Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 16

Multidirectional, multidimensional

3.27 a.m.

More than halfway done with our strangely chilly June as Bloomsday dawns: as always a propitious time to reflect on how much any person with the will for such an undertaking might cram between the margins of a single day; any old day, but especially June 16, 1904. That was the day and that was the year when Leopold Bloom navigated the streets of Dublin, accruing in that 24-hour span sufficient experience to fill 933 pages in the Bodley Head edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Bodley Head Ulysses — the one pictured above I acquired the past Tuesday from The Paper Hound, my bookstore of choice in Vancouver; weirdly, the dust jacket has been glued to the boards — was the regulation text at the University of Winnipeg — and no doubt at many other ivory-clad academies over the years — in the 1975 - 76 academic term when, in the third year of a four-year honours English programme, I enrolled in “Anglo-Irish Literature.” It wasn’t an expansive survey: Yeats and Joyce were, as I recall, the only items on the menu. Who played meat and who played veg I wouldn’t veenture to say.

I think I still have, among the books that linger and malinger in boxes in the house and (probably) garage in Manitoba that has become the unvisited Museum of Bill, my University of Winnipeg bookstore issue copy of Ulysses, with all my spidery, doubtless stupid notations: “Molly’s repeated Yes an affirmation of her womanhood.” And I’m pretty sure I still have in my keeping, somewhere —unless the silverfish have devoured it and they would have been welcome to it — the essay for which — I can’t believe I’m about to disclose this — I received, in April of 1976, a grade of A ++: as close as ever I’m likely to come to a heritage designation, or to being recognized as a side of beef. Only slightly more incredible than such a ridiculous, prideful disclosure is that, when so much has been deliberately discarded or inadvertently lost, this I still remember.

Dr. Fahmy Farag (PhD, Edinburgh), courtly and cultured, was our professor; he died very recently, age 96. To me, as an undergraduate, he seemed ancient; it’s strange and also embarrassing to do the minor math and realize that he was then 16 years younger than is my present age.

It’s thanks to him — and thanks also, I suppose, to James Joyce — that I understood how, despite Dr. Farag’s implied approbation, his over-the-top assessment of my critical capacities, age 20, I had no future as an academic. My assigned (by him) topic for the Ulysses essay, which I duly copied out, as per format requirement, on the title page, pounding away on my Olivetti portable, was: “‘What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it, an abode of bliss.’ Discuss the multidirectional, multidimensional implications of the Plumtree’s Potted Meat motif in Ulysses.”

I had as little idea when I came to the end of the 43 — or however many, possibly more — double-spaced bond pages as I did when I started out about the Plumtree’s Potted Meat motif in Ulysses. Even its unidimensional, unidirectional implications evaded me. I can’t remember now a single word of what I wrote, not a single idea. There may not have been anything that merited that designation, “idea.” It must have been complete nonsense, top to bottom, yes, it surely was, and I knew it the whole time I was sitting in my bedroom, at my desk, most of it colonized by a philodendron I’d been growing for 10 years, staying up till 3, 4 a.m. night after night, reading and re-reading the relevant parts of the text and what must have been the usual critics. Richard Ellman I want to say — or was he Yeats? Who else? Brenda Maddox? Or did she come later? All gone, now. To have engaged in this protracted act of fakery, of snake-oil manufacture and salesmanship. and then to have pulled it off, to have seen it work — A++ — was more than even I, who from earliest childhood had been able to engage in the most pusillanimous displays of dishonesty just to garner approval — could bear. I quit the honours programme. I graduated with a three year degree and a French major. I went to France. My life changed. I would have been miserable, had I continued along that charted course. Thank you, Fahmy Farag. Thank you, James Joyce.

you’re welcome, Bill

The last entry in this diary, posted Tuesday, June 14, related how Mavis Gallant (MG) and Barbara Kilvert — they met in 1944, were friends until Barbara died in 1998 — would call one another every Bloomsday — they also spoke routinely otherwise — and read aloud their favourite passages from the book. My thanks to those of you who took the time to listen to, and to comment on, the interview with Ian Kilvert, Barbara’s son, that was appended to that instalment.

Ian spoke in that interview of how he was sorting through the many letters — round about a thousand — MG and Barbara Kilvert exchanged over the course of their 54-year friendship. A couple of readers wondered if he might one day publish that correspondence, or some part of it. About this I can’t speculate, beyond saying that it would be for Ian, as it would be for anyone who has been deeded such an important collection of documents, a decision that would be, essentially, a moral one: weighing on a scale he would have to calibrate to his own comfort and satisfaction the requirements, whatever those might be, of scholars investigating the work, as well as the curiosity of the reading public, which may be merely prurient, against the privacy of the principals whose wishes in this regard may or may not have been made explicit. Plainly, the sensibilities of the families, and the feelings of whatever friends or public figures who are named, likewise their close descendants, need to be taken into account. All this is self-evident. As well, the decision to make such a wide disclosure would not be his alone, but would require the permission and participation of the Gallant estate which represents MG’s work and interests. Her letters to Barbara — this would be so of any / all such missives of whatever length, regardless of content, sent to any of her far-flung network of correspondents — are, as physical objects, the private property of the Kilvert family or whoever the recipient. This isn’t so of the contents, the words themselves. They remain — this is my Grade 5 take on the matter — the intellectual property of their creator, as represented by her appointed designate. Death is enough of an insult; maybe it affords the famous, as they head for the exit, some degree of comfort to know that the grave can be a fine and, at least for a time, a private place. Ian said it’s his intention to deposit the letters — whichever he chooses to release — with the Thomas Fischer Rare Books Collection at the University of Toronto; they would be an important addition to the MG materials already there. The usual thing would be for some condition of use, an embargo or time restriction, fifty years, perhaps, to be applied.

Literary estates become their own stories, some more gothic than others; as a general rule, the bigger the fish, the bigger the smell. This was certainly true for James Joyce whose grandson, Stephen, inherited the control of that legacy and was extremely vigilant and litigious. About that situation, a lot has been written. Here’s a recent shorthand version; it references and will link you to the long New Yorker piece from 2007. It’s a good Bloomsday read.

read article here

I’ve seen a few letters from MG and they were, as you would expect, fascinating: the same incisive voice that informs her fiction and journalism, wry, keenly observed, critical. They were the work of a few minutes, but the sheen of polish is still there. Words found her an easy conduit, a ready portal into the world. To read a large collection of them would, of course, be a pleasure; I think it unlikely to be a pleasure I’ll know in my lifetime. Fair enough. It’s enough to pick up the Bodley Head Ulysses and to wonder which of the passages she might have read, on this day, on the phone, to Barbara Kilvert; which passages Barbara might have read back to her. It’s strange how much memory lives in the body, how many memories the feel and weight of a book can bring back. I hold that just-acquired copy of Ulysses and so much comes back to me: Dr. Farag at the head of our seminar table, the room itself, the other students in the class — one named Mavis, now that I think of it. I remember the satisfying absorption of reading it, the initial difficulty, of how that gave way, of how wrapped up in the story I became. This I remember, even though, close to half a century later, the actual particulars of the narrative are mostly lost to me; it’s been that long since I’ve read it. Don’t even ask about Finnegan’s Wake. But mostly I remember those late nights, 2, 3, 4 in the morning, at my desk, at the Olivetti, and how, sometimes, even though I was writing nonsense, the words themselves seemed the right ones for the page, in that time and in that place, they just flowed, no dams or barriers to vault over, the sound of the keys and the satisfying whack of the mechanism, the ink to the paper, the ping of the bell, the carriage return, the actual pleasure of adding the sheet to the growing pile, page 6, page 17, page 25, the footnotes, and the emptiness when it was done, the feeling of — now what? It was a bigger question than what assignment would come next. It was a life choice. I’d written myself out of what I’d imagined my future might be. I’d killed it with nonsense and yet it was nonsense in which, somehow, I believed. Which is a good summation of my “writing career” to date, and also of these diaries. (Just wrote “dairies,” changed it, shouldn’t have.) A ++. It’s somewhere among my effect, that paper. I hereby grant anyone permission to do anything they want with it. Feed the flames would be my best advice. Lord. The time. The store! I’m gone. Thanks for reading, xo, B