Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 16

The Lusty Month

May 1

3.38 a.m.

Today is my Friday, as we who work Wednesday - Sunday can never get enough of saying. Especially on a Sunday. It should be a busy day at the store, what with the Vancouver Marathon getting underway in a few hours, and what with the finishing line being a few blocks away. There’ll be lots of friends and family milling about, looking for healthy snacks and so on; probably some of the runners will come in afterwards as well, bedight with sweat and their registration numbers, needing something to bring the life back to their knees. Moth-balled in the trunk of my mind are many aspirations I’ve folded up in nearly new condition, but Marathoning is not one of them. I can say with some certainty that I’ll never appear in someone’s “lighter side of the news” column as the perky geezer who thumps 26 miles along the city pavements for the first time at three score and ten. I say this for the benefit of my future biographers who might be anticipating this happenstance, to round out their footnotes.

May Day usually comes and goes and round about May 4 I’ll realize that I forgot to back some unsuspecting soul into a corner and force on them my rendition of the Rogers and Hart classic “Mountain Greenery,” see above. It’s one of the great first of May songs. I loved it when I was a kid — there was sheet music in our house, which was how I knew it — and I can still remember reading over and over and not being able to get over the cleverness of the lyrics, the felicity of their inner workings.

In a mountain greenery,
Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together.
How-how-how-how-how we love sequestering
Where no pests are pestering
No dear momma holds us in tether
Mosquitoes here,
Won't bite you dear,
I'll let them sting, me on the finger!
Beans could get no keener reception in a beanery
Bless our mountain greenery,
Far from life's machinery
Bless our mountain greenery home!

At some point in every life we learn the word “sequester.” I’m glad this was my way in.

“Revenons a nos moutons,” is a French expression I also remember learning, at some station of the cross along the way; the precise when and where of it is lost to me now, and a good thing, too. Otherwise, you can be sure, I’d burden you with it, here. Were I a translator I’m not sure what bleating member of the idiomatic flock I’d settle on as the English equivalent of “Let’s get back to our sheep.” Your recommendations are welcome, bien entendu. Mavis Gallant is the object of scrutiny here, let’s find out where she’s grazing.

Yesterday — I think, I lose track, I only write these things, don’t read them — I wrote about dreams, which were an MG fascination, possibly even obsession. A propos, here’s an excerpt from a diary entry, one of a selection published in Slate in 1997.

August 14, 1997

In the supermarket of the Bon Marché department store, which is our local salon, I run into a neighbor with her 9-year-old son. He is back from a holiday, looking healthy, eating a cone. I ask if he had any interesting dreams while on vacation. He remembers one: “I had to do a lot of things I didn’t want to and I did them and at the end I was a saint.” A lesson for us all.

I love the idea of this encounter. MG was the great chronicler of the wise but sidelined child. I have no way of knowing this, but my intuition would be that she enjoyed meeting children, and that she took them seriously. The neighbour child wouldn’t have known who she was, one of the world’s great writers, she would have been the old lady, prying, interrupting his ice-cream licking. It was a fleeting encounter, one of many he’s had as he enters his middle years, and it would be unlikely that he’d remember it. Here’s what MG wrote a few days earlier. The day prior would have been her 75th birthday.

August 12

My birthday. What occurs on one’s birthday sets the tone for the next 12 months. So far, so splendid. The apartment is like a garden and smells of lilies and roses and even sweet peas. I had a successful tussle with French bureaucracy and left them smiling. (The trick is to say, “I knew this was going to make me miserable,” and just stand there, looking as agreeable as one can, under the circumstances.) My German publisher has issued a friendly press release, announcing my birth date, with a photograph in which I look nothing so much as a boiled potato with earrings. Inland Revenue, the British income tax, has refunded me a sum I never expected to see again. I shall be dining at a place where there aren’t too many bright lights, so that I can see the August shooting stars. That ought to make for a fine year.

She refers to the Pleiades meteor showers; Pleiades, like Marathon, one of the many, sturdy Greek rivets that hold together our hic et nunc quotidian. The Pleiades fireworks would be one of the reasons we members of the August 11 club feel blessed, that year after year a light show, sometimes spectacular, sometimes subtle, is put on for our benefit. As, of course, we feel. Living in the country in Manitoba, away from city lights, I used to make it a point to stay up late — i.e. until the time I now get up — so I could stand outside and stare up and count the shooting stars, every one a blessing, a wish granted. But where are our sheep? What has this to do with May 1? Ah. Here’s the link, from that same brace of diary entries.

August 15, 1997

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Assumption and the whole of Catholic Europe will shut down its cities and make for mountains and beaches. Any tourist caught in Madrid, Vienna, Rome, or Paris on a 15th of August can vouch for what “empty city” means. After the 15th, summer declines. It is the last long weekend until the 1st of November, the end of the best of the year that began with May Day. I shall try not to mope steadily between the 16th of August, 1997, and the 1st of May, 1998, but it won’t be easy.

In a long interview published in Granta Magazine, with Jhumpa Lahiri, MG talks about her diaries, how when she left Montreal in 1950, she burned most of what she’d written to date, to symbolize the start of a new life, how she kept regular track of her comings and goings as she traveled around Europe, and as she settled into her routine of half-time Paris, half-time Menton and then, finally, full-time at 14, rue Jean Ferrandi. She said she stopped journal keeping round about 2000; stopped as a regular habit. I love the excerpts published in Slate — as I do those in The New Yorker, Queen’s Quarterly, Paris Review, Antaeus — but these have a different sound to them, slightly. They seem occasion-driven, not written so much for the self as for an audience of readers. Which is, of course, exactly what I’ doing here in these circular wanderings, trusting the sheep to to dogs and to luck.

Wandering some more, but still with the grazing flock in mind, bear with me, I note that yesterday, April 30, was the 20th anniversary of the publication of Carol Shields’s final novel, Unless. Reta, a writer and translator, who counts on language to get her through, as an ordering principle in the universe, is unable to make sense of a family tragedy. Her daughter, Nora, has undergo a tectonic shift, her foundations crumbled, has left home, is spending her days sitting under a tree in the Toronto city core, holding a sign that says Goodness. How and why this happened preoccupy Reta, as, of course, they would. In Unless is also a debt to the Greeks: it’s a re-telling, after a fashion, of the Demeter and Persephone story, a constellation of unhappiness and grief, seen from the ground at the beginning of our present millennium.

The writer and critic Marta Dvorak, another August 11 birthday, lives in Paris. She’s written widely and deeply about both MG and Carol Shields. In Mavis Gallant, The Eye and the Ear, she makes a passing reference to having lunch in Paris with Carol and her husband, Don — the occasion was a French production of Carol’s play Thirteen Hands — and to a subsequent email exchange in which Carol said that the two writers upon whom she and her daughters conferred god-like status were Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Divine Mavis, Divine Alice.

But wait. The sheep are calling us home. Here’s a passage from Unless where several strands — birthdays, Paris, and May Day — come together.

My daughter Nora’s birthday, the first of May, was coming up in a week’s time, and she longed to have a beautiful and serious scarf. She had never had a scarf in all her seventeen years, not unless you count the woollen mufflers she wore on the school bus, but since her grade-twelve class trip to Paris, she had been talking about the scarves that every chick Frenchwoman wears as part of her wardrobe. These scarves, so artfully draped, were silk, nothing else would do, and their colours shocked and awakened the dreariest of clothes, the wilted navy blazers that Frenchwomen wear or those cheap black cardigans they try to get away with.

and later

Sunlight fell with a thud on streets that Norah would never walk down, the stupid, dumb, dead sun. Her birthdays would go on without her, the first of May, ten years from now, or twenty. Somehow she had encountered a surfeit of what the world offered, and had taken an overdose she is not going to be able to survive.

I knew Carol Shields just a little. There are many, many people who had the chance to meet her and who, like me, had the unwarranted feeling of knowing her well. She brought that kind of attention and warmth and humour — she was very funny — to the conversation. I met her when I interviewed her, just after the publication of her novel — it’s one of my favourites — The Republic of Love. It’s one of the most perceptive portraits of Winnipeg you’ll ever hope to find — mind, it’s the Winnipeg of a quarter century back — and she writes fondly of radio, too. She was, and is, divine.

I hope I’m not misspeaking here, don’t have a copy of The Republic of Love hand to check, but I recall there’s a moment when someone drops dead while running a marathon. This marathon has to end now, because the other is about to begin, and I need to get to the store and do what I can in the name of readiness. Thanks for reading, happy May Day, a la prochaine, xo, B

P.S. Speaking of goddesses: