Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 2

A tisket, a tasket, a basket with Joe Plaskett (and several other ingredients)

Here’s something I missed while beating the bushes for the Canada Day round up of pertinent Mavis Gallant (MG) quotations. In his memoir A Speaking Likeness — he wrote it, in part, because MG encouraged him to do so — the painter Joe Plaskett said, “… my bond with Mavis was founded on a rock, the fact that we were both Canadians. Our exile or expatriation had never extinguished the loyalty we felt for the land we came from. We both longed for recognition from our countrymen.”

This is a Joe Plaskett painting —

— and this is not:

I bought this teak-framed fellow a few years ago, just around the time I moved into my tiny-town apartment and needed something for a wall that was naked and ashamed. At great personal risk I did the hanging myself. Hammer, hook, nail, in my hands, are disaster’s formula, a Malthusian equation, nasty, brutish, short. I got it up and it hasn’t yet fallen down, but there was every chance things would go so far south it would fall to penguins to sweep up the mess.

Here’s the deal. I’m badly co-ordinated. My hands and brain work in opposition; I drop things, knock them over, sometimes just with my aura. Also, I’m spatially inept, can’t look at a pattern and translate it into its three dimensional form, couldn’t necessarily take a baby’s block game and put the square peg where the square peg should go. I’m sure those deficiencies are linked to the big gap on the shelf of the self where sense of direction should be stocked. It’s a subset of dyslexia, I think, by which I’m hobbled to the extent that I’m forever mislaying myself in the small store where I’ve worked for two years now. “Senior’s moment,” I’ll trill to the customers I conduct to the chips aisle when it’s the sparkling water they’re after. They are Dantes, pilgrims who have invested their short-term trust in absolutely the wrong Virgil. Don’t count on me to get you even as far as Purgatory, you’ll be rattling around one of the deeper, ranker circles of Hell well past the time your meter expires. This business of always being lost is a lifelong affliction, has nothing to do with my present age; I’m merely incompetent, but “senior’s moment,” is an easier gambit to lob at a stranger than “oh, well, tee-hee, the fairy in charge of spatial dimension wasn’t invited to my christening.” Not surprisingly, given the lacunae in my skill set, I can’t draw. The house I would sketch for you now would be indistinguishable from the triangle on a rectangle with a chimney spewing smoke and a few squiggles for birds and a smiley face sun I would have drawn 60 years ago. Longer, even. This is a long-winded way of saying I’m a visual arts ignoramus, and my opinion — which I’m stupidly about to express, re: the painting above — counts for nothing.

I saw the portrait, saw it was for sale, didn’t let my shaky critical foundation get in the way of judgment. At a first quick glance I took it to be the work of a Sunday painter with a slightly more than average knack. It wasn’t great work, wasn’t distinguished, but it was attractive. Plainspoken and ordinary, it still struck me as thoughtful, well-made. I liked it. That was the depth and breadth of my analysis. With the portrait I sensed a connection; from across the room eye met eye, mind met mind. “Come over,” it seemed to say, “we’ll have a chat.” I did, and when I determined a longer-term conversation was possible, I decided to buy it; that it was modestly priced was also a draw.

This was before I knew anything of its provenance, not that it would have made a difference.; I didn’t care who the guy had been with, I just wanted him for myself. Appended to the back of the painting was (still is) a typewritten slip, taped there by an executor or some such helpful soul. It states that the painting was part of the estate of a Vancouver dentist named Dr. McLean, no first name given. It’s a self-portrait of Jack Smith; his initials appear at the bottom of the canvas, JS, along with the date, 60. Jack, who was a friend of Dr. McLean, had either sold it or gifted it to the dentist; perhaps traded it for a bit of bridge work, who knows? About JS not much is revealed. Whoever provided the brief gloss says that he was active in the Vancouver art scene in the 60’s, is now little remembered or known, is assumed to be deceased.

That’s probably so. How old is Jack in his 1960 self-portrait? In the 27 - 35 range, I guess, i.e. born circa 1930; the chances of his being extant are not vanishingly slight but on the cusp. Gaydar is not a reliable signalling device; my own has never been finely tuned, and with paintings or drawings, pace Tom of Finland and / or Caravaggio, it almost never kicks in. It did with Jack, though, whether correctly or not. I imagine — I’d be willing to bet on it, if there were any way of actually testing the wager — that he and Dr. McLean were part of a tight social circle, publicly guarded and privately outrageous, wary in the world and bawdy on a Friday night in one another’s apartments, probably not far from where I live, and where Jack has come to roost. I imagine them giving private drag performances, imagine them sitting around smoking and drinking and listening over and over to the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall double LP — “I know what we’ll do, we’ll stay all night, and I’ll sing them all!” —imagine how they would have called one another Phyllis or Mary, imagine them all trooping down to The Cave to see Mitzi Gaynor or maybe even Barbra Streisand, 18, and just taking off, but somehow already appropriated as a goddess. Maybe my queering of Jack is owing to nothing more than the way he looks, at least in his own representation of himself, strikingly like the young and famously gay Benjamin Britten who, with his lover Peter Pears, came to Vancouver in 1961 for a series of performances and recordings.

Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, chin, and the hair, tight and wavy, most of all: it’s almost mirror-like; at least, to my inexpert eye. I imagine the more classically inclined of the group hanging around the stage door after a performance of Winterreise, perhaps a drink at the Hotel Vancouver.

None of this matters. I’ll never know Jack, but I’m glad he’s come to, quite literally, hang around. Silent, a little broody, exercising no demands except on the imagination: as roommates go, he’s ideal.

None of this relates specifically to Mavis Gallant (MG), but I’ve always preferred the tangential to the direct, the sidelong glance to the gorgon stare. Jack Smith could well have been in the orbit of Joe Plaskett who, by 1960, was well-ensconced in Paris but who would have been a presence in the city when Jack — assuming he grew up in Vancouver, he might well not have, of course — was a student. That they might have known one another is far from impossible. Plaskett and MG landed in Paris round about the same time, the early 50’s, but managed not to meet until ten years later. They became good companions, and about that friendship, see the Plaskett quote above, I’ll write more in the next couple of days.

Jack looks down from his place on the wall, a Benjamin Britten look-alike surveying all my assembled and growing collection of Gallantiana — which sounds like a Britten opera. MG was drawn to 20th-century music, to Bartok and Hindemith, Stravinsky and Berg. I think her inclinations may have been more to the pure and abstract than the neoclassical, and Britten might not have been to her taste. His operas — Peter Grimes most notably, also Albert Herring and Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Rape of Lucretia — were performed in Paris, as they were all over the world, but it wasn’t until the 1990’s that they found at the Garnier or the Bastille a more willing and receptive audience.

There’s another obscure route we can follow that will connect, if only tenuously, MG to Benjamin Britten. Follow the signposts that lead to a most unusual character, the fisherman / invalid / painter / embroiderer John Craske —

— and then continue along the narrow road that’ll take you to the writer / poet / church music authority Sylvia Townsend Warner, who was, it turns out, an avid Craske collector.

Our destination, MG, is not far distant but still out of view. Pause here for a moment to reflect on how the tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s lover and companion and muse, was Sylvia’s good friend. It was in 1970 that they met. In February of that year, with Craske in mind, she wrote to Pears for the first time.

Dear Mr Pears,

Reynolds Stone has advised me to write to you about my collection of pictures by John Craske. I enclose an article about him, this I should like to have back.

You will see he is an artist whose work should be on view in East Anglia, and I would like to leave my collection to The Maltings or some centre in Aldeburgh. I have ten: four needleworks and six paintings. All are framed. The largest is 35 inches by 26.

Obviously you cannot decide without seeing them. But if you, or Mr Britten, would consider this proposal perhaps you could combine seeing them here with a visit to Reynolds and Janet Stone.

Yours sincerely,

Sylvia Townsend Warner

(See here for more on the exchange of letters this first one begat.)

Now, if you’re ready, we’ll move on to our final destination. The other day, speaking on Zoom with Neil Besner, who has written about MG and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others, I wondered if they, Bishop and MG, had ever met. He thought not, but, like Jack Smith and Joe Plaskett, it wouldn’t have been the strangest thing in the world. Similarly, did MG ever cross paths with Sylvia Townsend Warner? She was a writer MG admired, and one could easily imagine such an intersection and, fictionally at least, there was at least one minor collision. This occurs in the story “In Youth Is Pleasure,” in which Linnet Muir returns, as did MG, to Montreal after finishing high school in New York. Her luggage consists of a small suitcase and an Edwardian picnic hamper — “a preposterous piece of of baggage my father had brought from England some twenty years before; it had been with me since childhood when his death turned my life into a helpless migration. … My travel costume was a white pique jacket and skirt that must have been crumpled and soot-flecked, for I had sat up all night. I was reading, I think, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner.”

I wonder if Linnet / Mavis might have been reading Lolly Willowes, with its opening sentence that tells of a life similarly upended. “When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her elder brother and his family.” It was published in 1926 but the Penguin edition I have came out in ‘37 which would have been, I think, the year of MG’s journey back to the homeland. It would be nice if that were so, but such a detail will never be subject to discovery.

Joe and Jack, Jack and Ben, Peter and Sylvia, Sylvia and Mavis: wild, fruitless, and stupid speculation, dots on a page with no numbers attached, draw any lines you like. Nothing is provable, nothing would change anything. These are juststrokes on a canvas, experimental, searching, haphazard downward brushings, made in the hope that possibly, eventually, a portrait might emerge. That something will come to make, even approximately, sense in the formless void. That’s it. Enough said. Too much, really. Thanks for reading, xo, B