Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 21

Read something else. Come back later.

my father’s copy, fragile now, of the Rubayiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald translation. Pocket Book Editions. Fourth Edition, June 1948.

opposite leaf, its accompanying illustration, by Gordon Ross

3.03 a.m.

Summer solstice. All our toboggans are dusted off and angled downhill. The reign of darkness begins anew. It’ll be “Little Drummer Boy” in the mall before you can say pa-rum-pa-pum-pum. All will be well, now. Be of good cheer. From this day forward you can, in all good conscience, resume your daily trips to the basement to fondle the chains of Christmas lights, the better to enhance their lustre. Nothing weird about that. You’ll be glad you did come November 12 when you string them up again.

Brief entry today, don’t know why that feels like cheating when it’s probably a relief from my habitual logorrhoea. My God, I do go on. Saw a friend and neighbour in the store the other day — hi, Al — who told me he subscribes to the diary — I am the Pepys of the West End, though without the offended wife — and reads it as time allows. “I’ve got some catching up to do,” he said, with an adorable downward glance and a little blush that was really most fetching. In this exchange, against the olfactory bass continuo of tahini, I scented a top note of apology, and reassured him I was in no way offended by what many — most, let’s face it — would regard as a cold, callous display of cruel indifference. (Here, I might add LOL or use punctuation signifiers to make a winky face but my intention is to die without ever having resorted to diacritical marks or acronyms to enforce irony.)

Go on. Take it. It’s organic.

I carry no expectation that anyone will ever pay attention to a single word I write, why on earth would I, and why on earth would they? All our lives exert so many demands, who has time for such impositions, who has that much courtesy? I told my friend, there in the store, with the nut butters to the right of us, the Ritter Sports Bars to the left, told him and meant it, that I myself would never pay attention to a document like the one I’m making if it landed day after occasional day in my inbox, with a great, dull thud, like a baby dropped on an orphanage stoop by a giantess who’d found herself in the family way after what was supposed to be a speed date with an ogre. I probably should read it, if only to find out where I went wrong, but I don’t. It’s disposable in the way of, say, a Canadian Tire flyer, or a copy of the Watch Tower. I write it, give it a quick glance over for typos, gaffes, infelicities; frequently this is in the few minutes before I go to work at the store, often while I’m astride the throne: multitasking, darling, blog on bog. I scroll through the text on my mobile because the change of screen somehow makes apparent what’s overlooked in the Ur platform, if that’s what it’s called. I guess it is, now. If I have time I make some quick corrections, emendations. If not, I don’t. I click on the tab that says Publish, and make peace with whatever the imperfections, release them into a world that will never pause a second in its whirling if I typed Id when I meant to type Is. (Of course the question would be — are there any errors, especially when the Id intrudes on the verb “to be.”)

There’s more than a dollop of solipsism at play here, as nobody need tell me. The focus is ostensibly Mavis Gallant (MG), unjustly overlooked in this, her centennial year. She was born on August 11, I was born on August 11: I could not let such neglect stand! I am concerned, of course, have been from the beginning, that MG be centred in the frame; but it’s been true from the get-go that these predawn outbursts are also about me: dude, it’s a diary. So, even when I’m writing, whether directly or from an oblique angle, about MG, my choices and biases and preoccupations — put them in shaker and agitate thoroughly, with or without ice, and you wind up with what is known as “taste” — are foundational. It’s self-evident, can’t be otherwise.

amazing that this was kept on the family bookshelf, a close companion to the Bobbsey Twins

Writing in this way, on Substack, putting it out there for free, wasn’t my first choice for this project. When I started thinking about how to make something of MG’s centennial year, it did occur to me I might be able to, you know, monetize it, and to win the imprimatur of a marquee institution, along with the ego-bolstering jolt of third party approval. I did think there might be out there, in the big, wide world, some editor or producer who might find it shocking — I did and still do — that the landmark anniversary of one of our most notable writers, a Global Commodity, a Brand Name, was seemingly going unremarked. I did think there might be someone with commissioning chops who was as interested as am I in what became of her diaries, which were meant to be published and never were, likewise the study of the Dreyfus case, which absorbed her for 20 years, but which she was never able to finish it. Why? Where? When? Who? These were the rudimentary lines of inquiry that, to me, bore asking. (Some answers, in fragments, I now have.) And the more I thought about how odd, even reprehensible, it is that there is not a comprehensive source for her work, no collected stories, no published collection of the long and intelligent pieces she wrote for the Montreal Standard as a young woman, no authoritative gathering of her non-fiction and criticism, no big boxed set, the more I thought to ask, Who is not paying attention here?; the more I was persuaded someone, somewhere, might commit to endorsing, supporting, and guiding such a study. That person must exist. I did not find them. The blame for that, if blame must be apportioned, is mine. I didn’t lift the right rock. I can understand well enough how, for the generation of people who are the now the gatekeepers of our culture, MG might not be a compelling voice. She was born in 1922. She was, in her preoccupations, western, European. She did not address, often, and in a specific way, identity politics, race relations, climate change. I could easily make the case that she spoke eloquently to these and to all contemporary conundrums because her business was the human heart which is the wellspring of all our joys and woes and always has been and always will be, but who has time for that, shut up. Oh, well. When the gilded city is a distant dream, when your ship has foundered on a coral reef and all you can do is paddle out on your raft and look for waterlogged weaponry, the desert island remains. We have the example of Crusoe. You can make your own tools and garments and umbrellas of whatever happens to be on hand. Goats. Driftwood. Substack. At least you have your parrot. You can train it to say, “Poor Crusoe. Poor Robinson Crusoe.” The pity of a parrot is one of comfort’s principal pulse points. (1)

inspired by this illustration, i engaged in a choreography that led to discipline and the forced removal of my hula hoop

For the last few years, since well before Pandemic, with the exception of some children’s books, of which I’m proud, and which have been given beautiful treatments, for which I’m grateful, I haven’t written. I didn’t see the point, couldn’t believe the voices inside my head could hold their own in a market economy: what demand would they supply? I couldn’t get past the idea that the endgame was for someone else, anyone else, however inept, to demonstrate approval by dint of saying yes, by cutting a cheque, by asking for a head shot, by booking one into a literary festival. I couldn’t believe anyone would take a commercial chance on what I had / have to say, which isn’t much, and isn’t especially original. I was right not to believe that, just as they’d have been right to politely say, Thank you for your submission, it does not meet our present needs. I got caught in the trap of believing the point of writing is a pages- stitched-between-boards publication. That’s worthwhile, in its own way, and many fine people are engaged in that trade; it’s been my privilege to work with many of them. But there are other homes for words. You can write them on vellum and nail them to trees, all around the Forest of Arden. Or you can strip the bark off those very trees, you can wring the ink from an accommodating squid, you can take the feather some gull left behind on the wave-washed strand, you can write them down, your words, then put them in a bottle. You can judge the tides, throw it out, watch as it’s hauled out and into the mercies of the deep. Maybe no one will see. Maybe someone will. Maybe you will know. Maybe you won’t. I believe this is what the French call “le show business.”

I have no, or little, idea who reads these missives and, while I’m so thankful to anyone who might, I’m not deeply interested in knowing. My job is simply to come to the one bench that’s now available, and to take the tools I find there, and to make something. What anyone makes of what I make, how they might understand or use it — I think it’s for coring apples. No, it’s for signalling ships on the far horizon — is entirely outside my control or sphere of influence. In other words — it’s writing, doing what writing has always done, using symbols to communicate not just ideas but a mood, a degree of sobriety, a tone of voice, which is all just guess work for anyone who wants to take it on.

What I mean to say is — thank you. I am grateful — I mean this, actively, mindfully, gratefully grateful — for whatever precious minutes from your lifetime allotment you give to this. If it’s inspired you to spend some QT with MG, well, so much the better. And to my friend Al, last seen in the nut butter aisle, and to anyone else on whose shoreline these bottles might wash up, and who might feel inclined to shuffle and look down and say, “I haven’t read them all,” I give the almost last word to the Mother of Us All, MG, who concluded the introduction to her Selected Stories by writing, “Stories are not chapters of a novel. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”

3.55 a.m. The robins are singing. I can’t detect the light from the east — it will never arrive this early again, not in this trip round the sun — but they can. What are they saying? I don’t know. What you can’t understand can still be beautiful. Thanks for reading, xo, B

(1) Alliteration is the cheap perfume of literature.