Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: The Late Bill Richardson Edition

The Pity of Parties, Part 1

The essentially unsavoury character of my ghostly collaborator Artist is revealed in this commissioned image of “child on a swing in the style of Kate Greenaway.”

(I’d written what follows, was just about to hit the “Publish” tab when I saw, via the New York Times, that Bill Richardson — the diplomat, ex-Governor of New Mexico — has died aged 75. It gives one pause when the death of someone with whom one shares nothing but a name is so prominently announced. I confess I paused and took my pulse. For a short time, years back, the few books I’ve written that were published in the States sold well in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and I’ve often wondered how many readers could simply not credit that their favourite son would sink so low as to churn out such drivel. And I used to feel a slight frisson during his time as the US Ambassador to the UN when I’d be eating my Cheerios of a morning, listening to the radio, and learn that I was staring down Saddam Hussein. Not to make light of Mr. Richardson’s passing — he had a very distinguished career — but, if you read through this meander, you’ll guess why this news, on this weekend, is, for me, even weirder than it might be, otherwise.)

Labour Day Weekend. I’ll post this entry — which has more to do with Mavis Gallant than is at first apparent — in several portions, as time and will allow.

Hot here in middle Canada, temperatures 12 degrees above “normal.” Visiting grandchildren have descended on the neighbours, shrill voiced, fair-haired animating forces for a backyard swing that’s more usually the plaything of the wind which, today, would be no competition for the young visitors. Very still this morning. Smoke from the wildfires, little blonde kids indifferent to the grainy particulate, laughing, pumping their legs, rising high in the haze. I hanker for that easy, thoughtless mobility.

Here’s “The Swing,” the double page spread from my mother’s copy of R. L. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, illustrations by Eulalie, whose take on the poem was more wholesome than that of Artist, above.

The monomymic Eulalie was Eulalie Banks who died in 1999 at the age of 104.

That edition of A Childs’ Garden was published in 1929, Platt and Munk, New York. It’s inscribed, in what I think is my grandmother’s hand, “To Peggy, Merry Christmas, Patricia, 1933.” They lived in Calgary, then: 2102 - 7th Street W. Peggy — she would have been 6 that Christmas — was my mother; Patricia her older-by-six-years sister.

I recently found, in a box of family stuff, Pat’s autograph book, its pages (buff, pink, and teal) inscribed ninety years ago by various school chums. Here are a few facsimiles, fond rhymes, probably not original, some with those corny “yours till Niagara falls” salutations.

Amazing that this has survived when so much has been lost. Do any of the signatories survive? They would be well into their centenarian experience, but that’s far from unusual, now. What does one do with a document like this? I feel like it has some value beyond the familial and the sentimental — I don’t mean monetary — but quite what might be the apt depository I can’t say. Suggestions welcome.

Where was I? Ah yes, I was admiring and envying the easy, reflexive, and wholly unconsidered mobility of the children on the swing next door. I watch them and think not so much, “Lord, that looks like fun,” as “My God, that would hurt.”

A few days back, I traveled to the next town over to visit the excellent physiotherapist, the better to subdue the ongoing coup in my lower back. Well. It’s more a cluck than a coo. This unassailable pain is chickens coming home to roost; this is what hatches from all those years of poor maintenance, of sedentary desk jockeying, of lazy slouching. I have total recall when it comes to humiliation, and vividly remember Mrs. Wincure, my third grade teacher, standing by my desk (which was always used as an example when a messy workstation had to be found) and telling me not to slouch, to sit up straight. I would, but only in the shortest of terms. “And there he goes,” she would say, as I slowly began to wilt.

I should have listened to Mrs. W. (where is she now?) and all the many other apostles of posture I’ve met over the years. As sitting, for now, has become an impossibility, here’s a photo of my improvised standing desk, an inspired combo of reference tool and kitchen counter.

I love the OED. If I had the wherewithal and the shelf space I’d track down a good second hand run of the 20-volume set. I found the boxed, two-volume compact edition pictured above at a used bookstore in Winnipeg. The price was excellent and I was able to haggle it down by a few bucks owing to the sad absence of the ocular aid that ought to have been in the little top drawer. This past week, acquiring analgesics, I thought to ask in our village drugstore — very selectively curated — if they happened to have a magnifier. They did.

In my last missive, I wrote about Mavis Gallant (MG) and about how she liked to get out of town, sometimes on assignment (1944 - 1950) for The Montreal Standard. She traveled to Péribonka, 6 hours (probably longer, then) north of Montreal, in the Lac St. Jean region, to write about Maria Chapdelaine, the famous novel set there by Louis Hémon’. I wrote about Hémon’s death on the CPR tracks near North Bay, and about how it was reported that he was traveling with a “vagabond companion.” It was really that word, vagabond, that inspired the acquisition of the magnifying glass. I wanted to be able to look it up, to trace its etymology the old-fashioned way, in the OED, but the microprint, sans glass, made such research impossible. Hence, my Holmesian acquisition (I should have asked if they had a meerschaum pipe and a deerstalker hat to round out the look.)

In addition to the root reasons of “vagabond,” I was also trying, owing to MG’s writing on Maria Chapdelaine, to find out about the particulars of the life of Henri Paul. He was the photographer who accompanied MG on that Saguenay saga. Here are the notes I took, exactly as I jotted them down, unrefined and unedited.

Henri Paul. 1891 - 1974.  Born in Paris. War refugee? His name starts appearing in Montreal in 1940; throughout the 40’s he lived at 222 rue Milton, Apt. 4. He worked for the newspaper publishers Poirier, Bessette & Cie, and was for a time the house photographer for La Revue populaire.  The Montreal Standard was also among his clients, as was CBC / Radio Canada. He was one of the first newspaper photographers to use a 35 mm camera in the field. He’s remembered especially for his photographs of painters, musicians, and actors, particularly those who worked with Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde. In 2022, Canada Post / Poste Canada issued a stamp bearing the image of the actor Monique Mercure which was based on a 1963 Henri Paul photograph. Sam Tata took a portrait of Henri Paul in 1973, a year before Paul’s death. It’s part of the Tata fonds at the National Library and Archives of Canada. Paul’s brief obituary appeared in the Montreal Gazette, August 12, 1974. The death date — must have been round about August 7 — is not noted. No descendants noted.

There are some really outstanding portraits. I like this one of a sadly unnamed accordionist, going to town on her Excelsior.

And this one has its own indisputable charm.

The gentlemen with the fish is one of several that form a series of (I guess) promotional photos Henri Paul took for the Université de Montréal— when? Must have been the 50’s. Here is my favourite — for the geology department, one would suppose — particularly because it came to light within an hour of my acquiring my very own magnifying glass.

I also admire, in my present condition, the lumbar flexibility that allows this hard rock miner to hoist his hoof so effortlessly and assume the stance of a conquering colonist. While smoking, what’s more.

Labour Day weekend has never been the same for me since 1997. It was on that Monday — it was September 1 — that I was to broadcast the first show in a new afternoon CBC Radio programme called “Richardson’s Roundup.” My colleagues (hello Heather Kennedy!) and I had worked hard to put together a really super show. That, of course, was the weekend Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al-Fayed came to grief in the tunnel under the Seine, and everything we’d planned had to be jettisoned in favour of solemn music, mostly the Barber Adagio. It was a most peculiar time. Also peculiar, from where I now stand (at the kitchen counter, in the rural municipality of Louse, with my laptop open on the OED) was that the driver of their limo, whose light was similarly snuffed, the head of security at the Paris Ritz, was also named Henri Paul. The capper to this story, for this Labour Day Weekend, 2023, is the death on August 30 of Dodi’s dad, Mohamed, the 1,493rd richest person in the world. No one was happy about that, save whoever was the 1,494th richest person in the world, who now, I guess, ascends the ranks.

I’ve got more to say about MG and Labour Day and will return to this tomorrow. Here’s one last photo from the autography book my Aunt Pat kept in Calgary. The earliest entry is dated 1930, the latest 1934. I don’t know when this was written, at some point in that short span of time.

I’m no Henri Paul — neither the photographer nor the chauffeur — and it’s not a prize-winning photo, so I’ll transcribe the not-necessarily-legible text.

Dear Pat

When you are married

And have twins,

Come to me,

For safety pins.

Chum

Lily Belzberg

Pat did marry, but never had children. Her parents separated, she moved to Winnipeg with her mother and sister (my mother), duly married, then followed her husband to Moncton, Edmonton, Ajax, and back to Winnipeg, where she died in 1984. I’ve only recently learned how hard her life was, despite the accumulated good wishes that came her way in Calgary, in the 30’s. Lily Belzberg Faider had one son, Eric, who predeceased her. I have no reason to think that Lily and Pat stayed in touch. Here’s Lily’s obituary from the Calgary Herald, June 3, 2021. I will point out that because the autograph book wouldn’t stay open at the necessary page, I grabbed a random object, whatever was near to hand, to hold it in place. It happened to be a tomato; that’s the red globe you see. It wasn’t until I read the obituary — see below, at the bottom —that I knew that Lily’s nickname was, yes, Old Tomato. A minor shiver — two of them, with Bill Richardson’s passing added to the mix — on a hot afternoon, that old tomato sun pressing down hard on the flat and windless bowl of the prairies.