Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 24

a few more words as I take down my tent, peg by peg, pole by pole

Went to the liquor store after work. Bought a bottle of cheap sauvignon blanc; cheap, as these things go. The wine was organic, also Chilean: two possibilities to which I will never be able to lay claim. Let us observe a moment of silence to mark and to mourn this certainty.

The label is decorated with a bicycle, God knows why. Made me think, a bit queasily, of how, years ago — not an excuse, I was even then well and truly old enough to know better — I rode home from a dinner party on my bike, quite a few sheets to the wind, and had a near collision with a raccoon traversing the road. It escaped, unscathed: as I was falling towards the pavement it was looking over its shoulder, not out of concern; our eyes briefly locked. I think I saw its lips form the word “asshole,” but I could be wrong on that count, as on so many others. I drove my jawbone into my ear canal, flayed most of the skin from my forearms, and the thick scar on my chin is a reminder of my intemperateness (also of the cavalier instincts of raccoons when it comes to street crossing) whenever I shave, which is to say, every day. The story came with a moral: I had to abandon either drinking or bicycling. As noted, I bought a bottle of wine, sauvignon blanc, organic, Chilean, cheap.

“That’ll be 19.54,” said the woman at the till.

“Really?” I trilled.

She didn’t deign to reply, perhaps because she thought I was going to dispute the price or make some tiresome, unanswerable remark about inflation. She nodded at the figure on the little monitor that allows the customer to see the price. 19.54. It was unequivocal, not that I was inclined to equivocate.

“Oh, wow,” I said.

The clerk had about her the world-weary aura of someone who deals with too many inebriates before noon, and with too many juveniles intent on pulling off a fast one. An experienced hand at encounters just like this, she could tell that I, in the tiresome way of the garrulous elderly who have nothing better to do than to waste the time of minimum wage workers and irritate those standing on line waiting for them to either to shut up or die, was angling to impart some shaggy dog tale. She wasn’t wrong. I was primed to relate how odd and yet how timely a total that was, 19.54, owing to what I’d been thinking about, and was planning to write, but I could sense that she could sense that whatever intelligence I was about to divulge was something about which she could not have given a cold, hard crap, so I had the sense to shut up and keep it to myself. If she changes her mind, she’ll be able to read all about it in what follows. Here, I tell all. Please take a moment to gird your loins, possibly with Kevlar.

Mavis Gallant (MG) had a genius for friendship. So I think, and I’ve said so before. This perception was an aspect of her being that, along with her literary brilliance, snagged my attention when I began to write about her. These human traits interest me, in part, because they are exotic, foreign; neither is a boon — I take them to be boons — with which I was deeded. I am a stranger, lifelong, not only to writerly insight and innovation, but also to an affinity for making and keeping friends. My mother must have spent the entirely of her pregnancy smoking and watching Garbo movies, for my earliest memory is of wanting to be admired but at the same time wanting desperately to be alone. This has never left me. 90 minutes of human company is all I can take. I wish it were otherwise. Oh, Bill. Liar liar pants on fire. You wish no such thing. Hermitry. Asceticism. Such is your nature. You might as well wish for hazel eyes, a full head of hair, or size 13 feet. You feel now as you’ve felt for nigh on three score years and ten: 90 minutes of someone else saying what they think is plenty.

Speaking of full heads of hair, Neil Besner, who for many years taught English at the University of Winnipeg and who wrote the first-ever PhD dissertation on MG, and whom I interviewed perhaps six weeks ago, was recently in Vancouver. We got together — for 90 minutes, perfect! — at the Sylvia Hotel, and talked about MG, whom he knew and met on a number of occasions. We spoke also about the writer who has more latterly been occupying his research and writing life, the American poet (with Nova Scotia antecedents) Elizabeth Bishop. Neil grew up, in large measure, in Brazil — read his excellent new memoir, Fishing with Tardelli for the whole story — and Bishop moved there in 1951.

Elizabeth Bishop and MG both had long histories with The New Yorker. In 2006, in her appealingly cluttered office, I interviewed Alice Quinn, then the poetry editor of the magazine, about her work on a collection of Bishop oddments and uncompleted poems, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. Among the fragments there gathered is this:

Suicide of a Moderate Dictator

This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;
leak from the dangling telephone earphones
sapping the festooned switchboards' strength;
fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,
—the vague, slight unremarkable contents
of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers
like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,
crocking the way the unfocused photographs
of crooked faces do that soil our coats,
our tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths.

Today's a day when those who work
are idling. Those who played must work
and hurry, too, to get it done,
with little dignity or none.
The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters
crash down. But anyway, in the night
the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets
and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed
even to the first floors of apartment houses.

This is a day that's beautiful as well,
and warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw
the dogs being walked along the famous beach
as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,
leaving their paw prints draining in the wet.
The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,
segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.
At eight two little boys were flying kites.

This is an unusual poem for Bishop, who didn’t typically gravitate — in her poetry, at least — to overtly political themes. The politician in question was the Brazilian president, Getulio Vargas. The front page of the NYT, August 25, 1954.

It was sensational news: a world leader who took his own life, who left behind a passionate explanatory note that, within hours of his death, was broadcast to the nation. MG, a political animal, a devourer of the news, would surely have found it gripping, and when she heard or read how Vargas, on August 24, 1954, had shot himself through the heart, I wonder if she thought of Hedda Gabler. She knew her Ibsen. It was surely A Doll’s House she was remembering when she created the character of Nora in “Bernadette,” her study of a Montreal, Duplessis-era marriage —the ominously named Knights — built on a foundation of sand; and in “Virus X,” Lottie, newly arrived in Paris from Winnipeg, in France to pursue graduate studies in sociology, attends an Ibsen revival starring Danièle Delorme at the Comédie-Caumartin. The play isn’t named, but it would have been A Doll’s House. Learning that Vargas pumped a bullet into his left chest — for a long time, it may still be the case, the pistol he used and the pyjamas he was wearing, see above, were part of a museum display dedicated to his life and accomplishments — she would probably have thought of how Hedda Gabler encourages Eilert Lovborg to make for himself a beautiful death, an honourable death, to shoot himself, not in the temple, but through the heart. Lovborg’s eventual death, by a gunshot, is neither deliberately self-inflicted nor through the heart, but Hedda has a brief transcendent moment of believing it was so.

I would suppose that MG read, and was thrilled by, this review, published in the New York Times Book Review, on February 21, 1954. The reviewer, Elizabeth Bowen, was always someone MG named when she was asked what writers she most admired; she would often cite The House in Paris as one of her all-time favourites. And Virginia Woolf, that bold experimenter, that daring innovator, was, along with Colette, Katherine Mansfield, and Proust, one of the stars MG steered by. Harcourt, Brace published A Writer’s Diary in the U.S. in 1954; it appeared in the U.K. in 1953, via the Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s diaries (also her letters) in their (more or less) entirety have been available for, what, forty years now; this introductory selection, edited by Leonard, was a revelation, was the first time the public was accorded an opportunity to see into the quotidian life — the life of the mind, the life of the press, the life of her friends and families, the life of her marriage, the life of her madness — of this writer whose work struck many readers as chilly, remote, difficult, abstruse. She was shrewd, funny, gossipy, insecure: a delight.

The last time I wrote here — August 14, ten days ago — was to flag and fete the appearance, online, in The New Yorker, of some remarkably moving and intimate excerpts from MG’s diary from — how could it be any other year? — 1954. This publication was in honour of the hundredth anniversary of her birth, b. 08/11/1922. MG, indefatigable, always writing, kept her journals for 50 years. The New Yorker — as have perhaps half-a-dozen other publications — published excerpts from them, now and again, most notably her detailed account of the student riots in Paris in 1968 and, in 2012, what were called “The Hunger Diaries,” her edge-of-your-seat account of an extremely lean time in Spain, round about 1952. If you haven’t read them, do, and then read — or read at the same time — her classic story, from 1960, “When We Were Nearly Young.” They are highly complementary.

Accompanying “The Hunger Diaries,” was an interview between The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (she spent part of her childhood in Vancouver, as it turns out, not that this has any bearing on anything, but noting a Canadian connection, however remote and tenuous, is something Canadians of my generation love to do, I’ve never been clear on why, I suppose we imagine it gives us some kind of foothold) and Steven Barclay, the principal (oh, Bill, just say eponymous, you know you want to) of a gold-plated (David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman, etc.) speaker’s bureau, The Steven Barclay Agency and a friend / helpmate of MG. (What his Canadian connections might be — apart from his friendship with the woman who animates this diary — I have no idea.) The interview — again, I’ve covered this, I apologize for the repetition, and offer this brief recap for the benefit of anyone who might be new to this — announced the publication, foreseen for 2014, of MG’s diaries from the 50’s and 60’s. Presumably, the extract that appeared on August 14 of this year — again, online, not in the print edition of the magazine — would have been included therein. That those diaries never appeared was the reason I started writing my own diary; I was curious as to why. That “Don’t Describe It, Remember It,” was published is an encouraging sign that the differences between MG’s literary executor and the consortium announced a decade ago — Bloomsbury in the UK, Knopf in the US, and McClelland and Stewart in Canada — might be, in the long term, soluble. I hope so, and I daresay I’m not alone. Let me hoist my flagon of cheap, yet also organic, Chilean sauvignon blanc — there are no raccoons in my little room, also no bicycles — and offer a toast to dialogue, co-operation, and to the certainty that no writer survives in the absence of her readers, and that writing like we read on August 14, online, in The New Yorker, is a regular gill net — or do I mean purse seine, my fisheries knowledge is no longer what it was — to draw in a new and eager audience.

There was so much I loved about those diary extracts. First of all, there was the selection itself, which I suppose was the work of Ms. Treisman — a guess on my part, but not outlandish. They’re beautifully organized, geographically — London, Venice, Dubrovnik, Paris — and temporally, winter through fall. MG had not, at this time, established herself in Paris. She was wandering, she was experimenting, she was testing freedom and its limits. She had already had considerable success as a writer, but she was still coming into her own. My God, how she writes, how she invests in place, in weather, in colour, in art, in chance encounters, in the body, in love, in disappointment, in tragedy, a combination of the analytical and the instinctual, a sort of synesthetically fired accumulation of apercus. I have only one hat, it’s a horrible thing, nothing could persuade me to eat it, but I’d be willing to bet a kidney — working hard to process the Chilean sauvignon blanc, organic and cheap — that MG had, by the time she was writing what appears in those celebrate-the-birthday excerpts, read and re-read A Writer’s Diary. I say this without benefit of having read what came before, in her diaries, I mean, but I suspect that what she’s doing is, with Woolf as an example, challenging, for herself, the borders of the diary, imagining it as a document that will one day be sought after and read and evaluated. That Woolf — who is specifically invoked, likewise Mansfield — did this there can be no doubt. MG wrote what she wrote, she must have done so, my every instinct insists on it, in the full expectation that it would one day have, for readers, value; that it would be seen, be wondered at, be spoken of, be approved. In interviews, and in occasional stories, MG alludes to how someone — usually a mother — invades a child’s privacy by reading diaries or other private papers. This feels like a personal record, but it also feels stylistically deliberate. I simply can’t believe that she didn’t intend, in the long run, for what she wrote to be read. This is not the writing of someone whose first intention is concealment.

I had an email from the poet Rhonda Batchelor Lillard; you might remember, if you are a regular reader, that it was Rhonda who, she’s not sure how, found herself in possession of MG’s copy of Ulysses, from the 40’s: a VERY precious artifact. Rhonda has been reading through the great, big, Bible-sized volume of MG’s Collected Stories (1996). The stories are grouped by date or theme; the penultimate suite of four stories is, “Édourad, Juliette, Lena.” All were written in 1985, which is to say they date from MG’s “late maturity.” They are among her last stories, also among her most poignant. Rhonda, possessed of sharp eyes, pointed out a typo in the running title: you can see it above. What should be “Édouard,” appears, once, as “Éedouard.” This is not the case in my edition. The difference seems to be in country of origin. Collected Stories is how they were published in the U.S.'; the Canadian version was accurately called Selected Stories. So — a bibliographic oddity. I hope MG never twigged to the error — I’m sure she would have been furious.

There’s something else to pay attention to here. In the same way that you can read “The Hunger Diaries,” as a gloss to the story “When We Were Nearly Young,” “Don’t Describe It, Remember It,” the latest diary publication, offers a telling and touching optic on the quartet of stories about Édouard, Juliette, and Lena. Edouard marries Magdalena, known as Lena, to give her a French name and to save her from deportation, from France, to the camps during the Second World War. Lena is an enthusiastic Catholic convert. As far as she is concerned, they are married forever, even though it’s a marriage of convenience (like Auden’s to Erika Mann), and even though they separate and Édouard joins the resistance. In London, during the war, Edouard meets Juliette, a young French woman whose father is a mover and shaker in the resistance. They fall in love. A triangle is established. Édouard and Lena have staked a claim to each other but there’s the presence of Lena, who won’t grant a divorce. They muddle along. I won’t spoil your pleasure if you haven’t read them; suffice it to say, a kind of resolution is reached. It’s also fun to read MG writing, as she did very well, in the first person with a male (Édouard) as the narrator.

I’d read these stories, but years ago; the details were lost to me. Alerted by Rhonda to the slight aberration in the running title — Éedourad where Édouard should be — I looked at them again, fresh from the amazement the 1954 diary excerpts, fresh from having read MG’s searing account of her thwarted love affair with “JH.” Again — I won’t ruin the experience of reading them if you haven’t by offering more details, save to say, it’s hanky-worthy. “JH” is not identified in The New Yorker August 14 online publication, and I assume that it was MG herself who required that discretion when the diaries were first being prepared; so, respecting that, I won’t name him. I think anyone with a will to find out can do so; similarly, the other woman, his wife, identified by the initial U. He was — this is not too much to reveal — a literary man, a writer and translator. Lena, also, in MG’s fiction, is a translator. What I think — I could be miles off base — is that, thirty years after her disastrous affair, remember that time when she was physically debilitated and psychically depleted, MG used her alchemical wizardry, applied imagination to memory and observation, and wrote a wonderfully tender, forgiving, elegiac set of stories that, perhaps, were a way of making peace with her own past. In the final story of the suite, in “Lena,” Édouard describes the one meeting between his two wives. I’m hoisting this from an online version of the story, apologies for the fragment at the end…

And then, a few pages later, when they’re having lunch at Michelin listed restaurant in Fontainebleau — not far, no doubt, from the grave of Katherine Mansfield —

In 1955, MG published only one story: a kind of gap year. 1954 took its toll, or so I would suppose. No one could read her recently published diary entries — powerful, angry, mournful — and then this story, and the set of stories to which it belongs, with its specific reference, not accidental, to September of that same year, 1954, and not understand that there’s a link. Is it necessary? No. Absolutely not, in the same way that the two discrete pieces of land separated by a body of water have their own value and integrity and need never have anything to do with each other, but the implementation of a bridge, a ferry, brings them each into a different perspective. It turns out they have quite a lot to say to one another, given the chance for contact. One enhances the other. The fiction is the fiction. The diaries are the diaries. They are both the work of a master writer who understood that, whatever the conveyance of an idea, there was only one way to do it honourably, to make it beautiful, to get it right, and that was to open the heart to anything, to everything, and to put the bullet there yourself. Thanks for reading, xo, B