Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, I forget what number, anyway who's counting?

The Don of the Day

May 29, 3.18 a.m.

Sunday. 5 a.m. start at the store. Three hours before the doors open to the public. I enjoy that time, buzzing around, doing this and that, busy work. Well-rested. Had an old-fashioned Saturday. Recuperative. No store. No Mavis. Slept late. Coffee. Lazy start. Decent day for end of May. Went with Bill P to our local farmers’ market. Pleasant walk there, with empty canvas bag, and back, bag full. The usual trees showing off their flowers. Spectacular this year, really, the garish advantage of a soggy season. I can never remember what any of them are, it would help if they wore lanyards. BP can always call them to mind, he has a professional responsibility in that regard. Sometimes he’ll ask me to identify whatever the shrub. Rhododendron. Magnolia. Camellia. Those are the usual choices, but I always guess the wrong one. Chestnuts now, too, lurid in hue. Busy at the market. Lots of young people selling artisanal cordials and micro greens. Pleased to note that the impulse to spend the winter making candles and then to haul them out and peddle them in the spring is a current now as it was in the 60’s. I will die without ever having embraced a craft or completed a jigsaw puzzle. With this, I’ve made peace. Long lineup for the excellent bread. Guitar and banjo player singing old-timey country music. Neighbours. Some familiar faces, a few with names attached. Oh, look. It’s Magnolia. Camellia. Rhodo. Masks mostly gone, at least in that outdoor settings. Saw a librarian, long-retired, with whom I worked as far back as 1978, when I had a kind of intern job, every second Sunday, at Vancouver Public Library. She looks the same, remarkably unchanged. She was celebrated for her skill in answering patron questions — I’m not sure if library users are still called patrons, they were back then — when the petitioner came to the desk with the most minimal information: the half-remembered title, the completely wrong author, the blue book borrowed back in 58, that kind of thing. Famously, when someone asked for “that book by the guy in the dress,” she was able to discern that what was required was The Divine Comedy.

A couple of days back, speaking of the Vancouver Public Library, I posted this photo. It’s the inscription on this inside cover of my borrowed copy of the Mavis Gallant (MG) collection, In Transit.

I noted that above the inscription were some fine notations, and a price, in pencil, bibliographic markings that suggested the book had come from a second hand source. Don, I said, was a usual name, and that there was no reliable way of knowing who this Don might be, but I speculated that it might have been Don Stewart, the proprietor of MacLeod’s Books, a venerable establishment famous for its Dickensian, olde curiosity shoppe interior. That, I thought, was that. But then came this. It turns out that I was right, but only half right, about Don Stewart.

Dear Bill,

I am gobsmacked.

I have reason to believe that what was once my copy of In Transit which I sold to Don Stewart a couple of decades ago has found its way via the VPL to you.

When I sold to the other Don I also sold him a couple of antique bookcases which were still there at McLeod's the last time I looked.

Mavis signed one of my books on 5/10/89. I know this because she signed with a PF-49 FINE Bic made in Canada pen which I provided and which I kept. When I sold my collection to Don Stewart I sheepishly showed him the envelope with Mavis' pen and he looked at me and said he understood.

I may have been willing to part with an autographed copy of In Transit because on May 20 1992 I attended "An Evening with Mavis Gallant" at the downtown campus of Simon Fraser University. On that occasion I took with me my favourite MG tome, Home Truths, which she was happy to sign and even date following her talk/reading. 

Mavis demonstrated her ability to write and hold a conversation at the same time because whilst she wrote I told her about my pleasure in reading The Affair of Gabrielle Russier. I remember to this day the word I used to describe my feelings. The word I chose was 'cathartic' and Mavis' facial expression conveyed caring, confusion and concern. It was as though she would have liked to carry the conversation further but the line of autigraph seekers was long and her schedule no doubt tight.

I am not certain why I chose that word. It is odd in the context of Gabrielle's suicide. I know that when I read it I was in a troubled space and perhaps Gabrielle's affair put my issues in perspective and I saw how much worse life could be. 

In any case It was a memorable meeting with MG which has stayed in this forgetful octogenarian's head ever since.

xo

Don (Davis)

Well, Don, I am as gobsmacked as you, rest assured. I love everything about this, that the connection was made, that you took the time to write, that you solved a mystery that was small but that I would have thought insoluble, and most especially that you kept that pen. I understand absolutely the impulse. In 1988 — I think I have that right — I produced Vicki Gabereau’s interview with Audrey Hepburn.

Miss Hepburn was in town as a UNICEF ambassador. In those days — this will amaze and disgust you — smoking was permitted in the studios, which were, probably still are, cubicles, not much bigger than a confessional, small and airless. Everyone who smoked, me included, would puff away in there, it was just what we did. Lord. Miss Hepburn was a devoted smoker, and lit up as soon as she sat down. Horrible as it all was there is something ice-breaking about having a smoke with someone, and it could, in fact, ignite contact. The interview was cordial — I mostly remember that the ladies clicked over their shared fondness for Jack Russell terriers, I believe Miss Hepburn actually bred them, or caused them to be bred — and when it ended there remained behind a coffee cup marked by her lipstick and, of course, several cigarette butts. All of which I claimed. They made a nice little shrine on my desk for a long time. I can’t remember the decision to discard them. Plainly it was made. Maybe they’re out there still, floating about, like pieces of the true cross, attending some eventual discovery. That I am now older than was Audrey Hepburn when she died I find unsettling and, somehow, wrong. The world, when it takes off its mask, shows itself to be both unfair and plain old stupid.

The point is, Don, that I understand the pen, I commend the conserving impulse, and I admire how you’ve lovingly preserved it over the decades. It’s an important part of your legacy. I think we should make a pact that we’ll each amend our wills so that we name one another as the legatee of some such precious token. I’ll take the pen and you can have one of my mint copies of Kate Aitken’s Lovely You, a real rarity which no boy should be without. Deal? Deal.

(Also, Don, I’m grateful for the reminder that I’ve been meaning to read Warren Ellis’s memoir Nina Simone’s Gum, which takes the fetishizing of a celebrity remnant to heights neither of us could imagine.)

4.32. I shall arise and go now, not exactly to Innisfree, with its reeds and wattles and bee-loud glades, but to what I’ve got, a fairly reasonable facsimile. Here’s another photo Don sent, his signed copy of Home Truths, 1992, inscribed just over 30 years ago. Thanks to Don and to you all for reading. xo, B