Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 23

RIP, Margaret Crosland

June 23, a Thursday in this year of our lord 2022, fell on a Tuesday in 1668. This was the day and that was the year Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, “Up, and all the morning at the office. At noon home to dinner, and so to the office again all the afternoon, and then to Westminster to Dr. Turberville about my eyes, whom I met with: and he did discourse, I thought, learnedly about them; and takes time before he did prescribe me any thing, to think of it. So I away with my wife and Deb, whom I left at Unthanke’s, and so to Hercules Pillars, and there we three supped on cold powdered beef, and thence home and in the garden walked a good while with Deane, talking well of the Navy miscarriages and faults. So home to bed.”

There was a longish season when I pronounced Proust to rhyme not with “goosed” but with “soused.” And a good deal of time passed between my first seeing the name Pepys and actually hearing it spoken by someone in the know, during which dark interim I rhymed Pepys not with “seeps” but with something close to “sepsis;” as in, the great diarist, Samuel Peppis.

I can remember how Pepys came to my attention — it was via the Readers’ Digest; my mother’s reliable Christmas gift from her mother, my grandmother, was a subscription — and the year would have been 1970 or 71. (Brief pause to do the math, reflect on the passage of the years, and shake one’s hoary locks, if locks one is fortunate enough to have retained.) Helen Hanff’s epistolary mega-bestseller 84, Charing Cross Road was a condensed book in the magazine round about then. (Decades on I became a “humour columnist” for the RD, from which sinecure I was released for being insufficiently funny. That hurt only because I was paid per column — and this was ten years ago, more even —considerably in excess of what I now earn in two weeks of really hard slogging at the store.) The Hanff story itself — smart but cranky New Yorker engages in correspondence with genteel English bookseller — I recollect in only the broadest of its strokes. The one detail of brushwork that lives with me has to do with how Helene H was offended either because Frank, the bookseller, had sent her an abridged Pepys, or because of the possibility that, because she was an American, he might.

My dalliance with Mavis Gallant (MG) over the last number of weeks has generated a lot of book buying on my part, much of it from antiquarian (so much more agreeable a term than “used” or “second hand”) sources found online.

but a few of my purchases, as seen from my bed. the socks were knitted by substack subscriber Mrs. Susan Wagner. The rest of you should kindly take note and follow her example.

Among these volumes, whether written by MG or alluded to by her, is Margaret Crosland’s 1971 biography, Colette: The Difficulty of Loving.

an extraordinarily artful shot of the book in question taken by myself using — and darlings, this beggars belief — nothing but my telephone. oh, this modern world.

I bought the book because MG spoke so highly of it when she reviewed it for the NYTimes Book Review in December of 1971. (For more on this, see June 17). About Margaret Crosland — an extremely prolific biographer and translator whose bibliography extends to 75 titles but who is not, safe to say, a household name — I became curious. She was inexplicably unexamined for someone so accomplished; I looked persistently and found no, or precious little, biographical information, interviews, profiles, photographs. In no source was her birthdate — June 17, 1920 — accompanied by an end-date. As near as I could determine she was still among the quick which meant that, on Friday of last week, she would have turned 102: far from impossible, but a statistical improbability. Fascinating, too, was the bright-to-the-point-of-being-garish exception to what I took to be a rule of scrupulous discretion on the part of Margaret Crosland. This occurs in Elspeth Cameron’s 1994 biography of Earle Birney where a whole chapter, and any number of footnotes, describe the passionate affair Margaret had with Earle; this was towards the end of the Second World War. Crosland spoke openly to Cameron about that relationship, and there’s a clear disconnect, an evident incongruity between such intimate disclosures and what seems, elsewhere, to have been a deliberate obfuscation of even the most basic facts of a life, including whether or not said life continued. I knew she had been married, for not quite 10 years, to Max Denis, knew they’d had a son, Patrick Leonard Dagobert Denis, knew the titles of her books. Otherwise, nothing. My question, very basic, was, simply: is she still alive? Because if she is, like, Happy Birthday.

Within an hour of publishing the entry — bear in mind, I had spent MANY hours trying to answer for myself this question — came this quick gloss from subscriber Linda Granfield.

Found via Ancestry, Bill--Margaret McQueen Denis died, age 97, in 2017. Both February 7 and March 7 are given as DOD on these UK government listings. So there's a month of Body/or/Soul Travels unaccounted for by the officials. ;) Last residence was Chichester, West Sussex. Place of death listed as Billingshurst, West Sussex. I couldn't locate an obituary.

Linda Granfield, Private Investigator

Linda Granfield is an excellent and prolific writer, mostly for young readers, and has done extensive research into matters military, especially the First World War. She is a legitimate, accredited historian of unimpeachable bona fides. ( Linda Granfield Scholastic page) We’ve met a few times, have stayed occasionally in touch. She’s smart and funny as all get-out and, what’s more, she’s the only person who ever accorded me a nickname: “Slim.” For this, and for her intelligence gathering about Margaret Crosland, I am grateful. I felt thick and dull when I read her quick summation of the situation, for it had simply never occurred to me that Margaret Crosland, as she was known professionally, i.e. by her “maiden name,” would have been legally registered under her married moniker, Denis, given that the marriage was dissolved in 1959. And while I felt ever so slightly, what, cheated that Margaret had upended my story, that she hadn’t had the gumption or strength of will to make it to 102, I nevertheless concluded that Linda’s findings — the absence of a death notice, and the uncertainty about the actual date of her passing — confirmed, or at least sustained, my inkling that she, Margaret, was someone who, as a biographer, chose to cover her own traces.

(Similarly, I wrote here a while back about how I’d looked in vain to find my two favourite writers, both New Yorker regulars, MG and the poet James Merrill, sharing space between the covers of that magazine. It seemed so likely a proximity, given that they were contemporaries and given the number of times they each appeared. As close as I’ve come was the day I received, from some Scottish source, a copy of the quarterly The Southern Review, Winter of 1965. Behold.

Here, at least, was an MG short story, one of the very few to which The New Yorker said no, keeping company not with James Merrill but with a poetic tribute to him. And who was Herbert Morris, the author of this paean?

My pulse, or what passes for one, quickened. He was yet alive! He was writing about the Soul! Perhaps he was actively looking for an heir! I would write him and make inquiries. But no. It took not much digging to find that Herbert Morris has crossed the bar and is now in a position to know if, when writing about the soul, he got it right. The lesson is, real scholarship apparently relies on more than Wikipedia.)

The point of this harangue is that yesterday’s mail — June 22, it would have been my mother’s 95th birthday, but she slipped from the world in January, 2003, at the sensible age of 75 — brought 84, Charing Cross Road to mind and Margaret Crosland to hand. From two English booksellers came Crosland’s second publication, and her penultimate one.

Meeting and Parting (Centaur Press, 2004) contains many of the poems she wrote at the beginning of her career, during the time she was involved with Earle Birney. They strike me — this is very much a first impression — as being accomplished but rather cool. (Many of these poems would have appeared in her very first book, a poetry collection Strange Tempe, 1945.)

Indisputably long on charm, and dating from 1949, the year preceding Crosland’s marriage to Max Denis, is this collaboration with Patricia Ledward.

It’s exactly as advertised, a collection of marriage proposals, some literary, some literal, gathered from various sources. Hardy, Meredith, Charlotte Bronte, Noel Coward, and Robert Burns are among some of the notable names, but most charming, to my mind, are the slightly offbeat contributions from anonymous sources.

I wondered why the artist who provided the whimsical book jacket drawing, as well as the flyleaf illustration —

— was uncredited. Then I saw her name, appended under the floral border of the flyleaf and the cover scroll containing The Happy Yes. Rosemary Hay. Who are or were you, Rosemary Hay?

I think there’s NO ONE better equipped than Linda Granfield to take this on, to determine if, on May 15, Rosemary Hay, evidently some kind of aristocrat, actually did turn 118. Linda, to you with failing hands we throw the torch. Have at it. Let us all know.

Oh, lord. Distraction. I’d intended to bring this back to MG but the naughty little clock on the wall and the imperatives of commerce — The Store! The Store! — dictate otherwise. There’s always tomorrow. Thanks for reading. xo, B