ten years ago, at the end of June, 2012, both in The New Yorker and in The New York Times. 2014 was the projected year of publication; that proved to be the year MG died. That the diaries have never appeared is a pity and is due, apparently, to a disagreement between the publishers and the estate. About the specific areas of dispute and what must have been fevered legal wrangling, which may still be underway, I know next to nothing, and not for want of trying, believe me. Perhaps, one day, a resolution will be found. In the interim, it would be fascinating if MG’s own account of her days — excerpts of which were quite widely published during her lifetime, I’ve alluded to them before — might be used, in part, where relevant, as a gloss on the stories themselves. That such a boon might come our way in this, MG’s Centennial year, is an impossibility. But perhaps it could be, at least, promised, announced. Whose interest would be served? Ours. Her readers, without whom any writer, no matter how great, is nothing. Readers are the sine qua non. Who is a writer, otherwise? A fawn that falls unseen in a forest. That should not be MG, who is not a writer’s writer, damnable phrase. She belongs to us all.

Enough said for now. Thanks for reading, xo, B