Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning, September 30

Orage / O rage / Orange

Hello, friends. My thanks to Carol Thomson — a Friend of Mavis Club Member whose secret decoding ring is in the mail — for this note: “I just want to let you know that Vehicule Press are terrific to deal with. I had a question re confirmation of my order; it was answered promptly as was the processing of the shipment. I hope to clear a big block of time next week to read the book. I fear I’ll start and won’t stop to the last page.”

I hope you enjoy Montreal Standard Time, Carol, and I’m glad your experience with the good people at Vehicule was as happy as was mine; and while I would never speak on behalf of my co-editors, Neil and Marta, in this case I’d venture a guess (semi-educated) they’d say the same. (Info here on ordering Montreal Standard Time directly from Vehicule, or finding it elsewhere.)

My assignment, apart from weighing in on the selection — there was much more that might have been included — was to write the annotations that appear as an appendix, along with Marta’s afterword. Neil wrote a preface, and there’s also a fascinating contribution from Mary K. MacLeod, the literary executor of the Gallant estate. As always when I start to write, I was in the grip of a bad case of logorrhea. The very first iteration of my gilded pensées was verging on 40,000 words - oy gevalt!

I’m lucky I had good editors with keen eyes and sharp scythes who hacked, then trimmed, then pumiced. By this process both the writer and, most importantly, the reader, the sine qua non of the operation, are well served. Here’s an example of how the screaming child of the first version was transformed into the restrained charm school graduate who graces the final and published page, a gladsome maturation wrought by the imposition of a little third party discipline.

The two following screen shots — the are from the proofs of Montreal Standard Time, not the final book — are the notes that attach to Mavis Gallant’s early career (1945) profile of the writer Claude-Henri Grignon, best known for the creation of Un homme et son péché.

This is what the reader needs to know; it’s an ample enough plate. By way of revealing the grubby and necessary underbelly of the editing process I include overbrimming bowl of the first version, even though it’s a little like sharing a candid shot taken of oneself stumbling out of the bathroom immediately after vomiting drunkenly at a party, age 18.

I wrote:

Un homme et son péché

Practices and protocols change with time. The editors at the Standard allowed their writers a longer anecdotal leash than would now be sanctioned, at least by what remains of the mainstream media, where standards of reportage are set and ostensibly upheld. MG often cites sources without naming them — a well-known psychiatrist, a leading social worker, etc. — and she sometimes presents informal surveys conducted (it seems) amongst her colleagues or social circle as barometers of broad-based public sentiment.

In the full knowledge that such an inquiry would never pass muster now, I nonetheless followed MG’s lead, and put a simple question to a select group of acquaintances. Based on their replies, which demonstrated the unanimity I both wanted and expected, I can report that anyone born in the post-war generation who grew up speaking French in Canada, whether in Quebec or in a Franco-Canadien outpost —New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, wherever  — will know the phenomenon that was Un Homme et Son Péché. (“A Man and His Sin,” is the literal translation; when the novel appeared in English — not until 1978, 45 years after its first publication in French — Yves Brunelle rendered the title as “The Woman and the Miser.”) They won’t need telling, for instance, that Sérafin, the money-grubber at the heart of what began as a novel and subsequently became a radio serial (1937 - 1965), a television series (the long-running Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut, 1956 - 1970), a comic strip, a theme park (“Le village de Sérafin”) and which was three times adapted as a film — the first, in 1949, outsold the Oscar winning Johnny Belinda and Ingrid Bergman star turn in Joan of Arc at the box office — has entered the rich argot of Canadian French: “un vrai Sérafin” is a real miser, as anyone culturally indoctrinated will know. (Writing about Grignon in 1945, MG chose to anglicize Sérafin; the character is named as Seraphim.)

If, on the other hand, your family was English speaking, and especially if you grew up outside of Quebec, the reference falls flat. Chances are, barring his inclusion in a second-year B.A. French survey course, you will never have heard of Claude-Henri Grignon, for whom streets and parks and schools are named. Grignon (July 8 1894 - April 3 1976) whose production was vast and whose energies were enormous, who was a civil servant, a politician, a pamphleteer (Valdombre was the name he used when he published his anti-Duplessis screeds, now highly collectible),  a novelist, a playwright — is one pulse point among many that merits measuring by anyone looking to diagnose one of Canada’s most persistent and lingering pathologies — the “two solitudes.” The only English literary property to have enjoyed an equivalent success, with the possible exception of The Handmaid’s Tale, would be Anne of Green Gables.

MG’s account of her visit to Ste. Adele to see the writer at work is striking because so little attention had been paid — this would not change — by the English language press to this vast enterprise and because it describes so closely and so fondly Grignon’s passion for using what, after 1959, came to be called “joual,” the vulgar tongue, the rich, idiosyncratic everyday French of Quebec. Valuable, too, are her description of his gossiping and glad-handing with the locals who were his source, and her account of his dramatic dictations of his scripts. There’s no doubt that he’s a force to be reckoned with, and one has the sense that he thought the same of her. Grignon won an important Quebec literary prize, Le Prix David, in 1935. MG was one of the few English language writers to be similarly honoured, in 2006.  MG concludes her writing with a mention of the mogul Herbert Holt who was, then, the richest man in Canada. Oddly enough, in 1959, Holt’s second son, Andrew, then 68, married Hope Messer, forty years his junior. He died in 1964, and Hope married MG’s former husband, John Gallant. It’s a small world.

A quick word about Bill Wabo, who was a stock, almost Commedia character, like all the others. It often fell to him to be a merry inebriate as well as an arsonist, and no one can read about his “half breed” status without cringing. In 1945, no one would have batted an eye. Times change, sometimes for the better. Note that on the IMDB page where the cast and characters of the TV series Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut are listed, no mention is made of Bill Wabo, who was not a minor character; nor is the actor who portrayed him, Guy Provencher, named. He was convicted of having sexual relations with over 200 boys, aged 12 - 14, and declared a dangerous offender, see  Montreal Star,  January 11, 1967: an intriguing if not necessarily praiseworthy instance of how the past can be scrubbed clean.

Guy Provencher, 1927 - 2013

I much prefer the edited version to the original. Apart from anything else, my first and too wide-ranging essay, had it been published, would have shown off my carelessness, for I failed to mention that there was a second television series based on Un homme et son péché; Les pays d'en haut had a five season run, beginning in 2016. As you’d expect, the Bill Wabo character, played by Marco Collin, received a very different treatment the second time round.

He intrigues me, Bill Wabo, his evolution, and particularly how both his deeply racist first depictions and the way the scandal-ridden Guy Provencher — he returned to acting, by the way, after his debt to society had been paid and the dust had settled — were swept under the rug. These revisions and omissions I find dishonest and weird, though perhaps no more so than how classical music announcers on CBC radio are not permitted to speak the once venerated name Charles Dutoit lest listeners be sucked into the appalling vortex of associative trauma. I find it bizarre that they haven’t eliminated the discs the disgraced conductor “helmed,” which is a loathsome verb unless it applies to boating; the recordings are contagion free as long as the beast’s name is not whispered. I’ve been tempted to write to someone in charge, whoever that is, and suggest that perhaps he could be accorded the courtesy of another identifier. I think “the C word” has another association, but they could go for “Chucky Of The Roof.” Or perhaps “Rien Du Toit.” When it comes to Placido Domingo I have no remedies to offer. Honestly, I’ll never understand why they fired me.

Oh shut up, Bill.

The point is, we have before us a question — it should be a minor quandary, really — with which anyone engaged in this sort of retrospective enterprise must grapple: ought one point out to the contemporary reader, whose sensibilities are finely honed and whose antennae are sensitive to every possible offence, that the dead writer whose 80-year old work is being exhumed and examined, may not have had the moral genius to apprehend that, half-a-century and change on, (a) someone would think to dredge up her work and (b) that some of the diction and phraseology might not pass future muster? I have good reason for meditating on this, and I think anyone of my vintage would understand why. I’m 69, and in the Winnipeg neighbourhood where I grew up, when we played “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe,” it was NOT a tiger we caught by the toe. I cringe now to think how easily that charged, forbidden word came to mind, and how untrammelled was its passage to tongue, to air. “Half-breed?” As noted above, no one would have batted an eye.

Of course this comes to mind in the present moment because I’m writing this on the morning of Monday, September 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation; Orange Shirt Day, as it’s popularly called. In Winnipeg, in, say, 1960 — I daresay this was true everywhere in the country — this was a possibility no one could have imagined, just as no one could have foreseen the day a member of Parliament from my natal city (Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre) not only a (gasp!) woman but (double gasp!) indigenous, would rise in the House of Commons and introduce legislation that would criminalize anyone whose speech contradicted the truth of our great national shame, residential schools. This fascinates the hell right out me, for all kinds of reasons, none of which I’ll get into here, beyond saying that the determination of what constitutes “the truth” is probably not one I’d care to leave in the hands of the appointed members of our Senate, nor in the care and keeping of the Ministry of Allowable Dissent that would have to be created to manage it.

I’ve often wondered — stupidly, because no answer is forthcoming — how Mavis Gallant would have responded to the human rights and justice issues that are so bandied about on social media and that have become so divisive. When I asked one of her friends a while back where she (MG) would have stood on Gaza, she replied with no hesitation and with some certainty; I’ll leave you to speculate about her quick verdict, it’s not germane here. That Mavis Gallant abhorred racism I have no doubt, and she would probably have repented “half-breed,” had it been called to her attention, decades after the fact. But would she have done it in a public sackcloth and ashes way — I am sorry for the harm — as has latterly been so much in vogue? I can’t suppose so. I expect she would have said, “Yes, well, that’s how things were,” and left it at that. I do wonder, too, how someone whose project had much to do with examining the causes and effects of fascism might have responded to a well-intentioned contemporary instance of a parliamentarian’s longing to limit the liberty and physically confine anyone whose speech violates the tightly controlled borders of a party line. Again, no point in asking, for every self-evident reason. I tamp down the urge to invoke the usual cries of Orwellian, Draconian; and who the hell cares what I think? All you people out there who are disinclined to line up with your begging bowls, importuning me to fill them with my punditry? I see you. I am with you. You are correct.

Here Artist responds to my request that Artist provide an image representing an old man who is coming to terms with his irrelevancy, in the style of El Greco

An important legacy left by the young Mavis Gallant during her time at the Montreal Standard, and one I’m glad we were able to highlight in some small measure in the book, is that she brought to the attention of her readers, many of whom would have been anglophones and stubbornly unilingual, the emerging and weirdly hidden riches of the other solitude. The feature about Claude-Henri Grignon is a good example, and I love “French Canada’s Dorothy Dix,” the profile she published of the advice columnist who was known (to French speaking readers) as Colette. The annotation that appears in Montreal Standard Time is appropriately bite-sized, at about 200 words, much more contained than the 850 contained in what I first wrote. I append it here by way of giving one more example of the gratitude writers owe to editors, who commune with the best of the better angels.

The trick with advice is as much knowing when to give it as when to ask for it. In MG’s novel, A Fairly Good Time, Shirley Perrigny, childless, can’t stop herself from foisting her opinions on the family of a troubled young woman she’s taken under her wing. It’s tempting to wonder, if impossible to prove, that perhaps this was MG remarking, wryly, on her own penchant for plying parents (via the Standard, if not in person) with unsolicited counsel on how best to manage some irascible child. At the paper, her editors allowed her a free hand when it came to choosing her subjects and themes. She was able to persuade them to devote a column (her’s) to radio reviewing, and she did a brief stint, at the tail end of her time there, as a film critic. What enterprising young journalist, given the run of the house, wouldn’t want to take a crack at some other reliable destination for readers: astrology, maybe? Or, better still, advice? MG would surely have been as forthright and commonsensical and impatient with the lovelorn as she was with parents whose children wouldn’t stop wetting the bed or get over their fear of dogs.

At the Star, the Standard’s sister daily, there was no local Miss Lonelyhearts. Rather, Dorothy Dix made a syndicated appearance. Dix — the nom de conseil for the hugely successful and unflaggingly prolific New Orleans-based Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (1861 - 1951)  — “the World’s Highest Paid Woman Writer” as her columns proclaimed her for a time — had been in the advice game for approximately forever, and she pronounced on her readers’ problems and qualms with an honesty that was thrillingly brutal. On the day prior to the publication of MG’s feature on Colette, Miss Dix opined on the spectacle of women failing to act their age.

“It is enough to make the angels weep to see an old woman, decked out like  debutante, gambolling around a ballroom floor with some lad young enough to be her grandson, who is paying his dinner debts to her and cursing every step that her blundering old feet take her. And surely no woman ever commits a greater folly than the old woman who tries to be cute and flirtatious, and who kids herself about her boy friends. For she throws away her trump card, which is the mother act, for practically all men fall for that, and they admire and love and enjoy the wise old women who act their age.”

(Shirley Perrigny’s mother — a letter writer as well as an advice-giver in A Fairly Good Time — might well have clipped that and sent it off to her daughter in Paris along with a smart remark about Cat Castle, the family friend who takes up with a man half her age whom she meets on a train.)

For the better part of sixty years, Dorothy Dix was a household name, and if it doesn’t now set bells jangling, if the rose that was named after her in 1926 is no longer in favour, if no one recalls that once she earned 75,000 a year, a staggering amount in the day for a newspaper writer and a woman, too boot  — well, that’s just a symptom of time and what time does, and that’s too bad for us.

Colette, writing in La Presse for a hometown crowd — her column was “Le Courrier de Colette,” not “Le Courier” as appears in the Standard — tempered her forthrightness with a bit more tendresse than you’ll find in Dix; that said, she didn’t pull punches. Here are two pieces of correspondence, translated, that demonstrate her sagacity and style.

Q: A widower, a man with children, was courting me for a while, but we broke it off when I could no longer ignore his flaws. Since then, he’s washed up at my house three times, completely drunk, with no idea what he’s doing. His children, seeing him in such a state, imagine he’s been drinking at my place and blame me, which I don’t deserve. If it happens again, would I be justified in getting him hauled away by the police?  Signed, Passe Modèle.

A: That might be a bit extreme. You could simply ask someone to take him by the arm, or call a taxi, or, simplest of all, close the door on him.

Q: While in mourning, is it okay to wear a ring with a black stone? Signed, Anxious to know.

A: Yes.

Like Claude-Henri Grignon, a towering presence amongst the French majority in the province but not widely touted by English speakers, Colette (Édouardina Lesage, August 7, 1875 - April 2,1961) escaped the notice of the Gazette and Star. They payed scant attention to the dinner given in her honour in 1953, to mark her 50 years in the business, even though it was hosted by Mayor Houde and Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, the archbishop of Quebec, and while thumbnail obituaries appeared in both the English dailies — she was named as Colette Lesage — the passing of a legend, whose column appeared until 1956, went otherwise unremarked.

What was I thinking? Anyway, Colette and Dorothy Dix and professionally delivered advice came to mind yesterday as I was writing the latest entry for The Bankhead Gleaner, my other Substack project, which I keep on calling a “gain of function commonplace book,” even though I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. I use it for all kinds of things, mostly to post oddities that I find and that amuse me and that I think might amuse others with the time and patience to read them. (Who has such time and such patience any more? Who has read this far to join me in wondering?) Latterly, I’ve been engaged in a kind of Burroughs-like Dadaist exercise that involves taking out of context what rises to the surface when I enter key words and phrases in the search engine for the online archive newspapers.com. My appetite for this kind of weirdness is insatiable, but I appreciate that, in this regard, I may well stand alone. Here’s the latest, for anyone who might be interested. As always, I thank you for reading, and I wish you a thoughtful day of truth and reconciliation. I can’t wait to see how and where and why our country and the world will change next.

The Bankhead Gleaner, September 30, 2024.