Early start at the store today, this being “the flip,” when the old sale sails and the new one comes into port, flying its little flags of thriftiness, if not convenience. I’ve never been absolutely clear on who makes the decisions about what products to discount, or why they so often settle on items that have been out-of-stock for weeks on end. I imagine those boxes are checked four or six months in advance of the actual event; who could reliably know what brand of mustard or artichoke hearts, intended to gladden the hearts of the parsimonious, will be languishing in the hold of a container ship stuck in Genoa (or, worse, Zurich) owing to job action by stevedores or tugboat operators? Commerce is a gamble, like everything else. I was thrilled to discover that vested in me, in my capacity as a newly-minted dry goods buyer, is the power to make discretionary intramural choices about price markdowns. Every Sunday, with Wednesday in view, I decide what we have too much of, what must endure the indignity of the markdown, of being put out to pasture. Mostly, I take this as an opportunity to wipe clean my own slate, to erase the tangible, visible record of my miscalculations and outright stupid mistakes. When a buyer errs the result is either an empty space — for instance, don’t come looking for the smaller jar of Lisc dill pickles this week, I somehow overlooked what I later saw to be an impending vacancy and the vendor only delivers on Tuesday, no exception, if you call and plead they will, literally, and I know what “literally” mean, laugh at you; or else you end up — and this is worse, because it takes longer to repair — with shelves that groan under the weight of unwarranted excess: a sale in the making. I won’t trouble you with the sorry excuses — ex-SKU-ses— that landed the store, owing to my negligence, with 5 dozen vials of really, really dear truffle oil, which might have moved one or two units over the course of any give week. However, I can tell you that if ever you wanted to acquire such a commodity, and flavour the purchase with the earthy taste of victory, of knowing it’s being sold at an actual loss — it’s still a long way from cheap — you have at least another seven days to profit at “our” expense. Dabbed behind the ears it has a pheromonal effect that is nonpareil. Suitors will come snuffling after you, like randy pigs.
The shelves of the store represent — within the self-evident constraints of what products are authorized and available for ordering and eventual display — an act of someone’s authorship or, at least, of editorial judgment. Back in my radio days, if I felt like giving time a time-out, I would treat myself to a session of editing. The cosmos deeds us no greater gift — here I sound like one of the scribes who gave us the book of Genesis — than that rare absorption whereby you think to check you watch, your phone, whatever, and realize that the short span you thought had elapsed — five, ten minutes — was, in fact, three, four, five hours. You haven’t thought about eating, sex, drinking, sex, sleeping, sex, peeing, sex, debt, sex, or sex, in all that time. There’s only been the task at hand. It’s its own mysticism. Quite why audio editing proved such a pathway to the sacred grove, I can’t say with precision. Something about making order from chaos. Something about the excision of the ummms and the ahhhs, something about discerning how the breath that occurs at the 10.18 mark of the 30-minute file might sound better if it were swapped for the breath at 17.54, something about the contrivance of the whole enterprise, of trying to make it sound natural, of knowing there is NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD who gives a cold, hard crap about any of this, but that to you, for some ineffable reason, it matters, deeply. Something about that.
There is no one else in the world who has noticed or who cares, nor should they, that, at 4.35 a.m., I decide to shift the chocolate chips that haven’t been moving from the left side of the shelf to the right side of the shelf to see if it makes a difference. There is no one else in the world who, perhaps twice a day, will check in on them to see how they’re doing. (No discernible change, sadly. Knock the price down a couple of notches, see how it goes.) No one else will notice or care, nor should they, not any more than any reader should pay attention to sentence order, or to semicolon placement or to any of the rest of the minutiae that preoccupy writers and editors, how I’ve rearranged the crackers, just a bit, settled on a minor placeholder kind of adjustment, so that the product we have plenty of will take up the space of the product that’s been shorting, but have done so in a way that it can all easily be rearranged if the prodigal snacks turn up at last, after months of wandering, and expect to take up their spot at the table. It’s not writing, it’s not editing, but it’s not utterly dissimilar. There is an idea, there is deliberation, there is decision, and the there is the actual work — not taxing, but physical nonetheless — of making the concept manifest. In the grand scheme of things, none of it matters. Nothing hangs in the balance, the world doesn't risk pausing a second in its whirling, but nor did it when Shakespeare took a pause, sucked on his quill, and wondered, as maybe he did, maybe not, if, within the closely guarded borders of iambic pentameter, Lear would say “gilded butterflies,” or “golden butterflies.” When it’s right, you know. It’s satisfying.
I walk through the store and I look at the shelves and I see the evidence of my hand everywhere. No one else will and no one else should. I don't think it necessarily speaks well of me that I find it as fulfilling as I do; that I can stand back at 5.10 a.m and consider the particular beauty of nut butters, or how the prunes are just so because of my intervention, and then, in the blink of an eye, the clock will be chiming six, or would be, if we had a chiming clock. In fact, it’s just the high pitched beep beep beep of the first of the morning’s trucks, backing into the loading dock. God, how I pity the neighbours in the buildings opposite.
The shelves of the store, for me, are a kind of diary. I look at the bouillon cubes and remember the woman — what has become of her? — who complained bitterly, every time I saw her, that none of them tasted quite right to her, wouldn’t it be possible to bring in many, many more kinds of bouillon cubes so that she could settle down to what would amount to a speed-dating session with them, the better to determine which would meet her approval and thus ensure her continued custom? I look at the bulk bin with the wild rice and remember the time it gave way and spilled all over the floor, and how dire that was, but how beautiful the sound. I look at whatever the kid-oriented cereal that has the gorilla on the packaging and remember the colleague who was notable for his silence, his reserve, coming up to me one day while I was shelving the stuff and whispering in my ear, “It might surprise you to learn that this box does not, in fact, contain even a single gorilla,” after which we became friends.
Diaries. I wish I’d had the discipline to keep one over the years, but I didn’t and I haven’t. Too lazy. Too little source material. Mavis Gallant (MG) was not so afflicted. In Mavis Gallant on her Work (2009), a long interview — it’s really a sort of story-by-story guided tour — she gave to Christine Evain and Christine Bertail, MG talks about her diary.
“I kept a diary from 1950 onwards. Doug Gibson wants to publish them. It’s going to be five volumes, so that means that every volume covers ten years… It’s very interesting because you find that things are not in the order in which you remember them. The diary has the dates right. And memory sends things into different time frames, and that’s very strange…”
(I’ll add here a caveat, which is — and this is nothing more than instinct talking — that there’s something about this document, which is interesting, which has value, and to which I’ve occasionally referred in previous entries, that doesn’t sit quite right with me. I don’t intend to impugn the integrity of the interviewers, I’m sure their methods and intentions were above board and honourable, but MG was, by this time, into her 80’s and had been through several serious health reversals. In some of her answers one senses a loosening of the stays, a setting aside of her habitual discretion. That may have been deliberate, a Mehitabel wot-the-hell; or, it may have been more emblematic a shift in capacity. There’s no way of coming to a clear and settled verdict and, in any case, there’s nothing on trial: the record is the record. I just feel compelled to note how the ice seems to me to be, possibly, thin.)
There’s a seasonal reason for noting this because it was just at this time of year, ten years ago, on Canada Day, in fact, that this “be-still-my-heart” news appeared in the New York Times.
(This is the only place, other than in the Alice Adams biography by Carol Sklenicka, that I’ve ever seen reference made to that friendship between those two writers; I bet their letters would make a great volume all on their own. [I note, too, that Frances Kiernan, one of the editors of the MG diary, was Adams’ editor at The New Yorker.]
Similarly seasonally and semi-simultaneously, this appeared in The New Yorker, July 29, 2012.
In the Evain - Bertail interview noted and quoted above, the one I sense — again, I stress instinct — should be flavoured with something like a grain of salt, MG talks about how, as early as 1984, she was thinking about the diaries and their publication. She speaks of how she had them with her when she did her Writer-in-Residence stint at Massey College in that year, how she was looking at them with editing and publication in mind, how some of the diaries from the 50’s were stolen from her room, were never recovered. She says, “I’ve published bits already, in The New Yorker and in The Paris Review. They’re always asking for fiction that hasn’t been run. I haven’t got fiction that hasn’t been run, but I’ve got the diaries.”
Someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this point but I don’t believe MG published any fiction, not in The New Yorker, not anywhere, after 1993. There were occasional reviews, prefaces, and so on; but her career — the main thrust of her career — was substantially over. Well. She was by then in her 70’s. Why should she not have retired? The point is just to say that apart from whatever pension income she was receiving, and whatever awards might have come her way — several, some substantial, but impossible to predict or count on — she had no earned income for the last 20 years of her life. It doesn’t take long to exhaust one’s savings, believe me, I know. What did she have to live on? She had the diaries. They were something to monetize. And beyond that, there was art, there was pleasure to be had from them, too, for her, for readers.
“I love reading diaries,” she told the two Christines. “I love Jules Renard. He’s sharp but he writes naturally. … People don’t read diaries for literature, they read diaries for life.”
As noted here before, the diaries that were announced days apart in the New York Times and in The New Yorker never saw the light of day. Rumours abound, for anyone who cares to track them down, about the differences between the estate and the publisher that kiboshed the publication. Perhaps they’ll be resolved. I, for one, hope so. The various entries that made their way into print — with MG’s full co-operation, and I’m sure she was glad to receive the cheques — are tantalizing. In the Queen’s Quarterly, Winter 2003, appeared this excerpt:
Monday, 11 February, 1996. Cold and grey with snow and rain. Feel ill and keep thinking I should call Joe (Plaskett) and say I’m coming down with February flu and don’t want them to catch it. But in the end I take some champagne from the wine rack and go round to rue Pecquay. As soon as I take my coat off I’m glad I’m there. All signs of February flu disappear. … The room, the glow from the fire and the big chandeliers are reflected on and on in the windows and seem imprinted on the falling snow and on some facades across the street. Other guests, good wine, and gossip. Joe gives me his new catalogue. When I get home I see he has written, “To Mavis, to whom I owe so much.” But he owes me nothing. Each of us owes the other our comfortable friendship. C’est tout.
This 1971 photo of MG appears in Joe Plaskett’s autobiography, A Speaking Likeness (Ronsdale Press, 1999). It’s uncredited, I assume he was the photographer. Plaskett writes:
Mavis once posed for me when I was making a series of large group “conversation pieces.” I captured an excellent likeness, but the total composition didn’t work. I now regret it was destroyed. Mavis wanted me to do a portrait that she could use on the jacket of a book. I tried desperately, but a likeness would not come. She suggested I sketch her while she read to me aloud passages from a work in progress, a life of Dreyfus. This didn't work either. Mavis’s personality is like quicksilver. Photographs rarely catch her essence.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at 2, rue Pecquay, to have been there for those sessions, however many there were, to have seen those two friends, both at work, no doubt laughing, gossiping, to have seen MG, however inadequately, emerge from the canvas, to have heard her read from the Dreyfus book, the obsession of her late career. I would have given anything. To capture her personality, her reasons: that’s well beyond my scope and ken. I’m just here to do what I can to make sure she doesn’t go out of stock. But at the same time, where to put her? I’m not that smart, but I’m smart enough to know she can’t be contained by any one shelf. Times’ up. Gotta bounce. Flip time, baby. Also, yesterday, just as I was leaving, a shipment of saffron, unbelievably expensive, and for which the inn has no room, arrived. Now it requires a place to linger, pending some future paella. I must have made its advent happen. But why? But where? My work is cut out for me. Thanks for reading. xo, B
Bill, this is my favorite entry yet. Thank you for your early morning companionship on these daily diversions. And yes, I couldn't agree more about the deep satisfactions of audio editing (literally!)
What a true observation that our memory of the sequence of events in our lives is so frequently wrong. I expect we edit to accord with our internal sense of what makes most narrative sense.
I was also intrigued that she went to Joe P.'s in the belief she had the flu and might spread it to him and his friends. One mustn't be a presentist, but after Covid days it's shocking how common that used to be (and perhaps still is).
The diaries. That's truly upsetting. I expect it's something that would have had to happen then, given how little interest there seems to be in her centenary, apart from your glorious journal and proslytizing.