Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 9

brute terrors like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic

3.06 a.m.

Twice a month, with the dependable regularity of a sluggish geyser, I remember a woman with whom I had a difficult encounter at the store. This was a long while back, a Sunday afternoon when a litre-sized bottle of maple syrup — who eats that many pancakes? — was knocked to the floor and shattered. A sticky, enveloping tide pooled out, pushing before it shards both major and minor. The store was busy, it was a high traffic area. It wasn’t a disaster on the scale of, say, an oil spill, but it was inconvenient, needed the immediate attention of, as I recall, three of us with mops and towels and broom and dustpans. Someone stood by acting as crossing guard, directing traffic away from the dark unguent that would never know the tender, pocked embrace of a waffle. (Breakage and spillage happen a lot in a store, and it would AMAZE you to see how many, many shoppers simply ignore the presence of a human person making minimum wage who is trying to clean up the mess for which they themselves are rarely responsible; who simply tromp on through the crime scene like the Golem of Prague, unable to be bothered taking a few accommodating steps to port or starboard. It’s actually shocking.) It was into the midst of all the wiping, the mopping, that a very irritated shopper insinuated herself. She needed to know, and needed to know NOW, why the chocolate truffles she liked to buy were not in their accustomed place. Had they been moved? And if so, why? And also, where were they? It fell to me to tell beautifully and expensively dressed customer, well-coiffed and amply moisturized, who had about her the smell of a brand new Ranger Rover, that the truffles had been discontinued. Does a face crumple or crumble? Maybe it can do both. Her’s did, first one, then the other. I think I remember her stomping her foot, but I may be making that up. If I am, let me add that it came down in the pool of maple syrup and droplets spattered everywhere, including on her coat, which was of leopard skin. She said, “But those are my treat! Those are my special treat!” I sent her a telepathic message then, an exhortation not to exclaim that it wasn’t fair, but she was beyond hearing it. “It’s not fair! It’s just not fair!”

Between this woman of about my age and any four year old who’s worn out and truculent and is in a snit about being denied chips or chocolate and is throwing a screaming wobbly, there was no material difference. On the one hand, she was ridiculous. On the other, who could not get it? The world was falling apart. All that was keeping her hinges in place — to think they might be well-oiled was absurd — was the certainty of her treat. Camel, meet Straw. I knew exactly who she was and how she felt. I’ve been there myself, more than once, more times that I can remember. The episodes I do recall make me cringe. (That time in the liquor store when, without a shred of irony, I shrieked, “What do you mean there’s no cold Prosecco?”)

The point of this long harangue is that now, every time I hear the word “treat,” I think of her, and feel embarrassed for us both. Twice a month, at the store, we are treated to “Treat Day.” It used to be that “Treat Day” involved a coupon that allowed the bearer to get a sandwich and a beverage from the deli counter, but somewhere along the line that was kiboshed. The scaled back “Treat Day” involves a couple of loaves of white bread and a jar of peanut butter and a pot of jam on the break room table, help yourself. It’s better than nothing, of course, it’s still a gesture, I appreciate it, but it just feels sad, somehow, to behold the bread and the condiments — a few sticky bits on the table, the jam marblings on the peanut butter, the shared knife — and to hear the word “treat” and to think about the maple syrup and the woman and the trouble with the truffles. What do I feel? Why,

A breath of melancholy … like a chill and sudden gust from some unknown sea

A glacial pang of pain like the stab of a dagger of ice frozen from a poisoned well

Brute terrors like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic

Debasing fancies gathering like foul birds

There are but four of the many, many similes and metaphors invented by Grenville Kleiser, and gathered together in his book, intended for the orator or after-dinner speaker, Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases.

I made considerable hay with this useful reference tool 25 years ago when I wrote a book called Scorned and Beloved: Dead of Winter Meetings with Canadian Eccentrics. (Whoever the reviewer in the Globe and Mail, I believe his name was Dickhead McHalitosis, called it “a thundering disappointment.” He may not have been wrong.) Somehow I got it into my head to imagine that everyone would find Grenville Kleiser’s far-fetched metaphors as funny as I did — I can’t remember how I came to have the book, but I did, and I couldn’t get enough of it — and I wedged his awkward circumlocutions into the text at every opportunity.) Nothing is more revealing about the skill of a writer than his or her way with a simile or metaphor or whatever the tool of analogy. A basic rule of thumb, I think, is that if you notice it — “She met his eager thrusting with the passionate, desperate, panting ardour of a breaching whale who hungers for the harpoon” — you know you might as well give up, slam the damn thing shut, and hurry off to the book return slot.

I’ve taken a few days away from writing here because I hadn’t made enough time in recent weeks to actually read Mavis Gallant (MG), and there are many stories that I read years ago and scarcely remember or that I haven’t read and it has been weighing on me. I spent a very enjoyable afternoon reading her short novel — it’s four linked stories — Green Water, Green Sky. I laughed out loud when I read, “Doris was proud of her education — a bundle of notions she trundled before her like a pram containing twins.” I didn’t stop to think, “Great simile, MG!,” I only paused because I wanted to savour the wit, the caustic irony, the originality of the writing. This — or so I think — is what a gifted writer — I would say a genius in the case of MG — does, whether via a commonplace device like an analogy or via the imposition of a broader vision: to make whole what is disparate. It got me thinking, and since it’s treat day, after all, here is a selection of similes / metaphors, a very small, random, in no way representative sample, a bouquet from the flower-loving MG. Or possibly a 21-gun salute. They are, as Grenville Kleiser would hasten to tell you:

Like a festooned girdle encircling the waist of a bride

Like a slim bronze statue of Despair

Like a summer-dried fountain

Enjoy your treat. Thanks for reading, xo, B

1. Good and bad luck comes in waves. It was a wave of the best that brought me to William Maxwell (her longtime editor at The New Yorker) who read my first story and every other for twenty-five years. He … let me think it was perfectly natural to throw up one’s job and all one’s friends and everything familiar and go thousands of miles away to write. He made it seem no more absurd or unusual than taking a bus to visit a museum. Everyone else I knew had quite the opposite to say. I felt suddenly like a stranded army with an unexpected ally. Introduction, Selected Stories.

2. It lends you an air of desperate nerve, as if a Malraux hero had wondered into a modern novel and been tossed out on his face. Lena

3. She looked like a burned-out child who had been told a ghost story. The Moslem Wife

4. The clergyman looked as though he had been blindfolded and turned about in a game and suddenly had the blindfold whipped off. The Four Seasons

5. Love required only the right conditions, like a geranium. The Other Paris

6. She emptied her mind, as if emptying a bottle, and waited for inspiration. Inspiration came, as warm as milk, and told her she had been born a Fairlie, that her husband had ill-used her, that her daughter had made a mésalliance, and possessed a heart as impenetrable as a nutmeg, whereas Bonnie’s heart was a big, floppy cushion in which her loved ones were forever sticking needles and pins. Green Sky, Green Water

7. Miss Pugh often said he had arrived on her doorstep looking as if he had spent his life in the rain, waiting for a London bus. A Flying Start

8. Viewing me at close range as if I were a novel she had to translate, Juliette replied that one ought to be spared unexpected visions. Rue de Lille

9. In the picnic hamper I used for storing journals and notebooks I found a manilla envelope marked “Lakeshore.” It contained several versions of ‘The Socialist RM,’ and a few other things that sounded as if they were translated from the Russian by Contance Garnett. Introduction, Selected Stories

10. I felt as if warm ashes were banked around my heart, like a residue of good intentions. Lena

11. She came into their lives dragging her existence like a wet raincoat. Green Sky, Green Water

12. The beginning writer has to chase, tear to pieces, spit out, chew up and assimilate as naturally as a young animal — as naturally and as ruthlessly. What is Style?

13. She was dressed in a bathrobe that looked like a dark parachute. The Tunnel

14. She remembered the philosophy of self-sacrifice she had preached and that still moped in a corner of their lives like a poor melting bird. She would have smothered if she could this old projection of herself; but it remained, indestructible as the animal witness in a fairy tale. Green Sky, Green Water

15. She has a talent for invective so precise that I dare not mention names. A leading Canadian poet “was dressed in a raincoat as though he was looking for a pornographic film.” The wife of one of Canada’s major architects “looked like a scone that had been sitting around so long the flour had turned all funny.” A prominent Canadian critic and novelist “had the eyes of a shark swimming towards a fixed destination.” From “Mavis Tries Harder,” by Geoff Hancock, Books in Canada, June - July, 1978.

16. “Hiroshima Mon Amour, (Marguerite Duras) said Madame Yourcenar… trivializes one of the greatest tragedies in history. The tale itself is in appalling taste, as bad as saying “Auschwitz mon chou.” Limpid Pessimist, Marguerite Yourcenar

17. It was a warm clear June day with towering clouds that seemed like cream piled on a plate. The Four Seasons

18. Doris … returned wearing some sort of finery. She looked like a social worker going to the movies with a girlfriend. Green Sky, Green Water

19. She crashed through life, like the farmers in the north of Quebec who, settling on new land, cut ever tree in sight just because nothing must stand. Its Image on the Mirror

20. Agnes was a mole: she was small and brown, and round-shouldered as if she had always carried parcels or younger children in her arms. The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street

21. If I pin it down as an adult calling, I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river, for more than forty-five years. Introduction, Selected Stories