Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 10
Cards laid on tables
“In those days I was always looking for signs. I saw signs in cigarette smoke, in the way ash fell, and in the cards. I laid the cards out three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday were no good, because the cards were mute and evasive; and on Sundays, they lied.” Mavis Gallant, “When We Were Nearly Young”
7.34 a.m.
I’m a stoic and a cynic and my heart’s a limestone fossil of a lump of coal; to the lachrymose, I’m inimical. Still, even my coarse, atrophied tear ducts heaved and burbled a little — with the sad sound particular to the radiators of November — when I read this:
BiC: What makes you decide to put together a collection?
Gallant: I would like to have my work in print in my lifetime.
This is from a 1989 interview between the Dutch-Canadian writer Pleuke Boyce, on behalf of Books in Canada (b. 1971 - d. 2008) and Mavis Gallant (MG). It appeared in the January / February 1990 issue of the magazine. They were speaking about what was then her most recent collection of short stories, In Transit (1988). You’ll see it in the photo above, five down from the top of the pile. This is the Vancouver Public Library copy — I renewed it — that bears her inscription to Don, who turned out to be Don Davis, who saw the photo, who put two and two together, who got in touch, who had kept the pen MG used to sign the front flyleaf. He passed it on to me. This meeting between Don and Mavis — fleeting, at the autograph table that’s an inevitability when authors appear in public — was in 1989, at a reading sponsored by Simon Fraser University; presumably, it was at this same time she sat down with Pleuke Boyce for BiC. (I realize just now that the pen is also a Bic, another of the lame jokes from some fevered quadrant of the cosmos that keep coming my way, begging for punchlines I am unable to provide.)
Gallant: I would like to have my work in print in my lifetime.
BiC: But don’t you have more still?
Gallant: Yes, but I don’t know where they are or where they were published. I’ve never kept track. I’ve more or less kept track of work published in The New Yorker. The only people who know where everything is, where everything was published, are academics who have written studies of the work. But I don’t.
This confession might provoke from the casual reader a Lady Bracknell-style “A handbag?” response. That the mother of the tales might have somehow mislaid them, or forgotten that a few have been living in Rome for years, seems a bit careless, a bit “your house is on fire, your children alone.” However, you don’t have to be a writer, as was MG, of vast and varied accomplishment to understand how this might be. I was asked recently how many books I’d published and I couldn’t even give a number. I ball-parked 18, but the tally, when I actually summoned them all to Bethlehem to be numbered and taxed, proved to be 25. Is it in Lucky Jim where someone, probably Jim Dixon, remarks that books of poetry are always said to be slender when scrawny would be a better term? That applies to my oeuvre, for sure. Most of my “books” could go out on Hallowe’en disguised as pamphlets without any need of shedding a few pounds to bring off the ruse. Stack them all up — not that I could do that, I haven’t bothered to keep copies — and the height of the pile would not quite match that of MG’s Selected Stories, see above, eighth from the bottom. Leaving aside considerations of volume, not a single paragraph, not a sentence in those 25 “books” — they qualify as such for Canada’s generous Public Lending Right payments, thank you Andreas Schroeder, which has been for years my one semi-reliable source of income as a writer; when cheques arrive from publishers they are, in the main, only the occasion for a Jim Dixonesque musing about why they’re called “royalties” when “common” would be so much better a word — could stand next to anything to which MG put her hand.
(Because I’m in a sharing mood — understand I think this is hilarious, not pathetic, though it’s that, too — here’s the bottom line of my most recent payment, I don’t even know for what, made out to a corporate entity that was dissolved five years ago and with an address, misspelled, that hasn’t been current for nearly as long. I will not, understand, be making any moves to correct this, and hope the publisher will eventually just fold the 38 bucks back into general revenues, with my best regards and wishes.)
This I include for clarity’s sake. I know the lay of the present land, where I’m a journeyman plodder, always will be. But MG was a genius, she was from the get-go. She could — what? Could look into the sun without protective lenses, she was like a Mother of Dragons who could withstand immolating heat, she was, was, what else, was a medium, a sensitive, with access to planes denied most of us, her writing was, is, an act of levitation. Stop me before I say “numinous.” Excuse me while I take a cold shower.
There. Better.
This is all the say that even a writer of negligible gifts can understand how MG, one the greats, might not have been inclined, perhaps just by nature, to devote herself to the dull chores of administration required to keep tabs on those hundreds of thousand of words she marshalled from brain to page and sent out into the world. She was nearing the end of her days — as I’ve been reliably told — before she took definitive steps to look to her legacy, to write a will, pour mettre en rang tous ses canards. As I suspect the French never say. There’s a reason why I’ve never worked for the U.N., wearing headphones in one of those little hermetic booths, performing daily acts of crisis-averting alchemy with hard-to-parse idioms.
Gallant: I would like to have my work in print in my lifetime.
I read this and, truly, I want to weep. This is not too grandiose or outlandish an ask. This is not like saying, “I would like the warring factions of my family to set aside their differences and gather around a communal table for what might possibly prove to be my last Christmas on Earth.” This is a quiet, measured declaration of self-worth from one of the really inspired, original voices of 20th century literature in English. About this, about how MG has been ill-served, as have her readers, by the altogether helter-skelter nature of her published work, I have more to say, but I’m going to leave it here for now. It’s my day off from the store. I have errands to run, a haircut to wrangle, and my apartment looks like it should be cordoned off with police tape and Crime Scene Investigation signs. Also, I want to think carefully about what to say next. Like my father, I think the best thing we can do for one another is to aim for invisibility, to lie low, not offend, sidestep riling. Quite why I should be concerned on this front, I can’t say. No one should take what I say seriously. I’m a grocery clerk, an unauthorized version, a free-associative agent representing nothing but surmise and assumption. It’s a house of cards I’m building here, most of them laid out on a Sunday, when they are known to lie. I mean to say, it’s just my opinion, and it counts for nothing, but it’s all I have. My opinion. My freedom to give it rein. Rain. Reign. Whatever, dude.
A propos, I leave you with this poem, which is of my own devising, which has never been collected, which is INEXPLICABLE, but which I consider my best work; my Pegnitz Junction. It is short enough to chisel on a tombstone, and I invite anyone who cares to do so to go right ahead, without need of permission or attribution.
“What is Pi?” the teacher pried;
the brightest of her minions
answered, “Pi’s what separates
the onions from opinions.”
Here endeth the lesson. More tomorrow. Thanks for reading, xo, B
1992 apparently, though I thought it earlier. I'm working at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and I pass by a bookshop window at Bathurst and Davenport and see your book in the window, 'Queen of All the Dustballs'. By then it's been several years since we hung around briefly in Vancouver, and I am entranced. (You'd had that effect on me, though you probably didn't know it. I was so happy to see you tangibly in print. I got a copy the moment the store was open.) Google reports...."This is the first collection of verse by CBC Radio's resident poet-laureate, Bill Richardson, who transforms mundane experiences into hilarious epic tales." And it was so for me, and your line, 'His mighty crevice tool', remains a favourite.
I love your poem!