Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning, June 14
Gardening in Sunny Lands: Ex Libris Mavis Gallant, 3: Ulysses
Note: Gardening in Sunny Lands is the title of a book Mavis Gallant (MG) invented for her short story “In Italy.” It’s a guide that enables Anglo expats to recreate English gardens in Mediterranean places. I’ve borrowed her fictional title for this sequence of posts — this is the third — about books (verifiable, published, some in and some out of print) she mentions, often glancingly, in her stories and journalism.
“The Remission” appeared in the August 13, 1979 edition of The New Yorker, and was anthologized that same year in From the Fifteenth District. It’s 1953. Alec Webb is ill, his prognosis grim. He hasn’t much time left. With his wife, Barbara, and their three children, he quits England for Rivebelle, a French / Italian border town much like MG’s own Menton, and a crumbling house called “Lou Mas.” Unsurprisingly, there’s a gulf between expectation and reality. As it turns out, Riviera living doesn’t make for graceful dying.
The much more compact “In Italy” shares DNA with “The Remission;” the first can almost be read as a study for the second. Each observes the blinkered eccentricities of the English colony: self-exiled imperialists for whom the world they’ve found on the other side of the Channel holds little that is of intrinsic interest, beyond the merely quaint, and is only as valuable as it is pliable; how readily it can adapt itself to the manners and customs of the island nation they abandoned yet cling to.
Like Henry, the patriarch in “In Italy,” Alec Webb’s finances are guttering; he has no money to leave. Both stories are set in locales that are writer-adjacent. Max Beerbohm lives nearby to the chilly, damp palazzo where Henry and his family wash up, and the Webbs, in “Lou Mas,” find they have writer neighbours (MG inventions) on either side. In Mrs. Massie, who inhabits Casa Scotia, we hear echoes of Gardening in Sunny Lands; she’s the author of “a whole shelf of gardening books” that she pounds out “on her 1929 Underwood — four carbons, single-spaced, no corrections, every page typed clean.” She brings Alec copies of her books, including her masterpiece, Flora’s Gardening Encyclopaedia, the seventeenth edition. She signs all her books “Flora,” although it’s not her name.
In Villa Osiris lives a novelist, Edmund Cranfield. He’s not sharing with his oeuvre, but Mrs. Massie passes his books on to Molly, age 11; she’s the second-born of the Webbs’ three children.
[Molly] discovered, by chance that [Mr. Cranfield] had another name — E. C. Arden. As E. C. Arden he was the author of a series of thumbed, comfortable novels … one of which, called Belinda at Sea, was Molly's favourite book of any kind. It was about a girl who joined the crew of a submarine, disguised as a naval rating, and kept her identity a secret all the way to Hong Kong. In the end, she married the submarine commander, who apparently had loved her all along. Molly read Belinda at Sea three or four times without ever mentioning to Mr. Cranefield she knew he was E. C. Arden. She thought it was a matter of deep privacy and that it was up to him to speak of it first.
In “In Youth is Pleasure,” MG’s alter-ego Linnet Muir, eighteen, arrives back in Montreal after a several-years sojourn in New York, descends the bus, and is immediately accosted and groped by a man with “a bitter Celtic face, with deep indentations along his cheeks, as if his back teeth were pulled. … The man's gaunt face, his drunken breath, the flat voice which I assigned to the graduate of some Christian Brothers teaching establishment haunted me for a long time after that. ‘The Man at Windsor Station’ would lurk in the windowless corridors of my nightmares; he would be the passenger, the only passenger on a dark tram.
The Linnet Muir stories are in large measure autobiographical. Whether the “Man at Windsor Station” and his unsettling violation were invented or drawn from vivid memory, I can’t say. It does have about it, that part of the story, the whiff of authenticity. That moment from “In Youth Is Pleasure” comes to mind reading this passage, written five years later, in “The Remission.”
That winter Molly grew breasts; she thought them enormous, though each could have been contained easily in a small teacup. Her brothers teased her. She went about with her arms crossed. She was tall for her age, and up in the town there was always some man staring. Elderly neighbours pressed her close. Major Lamprey, calling on Alec, kissed her on the mouth. He smelled of gin and pipe smoke. She scrubbed her teeth for minutes afterward. When she began to menstruate, Barbara said, “Now, Molly, you are to keep away from men,” as if she weren't trying to.
“Major Lamprey” is the perfect handle for so predatory a man, with his unwanted, eely, sucking mouth. Was MG as deliberate in choosing the names for characters who are more central to the story, and who serve a purpose beyond the satirical? Why is Molly Molly? And why is her mother, Barbara, Barbara? I have no way of knowing, but both names, for MG, would have carried a certain charge.
There are a few interviews with MG that are indispensable to anyone interested in her writing, and one is her 2008 conversation with Marta Dvorak, which was published as “When Language is a Delicate Timepiece,” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. I’ve referred to it several times before, and to this extract from the conversation where MG replies to Marta’s question about James Joyce.
I adored Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I also loved his short stories, Dubliners. And there are still things that are very vivid in my mind from Ulysses. I had a friend in Canada who knew Ulysses almost by heart. We had met when both of us were working on The Standard (one of the three English dailies which came out, morning, noon, and evening – it doesn’t exist anymore). She was nineteen and I was twenty-one. After I moved to Paris we often talked on the phone, and every 16 June we would read a part of Ulysses to each other – she in Toronto and I here in Paris. June 16 is Bloomsday, as you know, Marta. The whole of Ulysses takes place on a Thursday 16 June, 1904. Her name was Barbara Kilvert. She died a few years ago. There are very few friends you can do things like that with. Now, on 16 June, I read some of Ulysses on my own – usually at breakfast.
I wonder if this might have been one of the passages that made its way over the trans-Atlantic cables, or that MG read at breakfast:
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Leopold Bloom is moving about his Dublin kitchen on the morning of June 16, 1904, not just with his own breakfast in mind, but also that of his wife, Molly. To his inquiry about whether she wants something to eat Molly, still in bed, gives a reply only articulate enough to be understood as negative. Leopold, then, goes out into the early morning in search of kidney. And so it begins, the most famous (and certainly the longest) single day in all of twentieth century literature.
Molly, of course, is one of the great modern goddesses, the unpunctuated avatar of the temple of flesh, carnality, sensuality, appetite, blood, animated by the fever of longing, the embodiment of everything that is yes, and yes, and yes. At the beginning of her celebrated, one-breath monologue, she invokes breakfast: “Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs…”
Did MG have Joyce’s Molly in mind when she created her child character who, early on, grows wise to men and their ways; their threats to her bodily autonomy? “I suppose he thinks I don’t know deceitful men all their 20 pockets aren’t enough for their lies…” It’s not the kind of question that will keep anyone awake at night, but I can imagine well enough that it might have been a deliberate ploy, perhaps even a gift offering to a friend who might have been the only one to appreciate its sly significance.
This year, Bloomsday has to vie for attention with Father’s Day. This is hardly as rare an occurrence as, say, the passing of Halley’s Comet: the last time they were coincident was in 2019, and in 2030 those intent on giving brunches for one occasion or the other will again be in stiff competition for the more desirable tables in the better restaurants.
The word “Father” occurs just about four hundred times in Ulysses, taking into account such variants as “Papa,” “Pa,” “Pater,” “Daddy,” and so on. Not infrequently, and unsurprisingly, “father” in Joyce’s novel often occurs in a Catholic context, referring to an officiant. That’s partly true in this excerpt which I offer in honour of both days, Father and Bloom, and in tribute to the long friendship between MG and Barbara Chipman Kilvert. Again, this is from Molly Bloom’s exuberant soliloquy, free of diacritical pause. I wonder if it might have been on the roster of excerpts lobbed from Paris to Toronto and back again, over all those many years. I wish you all a happy Bloomsday and a happy Father’s Day, however you mark them. Thanks for reading, BR
… I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking of his fathers I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills up with some liqueur Id like to sip those rich looking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time after we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us …
The more desirable tables in the better restaurants lol — you are hilarious