Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 30

Holy and Irascible

It pleases me when a circle’s joined; such a rounding off is taking place in my small life, via these pages. Or whatever they’re properly called. I can’t cite an exact date, because to do so would mean going back to examine the earliest entries in this diary, which I can’t, don’t have the strength, would find them cringeworthy and mortifying, like walking past a dive bar at high noon and seeing oneself implicated on the pavement by the baked-on evidence of a vomitous episode from a late night one knows was in the recent past but can’t otherwise pin down with certitude. (Oh, Bill! That’s charming! What a gift one has for metaphor! Why isn’t one rich, for heaven’s sake?) I’m fairly confident that, back in mid-April, at this project’s outset, I wrote about having recorded a video conversation for Early Music Vancouver (EMV) with the historical keyboard ace Olga Pashchenko. Four months later, as this experiment draws to a close — August 11, hurry on! — I’ve been similarly engaged, conducting a few pre-concert interviews over the last few days for EMV’s summer Bach Festival.

Such assignments were once run-of-the-mill for me, though I never found them easy or particularly pleasurable. (Were I to go back and look at that early entry, I’d probably find I’ve written exactly these words before.) The work I did for the public broadcaster, gassing away on air, providing hours of publicity for writers about their books and musicians about their recordings, came with the tacit expectation, an unwritten social contract, that I’d make myself available — freely, in every sense of the word — to anyone, anywhere, at any time, who wanted someone to turn up in the rented ballroom, in the downtown hotel, and glad-hand, and to introduce the acts, and to draw the numbers for the raffles, and to tend to the auction where pots of jam would go up by nickel increments. Also to stay sober. To this activity I devoted hundreds of evenings, often as many as three a week — it is true, there was chicken or salmon by way of compensation, I never lost sight of being lucky in that regard — and I honestly cannot remember a single detail specific to any of those many, many mostly charitable and, no doubt, always worthwhile events. (They are, truly, always, the result of a lot of hard work by devoted committee members. That I mock my own participation does not reflect on all the benefits that accrue because so many with the time and the will to care, care.)

There would always come, for me, a disassociative moment when my mind would detach from my body, exit my skull as a gas, and hover above the stage, the podium, the lectern, whatever you call the pulpit with the floppy microphone, the blond wood epicentre of chatter, and I would look down at myself urging people to find their tables so the evening could begin, or to return to their tables for the dessert service, or promoting the silent auction, or just making some lame joke — so, so very, very many, many, lame, lame jokes — and the words I would hear, spoken to my mouldering clay by my separated soul — a dull pewter colour — were always something along the lines of, “Jesus, what a clown you’ve become.”

I’m sometimes asked if I miss those CBC days, and that radio work, and when I answer, quickly and honestly, “No, not at all,” it’s also those extra-curricular activities that I’m remembering. Now, on the vanishingly rare occasion someone invites me to be an officiant or to disabuse myself of my wisdom before a rapt throng that is probably neither of those, I’m as surprised as I am grateful as I am flattered and I almost always say no. There are so many people in the world better equipped for the task than I. Also, there are wardrobe issues; I no longer own a single formal garment that hasn’t been aerated by moths, and I’m disinclined to refurbish the supply just to give the insatiable mofos more dinner. Early Music Vancouver is an easy exception to the no paseran rule. The concerts — and I should say that this is similarly the case for many other performing agencies in the city, so many are so smartly run — are wonderfully and imaginatively conceived, the artists are topnotch, both the imports and the locals, and my admiration for their AD / ED, Suzie LeBlanc, is unalloyed. I still spend days in advance tamping down the nausea that comes from nerves, but I’m more than willing to do it for a cause I support.

Mavis Gallant (MG), I guess, is such a cause. A few of you have wondered how I’ll wrap up the diary project on August 11; I think I’ve settled on a way. Marshalling all my forces of resolve and courage, it will be a a public event, though, mercifully, one at which I won’t have to say a great deal, or do much by way of invention, given that the format is well-established; ancient, even. (Oh, Bill! Whatever do you have in mind?)

Here are some visual clues.

Speaking plain, at 7 P.M. on the evening of August 10, at St. James’ Anglican Church, 303 E. Cordova Street, at Gore, I’ll sponsor a service of compline that will honour the memory of MG and afford anyone who is able to attend a place of peace and contemplation, as well as the opportunity to consider, in community, her contributions to our national literature — to world literature, of course — and to give thanks, in whatever way you choose, for the gift of her talents. I’m not an Anglican — MG was, though not observant — but I have my reasons for choosing this means of commemoration, about which I’ll say more on a future occasion. I’m grateful to Father Kevin Hunt, Archdeacon of Burrard and Rector of St. James’, for his expert, patient guidance and willing (as I’m assuming!) participation in this. Not everyone would be so welcoming to a heathen intervener with a half-baked notion brought forward at the eleventh hour. I hope, with the permission of the participants, to share an audio recording of the proceedings on August 11, by way of diary envoi. For the nonce, know this will happen on August 10, 7 P.M., at St. James. If you are able to attend, you will be welcome; it is, I can say with assurance, one of the most beautiful interior spaces in the city; a great place to meditate, to enjoy the migration of light, and to hear music, which there will be. Some of you will wonder about livestreaming, and I’ll let you know when I know if that will be possible.

I’ve said before that my intention here has never been to canonize MG. Not everyone who met her felt embraced. She was the sort of person for whom the phrase “does not suffer fools gladly,” was invented, and this was true, certainly, for people whom no one would ever describe as “foolish.” Some readers of this diary have mentioned in comments how MG, during her time as writer-in-residence at Massey College, alienated other, younger writers by speaking scornfully of what she saw as their reliance on the Canada Council and other granting agencies. Her point, I think, was that she had always seen herself as a participant in a true market economy, had lived from sale to sale, supply and demand, had never relied on handouts, on the grace and favour largesse of the nobility. In truth, anyone who is published in Canada, which by then she was, whether or not they are a direct recipient of such a boon, having applied for a grant and been assessed by a jury of peers, is a beneficiary, via their publishers, of that same system. And the time would come when MG — as has been publicly, if not widely, reported — would herself, when assistance was required, receive grants from different agencies, publicly and privately funded, whose business it is to assist writers who find themselves in straitened financial circumstances.

(I understand well enough how she might have landed between such a rock and a hard place. One of the performing dog tricks foisted on MG, as a child, by her parents, was by-heart recitations of poems by LaFontaine, probably “La Cigale et la fourmi,” the really nasty story about the party-hardy grasshopper and his purse-lipped neighbour, the tight-assed ant and what happens when winter comes.

MG’s position could never be described as “close, but no cigale.” She was definitely a grasshopper. She earned and she spent. It was her way. It’s been a bit my way, too, that’s the truth of it, and I’m noticing, late in the game, that when the wolf comes knocking on the door, there’s a certain urgency to his rapping, to the way he whistles, “Hey, Big Spender.” Oh, well. I’m not complaining, and I’m not without resource, I’m only saying that I understand how MG’s devotion — maybe it’s a Leo thing — to wearing decent clothes, drinking champagne, traveling often, picking up the tab for others, and — probably more than anything else — to living alone, came at a cost. How much of what can be legitimately read as absence of caution and / or foresight can be laid at the feet of nature, or inclination? How much pity is anyone owed when the chickens of improvidence come home to roost? Not much, I don’t suppose.)

The point is, MG had many loyal friends and admirers, and she also pissed people off. This is the liability with which those who feel free to speak their minds must contend. (I have done so, very often, though almost never deliberately. It’s been my failing not to understand just how tart a tart I really am.)

MG complained often, and bitterly, about how she was ignored by Canadian publishing; it would not be too much of a stretch to say she saw herself as a prophet without honour in her homeland. “I have often been treated with discourtesy,” she would tell interviewers. And maybe she was. She wasn’t moved to raptures by the first domestic publication of a collection of her stories, The End of the World, in 1974. She hated it so much she tore off the cover and threw it in the trash; so she said. (It was, it’s true, an EXCEEDINGLY ugly looking book.) It was thanks to Douglas Gibson that the logjam was finally broken, five years later, with the publication of From the Fifteenth District. MG owed DG a great deal, but dealt with him impatiently, as he relates in this excruciating excerpt from his book Stories about Storytelling. The link will take you to whole story of how she went on at length at a public event, read and read, the room began to empty. If she noticed, she didn’t care. Someone had to intervene. The whole awful story is painful to read, but has a train wreck allure. Here’s a brief excerpt:

I rose and took the three longest steps of my life, to stand with my hand on the front of Mavis’s podium. At the time, the phrase “own the podium” did not exist, but Mavis knew all about it.

“Excuse me Mavis,” I said, “ I think that people are very keen to have a chance to ask you questions.”

She might have said, “Oh my goodness, is that the time? Of course, let’s go straight to questions.”

What she did say was “Questions? Questions? But I’m in the middle of my reading!”

I stood my ground. “Yes, but as I say, time is going on, and I know that people are very eager to ask you questions.”

Mavis went over my head. Literally. She appealed to the crowd behind me, who were watching, thrilled. “Aren’t you enjoying my reading?” And they, the cowards, gave her a supportive round of applause, and Mavis looked down at me in triumph.

I slunk back to my seat and gave Bill Weintraub the best line of my life. “Well,” I said, evenly, “I think that went off pretty well, don’t you?”

Now Mavis, enraged, was reading brilliantly. Every so often she would glare down at me and say something like “I was going read you the entry for September 20th, but” (angry turning of pages) “I’m told I must hurry up.”

Ouch. Another example of Bad Mavis can found, fondly told, in John Metcalf’s commemorative address, delivered at the unveiling of a memorial plaque for MG — October 9, 2015 — in St. James the Apostle Anglican Church in Montreal; it was subsequently published in Canadian Notes and Queries.

In the academic year 1983–84, Mavis Gallant was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and was awarded during her tenure the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, an alternating award designed to deepen the two countries’ knowledge of each other’s literature. The Australian High Commission in Ottawa arranged a luncheon in her honour in a private room in the National Arts Centre. Mavis had apparently requested my presence.

We had been in touch by correspondence prior to this. In 1978 she’d had kind words for my novella Girl in Gingham, and in 1982 she’d written an essay to accompany two of her stories I’d anthologized in Making it New, an essay called “What is Style?” which she later plundered to use in the introduction to her Selected Stories.

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.”

Lunch proceeded with a litany of complaints from Mavis about the interminable line-ups at the Ontario Health Insurance office, the architectural brutality of the Robart’s Library, the sullen ugliness of this windowless – eyeless, she said, in Gaza – National Arts Centre, the tardiness of professor Sam Solecki in providing her with a typewriter, the appalling manners of that very bearded man, you know – flapping a hand – in Alberta…

She spread about her a certain tension and constraint.

I thought of the various occasions on which my wife Myrna and I had walked past her apartment building in Paris, No. 14 rue Jean-Farrandi; in the sixth arondissement, not even daring to think about intruding to pay our respects.

After dessert, waiters refilled the glasses and the high commissioner rose and made a deft and graceful little speech ending with the words:

“And now let us drink a toast to Mavis Gallant and to the day she sets foot on our shores.”

In a very loud voice, a Lady Bracknell, “a HANDBAG!” voice, Mavis said, “GO to Australia! I have no intention of GOING to Australia! Why would anyone think…I’m in the middle of a book. Who in their right MIND…”

And finally, in this Jesuitcal account from Father Patrick Samway, we see MG subjecting Anthony Burgess to a public flogging. (I should say I think he has the year wrong, I believe the symposium of which he speaks took place in 1982, not 1987.)

I met Burgess a second time in 1987, I believe, when the University of Angers sponsored an international festival on the short story. … During the symposium itself, I gave a talk on the short stories of Raymond Chandler, someone I had met and whose stories I admire. When it came the time for Burgess to speak, he talked about various Irish and British stories that had impressed him. Mavis Gallant, a Canadian who lived most of her life in Paris, and whose stories are absolute marvels, then read part on one of her stories. During the give-and-take session following the various talks, Mavis took the microphone and more or less lit into Burgess for not having read any Irish or British stories since his years as a teenager. Of course, everyone was astonished at her outburst. When she finished, she sat down next to me and said to me (I had just met her), ‘What did I just say?’ I replied, ‘Mavis, everyone one is looking at you now. We will have a drink later and talk about it. OK?’ She agreed. And, indeed, we had some Muscadet afterward, and she quieted down a bit.

Not a saint. Not by a long shot. Does it matter? That’s its own complicated question. The sum of her nature is not, never was, an easy calculation. What would MG think about people gathering in a church for a compline service to mark the hundredth anniversary of her birth? She’d laugh, I’m pretty sure. Possibly, she’s also be interested. Again — does it matter? That’s a question you can turn over in your heart on August 10. Maybe, by way of propitiating the ghost of Anthony Burgess, I can ask the organist to play a transcription of Burgess’s Petite Symphonie pour Strasbourg, that liminal place, half French, half German, passed back and forth over the years, that fascinated MG, and about which she often wrote. Or maybe I’ll see if he can come up with an all-stops activated version of Non, Je ne regrette rien. That, too, I think, might apply. Thanks for reading, xo, B