Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 8

What do they do, your mom and dad?

Mavis Gallant (MG) was a keen and life-long reader of poetry. Right at the outset of her interview in the Paris Review with Livia Manera Sambuy, she cites Philip Larkin’s most celebrated line.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad: you know Larkin’s lines, don’t you?” she said. “When I was four, my mother took me to a convent and left me there without any explanation. I was wearing my best dress, a beautiful blue dress. The mother superior said: you won’t be allowed to keep that dress here. Then my mother left and didn’t come back.” She gave me a defiant look. “Don’t write that I cried, because I don’t remember crying. Even if I must have.”

This be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

 And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

 By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Larkin wrote what MG did. Got out as soon as she could, achieved emancipation. And children? None. Six or so weeks ago, the excellent writer Ken McGoogan published on his website a wonderful account of the time he spent with MG in 1992 when he was a reporter for the Calgary Herald, and she had come to Banff; she gave a reading from a novel that never appeared, was presumably never finished. I’ve mentioned this mysterious book before — she spoke of it in interviews, said she wanted to finish it before she got back to the Dreyfus study — and Ken, bless him, reveals the provisional title: Clowns and Gentlemen. His piece is also revelatory for what she had to say about children, i.e. about having / not having them, and it’s especially memorable for the AMAZING photo of Mountain Mavis. I’m taking the liberty (ENTIRELY WITHOUT PERMISSION, Ken, forgive me) of reproducing it here.

Tomorrow, August 9, is the centennial of the birth of Philip Larkin. To this I had not twigged until diary reader Keith MacKinnon alerted me to the near coincidence of their advents — if only Mrs. Larkin could have held on for two more days! — and provided this link to a collection of Larkin tributes in The New Statesman.

“Church Going”remains my favourite Larkin poem, along with “Love Songs in Age.” I’m sure MG knew them both. The experience Larkin describes in “Church Going” — of being wholly secular, and of entering a church and of being invaded by the certainty that here is a place in which people for generations felt the power of mystery, of feeling how the holiness for which one has no time oneself, is vibratory, lasting, like the lowest note of a bell — is exactly what MG described in her 1965 CBC television interview with Fletcher Markle on Telescope. It’s well worth watching, if only to watch her twist her rings — you have to put up with two rounds of commercials but whatever — and at the 34 minute mark there’s a stagey visit to Chartres — is that Chanel she’s wearing? — where she’s seen lighting some candles. Here’s what she says:

“There’s something cumulative there, and that’s why I go back. … I’m not a mystical person, and I’m not a particularly religious person either, and I’m not a Catholic, so those things are all excluded. It’s something completely different. Something does gather in a place where people have always come with their fears, their demands, their worry about other people, their anguish. I’ve lighted candles for people which for some people is a harmless form of white magic, for others a wicked superstition, for others something deeply important. I’ve done it when I’ve been asked to do it, and I’ve done it when I haven’t been asked to do it because it isn’t what I believe that matters but what the person believes. If you were, for example, looking after someone who is very ill, you stop at nothing, and it isn’t what you believe it’s what the person believes, even if he doesn’t know you’re doing it.”

MG was not, in the church going sense, a person of faith. She told Geoff Hancock, in that long 1977 interview, that anyone who believed God had come down and walked among men ought to be dissuaded from the belief just by getting on the Metro. But to vibrations she was, I think, exquisitely attuned. She was no stranger to visions, not Fatima style, not like Joan of Arc: something more cinematic, almost, the appearance on the screen at the back of her eyes of a character, a situation that had about it so much weight and gravity that she was compelled to give it flesh. Her visions became her stories. Is that a religious experience? Not if you choose not to name it as such; but a smarter and better schooled person than I could probably make a case for how it’s not dissimilar. MG was not “religious,” but she had a knack for holiness, and I don’t think she would mind, somehow, that on Wednesday, on the eve of the Centennial of her birth, a few people who care about her work will gather in her honour at St James’ Anglican Church in Vancouver, 303 E. Cordova for a compline service. Together, we’ll put to bed the day, and say a prayer for untroubled passage through the night ahead. We’ll use our collective energies to ask for our own safety and bless her name. Father Kevin Hunt, the rector of St. James’ — a gorgeous church, very vibratory — will be the officiant, P J Janson the organist. Two singers from the choir will be on hand to offer plainsong chant, cantor Shefa Siegel will be there — a really great singer, and a true mensch — and Veda Hille (b. August 11) will perform a new song, a setting of a text I wrote, inspired by MG. And I’m so pleased to say that Gabrielle Rose will be there, too. She’s a magnificent actor; there could be no one better to read a secular but holy text. 7.00 P.M. is the time. You are welcome to join us.

3.41 is the time. I’m off to the store. Thanks for reading. xo, B