Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 24

Outrageous and austere

3.57 p.m. Day off from the store. Lying low, mostly. Met a friend, visiting from Victoria, for lunch at the Sylvia Hotel, where something reliably always goes wrong, but mostly in a charming, Fawlty Towers way. Today’s mishap had to do with an old menu and a new menu and how the salmon on the old menu was in a different column from the salmon on the new menu, also the new menu appended the adjective “wild” to the salmon, otherwise the old salmon and the new salmon were in every other way alike, but this shift of position plus the appending of “wild” had, according to our waiter, so thrown the kitchen for a loop that whoever was in charge of translating the salmon from a raw to a cooked state simply could not, would not, should not cope or carry on, it was all too much, it was exhausting, and that was why we waited an hour in a nearly empty dining room for the food to come. Well. If ever there was a situation that could be described as “not the Russian campaign” this would be it. No harm done. Never did we — there were three of us at the table — lose sight of our privilege, our luck at being there. The sum total of our ages was 209, and none of us was in danger of starving or even being bored. We live, what’s more, in a country at peace, and the view was of English Bay, the sun glancing off the water, and all the revellers on foot, on bike, on blades, on boards, on scooters, pushing strollers, enjoying the first hot day we’ve seen in a very long time. Paradise, really. It just took a long time to get to the bit with the apple.

My friend — she paid, bless her heart — had asked if we had any cornmeal in the store where I work and if I could bring her some. We did. I could. Her gratitude was disproportionate to the boon. She told me it’s in scant supply, cornmeal, right now, at least in Victoria, and not to be had, anywhere, for dove or honey. Was it not the same here, she asked. I had no idea. This putative and perplexing paucity of polenta — why can’t I stop myself? why? — came as news to me. In my new Middle Management and ladder-intensive capacity as Dry Goods Buyer (DGB) I had just this past week ordered up a case or two to supplement our shelves: they were looking gappy in the grits department, but weren’t empty. Nor had I been aware of cornmeal occupying a place in crosshairs of hoarders. Now, however, I’m concerned. I’ll spend the time between now and my return to the store on the Sabbath — tomorrow, Saturday, is my Sunday — fretting about whether what is emerging as a rare commodity was included in today’s delivery, as it ought to have been, or whether I’ll find that it’s yet another item about which I’ll have to commiserate with customers who want nothing more than some tasty pone, but will be subjected to one of the dark disquisitions at which I’ve become expert pertaining to supply chains, how they are at least as mysterious as God, and twice as vengeful.

About the store I’ve not said much, in recent days. Lots of new young hires just now, most of whom I haven’t met, or only glancingly; buyers start early, and my shift is over before they begin. This means I’ve missed all the afternoon pep talks — huddles, we call them — where, as a kind of hazing ritual, those just on-boarded are compelled to share a “fun fact” about themselves and listen while those of us who are more barnacled do the same. The last “fun fact” I revealed about moi-même — peeling back the onion layer of my being with the finesse of Salome fingering the seventh veil — was that I am able to sing three of the four verses of “O, Canada:” lordly rivers, stalwart sons, gentle maidens, the whole enchilada. Has ever there been a funner fact? I think not. And in laying claim to such an accomplishment, out loud, in a group, has anyone ever extended a more overt invitation? The question is rhetorical. And did anyone rise to the bait and ask me to prove it, then and there, in the crowded back-of-house while Tessie from Produce mashed up avocados for the guacamole for which she is so justly famous? No! They merely visited upon me that pitying regard the tender of flesh so often bestow with their cataract-free eyes on the long-of-tooth, and shared with each other sidelong glances that conveyed the clear message, “Not to worry, he’ll be dead soon, and then one of us will get his locker.” Fun fact: they’re right. Probably from falling off a ladder.

Here’s a fun fact Mavis Gallant (MG) revealed.

Once in Yugoslavia I sat for a painter. While he painted me I looked out the window and thought that if I were a painter I would not be painting me, but the harbour.

This came up during her conversation, 1977, with Geoff Hancock, who interviewed her for the Canadian Literature quarterly. I’ve often mentioned this exchange, it’s an excellent resource. Who was the painter and what was the date and what was the fate of the painting? These are the questions I might have asked MG had I been in the room when she brushed from the table so tempting a morsel. Geoff Hancock chose otherwise; he parried with, “But you also like your prose to be — shall I be colloquial here? — lean and clean and mean. You don’t like pulpy centres to your sentences.”

OK, well, fair enough. Some fascinating details were lost forever but it wasn’t, as Elizabeth Bishop would remind us in “One Art”, a disaster, not even a misstep; Hancock was more interested in prosody than in portraiture, that’s all. It’s also true that imagination rises to fill the void created by an absence of facts. I recall MG saying — I paraphrase here, very broadly — that the limits of journalism are marked, in part, by the unasked question, or the evaded question, or the answer that reeks of mendacity. When you come to the end of what journalism can do, fiction begins. The obvious questions about the painting might be a starting pistol for someone with a storytelling bent. And who knows? Perhaps someone with good, solid information, the hardtack of knowledge, can put us all wise.

Geoff Hancock’s photograph of MG — I assume it was taken at the time of that interview, in the fall of 1977 — was chosen for use on the book jacket of her collection Going Ashore. Here’s a link to another MG interview, this one with the CBC’s Shelagh Rogers in 2009, the year Going Ashore was published. MG had already experienced some severe health reversals, but she sounds lively and engaged and very funny.

Shelagh Rogers and MG on The Next Chapter

It’s possible that link will lead you, if this is a place you want to go, to my interview with Shelagh about this diary, my idiosyncratic, error-riddled, fast-and-loose-with-the-facts MG Centennial tribute. Shelagh is a practiced, always intelligent and well-informed interlocutor; I had fun talking with her, always have. We knew each other, back in the day; it felt like old times. She’s probably done more than any other one individual in this country to excite wide public interest in the really and truly astonishing surge of indigenous writing that’s taken root and flowered, especially in the last several years. Of course, many have had a hand in this, publishers and agents and booksellers and — it should not need saying — the gifted and determined writers themselves, most of all; but Shelagh, along with her colleague Jacqueline Kirk and others on their small, committed team of producers, have been rigorous and determined, ever since the release of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to ensure, as creatives well-ensconced in the echelons of the public broadcaster, that First Nations voices are accorded a place of prominence. She was doing this before anyone else was. What might have seemed at first like the enforcement of a protocol, of a newly implemented set of regulations has come to feel natural, organic, and — I say this as a tired old white man, cranky and conservative and unable to locate my own relevance in the rear-view mirror — not just necessary, but welcome. I’ve often heard Shelagh say to her guests, “It was an honour to speak with you.” It was, I say with truth, an honour to speak with her.

Okay, I’ll wrap this up for today by returning, probably for the last time, to MG’s NYTimes review, from 1971, of Margaret Crosland’s biography Colette: The Difficulty of Loving. She writes, “The two halves of Colette’s face are completely different. If you cover one, then the other, you find a mocking eye and an inquisitive one; as she grew old half her face seemed wise and the other half cruel.”

This is true of most faces, to one degree or another. I tried the half-cover technique with the Hancock photo of MG duplicated (crudely) above, and while there’s a slight disparity, her fifty-something face is actually quite symmetrical. I don’t know the date of the photo by Frank Grant that appeared on back cover of In Transit; I’d guess she’s 15 years older.

Experiment with the left / right divide and you’ll see how a difference is starting to emerge: left face analytical, right face intuitive, by my interpretation. In 2012 Alison Harris, who was MG’s good friend and who often photographed her, took a striking picture of MG in her kitchen at 14, rue Jean Ferrandi. She was ill by then, had been in and out of hospital, more in than out, and the two halves of her face, like Colette’s when she was old, are engaged in a dialogue of difference. MG said the Colette divide was between the wise and the cruel. With MG, I would say it’s more the tragic and the comic. Again, these are crude reproductions, me with my phone taking a pic of an image on my laptop, an annoyingly pixilated, also entirely unauthorized, and I encourage you to seek out a clearer facsimile of this beautiful shot, easy to find online.

What comes to mind more than anything, looking at this bifurcation, is the Elinor Wylie poem “Let No Charitable Hope.” She was in her early 40’s when she died, but it seems to me she got this right in a way that might have come from a much older person. To Elinor, the final word. Thanks for reading, xo, B

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope;
I am in nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

P.S. It would be unlike me not to point out that Elinor Wylie’s brother, Morton, was three times married to and three times divorced from Tallulah Bankhead’s sister, Eugenia.