Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Diary, 15

Ain't no saints named Enid or Mavis

April 28, 3.20 a. m.

An earlier than usual start at the store this morning, so keeping this short. Whew, you say, and so do I. Apologies in advance for typos, malapropisms, cringe-making bowdlerizing, excessive use of the em-dash, etc.

Mavis Gallant (MG), recalling her earliest years, would tell interviewers how some adults saw her as compliant and sweet, a model child, while others saw her as obnoxious and disobedient, a brat. Either descriptor, she would say, might have been true, depending on the circumstances and personalities — the environment — to which she was responding in the moment. To me — I suspect to most of us — this makes perfect sense. None of us is one thing to the exclusion of the other. I was an obedient child, and for that reason easy to tolerate, if not to like, but I was also, and without cause, uppity and insufferable, a genuine snob. Snobbery was the only area of human endeavour in which I was precocious. It was ever thus. The first thing I did upon learning I had a nose was to turn it up at whoever taught me.

This may have been genetic. Writing this I remember meeting at some Winnipeg social gathering, maybe 10 years ago, Charles Huband, a lawyer and politician. He asked, as often happens in my hometown, if I was any relation to the grain baron Richardsons. I couldn’t admit to that vaunted kinship — this confession always casts a pall — but I inquired of Charles if he, a man of the bar, might ever have met my grandfather, B.V. Richardson, K.C. — http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/people/richardson_bv.shtml — who was born in Ninga, Manitoba, not long after the village was founded — it’s a stone’s throw from where I live when I’m lucky enough to be in that part of the world — and who ran a small — make that boutique — law firm in the city for more than 30 years, and developed, in the early years of flight, an interest and specialty in aviation law. (https://scholar.smu.edu/jalc/vol9/iss2/1/)

It turned out that not only did Charles know B. V., he had worked for him in the late 50’s, as a newly articled graduate. He told me — with just possibly a bit more delight than was necessary or seemly, given that dude was, like, you know, my gramps — about what a poseur was B. V. , K.C. Whenever a client came to call, B. V. would invite him (or her, but probably him) into his office and say in stentorian tones to his secretary: “I shall be in a meeting and must not be disturbed. Kindly hold all calls (beat pause for emphasis) save those from overseas.”

“Save those from overseas!” roared Charles, almost choking on the a puff, “Good lord, he wasn’t expecting a call from Boissevain!”

I laughed then with him and I smirk even now, here on my own, 3.40 a.m. Pacific standard time, remembering it. I didn’t doubt this was true; I could imagine it very well, could hear B.V. say just those words in the same imperious register he used when he and my grandmother would make one of their occasional return visits to Winnipeg — they got out early, moved to Victoria — and they would stay with us, and he would call from the airport, and I would answer, and he would say, “I wonder if you would be good enough to look in the appropriate cabinet and see if there will be any Scotch whisky in the house, pending our arrival.”

My point is that maybe my snobbery was deeded me, it was bred in the bone. Maybe there’s some DNA strand, some genetic sequence, that gets passed down the line like a relay baton, that governs such unfortunate impulses. Maybe, sometimes, like eye colour or male pattern baldness, such coded tendencies lie fallow, skip generations. My father, B.V.’s son, was proper and contained and upright, but no one would have called him snobbish. Me, though, oy vey.

A true child of Empire — when “the old country” was invoked in our household, which it often was, it signified Ireland, Scotland, or Yorkshire — I believed deeply, reverently, that all things upon which the Queen smiled were fundamentally good. If it was English, I loved it. That impulse smouldered in me from the get-go, and it was Enid Blyton who fanned the flames of anglophilia. I just loved the Noddy and Big Ears books, with the golliwogs (yup!) and the little yellow car that went ‘Parp-parp,” and the The Famous Five and the Secret Seven and the Adventure Books, which were my particular favourites: macs and wellingtons and torches and orange squash in a flask and jolly good and I say and bread and butter for tea and kettles on the hob and all the rest of it. I was desperate to go there, to England’s green and pleasant land, to join up with Philip, Jack, Dinah, and Lucy — who could be counted on to say, whether the adventure was taking place in a circus setting or in some hidden cave behind a waterfall, “I do think food tastes so much better when eaten out of doors,” which has more or less the same cadence as “Hold all calls, save those from overseas” — and with Kiki, the parrot. With them, through them, I would find my true self. I was sure of it, in the same way I was sure Julie Andrews was really my mother. Enid Blyton was the midwife to a nostalgia for a past I’d never known.

Enid Blyton was powerful medicine. She was born in 1897 on August 11 — MG’s birthday, my birthday, and also, as I’ve latterly learned, the birthday of podcasting legend Joe Rogan. Now, it might surprise you to learn, having just come to St. James Court and presented my twee credentials, that I’m partial to Joe Rogan. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a fan, don’t listen to his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience” with any regularity, but now and again, if I’m making something like a risotto that requires a lot of stirring and I require something to take my mind off my aching forearm, or if I need the drone of human voices to lull me to sleep, I’ll summon Joe up and listen to him and whoever his guest: almost always a man, very often a comedian, or an MMA fighter, or a comedian who is also an MMA fighter and possibly a vegan. I’m surprised at how much patience I have with this, because these are things that interest me NOT AT ALL. But Joe does interest me. He impresses me with, if nothing else, his fluency. The interviews are long, way, way, way too long, 2-1/2, 3 hours, and he seems to have done very little for these marathons by way of preparation. He doesn’t let it flag though, not ever. He stokes the engine with endless opinions, abundant energy, plain old chutzpah, and reserve of worldliness, and, most of all, the continent-sized confidence that comes with knowing you can (a) beat the crap out of just about anyone who might come after you and (b) your audience share is larger, by a vast margin, than that of, say, CNN, or most mainstream media outlets. Rogan is the object of a lot of scorn, and I understand why. But no one does what he has done by being stupid. Like it or not, that is simply so.

I’ve interviewed many, many writers and if there was ever a time when I hadn’t read whatever the germane book before sitting down to talk, I can’t remember it. I may not have read them deeply, and my understanding might have been more bonsai than old-growth, but I was always as steeped in the stuff as I could be. I couldn’t, wouldn’t do otherwise. Not so Joe. Rogan — at least, this is my impression — if the guest is a writer, has rarely done the reading. He almost never mentions the book, not its themes, not its substance, not even the title, sometimes not even in passing. Nor do his guests seem to mind the oversight. Why would they? They’ve got an audience of 10, 15, 20 million people, all savvy enough to track down the bibliographic info if they want it. They play gleefully along.

Early in the morning, not much sleep, and I’m wondering, semi-delirious, what it would be like to hear Joe Rogan interview MG, his August 11 confederate, his Leo twin. What would they have talked about, once they’d exhausted the subject of sun signs? Would he have lit up a cigar and taken a gulp of single malt and said, “Tell me about how you explore the theme of exile in your short stories, so frequently published in the pages of The New Yorker?” Or would he take the line to which many of his guests warm and lean forward on his sinewy forearms and say, “What’s the wild boar hunting like where you live?” I can imagine that MG might have enjoyed such a gambit, might have replied with, “I believe they can be found nearby the leafy outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, or possible in the vicinity of Fontainebleau, not far from where Katherine Mansfield is buried.” And would Joe have said, “No kidding. Do you go after them with a gun or a bow? And what about Ivermectin, anyway?”

It’s not impossible — I think it’s likely, actually — that MG would have been charmed by Joe Rogan; at the very least, she would have been interested, would have been curious. I haven't done an exhaustive study — in fact, it hasn’t occurred to me until now to even wonder — but I’d venture a guess that she was more often interviewed by women than by men. And I wonder if she, MG, might have been different with men than women in these formal, often quite artificial, interrogations. I wonder if, with men, she might have shown a tendency to be more combative, more challenging, more mocking, even. She was brilliant at exposing their — our — hypocrisies, puncturing our accustomed privileges, but I think she also enjoyed the company of men. She would have made it clear, early on in the encounter, that she was no pushover, didn’t need a head start, or a handicap score. She could hold her own, more than, give as good as she got, better.

Feh. This is empty, useless speculation. I can say with certainty that MG was a writer who had a reputation, who jangled the nerves of interviewers who knew her to be someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly, who could be sharp, cutting, dismissive, haughty. I suspect, out of a place of insecurity as much as impatience, she could seem just out and out rude. She could seem — just as she could seem warm and engaging and involved in other circumstances — shirty. Snooty. A snob. And, of course, she could be utterly the opposite. As when she was girl — it depended on the circumstances.

Enid Blyton was, according to reliable contemporary accounts, including those of her daughters, self-obsessed and image-mongering and career driven and negligent, beloved by the children who read her, but utterly unequipped to be a mother. Much has been said about the unsettling gap between her person and her presentation and her work, while sill adored by many young readers, has long been considered problematic, racist, imperialist, xenophobic, etc. There is no saint named Enid, nor is there one named Mavis; not, at least, that I’ve been able to discover, I know someone will correct me if I’m wrong. Neither MG nor EB, however worthy they are of earthly veneration, will be the first of their name to be canonized; this I mention only because I’m aware, writing these little entries, that they risk becoming an MG hagiography. That’s not my point here. If you were to ask me at this moment what the point is, now, at 4.09 a.m. with the need to wrap upon me I’m not sure I could answer. Getting under the rock of her reasons, as best I can. Taking a good look at what lives there when you let in the light. Finding all of it interesting. Why? Just because — I want to. Want never comes from nothing. In the case of MG it comes from the writing, that great, important, still-warm body of human work. Look. It’s a coin. It’s what she paid for her life on the earth. Counterfeit? No. Here’s the mark of a gypsy’s tooth. It’s the real thing. Gotta go. Thanks for reading. A la prochaine. xo B