Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 17

Life is grand and tickety-boo, look who's turned a hundred and two

Myself, looking atypically dateable, with an unknown sign language interpreter or possibly mime

Can’t for the life of me say when or where this photo was taken. Mid-90’s? In Vancouver, for sure. Look like I might be conducting a choir or leading a prayer service but more likely was officiating at something less musical, more secular. A conference of some kind. One of the many international AIDS confabs that were then current? Seems about right. It was an event where ASL interpretation was offered, that’s for sure; at least, I think that’s what that handsome photo bomber — hello, sailor! — is up to. What was I doing there, wherever, whatever it was? What did I say? Why was I asked? How was I ever so skinny? What was going through my head that I thought it was a good idea to wear bracelets? Why did no one take me aside and have a word? This picture — how did I get it? who sent it? — is the only evidence I have that I took up space in that forgotten somewhere. It surfaced the other day from my digital crypt when I had to locate a graven image of myself to send off for professional reasons. Thought ever so briefly about using this but, well, you know, twixt then and now time has been busy being unkind. Resorted instead to facial facsimiles of more recent vintage, all featuring wattles and chins that could be useful on Sesame Street on those days when they want to highlight the number four.

I have a lot of respect for people — they’re rare — who resist cameras, their invasive imperatives, the preferential treatment they give to some, the dunning slights they disburse to others. The assumption that one is happy, is willing to put up with portraiture, to smile about it, and then to share the results, is so deeply ingrained that just saying no requires strength of character and conviction. (Who’s the novelist, French or Quebecois, who is never photographed? Ach. Something else I forget, must find out.)

Margaret Crosland — NOT the Canadian figure skater from the 50’s — boasts a bibliography of 75 titles. She’s credited as translator of many books, in many genres, from the French and Italian, and as the author of her own original works, most of them biographical or critical studies, especially of such seminal 20th-century French creatives as Edith Piaf, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, and, more than once, Colette. Her first book — I’ve ordered a copy, can’t wait for it to arrive from a book dealer in Wales — was an anthology of memorable wedding proposals. Of all things, I feel the need to add; but then, why not? She wrote survey guides for opera and ballet, wrote a critical study of Ravel, wrote poems, too, many of them, very accomplished, especially at the beginning of her career, the mid-forties.

I have not inspected all those many titles, far from it, but, given the evidence of the dozen or so I’ve managed to assemble, I feel secure in saying Margaret Crosland was someone who, if pressed by her publisher to provide a photo for book jacket or publicity purposes, demurred. None is so decorated. This is one of two photos of Margaret Crosland I’ve been able to discover; at least, I think this is her. The last I made an attribution without careful verification it turned out I’d assigned another identity to Catherine Deneuve. Catherine Deneuve, I’m persuaded, this is not.

potentially Margaret Crosland

As editor and translator, Miss Crosland also published at least one title, this one —

under the nom de plume Leonard de Saint-Yves. This would have been in the mid-50’s. She set aside any considerations of disguise for her later writings about De Sade; perhaps the Lady Chatterly trial meant, in her Leonard de Saint-Yves days, that she didn’t want to risk the taint of association.

I’m quite curious about Margaret Crosland, the more so because it’s so damn difficult to find out anything about her. Perhaps she spent enough time working as a biographer that she developed an aversion to the idea of anyone looking under the rock of her reasons, took care to cover her traces, made sure to splash across plenty of creeks to obliterate the scent and fool the baying pack of hounds. Given her profession, she was well-equipped for such camouflage: the detective who understands better than anyone how to pull off the perfect crime. Year after year she published books, many, many. She must have given interviews about them, from time to time, but, if so, I’ve not found any. There are no profiles, no puff pieces about her taste in cardigans or decor, no appearance on Desert Island Discs. Effectively — nothing. Here and there are traces. Her father was Leonard; he wrote a couple of mathematics textbooks and in 1913 was listed in this Directory of School Masters.

Her mother was Beatrice, nee Wainwright. Is she the same Beatrice Crosland who’s mentioned in a Huddersfield newspaper from the 1890’s who was the fortune teller at a parish carnival? Maybe. Margaret was married in 1950 to Max Denis, a French national; the marriage was dissolved in 1959. About Max I can find nothing. Is he the same Max Denis who played a small role in 1980 in the seemingly lamentable French flick called Cauchemar? One doubts it. Their son, Patrick Leonard Dagobert Denis, was born in 1956. THAT’s an easy name to check. He turns up as a Lloyd’s underwriter, and then as a corporate director for a few different agencies, now no longer current. For a stretch of time, Margaret’s address was listed as “The Long Croft, Upper Hartfield, Sussex, England.” The image that google provides when prompted with that name is this, but it might be the home of Catherine Deneuve, for all I can say. Looks pretty posh.

Most significantly, on this particular day, is Margaret Crosland’s date of birth: June 17, 1920. I can find no evidence of her passing. If she remains among the quick, Margaret Crosland today turned 102, which puts her Olivia De Havilland territory: a remarkable run.

My attention was drawn to Margaret Crosland when I read Mavis Gallant’s (MG) review of her 1973 biography Colette: The Difficulty of Loving. It was published in the New York Times Book Review, and reprinted in Paris Notebooks. Anatole Broyard also reviewed The Difficulty of Loving in the arts section of the NYT, December 27, 1973. He opened up with: “Margaret Crosland has done something quite extraordinary in this book: She has very nearly succeeded in making Colette boring. In fact, I'm not sure that she hasn't.”

MG, writing earlier in that same month and year, was kinder, by far. “It has remained to an Englishwoman, Margaret Crosland, to produce the best work to date about Colette. Miss Crosland must have been thoroughly immersed in her subject, for the book seems to have been written by someone thinking in French—not only the occasional turn of phrase, but the turn of mind.” Read the whole review here, or, as noted, in Paris Notebooks.

NY Times Book Review, MG on Crosland

If you could make time for only one biography of Colette, in English, you’d probably want to opt for Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh, from 1999, which MG also reviewed for NYT, but Margaret Crosland’s is nothing if not insightful, informative, and elegantly written. She had, what’s more, the benefit and advantage of having actually met Colette; there can’t be so very many people alive today who can make the same claim.

The last time I wrote, two days back, I addressed the question raised by several readers of this MG tribute diary pertaining to her correspondence with her friend Barbara Kilvert. Those queries came in response to an interview with her son, Ian.

Ian Kilvert Interview

Some of you wondered whether Ian, to whom those letters between MG and Barbara were entrusted after his mother’s death in 1998, might publish them, in whole or in part? With that possibility in mind, read this excerpt from MG’s 1973 review of Crosland’s biography. Here, she writes about Colette’s deep but difficult relationship with her mother, with the legendary “Sido.”

“The person to whom Colette remained a child is someone we hardly know about, for the “Sido” of literature is transformed, half imagined. One of Sido's sons, Léo, was never able to make a life for himself as a man; his mind and emotions remained in childhood, in Sido's garden. After Sido's death her elder son, Colette's half‐brother, who was a doctor, burned the 2,000‐odd letters Colette had written their mother. Probably the too‐loving, too‐powerful mother could never be shared. ‘Sido's domination of the family was the most dangerous of all because it was insidious, not authoritarian,’ Miss Crosland explains.”

The cleansing fire is one way, unequivocal, of dealing with the issue of personal letters and how they might be used and interpreted or misconstrued by future generations of looky-loos, like me.

Letters play an important part in the Margaret Crosland story, too. For all her seeming reticence, there’s one quite extensive and really fascinating account of an important and formative period of Crosland’s life; it can be found in Elspeth Cameron’s foot-breaker of a biography, from 1994, Earle Birney: A Life.

Margaret was 25, a published poet and working in the antiquarian book trade, when she and Birney met in 1944. Birney, with the army, was stationed in London. Chapter 14, “That Sea Called Time,” is largely devoted to the story of their affair which was, by both their accounts, extremely heated, passionate in the way that love in the time of war — read any novel by Mary Wesley — can be. It’s a terrific story, not least because of the approving involvement, an ocean away, of Birney’s wife, Esther, who put up with and condoned, though not always, the poet’s dalliances which were, well, frequent. (Having read in Elspeth Cameron’s biography the letter Esther wrote Earle when she’d finally had enough and was giving him the heave-ho has forever changed my feelings for the Sylvia Hotel, a two-minute walk from my apartment, which was where she was hunkered down when she took up her pen and poured her heart out, I suppose on hotel stationery. It’s as magnificent a “fuck you” as ever you’ll read.)

About the affair, and its lingering aftermath, I’ll say no more — it is the lady’s birthday, after all — except to add that Elspeth Cameron’s book, almost 30 years after is publication, remains engaging. I recommend it, heartily. I’ll also remark, because it’s germane, that much important information about the Birney - Crosland relationship came from one of the horse’s mouths, from Margaret Crosland herself. I contacted Elspeth Cameron to ask her about it — I think she won’t mind that I disclose that here — and she remembered visiting her, Crosland, at her house in, at that time, Tunbridge Wells. The room was strewn with papers: she was working on a book. That she, Miss Crosland, was so open in her replies to what were necessarily personal, intimate questions, doesn’t quite jibe with the idea I’ve formed of her as someone who closely and actively has guarded her privacy. You don’t take away the sense that Margaret Crosland was out for vengeance, but agreed to tell her story in the interests of an accurate, representative public record. She doesn’t come off as at all embittered, speaks of Birney and that time with as much fondness as candour.

Elspeth Cameron couldn’t have written her book were it not for the permission granted her by the estate — it’s managed by Birney’s last partner, now an Ontario Superior Court judge, Madame Justice Wailan Low — to explore and quote from the vast archives of Birney papers kept by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. These include the correspondence between EB and MC, at least that portion of it that was Birney’s to turn over when he made the decision to sell his papers. I haven’t been able to find out to whom Margaret Crosland, in turn, subsequently auctioned off her cache of Birney material — turnaround is fair play — including personal correspondence. Setting aside the adage about sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander, Birney took umbrage at this, saw it as a betrayal, and broke off contact with her; they had stayed in touch — fondly, by Elspeth Cameron’s account — for many years. Here’s a photo of a photo, the only other snapshot I’ve seen of the much-published Margaret Crosland. It dates from a visit to the UK in 1953 when Birney (far left) and Esther (next to him) got together with some friends, including Margaret (far right) and her husband, Max Denis, just behind her, eyes closed, several chins.

photo from Earle Birney: A Life, by Elspeth Cameron, Viking Penguin, 1994

The moral of the story is that letters, like all the best medicines, are potent and require careful handling. Their use should only be prescribed after ensuring all other viable options have been tried and found wanting. I end by wishing Margaret Crosland many happy returns, and while “many more” would be a wish too fatuous for anyone as intelligent as she, great happiness for whatever time remains. Thanks for reading, xo, B

*************************************************************************************************************

CROSLAND, Margaret, 1920-

PERSONAL: Born June 17, 1920, in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, England; daughter of Leonard and Beatrice Masterman (Wainwright) Crosland; married Max Denis, 1950 (divorced, 1959); children: Patrick Leonard Dagobert. Education: University of London, B.A. (honors), 1941. Politics: Labour Party. Religion: Church of England. Home: The Long Croft, Upper Hartfield, Sussex, England.