Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 27

Screaming around the garden, tearing off the heads

3.03 a.m. Posting this a bit half-cooked, otherwise it’ll never get out. Super busy week with one thing or another. Probably last entry for a few days. Thanks for your patience!

When last we left Mavis Gallant (MG) she was striding down the Boulevard St. Germain on May 27, 1968, a cold, wet day at the end of a dangerous spring, bound for a political meeting, pacing herself, urging herself forward by chanting — in the high-domed cathedral of her brain, although, who knows, perhaps her lips wee moving — few stirring lines from “Bloody Orkney,” by Andrew James Fraser Blair, 1872 - 1935. In latter years, “Bloody Orkney” is perhaps best known as the template for the poem “Evidently Chickentown,” by John Cooper Clarke, which secured its own place in the canon when it was used over the closing credits in the penultimate episode of The Sopranos.

Better known as Hamish Blair, Andrew James Fraser was a novelist and journalist; in the early years of the 20th century he was the editor of a couple of colonial newspapers in India — one called The Englishman, one called The Empire. (I wonder if they employed an advice columnist and, if so, what counsel was dispensed?) My sense, from the little I’ve found — no doubt much more is available, and as soon as my amanuensis has returned from his stress leave, six months at this point, but who’s counting, I’ll ask him to look deeper into the matter — is that Hamish would a fascinating study; he was, I think, quite caught up in the investigation of things spiritual, even mystical. As near as I know, he left no descendants behind, and I found only one reference to Mrs. Blair, the former Constance Ibbotson, whom Hamish married in 1900. (Linda Granfield, this has your name written all over it.)

Casually — without much hope of success and with only a cup of dried pulses, gathered from my wrists, and temples, to present as an offering — I visited the great oracle Google and inquired after Constance Blair. A pause. A sigh. A slight grinding of cogs and gears. A belch, and puff of fetid smoke, then a grudging, “Here you go.” A this file was made manifest. All was silent.

“I think it’s the wrong Constance Blair,” I said, but there was no reply. A cup of dried pulses will only buy you so much, and anyway, I liked the look of her, Mary C. Blair — the C. is for Constance — in this old photograph; from when? about a hundred years ago, I guess. The trees aren’t yet in leaf, so it’s the spring, probably, perhaps the late autumn, and it must have been a breezy day, the wind whipping the apron, or whatever that portion of her garment would be properly called. How old is she? Hard to say, in her 30’s maybe. She has a kind of genial, Bohemian look about her, but also practical, no nonsense. I can’t suppose it was planned, this photo, it must have been spontaneous; and taken for what reason? A spur of the moment meeting meeting between Mary Constance and whoever held the camera? Or was it marking a moment? What is she holding in her left hand? Keys? I think so. The photo is from the files of the Smithsonian, and N.W.U. stands, as it turns out, for Northwestern University, which was where Mary Constance Blair, 1877- 1955, earned a BA with distinction in 1913, an M.A. in 1918, and a Ph.D. in ecology in 1922, the first such degree awarded at the school. 100 years ago. The natal year of MG.

Maybe the photo was taken to celebrate the granting of her doctorate — she would have been 45 at that time — and those are the Keys to the Kingdom. You can’t make it out in the photo above, but the obscured squiggle at the bottom is the top of the “D” of Dr. Or, maybe it was taken to mark this publication in The Botanical Gazette, June 1926.

It’s frustrating that so little can be readily found. Mary Constance Blair was a professor of botany NWU; she can’t have had many women colleagues. For that reason alone she is distinguished, unique, and that she received the first post-graduate degree in ecology from this prestigious university is remarkable for every reason. Surely her name should live on, attached to a research facility, or a residence, a library, or even a dining hall. But no. It seems not.

Most of what I’ve been able to discover comes up in genealogical accounts devoted to male members (you should excuse the expression) of her extended family. Here, she’s portrayed a slightly kooky eccentric who may have done something notable, but is mostly remembered as a classic cat-lady spinster, code for lesbian.

One family account say that Mary eventually became a professor at the university, though no independent documentation has been found to confirm this. What is certain is that Mary was a colorful figure, a lifelong spinster who co-habitated long-term with Helen Lester, a dressmaker eight years her senior, and then retired to Nora, IL where she shared her home with a horde of cats.

Here, she is more generously considered:

Dr. Mary Constance Blair's record of accomplishments as a botanist gives her high standing in her profession and on the roll of honoured natives of Stephenson County. Born in Winslow Township in 1877, she spent much of her childhood enjoying the beauties of the Apple River area. By the time she had received her B.A.magna cum laude, her M.S. summa cum laude and her Ph.D cum laude, all from Northwestern University,Evanston, she had found her special mission in life, which was to make known and preserve the unique vegetation of Apple River Canyon. Because of its being an unglaciated island in a glaciated area she discovered there many plants unknown outside of places far distant from Illinois, for example, and arctic primrose. Her doctoral thesis is valuable list of plants hitherto unknown east of the Grand Canyon, and her labors started the visitation of the area by many distinquished botanists. It was she who aroused enough enthusiasm among local people and state authorities to get the site eventually made a state park. After her retirement from her position as associate professor of botany at Northwestern University, she made her home in Nora an arboretum of rare and beautiful wild plants and did other landscaping.

Her passing, at least, in 1955, didn't go entirely unremarked.

I’m glad to know what little I know about Mary Constance Blair, who was never married to Andrew James Fraser Blair, whose name may or may not have been known to MG as she marched down the Boulevard St. Germain in May of 1968 chanting, “Bloody, bloody, bloody.” Both Blairs — and who knows, perhaps there’s a family link between them, however dilute — came my way via reading MG’s remarkable account of the student uprising. That linkage was never her intention, and surely the unexpected tangents are one of the unlooked for gifts of reading.

MG loved gardens, flowers, botany. I feel sure that she and Mary Constance would have found a lot to say to one another. I feel sure MG would have had something insightful to say were one to have asked her why MCB is so little known. Here’s a collection of short excerpts from her stories, a sort of commonplace book you might enjoy. It’s a bouquet from MG. Let’s imagine that on the accompanying tag are the initials MCB. Thanks for reading, xo, B

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I teach elementary botany to girls in a village half a day’s journey by train from Montreux. … My father was a professor of Medieval German. He was an amateur botanist and taught me the names of flowers before I could write. … Among the very few relics I have is Wild Flowers of Germany: One Hundred Pictures Taken from Nature. The cover shows a spray of Solomon’s-seal — five white bells on a curving stem. It seems to have been taken against the night. Under each of the hundred pictures is the place and time we identified the flower. The plants are common, but I was allowed to think of them as rare. Beneath a photograph of lady’s-slipper my father wrote, “By the large wood on the road going towards the vineyard at Durlach, July 11, 1936,” in the same amount of space I needed to record, under snowdrops, “In the Black Forest last Sunday.”  An Autobiography

*****

Montreal, May 26, 1963

Dearest Girl:

The sadly macerated and decomposed specimen you sent me for indentification is without doubt Endymion nutanus or Endymion non-scriptus or Scilla nutans or non-scriptus. Also called wood hyacinth, wood bell, wild hyacinth. It is, in short, the common Eurpean bluebell. A Fairly Good Time, Chapter 1 (the whole chapter, in fact, could have been cited here)

*****

He was reading a book about gardening. He held it close to his face. Daylight tired him; it was like an intruder between memory and the eye. He read, “Nerine. Guernsey Lily. Ord. Amaryllidaceae. First introduced, 1680.” Introduced into England, that meant. “Oleander, 1596. East Indian Rose Bay, 1770. Tamarind Tree, 1633. Chrysanthemum, 1764.” So England had flowered, become bedecked, been bedded out.  The Remission

*****

The hotel was painted a deep ocher with white trim. It had white awnings and green shutters and black iron balconies as lacquered and shiny as Chinese boxes. It possessed two tennis courts, a lily pond, a sheltered winter garden, a formal rose garden, and trees full of nightingales. In the summer dark, belles-de-nuit glowed pink, lemon, white, and after their evening watering they gave off a perfume that varied from plant to plane and seemed to match the petals’ coloration. In May the nights were dense with stars and fireflies. From the rose garden one might have seen the twin pulse of cigarettes on a balcony where Jack and Netta sat drinking a last brandy-and-soda before turning in.  The Moslem Wife

******

At last the good weather fades, the crowds go away. The hotel closes its shutters. … All at once Walter’s garden seems handsome, with the great fig tree over the terrace, and the Judas tree waiting for its late-winter flowering. After Christmas, the iris will bloom, and Walter will show his tottering visitors around. “I put in the iris,” he explains, “but, of course, Miss Cooper shall have them when I go.” This sounds as though he means to die on the stroke of sixty, leaving the iris as a mauve-and-white memorial along the path. An Unmarried Man’s Summer

*****

From the kitchen one could look down a slope into garden where flowering trees and shrubs sent gusts of scent across to torment Mrs. Unwin, and leaves and petals to litter her cactus bed. An American woman called “the Marchesa” lived there. Mrs. Unwin thought of her as an enemy — someone who deliberately grew flowers for the discomfort they created.  …  Soon after Christmas, the garden began to bloom in waves of narcissi, anemones, irises, daffodils; then came the great white daisies and the mimosas; and then all the geraniums that had not been uprooted with the rosebushes flowered at once — white, salmon-pink, scarlet, peppermint-striped. The tide of colour continued to run as long as the rains lasted. After that the flowers died off and the garden became a desert.  The Four Seasons

*****

Mrs. Massie… gave…to Alec…Flora’s Gardening Encyclopaedia, seventeenth edition, considered her masterpiece. All her books were signed “Flora,” though it was not her name. The Remission

*****

If anyone had asked Carol at what precise moment she fell in love, or where Howard Mitchell proposed to her, she would have imagined, quite sincerely, a scene that involved all at once the Seine, moonlight, barrows of violets, acacia in flower, and a confused, misty background of the Eiffel Tower and little crooked streets. This is what everyone expected, and she had nearly come to believe it herself.

    Actually, he had proposed at lunch, over a tuna-fish salad.  The Other Paris

*****

The trouble about the grave is that he’s got family living around Muggendorf. My cousin-in-law tipped them off. They’re watching the grave closely. At the first sign of drought, weeds, plant lice, cyclamen mites, leafhoppers, thrips, borers, whiteflies, beetles feeding, they’ll take color photographs of the disaster and use them as evidence. Which would mean the end of the eight hundred dollars. … Last Sunday they happened to find one bare spot and they planted an ageratum. A reproach. What nobody understands is that it isn’t usual to buy a plot for a can of ashes. I would have kept them at home, but his will had one whole page of special instructions. What can you put on a plot that size? Not much bigger than a cat’s grave and the stone takes up room. The begonias are choking the roses and vice versa.   The Pegnitz Junction.

*****

My textbook of elementary biology in high school explained about the pure and the impure, beginning with plant life. Here was the picture of an upright, splendid, native plant, and next to it the photograph of a spindly thing that never bloomed and that was in some way an alien flower. Bibi’s round face, her calm eyes, her expression of sweetness and anxiety to please spoke of nothing but peasant sanity; still, she was different; she was the “other.” An Alien Flower

****

My birthday. What occurs on one’s birthday sets the tone for the next 12 months. So far, so splendid. The apartment is like a garden and smells of lilies and roses and even sweet peas. I had a successful tussle with French bureaucracy and left them smiling. (The trick is to say, “I knew this was going to make me miserable,” and just stand there, looking as agreeable as one can, under the circumstances.) My German publisher has issued a friendly press release, announcing my birth date, with a photograph in which I look nothing so much as a boiled potato with earrings. Inland Revenue, the British income tax, has refunded me a sum I never expected to see again. I shall be dining at a place where there aren’t too many bright lights, so that I can see the August shooting stars. That ought to make for a fine year.  Diary, Published Slate, August 12, 1997

****

The garden was another of her grievances. Instead of grass, it grew gravel, raked into geometric patterns by the cook’s son, who appeared to have no other occupation. There were the big cactus plants — on which tradesmen scratched their initials to while away the moments between the delivering of bread and the receiving of change — a few irises, and the inevitable geraniums. The first year of her marriage, Stella had rushed at the garden with enthusiasm. Part of her vision of herself as a bride, and a lady, had been in a floppy hat with cutting scissors and dewy, long-stemmed roses. She had planted seeds from England, and bedded out dozens of tender little plants, and buried dozens of bulbs. Nothing had come of it. The seeds rotted in the ground, the bulbs were devoured by rats, the little plants shrivelled and died. She bought Gardening in Happy Lands, and discovered that the palm trees were taking all the good from the soil. Cut the palms, she had ordered. She had not been married to Henry long enough  then to be out of the notion of herself as a spoiled young thing, cherished and capricious. The cook’s son, to whom she had given the order, went straight to Henry. Henry lost his temper. It appeared that the cutting down of a palm was such a complicated undertaking that only a half-wit would have considered it. The trunks would neither burn nor sink. It was illegal to throw them into the sea, because they floated among the fishing nets. They had to be sliced down into bits, hauled away, and dumped on a mountain side, somewhere in the back country. It was all very expensive, too; that was the part that seemed to bother Henry most.

“I wanted to make a garden,” Stella had said, too numb from his shouting to mention palms again. “Other people have gardens here.” She had never been shouted at in her life. Her family, self-made, and with self-made rules of gentility, considered it impolite to call from room to room.

“Other people have gardeners,” Henry had said, dropping his tone. “Or, they spend all their time and all their income trying to create a bit of England on the Mediterranean. You must try to adapt, Stella dear.”

She had adapted. Gardening in Happy Lands had been donated to the British Library, and nearly forgotten; but she still could not look at the gravel, or the palms, or the hideous cacti, without regret.  In Italy

*****

… I ran screaming around a garden, tore the heads off tulips, and — no, let another voice finish it; the only authentic voices belong to the dead: “… then she ate them.” Voices Lost in Snow