Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning. September 11, 2024

Funny Uncle Duncan

It’s been a long time since I posted here. This quick salute is mostly to say that Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant has passed into the hands of the printer, whence it will be conveyed to the hands of God. It’s a selection of the features Mavis Gallant (MG) wrote for the weekly Montreal Standard between 1944 and 1950. My only disappointment is that we weren’t able to include more; I suppose that’s why God (see above) invented sequels. I worked on the painful but necessary winnowing (not that there was anything that resembled chaff) with Neil Besner and Marta Dvorak, and also provided an appendix of annotations that may or may not be useful. Vehicule Press is the publisher, which seems perfect; Simon Dardick and company have been making fine books in Montreal for over 50 years. We were lucky to land in their good and independent hands, which paved the way for the printer’s paws and those of God, q.v. The book is slated for publication late in October.

While you’re here and held tight in the hot thrall of my lapidary (also infrequent) prose, I’ll call your attention to how,  in 1894, Lloyde Osbourne and his soon-to-perish father-in-law, Robert Louis Stevenson, published an antic seafaring tale, The Ebb-Tide. Three drifters who have washed up in the south seas fall heir to a schooner, the Farallone, loaded with a cargo of California champagne; the ship had come to grief somewhere between San Francisco and Sydney. The commandeering reprobates decide to sail it to Peru, there to offload the bubbly for a huge profit, and are underway when they discover that the bottles in the hold contain plain old flat water. Thereby hangs etc etc. The named members of the original crew of the Farallone — the only two white men, we’re told — are Wiseman, the captain, and his mate, Wishart.

What has this to do with MG? you might well ask. Not much, really, and I bring it up only because of another Wiseman / Wishart coincidence that was visited upon me just yesterday, pursuant to a conversation with the Montreal writer, Marian Scott. Marian was for many years with the Gazette, and has been freelancing since her retirement a couple of years ago. For her alma mater she’s writing a piece about Montreal Standard Time. It was to this end that we spoke and talked, in small part, about MG growing up in Montreal; and about her parents, Stewart Young and Benedictine Wiseman Young, also known as Bennie or Benny. Marian told me that as part of her research she routinely consults the many, many years of published Montreal city directories, the better to know where the subjects of her various studies lived in the city. The directory, in addition to disclosing the name and address of the citizenry, also listed occupation. Later, she very kindly sent me some screenshots from the directory pertaining to the Wisemans — MG’s maternal grandparents — and I was intrigued to see that their alphabetical neighbour — not their next-door neighbour, just adjacent to them in the listing — was one Duncan Wishart. He was, according to this inventory of citizens, the president of the Canadian Office Furniture Company.

This intrigued me. For one thing, the name Wishart — I’ve written about this before — occurs in MG’s story “Travellers Must Be Content;” you’ll recall it’s also one of the chapters in her short novel, Green Water, Green Sky. (A new edition has just been published in the UK by Daunt Books, with an introduction by Brandon Taylor.)

Aynsley Vogel took this picture of Green Water, Green Sky filling the window of the Daunt Bookshop in London.

Wishart is a pathetic gigolo, a conniver, a gay man who only stays afloat through the hospitality and kindness of the roster of women among whom he circulates, including Bonnie, a feckless, amoral American divorcee whose main obsession is the manipulation of her daughter, Flor. (My guess would be that MG invested Bonnie with qualities she observed in her own mother, Benedictine, but that is entirely speculative.)

Secondly, I was struck by Duncan Wishart’s involvement with the provisioning of office furniture. He seems to have been born into the business. He belonged to a branch of Canadian Wisharts — the name is neither common nor rare — that had come to roost in Manitoba (both in Winnipeg and round about Portage La Prairie) and in the Hamilton area; Duncan was born in Dundas, or nearby. The Wishart name was attached to a school and office supply company in Winnipeg in the 1890’s. The business was transferred first to Toronto, then to Montreal, which was when Duncan — he must have been reared with a princeling’s certainty of ascendancy to the throne — took up the reins.  The organization went through a couple of name changes before Canadian Office Furniture Co, stuck.

Round about the same time, also in Montreal, Percy N. Jacobson established the Office Equipment Company Canada. One can only suppose that Duncan and Percy must have been competitors, if not out-and-out rivals, fishing, as they both were, at the same local pond of office equipment.

I’ve written in the past about how, in her 1975 short story “In Youth Is Pleasure,” MG describes how her alter-ego, Linnet Muir, returned to Montreal after an absence of some years, tries to come to terms with her father’s mysterious disappearance by making investigative visits to a few of his male friends. One of them, his “literary Jewish friend,” is Quentin Keller. He’s a “jackass,” and Linnet recalls playing a small part in an amateur production of one of his plays, Forbearance. On April 26, 1932, Mavis Young, as then she was, took part in an evening of one-act plays presented by the Canadian Theatre Group. (Jacobson was a founding member.) The Montreal Gazette doesn’t say in which of three pieces she appeared, but safe to say it was Pity by P. N. Jacobson, and safe to say it was her walk-on role in that piece she was remembering when she handed the experience over to Linnet Muir more than 40 years later. I’ve speculated — again, that verb! — that her father, Stewart Young, who we know worked in furniture sales, might have been an employee of Percy Jacobson at Office Equipment Canada, and that this connection was her entree into that evening of one-act plays. Whether this was so or not I have no way of knowing — it’s not an unreasonable surmise, how else would a nine-year old girl have worked her way into sucking a situation? — and now I find myself wondering if the name Wishart, another player in the not overcrowded world of Montreal office furniture supply, might have been one that came up, say, round about the family dinner table if the conversation ever  turned to who said what about whom at work. (There was no chance that Wishart attended that evening of amateur play-giving at the YMCA; he was well past the possibility of play-going, having died, suddenly, on August 15, 1930, a few days after MG’s eighth birthday. He was sixty-five, and a bachelor, lifelong.

The Mtl. Star, August 16, 1930

You’ll understand, of course, that I make the point (snickeringly disingenuous) about bachelorhood to underscore the possibility that Duncan Wishart, like Wishart in “Travellers Must Be Content,” might have been gay. He might just as easily have not; there were all kinds of reasons why someone at that time and in that place might have eschewed the married state. Same sex attraction was but one of them, and mercy knows that aspect of the human condition often didn’t get in the way of people doing their best to lead “conventional” lives. (It still doesn’t. It astonishes me how many intelligent people, for the sake of mimicked normalcy, will willingly sustain such repression, suppression, oppression.) But even if Duncan’s homosexuality was suspected or known or hinted at among his contemporaries and colleagues in the small universe of office furniture sales, or the Anglican church, would such speculation or knowledge have entered the Young’s family realm? Could it have found its way into the sponge-like mind of the observant child Mavis? Fatuous question, utterly unknowable, but one must remark the strange coincidence, the business of the furniture, and the years-later assignment of the name; sometimes, of course, coincidence is just that: strange, accidental, not a consequence of contrivance.

It may not be accurate to say that Duncan Wishart, Anglican purveyor of office furniture, was litigious, exactly, but he was not shy of a court or legal proceeding. A number of times he sued (always successfully) clients who had tried to avoid paying bills, and he was the co-complainant, along with his sister, in a case that involved issues of inheritance and two family farms in Manitoba. His sister’s married name was Voltz. She lived in, I believe, Buffalo, New York, or possibly Paterson, New Jersey. One of her children was Hector Gordon. In the little bit of information available about him, I sense a strain of unhappiness. He tried to enlist in the U.S. army towards the end of the First World War but was declared unfit for active duty; he wound up serving in a secretarial capacity somewhere in Washington state. Late in 1918 — I have no idea why, but this is not the kind of thing that happens in families where all is tickety-boo and harmonious — he legally changed his name from Hector Gordon Voltz to Hector Gordon Wishart. Notary records indicate that, round about this same time, his uncle, Duncan Wishart, made an alteration to his will. (He did that rather often.)

There is no more trace of Hector Gordon Voltz or Wishart until September 5, 1921, when this article appeared in the Montreal Gazette; I append a facsimile of the headline, which is a bit awkwardly written. The business about the spilling tea and the scalded child refers to a story that followed the report concerning Hector; it was he, Hector, however, who was said to have been eating an apple after drinking a glass of milk, just before the fatal plunge.

Here’s the text:

Hector Gordon Wishart, 27 years of age, of 126 Durocher St., Secretary-Treasurer of the Canada Office Furniture Co., Ltd., of 243–245 Notre Dame St. West, was drowned while bathing in Lac l’Ashigan, twelve miles from Shawbridge, on Saturday evening. The body was recovered fifteen minutes after the accident and was brought to Montreal last night. Wishart and a friend, Martin Jensen Barford, had gone to Lac l’Ashigan to spend the holiday over Labour Day. They arrived at Shawbridge shortly before four o'clock and decided to walk to the lake. It was nearly six o'clock when they arrived. They had supper and later, being warm after their long walk, decided to have a swim. The two young men entered the water and in a few minutes Wishart sank. His friend plunged to the bottom after him and quickly found him and pulled him ashore. Wishart was dead.

The body was taken to the residence of friends with whom the two young men had been staying, and Dr. L. Labelle, of Saint-Jerome, coroner for the district, was notified. The coroner held an nquest yesterday morning. The coroner was unable to ascertain if Wishart had died of heart disease or if he have been taken with cramps caused by going into the water too soon after eating. A verdict of accidental drowning was returned.

The victim’s uncle, Duncan Wishart, president and manager of the Canada Office Furniture Co. Ltd., went to Lac l’Ashigan yesterday afternoon and the body was brought back to Montreal last night. While arrangements for the funeral were not completed last night, Mr. Duncan Wishart stated that the body of his nephew would be buried at Dundas. The victim’s mother, who is in Buffalo at present, was notified of the tragedy last night.

If I were to take a stab at filling in the gaps here — again, I show myself to be the King of Surmise — I would begin by wondering whether Hector the Hapless, unfit for military service, only good for stenography, might have followed in his uncle’s funny footsteps. It wouldn’t have been the first time such dangerous aberrance ran in the family. I might suggest that Uncle Duncan, sensing what was up, and feeling a sense of avuncular obligation, offered his nephew a way out of New Jersey — or was it Buffalo? — and a chance at a new life. And what of his vacation companion? Were there feelings more than usually tender between Hector and M. J. Barford? Who knows? Mr. Barford had come from Denmark, as we learn when we read the notices of his marriage a few years later. More often than not, a swimming buddy is merely a swimming buddy. No one will ever know the truth of it. We can only say for certain that Hector died young, and with a belly full of doctor-forfending apples. The obituary in the Buffalo papers made no mention of Uncle Duncan. It named the dead young man as Hector Gordon Voltz.

A few months later, Duncan Wishart visited a notary. Once again, he changed his will.

I hope that one day the mystery of what happened to Stewart Young, furniture salesman and Sunday painter, father of one of the great writers of the 20th century, will be solved. Those who have included what little is known of her father’s biography in articles about MG — in her obituaries and so on — have stated categorically that he died in 1932; of kidney disease, they sometimes say. He didn’t. On August 18, 1933, Stewart Young, a “designer” sailed from Montreal to Plymouth on the SS Ausonia. Four months later, his address listed as “c/o Salvation Army,” he sailed (occupation, “artist”) back again, this time on the Aquitania. The vessel arrived in New York on January 9, 1934. What happened to him then, well, that’s where the mystery begins. For me, at least.

Ok, that’s enough for now; more than enough, truth be told. I’ll leave you with two more speculative clippings, connected not to Wishart but to Wiseman. In past posts I’ve appended facsimiles of articles from the Montreal Star and Gazette that describe the petty crimes of boy named Benny Wiseman. This is, certainly, the very young Benedictine, the future Mrs. Young, who cross-dressed so convincingly that she is named in the 1911 census as a son of the Wiseman family. I believe this is the first time she was linked with something shady — January 8, 1910: the case of the mysterious toboggan.

But just a few days prior, December 28, 1909, Benny and Charles Wiseberg, freezing foundlings, are in the news, in the Star with their tale of woe and abandonment. Along comes the rabbi to whisk them away, and this was the first and last time any mention was ever made of the Wiseberg boys. Oh, come on. This is certainly Benedictine and her brother, Constant (or Constantine), playing at being orphans. They were both fond of disguise. They both a gift for pseudonyms. Wiseman to Wiseberg is not much a morphemic leap. Benny, Bennie, Benny. What a character. What a caution. Really and truly. Someone should write a book. Thanks for reading. And if you feel inclined to pre-order Montreal Standard Time, well, I thank you from the bottom of my speculating heart. xo, BR

Pre-order here!

https://www.vehiculepress.com/new.php