Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 1

super-Canadian fantasies, super-Canadian vices

Good morning. Day off from the store, a pity owing to this being Canada Day, which would mean time-and-a-half and all. Just as well, I might have been moved by patriotic fervour to commander the PA system and sing “The Maple Leaf Forever,” which was a great favourite of mine as a child. It’s much more singable than O, Canada — who can’t really get behind a line like “Wolfe, the dauntless hero came,” — and at least twice as offensive. Growing up, like all Canadian children born in the years after the war, my little neighbours and I, too sophisticated by half for such indulgences as Kick the Can and Red Rover, were devoted to reenactments of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and I was celebrated all over Silver Heights for my General Wolfe impersonations, especially the death scene, the way I would clutch at my left chest and my face would glow with the prospect of transfiguration as I gasped out his final words, “Then I die happy.” This may or may not be a total fabrication. I think I’ll let the story stand, for the benefit of my future obituarists.

It’s a lovely morning here in the Pacific Northwest, or shaping up to be one, and I’m going to sally forth into it, having prepared this platter, this assortment of Gallantiana: a commonplace book for Canada Day. I hope you have a happy one, however and wherever you celebrate it.

1 I never like to leave Canada, because I’m disappointed every time. I’ve felt disappointed about places I haven’t ever seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When they arrived there, they met some neighbours from home who told them about a sign saying NO CANADIANS. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. The End of the World, 1967.

2 My life and work did not depend on Canadian reaction. Luckily for me. I have often, more than often, been treated with discourtesy and that bothers me. Canadian Writers at Work, Interview with Geoff Hancock, 1977

3 In Geneva Peter worked for a woman — a girl. She was a Norwegian from a small town in Saskatchewan. He supposed they had been put together because they were Canadians; but they were as strange to each other as if “Canadian” meant any number of things, or had no real meaning. The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, 1963

4 He said, rather coldly, “Have you been in this country long?”

“Around fifty years.”

“Then you should know some French.”

“I don’t speak it if I don’t have to. I never liked it.” …

“Perhaps, where you come from —” he began.

“Saskatchewan.” …

As soon as he got back to the gallery, he had Walter look up Saskatchewan in an atlas. Its austere oblong shape turned his heart to ice. Walter said that it was one of the right-angled territories that so frequently contain oil. Oil seemed to Speck to improve the oblong. He saw a Chirico chessboard sliding off toward a horizon where the lights of derricks twinkled and blinked. Speck’s Idea, 1979

5 One summer, after a particularly stormy spring, her father sent her to Grenoble to learn about French civilization — actually, to get her away from a man he always pretended to think was called Professor Downcast. Sarah raged mostly over the harm her father had brought to Professor Downcast’s career, for she had been helping with his “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia.” In the Tunnel, 1971

6 Toward the end of the night he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lotta thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns. She had wasted the government’s money and her own time. Virus X, 1965

7 I wonder if you are aware of the number of Canadians abroad who pretend not to be Canadian? It is the only nationality I know of where this happens. I mean English-Canadians. French-Canadians always identify themselves at once. Canadian Writers at Work, Interview with Geoff Hancock, 1977

8 Poor odd old Mrs. Castle had undergone a European tour with all its discomforts and loneliness in order to show her children back in Canada she did not need them. She acquired a Salzburger cape and hat. Beneath the hat, butterfly spectacles flashed. She dropped the menu, which she had been studying as it were in code … “We are from Canada,” said Mrs. Castle, preparing to turn the waitress to stone should she attempt to deny it. A Fairly Good Time, 1970

9 “You’ve never seen how abominable Canadians can be.” …

Vera mashed her cigarette out on her plate. “D’you know how Canadians used to cut the Germans’ throats?” she said. “Al showed me. You push the helmet like this,” and she reached across quick as a snake and pressed the long helmet Lottie Benz would have been wearing had she been a soldier into the nape of her neck and drew her forefinger under Lottie’s chin.

Lottie understood that an attempt had been made on her life and that she was safe. She said, “I love my country, Vera, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t run it down.”

“I’m not running it down. I’m telling you stories.”

10 I have a funny relationship with Canada. For thirty years I didn’t have a publisher there. I didn’t exist because I was publishing in America. And it was only when other Canadians began to publish in America — Alice Munro began to publish in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies — that I found a publisher. Mavis Gallant on her Work (2009), Interview with Christine Evain / Christine Bertail.

11 I did not own a passport and possibly never had seen one. In those days there was almost no such thing as “a Canadian.” You were Canadian-born, and a British subject, too, and you had a third label with no consular reality, like the racial tag that on Soviet passports will make a German of someone who has never been to Germany. … Americans were then accustomed to gratitude from foreigners but did not demand it; they quite innocently could not imagine any country fit to live in except their own. If I could not recognize it, too bad for me. Besides, I was not a refugee — just someone from the backwoods. “You got schools in Canada?” I had been asked. “You got radios?” And once, from a teacher, “What do they major in up there? Basket weaving?” In Youth is Pleasure, 1975

12 Madame Carette had a word with Berthe about Irish marriage: An Irish marriage, while not to be sought, need not be scorned. The Irish were not English. God had sent them to Canada to keep people from marrying Protestants. 1933, 1985

13 3 January 1997

Yesterday tea with Anne (Hébert) … She tells me about a dream she had the night before. She is a patient in a French hospital, so inefficient and overcrowded that she has to share a bed with another patient, a large stout woman who seems to be important and takes up most of the bed. She turns out to be Simone Veil. [A well-known and very popular political figure, a former Cabinet minister and president of the European Parliament.] Simone Veil has a great number of visitors who swarm all over the room and the bed. Some climb over A. in order to see the famous Mme. Veil. One is a priest wearing a soutane and carrying a bowl filled with champagne. In the dream, A. tells herself that his is what French hospitals are like.

I say that the dream is an argument in the Paris vs. Montreal debate, with A’s sleeping side taking sides. … All our conversation now is about apartments and catastrophes and the comparative cost of living here and in Montreal, with plenty of black marks against Paris. I have not lived in Montreal, except in hotels, for forty-seven years, so I have nothing to say. If she goes it will be this spring. If she stays she will have to find a new apartment. This one has become unliveable. To find a place in Paris now is about what it was in Montreal during the war. One has to “know someone,” and I’m not sure whether or not she does. Diary entry, quoted in MG’s introduction to Anne Hébert, Collected Later Novels (Anansi, 2003.)

14 My feeling about Canada is something else. I don’t allow foreigners to criticize Canada, especially when they don’t know what they’re talking about — which is most of the time. I’m very firm about that. Canadians getting together are apt to be doom and gloom, and I’m as bad as the rest of them. But that’s a private matter. Canadians talking to one another about Canada talk in circles. You have probably noticed it. Canadian Writers at Work, Interview with Geoff Hancock, 1977

15 Piotr was almost forty-one when he fell in love with Laurie Bennett. She lived in Paris, for no particular reason he knew; that is, she had not been drawn by work or by any one person. She seemed young to him, about half his age. Her idea of history began with the Vietnam War; Genesis was her own Canadian childhood. … Piotr was supposed to know by instinct every shade of difference between Victoria, British Columbia and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island … She talked often of an Anglican boarding school where she had been “left” and “abandoned” and which she likened to a concentration camp. “You’ve really never heard of it, Potter?” It seemed incredible that a man of his education knew nothing about Bishop Purse School or its famous headmistress, Miss Ellen Jones. Potter, 1977

16 I gave an introduction to some friends to a Canadian architect. They came back and were very shocked because his son had a paper route.

They couldn’t understand how the son of an architect in Montreal had a paper route. I explained, well he wants a boat and his father says he’ll have to pay for most of it himself. That seemed to be very ordinary. And then they said, but you said he is an architect and his son sells papers on the street, like a common…You know it was inconceivable to them. Recorded interview with Karen Mulhallen, 1989, published in Numero Cinq, 2014.

17 I strolled up to the NAC and found the room. I was alone except for a man fighting starched napery on a makeshift bar. Then Mavis sailed in ahead of her escort, a visibly cowed suit from External Affairs. Mavis inspected the table and went around reading all the name-cards.

Picking up a card that was beside her own, she said, “I have no intention of sitting next to that odious little man!” She switched the name card of this eminent Canada Council functionary for mine, seating me beside her and him, with further juggling, at the greatest possible remove.

“He accepts a salary from the Canadian government,” she said, “and comes to Paris making speeches espousing separatism.” John Metcalf, from a speech delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of memorial plaque for Mavis Gallant, St. James the Apostle Anglican Church, Montreal, October 9, 2015. Published in Canadian Notes and Queries.

18 Vera began to complain about the way streets had been in Winnipeg when Vera’s mother was a girl. Where Vera’s mother had lived there hadn’t been any sidewalks; there were wooden planks. If Vera’s mother stepped off a plank, she was likely to lose her overshoe in the gumbo mud. In the good part of town, on Wellington Crescent, there were no pavements either, but for a different reason. When Ukrainian children were taken across the city on digestive airings, after Sunday lunch, to look at Wellington Crescent houses … the children, wondering at the absence of sidewalks, were told that people here had always had carriages and then motorcars and had never needed to walk. Virus X, 1965

19 In our family, we were religious. We didn’t drink or smoke. My brother was in Norway in the war. He saw some cousins. … Harry said it was just terrible. They were so poor. They had flies in their kitchen. They gave him something to eat a fly had been on. They didn’t have a real toilet, and they’d been in the same house for about two hundred years. We’ve only recently built our own house and we have a bathroom and two toilets. I’m from Saskatchewan … I’m not from any other place. The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, 1963

20 Perhaps some uninhabited island could be turned over to the super-Canadians. They could all talk to each other in divine accents and hold their wineglasses up to the light or toast Princess Margaret or whatever it is super-Canadians do when no one is looking. They could play out their super-Canadian fantasies and develop their super-Canadian vices. Canadian Writers at Work, Interview with Geoff Hancock, 1977

21 I had to leave Canada when my father died. The End of the World, 1967.