Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary 22
My mother's hands were small, like mine
May 8, 3.45 a.m.
I had roomed at school with a girl with schizophrenia… She didn’t like her mother, either. I remember she scribbled all over her mother’s picture. I read Proust later on, and you get the thing about the lesbian making the other lesbian scribble all over her parents’ picture. So I thought, ‘That’s true, that can happen, Mr Proust.’ She ran around the room screaming. She had asked her mother for some money to buy a bathing suit. And her mother had written – I remember the letter – ‘Buy a simple, modest number.’ And she ran around the room.
That story came up during Mavis Gallant’s (MG) conversation with the writer Jhumpa Lahiri; it was published in Granta, in 2009. For Mother’s Day, here’s a very contained commonplace book — pamphlet, rather — a random bouquet, not necessarily sweet smelling, an arrangement of MG pronouncements on mothers and motherhood. It’s a bit arbitrary, just a few of many such examples that might have been included. The citations come from her fiction and from 3 different interviews. The sources are identified at the end of each quoted passage. This is from one of the Linnet Muir stories, collected in Home Truths. These stories, MG told Lahiri, were as close to autobiography as fiction can be. Here, Linnet remembers her mother, Charlotte.
My mother did not care for food. If we were alone together, she would sit smoking and reading, sipping black coffee, her elbows used as props — a posture that would have called for instant banishment had I so much as tried it. … She read one book after another without looking up, without scraping away the frost on the windows. “The Russians, you know, the Russians,” she said to her mother and me, glancing around in the drugged way adolescent readers have “They put salt on the window sills in winter.” … What age was she then? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Her husband had removed her to the country; now that they were there he seldom spoke. How young she seems to me now — half twenty-eight in perception and feeling, but with a husband, a child, a house, a life, an illiterate maid from the village whose life she confidently interfered with and mismanaged, a small zoo of animals she alternately cherished and forgot, and she was the daughter of such a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman — pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists.
Our rooms were not Russian — they were aired every day and the salt became a great nuisance, blowing in on the floor.
“There, Charlotte, what did I tell you?” my grandmother said.
from “Voices Lost in Snow”
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Q: Linnet’s mother, Charlotte, seems very childlike.
MG: Well, she’s not exactly my mother, because I would not put family quarrels into it. I do say in one story, “We parted — I slipped out of her life,” and that is true. It’s too complicated to tell you, but anyway. She also had this other side, of someone who read novels all day long and acted them out. It was disconcerting for people trying to lead a real life! What was happening was enough without that! I have never criticized her in book, or in life, really.
Q: Did she read your work?
MG: She certainly read the newspaper when I was working on the newspaper because she had someone take her picture reading it. It was open and you could see the name of the newspaper, and she sent it without a letter. (laughs) “My eyes upon you….” but I was twenty-one by then.
Q: You don’t know whether she read your fiction?
MG: I have no way of knowing. I had no communication with her afterwards. She said to someone apparently, an American who wrote to me, “I was a bad mother.” I didn’t answer the letter because that would be what she felt like saying at the time. Ten minutes later she may have said, “I sacrificed myself for you, ungrateful child!” She was not safe to be around. However, I never allowed anyone to criticize her to me. C’est ma mère, c’est ma mère. She had a bad character that was quite dangerous. She told me dangerous stories that were fantasy or beyond that. I’ve known people like that — it is not unknown…
From Mavis Gallant On Her Work, an interview conducted in 2007 by Christine Evain and Christine Bertail
Her mother looked small and helpless, struggling with the awkward camellia. Emma never pitied her when she suffered — it was too disgraceful, too alarming — but she sometimes felt sorry for some detail of her person; now she was touched by the thin veined hands fumbling with flower and pins, and the thin shoulder blades that moved like wings. Her pity took the form of exasperation; it made her want to get up and do something crazy and rude — slam a door, say all the forbidden words she could think of. At last, Mrs. Ellenger stood up , nearly ready. But, no, something had gone wrong.
“Emma, I can’t go ashore like this,” her mother said. She sat down again. “My dress is wrong. My shoes are wrong. Look at my eyes. I look old. Look at my figure. Before I had you, my figure was wonderful. Never have a baby, Emma. Promise me.”
“O.K.,” Emma said.
From “Going Ashore.”
**********
If, by chance, Jack found himself drawn to another woman, if the tide of attraction suddenly ran the other way, then he would discover in himself a great need to talk to his wife. They sat out on their balcony for much of one long night and he told her about his Irish mother. His mother’s eccentricity — “Vera’s dottiness,” where the family was concerned — had kept Jack from taking anything seriously. He had been afraid of pulling her mad attention in his direction. Countless times she had faked tuberculosis and cancer and announced her own imminent death. A telephone call from the hospital had once declared her lost in a car crash. “It’s a new life, a new life,” her husband had babbled, coming away for the phone. Jack saw his father then as beautiful. Women are beautiful when they fall in love, said Jack; sometimes the glow will last a few hours, sometimes even a day or two.
“You know,” said Jack, as if Netta knew, “the look of amazement on a girl’s face …”
Well, that same incandescence had suffused Jack’s father when he thought his wife had died, and it continued to shine until a taxi deposited dotty Vera with her cheerful announcement that she had certainly brought off a successful April Fool.
….
(Jack’s mother) had taken to saying, “My leg is dying before I am,” and imploring Jack to preserve her leg should it be amputated, and make certain it was buried with her. She wanted Jack to be close by at nearly any hour now, so that she could lean on him. After sitting for hours at bridge she had trouble climbing two flights of stairs; nothing would induce her to use the lift.
“Nothing ever came of your music,” she would say, leaning on him. “Of course, you have a wife to distract you now. I needed a daughter. Every woman does.”
From “The Moslem Wife”
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There were things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to play the piano, I don’t know why. I came from a family where everybody played instruments. My father, as a young man, played cello. He brought it with him from England as a young man. It was behind the sofa chez nous. You’d see the case lying on its side.
JL: Did he keep it up?
MG: By the time I became conscious of it, no, but before, apparently yes. My mother played the violin and my grandmother played the piano. They played together. When my mother was in a good mood and wanted to amuse me, she’d make it speak.
JL: The violin?
MG: I’d say, ‘What is it saying?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s saying it’s time for Mavis to go to bed.’ ‘No it isn’t!’ That was when she was in a good mood.
Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, Granta, 2009
JL: Have you kept a journal since childhood?
MG: I’ve stopped, except now and then. Up to 2000, I wrote regularly.
JL: When did you begin it?
MG: I had one when I was still in Canada, but I destroyed it when I left.
I was going to a new life.
JL: So you wanted to destroy the evidence. Did you start it as a child?
A teenager?
MG: I did as a teenager, sporadically. I had to be very careful, living with my mother. She went through my things like a beaver.
JL: But you always wrote in it honestly?
MG: At fourteen I wrote a poem called ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It began, ‘You ask?’ Of course, no one had ever asked me if I even knew what socialism was. I had got hold of A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, published in 1938. I was fifteen and that was the Depression. Left-wing poetry I admired enormously. I liked the marching rhythm. There was Auden and company. There was Ezra Pound, so they weren’t all left wing. I read this stuff over and over, knew it by heart. Muriel Rukeyser; the gang. And this inspired ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It was a better world. And my mother found this. She wanted to know who I was mixed up with. Mothers then were very interested in preserving their daughters’ sexual purity.
JL: Some mothers now, too.
MG: For the marriage market. She drove me cuckoo. She read everything. I never could keep anything to myself.
Interview, Granta, Jumpha Lahiri
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Believing it her duty, she read her children’s personal letters and diaries as long as they lived under her roof. She carried the letters to the bright room and sat, leaning her head on her hand, reading. If someone came in she never tried to hide what she read, or slip it under a book, but let her hands fall, indifferently. In this room Gerard had lived the most hideous adventure of his life. Sometimes he thought it was a dream and he willed it to be a dream, even if it meant reversing sleeping and waking forever and accepting as friends and neighbours the strangers he saw in his sleep. He would remember it sometimes and say, “I must have dreamed it.” His collection of pornography was heaped in plain sight on his mother’s desk. There were the pictures, the books carefully dissimulated under fake covers, and the postcards from France and India turned face down. His mother sat with these at her elbow, and, of course, he could see them and she said, “Gerard, I won’t always be here. I’m not immortal. Your father is thirty years older than I am but he didn’t have to bear his own children and he’s as sound as this house. He might very well outlive me. I want you to see that he is always looked after and that he always uses saccharine to sweeten his tea. There is a little box I slip in his pyjama pocket and another in the kitchen. Promise me. Now, the sweater you had on yesterday, I want to throw it out. It’s past mending. I don’t want you to sulk for a week, and that’s why I’m asking you first. He wanted to say, “Those things are’t mine, I’ve got to give them back.” He saw through her eyes and all at once understood that the cards from India were the worst of all, for they were all about people scarcely older than Leopold, and the reason they looked so funny was that they were starving to death. All Gerard had seen until now was what they were doing, not who they were, or could be. Meanwhile, the room rocked around him, and his mother stood up to show that was all she had to say.
From “Saturday.”
Linnet Muir is fiction, but people who knew me then have said, “That’s you. Every gesture, every word, every everything is what you were like.” So I got that right. I was careful because when I was writing the stories, people who had known me as a child were still alive. I didn’t feel that I should deliver my parents over to readers because, as they had died, I couldn’t consult them. My father died when I was a child; my mother rather later. My mother married again as soon as my father died and she didn’t have much to do with me after that. She went off to another life. That happens, you know. I still have feelings about it, but I don’t think I have the right to exploit those feelings—or her. I’ve taken only certain aspects of her character. There’s a story called “The Wedding Ring” that is absolutely my mother. I read it again when it was translated into French, and it’s exactly what she was like: very calm and then suddenly making a dramatic gesture. Or writing a letter from a country cottage—I’ve invented the letter—going over her marriage and taking it apart then sending it to her husband who works in the city, saying, P.S. Bring a roast of lamb when you come for the weekend. That was her to a T.
From The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, 1999. Interview with Daphne Kalotay.
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My mother is a vixen. Everyone who sees her that summer will remember, later, the gold of her eyes and the lovely movement of her head. Her hair is true russet. She has the bloom women have sometimes when they are pregnant or when they have fallen in love. She can be wild, bitter, complaining, and ugly as a witch, but that summer is her peak. She has fallen in love. … My mother is developing one of her favourite themes - her lack of roots. To give the story greater power, or because she really believes what she is saying at that moment, she gets rid of an extra parent: “I never felt I had any stake anywhere until my parents died and I had their graves. The graves were my only property. I felt I belonged somewhere.” Graves? What does she mean? My grandmother is still alive. … Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it, but I am told I did not — I was already in Boston. The weekend party, her chosen audience, watched her rise, without warning, from the wicker chair on the porch. An admirer of Russian novels, she would love to make an immediate, Russian gesture, but cannot. The porch is screened, so, to throw her wedding ring away, she must have walked a few steps to the door and then made her speech, and flung the ring into the twilight, in a green spinning arc. The others looked for it the next day, discreetly, but it had disappeared. First it slipped under one of those sharp bluish stones, then a beetle moved it. It left its print on a cushion of moss after the first winter. No one else could have worn it. My mother’s hands were small, like mine.
From “The Wedding Ring”
By way of a PS, here’s “Myth” a poem by her early lodestar, Muriel Rukeyser, that I think MG, who read poetry every morning — thank you, Marta Dvorak for that detail — must have known. I’m taking a day or two away to lie quiet and read and think. See you next week. Thanks for reading, xo B
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, 'I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?' 'You gave the
wrong answer,' said the Sphinx. 'But that was what
made everything possible,' said Oedipus. 'No,' she said.
'When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman.'
'When you say Man,' said Oedipus, 'you include women
too. Everyone knows that.' She said, 'That's what
you think.'
Do you ever find yourself hating MG's hypocricy? I get people who can't stand (or are ambivalent about) their parents and family and write about it. But MG goes out of her way to clarify that her stories are close to autobiography and that he friends agree, and then in the same breath to claim that she never did or wrote anything to disparage her. For example, David Sedaris has always written the most appalling things about his family, but hasn't tried to sugarcoat himself, even when dealing with his disturbed sister Tiffany and her suicide. Nor did Albee when writing and speaking about his mother.
The lack of charity to the report that her mother has said "I was a bad mother" is telling. Maybe she would have said the opposite a minute later, and/or maybe her mother said that so it would get back to her, but MG seems to like to nurse her grievances, with her mother as with Canada, in a way that never allows redemption or a generous impulse to the notion that even if her mother had an agenda (getting in touch) or was fickle, the act of verbalizing something so socially stigmatized (being a bad mother) meant worlds were happening below the surface.
Also her reaction to receiving the photo of her mom reading the newspaper she wrote for. Pretty cold and lacking the nuance she invests in balancing the language in her sentences. At least, that's how it strikes me. (It's a blessing she never had kids, don't you think? She would have made their lives hell.)