Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 32
The Statues Taken Down
May 23, Victoria Day Long Weekend Monday
So unfortunate when significant anniversaries pass by unremarked. Last year, for example, 2021, was the centennial of the advent of singing sensation and film goddess Deanna Durbin, Winnipeg-born, who for a year or two, in the mid-1940’s, was the highest-paid star in Hollywood. (She has already been mentioned in the diary which, given the all-encompassing embrace of my devotion, is the furthest thing from surprising.) I did my best to ramp up excitement around this occasion, to fan it to a fever pitch, wrote enthusiastic and encouraging and even threatening missives to various influencers, in her ville natale and elsewhere, invoking both artistic and moral and patriotic imperatives, beseeching them not to let this opportunity — once in a lifetime! — pass them by etc., etc. It was for naught. My emails went unanswered, my calls unreturned, my pipe and drum bands sent packing. No one gave a cold, hard crap about Deanna Durbin was the short, nasty, brutish lesson I took away from my enterprise, as failed as it was worthy. If ever evidence were required to prove the barbarians had breached the gate, here it was, set before me on a platter that was not even silver-plate. How was this possible? Did these people, these prosperous gatekeepers — none born before 1980 — even breathe the same oxygen as I, or was I hauling around a tank equipped with a gas specially formulated to sustain fossils from the 50’s? “Deanna!” I cried, and no head turned, no eye glimmered with recognition, or with the happy hope she so handily inspired in film-goers of the 40’s. How was it possible I got it so wrong? I was sucked at by the same sickly tides that washed over me when I’d receive a D-minus or worse on a geometry quiz; was gripped by the gnawing certainty that if I’d just tried harder, I would have succeeded. Geometry, however, would always elude me. Of geometry I had no intuitive grasp, as I did of Deanna: her life, her seasons, her reasons. It was just my bad luck she turned out to be the rest of the world’s impenetrable isosceles. It is hard, so very hard, to be frog-marched, so late in life, into coming to terms with how alone, so very alone, one truly is in this world. Oh, well. That’s show business.
It is to compensate for this failure to impose my will and unimpeachable taste upon the wider populace that I’ve taken on the Mavis Gallant (MG) file, and the now-and-again production of these dairy entries. If, come August 11, there isn’t some nationwide observance of the hundredth anniversary of her birth, I will at least know it wasn’t for want of my own trying. At least I’ll be able to say I did my best, and some other use will be found for all the bunting.
This is all by windy way of saying that, observant as I am of anniversaries of import, I can only offer regrets that I let May 21 slip by without noting — not here, not anywhere — it as the death date, in 1928, of Sir George James Frampton.
Best known for the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens — commissioned by James Barrie in 1912 — Frampton was also the sculptor of the Queen Victoria statue that sat, solid, stolid, and seemingly serene, sceptre and orb in hand, in front of the Manitoba Legislature, from October 1, 1904 until July 1, 2020, when she was painted and toppled. Her royal accoutrements were wrested from her grasp and her head was removed and tossed into the Assiniboine, whence it was later recovered, minus the crown.
Many such statues, monuments to Canada’s still recent colonial past, came down during that hot, troubled summer of racial and historical reckoning. Queen V — her birthday is tomorrow, she’d be huffing on 203 candles had she but managed to hold on — was an obvious and, I daresay, a necessary target. The ensuing conversations and arguments were likewise necessary and obvious, by which I mean predictable. You knew right away what would be the “on the one hand, on the other hand” talking points, just as you knew that laying them out, as had to be done, wouldn’t result in resolution. Not that resolution was necessarily the point. And so we put in the scales the festering sore of history, of trauma, of specific harm heaped on specific harm from generation unto generation and brewing an inchoate rage that required an outlet, an unseating, a dashing that had to be more than symbolic but required a symbol. This we measured against the rule of the law, the madness of the mob, the slippery slope, the question of whether a bronze embodiment of a hated system had more power on public view as an enduring example than it might if relegated to a warehouse or museum basement, a soon-forgotten former tenant of an empty plinth or pedestal.
“Deanna Durbin would fill that spot nicely,” was the glib thought that visited me when, a few months later, I walked by the place where once Victoria sat unchallenged, but given the tenor of the times and the charged nature of the site I deduced the idea would not find ready purchase were I to advance it publicly via, say, a Go Fund Me campaign, so I kept it to myself, and probably should have done so here. Please forget I ever mentioned it. Here, have a look at Peter Pan while I show this bad smell the door.
On Saturday, May 21, when I should have been doing something to memorialize Sir George James Frampton, I was working at the store, putting stock on shelves. One of the customers was a woman — her cart was full, it was her big shop day — whose two children were allowed to free-range. The boy was 7 or 8, his sister — as I suppose her to have been — was no older than 3. She availed herself readily and often of the cavities and resonators in her skull and generated scream after shrill scream of excitement while the two of them tore up one aisle and down the other. It was a bit unsettling, and another situation where the arguments for and against hardly need articulating. On the one hand, children are children and children will play. On the other hand, elderly people with canes and, displays that would topple under the force of a collision and shelves full of breakables. I debated whether I should intervene, have a word with the mother or the kids themselves. In the end, I decided I’d rather not live on in their memories, if at all, as the mean old man who stood in the way of their fun, so I let it go. Also, they were their own interesting study. Their affection for each other was clear. She followed him adoringly, and he was vigilant, custodial, always looking to see where she was. Sometimes she followed in the wake of her mother, and he was left as a solo act, describing an elegant trajectory between the high shelves of dry goods, executing what amounted to a series of grand jetés. He brought to his exertions a dreaminess, an absence of self-consciousness, no sense that he was being observed, assessed, judged. (There was about him, truth be told, something of Peter Pan, something elfin, a little bit magical. His mother spoke to him in what I took to be either Russian or Polish and he had the same Eastern European cast of face that belonged to a child who lived down the street from us while growing up, a Ukrainian family, a very imaginative child who broke his arm when he jumped off a low roof, believing he could fly, like Peter Pan. Books are dangerous, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.) Whether the boy in the store attends a ballet class I have no idea or way of knowing, but he’d do well in one, of that I’m sure. He used his hands beautifully, in an air sculpting way that was unstudied but somehow formally gestural, as if he were conducting the ensemble of his own small body. You could see he had that talent, surpassingly rare, that comes down to a contract with gravity, an understanding that it, for you, will sometimes look the other way. You see it in really great dancers and athletes, the way they manage to hover for a space in time that’s only nanoseconds longer than is accorded we lesser mortals but that makes all the difference. That is the gift. It’s evident early on, is innate, is not available for purchase or hire.
Great writers have that same gift, I think, although it’s differently deployed. MG was someone, absolutely, who floated during the necessarily plodding business of setting down one word after another. The “on the one hand, on the other hand” argument about “creative writing,” as an academic study, pertains to its teachability. For sure, workshops and tutorials and manuscript analysis are, or can be, valuable, can be at least instructive for writers finding their feet; but does any of it go any further than promoting mere competence absent a particular gift with which one is born? On this question I am a devout fence-sitter; MG, never one to withhold an opinion, was not. She often said in interviews that the writer’s gift was just that, something ineffable that was bestowed and could not be endowed with the granting of a credential. Here she is in 1983, speaking to Anne-Marie Girard for an interview in The Journal of the Short Story in English. They are speaking about how MG will soon be heading to Toronto for her 1984 stint as Writer in Residence at Massey College. The question is, what will that entail.
M.G. : A suivre et aider les étudiants qui veulent écrire et dont les professeurs pensent qu'ils ont quelque talent. Je les recevrai un par un, sur rendez-vous, deux après-midi par semaine. Il ne s'agit absolument pas de faire des cours ou des conférences. Je suis tout à fait opposée aux cours de «creative writing » qui, à mon avis, ne servent pas à grand'chose. Ce que je conseillerai aux futurs écrivains, c'est de lire, beaucoup lire.
A-M. G. : Pensez‑vous que l'on naît ou que l'on devient écrivain ?
M.G. : Pour moi, aucun doute : on naît écrivain, quoique l'on puisse avoir, bien sûr, une vocation tardive. Mais encore faut‑il savoir si l'on veut écrire : dans ce cas, il faut se consacrer à sa tâche et renoncer à tout le reste. Un mari, des enfants, cela me semble difficilement conciliable avec le métier d'écrivain. Ou alors, on ne fait rien comme il faut !
Short translation: writers are born. The vocation requires your absolute devotion.
The ballet boy and his sister stayed with me long after they left the store. When I came home from work and sat down to read, it seemed they’d predicted the story I’d choose, originally published in The New Yorker in 1965, “The Statues Taken Down.”
Hal and Dorothy are the brother / sister team in the story — their roles reversed from the pair I’d seen earlier that day. Dorothy, the eldest, is in charge. Their ages aren’t revealed but Dorothy would be 12, perhaps, Hal maybe three years younger. They are, owing to necessity, independent and adaptable. In the U.S. they live sometimes with their grandmother in the country, sometimes with their mother in New York. Summers, they come to Paris to stay with their father, George Crawley, a longtime resident of the city, an English poet of some literary reputation, also known to cut a romantic swath. He sets them loose in the gardens of the Palais-Royal — Colette, were she alive, could have watched them playing from her window.
Crawley is fond of his children, and not disengaged, but mystified by them, in some ways, and also misapprehends their essential natures, and their connection, one to the other.
“He looked from one face to the other and was looking not at his own children but at images of Victorian children, in repose, between reprimands, safely over whatever they had been deprived of that morning in the way of food or comfort and considering the safest way of avoiding an unknown offence. They were Victorian in expression, in watchful calm.”
He’s the sort of father who doesn’t make conversational or lifestyle concessions, who speaks to his children in ways that are not necessarily inappropriate but deal with considerations beyond their ken, that are stamped with enigma. When he tells them that their mother, when they first met, resembled the Holbein portrait of Lady Parker, neither the painter nor his subject stick. It becomes just another irregularly-shaped piece of the puzzle of their relationship that the children are left to mull and try to fit.
The story belongs to Dorothy, who is a child on the cusp, and has been left on her own to decipher the changes that are coming for her and what will happen after they arrive. Her information is spotty, incomplete. In the Tuileries she watches couples on the benches kissing, and worries for them. She knows that kissing itself is not regenerative, but also can’t believe anyone capable of the “private anarchy” described in the green-backed pornographic novel she’s found in her father’s apartment. She finds and reads her father’s poems, including one about a swallow caught in a net. He sees her looking at that page and tells her, candidly, that it describes his relationship with her mother. He has allowed his diaries to be published, and Dorothy reads those, too. They are explicit, revealing. They give her much to consider, even if they make him seem somehow more of a stranger.
One day in August, bored by Hal, Dorothy takes him to a cinema where’s there’s a festival of vampire films. He’s happy to be left there, eating chocolates and revealing in fear. In the Tuileries, alone, she reads her father’s poems. Time passes, unremarked. The light changes, and the weather. The air smells like a coming storm. The daytime habitués of the gardens have been replaced by solitary men who sit on the benches and consider her. The park is dangerous and electric. Something of the meaning of the change settles upon her. It’s also the summer of the beginning of a political waking that comes via the fate of a mysterious lodger, a rarely-seen man who came along with the apartment in which George is living during this particular visit. All told, it is very rich.
“The Statues Taken Down” was collected in In Transit, and it pack a wallop for all kinds of reasons. It would be a terrific double-bill along with Alice Munro’s “The Found Boat,” dealing as they do with girls arriving at a sense of themselves as women, as sexual beings. To read “The Statues Taken Down” — this can be said of all MG’s stories — and then to read it again with a mind to discovering how she does what she does is its own little masterclass, but without pat answers. What she does, thematically, mechanically, you can discern, but the how of it — that’s beyond parsing. That’s the hidden heart. That’s the gift.
The story appeared, as noted, in 1965, and is set a year or two earlier. A particular event discloses the timeframe. MG spoke of it in that same interview, in French, in The Journal of the Short Story in English. Here she’s talking about how once a story is done, it’s forgotten, but sometimes its ghost will appear unbidden, summoned back by a word, or a passing scene, in this case, from a bus window. She said,
Ou encore, l'autre jour, j'ai longé les Tuileries en autobus, et une de mes nouvelles, «The Statues Taken Down », m'est revenue à la mémoire : elle se passait au moment où Malraux, vous vous en souvenez, faisait enlever les anciennes statues pour les remplacer par des statues de Maillol. Je me suis rappelé que j'avais écrit une histoire autour de l'événement.
Here’s how she alludes to Malraux’s acquisition of the Maillol bequest in “The Statues Taken Down.”
“‘Is it true,” her father asked, as if she should know, “that they are taking down the statues in the Tuileries and replacing them with Maillols?’ She did not know and he did not bestir himself to see. ‘They were wild and romantic,’ he said, ‘and the Maillols will look damn silly with pigeons on their heads.’”
It’s a passing reference, but I think there may be more of Maillol and his story in the story than those few lines disclose. Maillol, in this regard, is his own intriguing, rather sensational line of inquiry. But that will be for next time, either tomorrow or Wednesday, whatever time and will permits.
Victoria Day has lost whatever lustre it once had, for sure, and I don’t mourn its passing. It remains the day when, on the prairies, you can safely plant your garden without fear of frost, and that’s something to be glad of. It’s a day off for many, a time, perhaps, for quiet contemplation. Last night, just before sunset, I wandered down to the Vancouver Art Gallery where the south side steps, on Robson, have been for many months now the site of a moving installation — shoes, dresses, personal effects, teddy bears — memorializing the children, some named, some not, who died in residential schools. It is more powerful than any statue. I don’t think it will be taken down any time soon. Thanks for reading, xo, B
I trust you let the powers that be know that, according to Wikipedia, "Durbin was well known in Winnipeg, Manitoba (her place of birth), as "Winnipeg's Golden Girl" (a reference to one of the city's most famous landmarks, the statue Golden Boy atop the Manitoba Legislative Building)."
I love that she quit at the peak of her popularity: "I can't run around being a Little Miss Fix-It who bursts into song—the highest-paid star with the poorest material." But oh my, to have passed on My Fair Lady, The Student Prince, and the West End and film version of Kiss Me Kate! Weird to have stay retired when the material finally lived up to her, or maybe she'd lost the drive. For sure, Winnipeg would have paid attention to her centenary if she'd notched those. Life.
I totally agree with MG about Creative Writing departments, especially now. Today, I think they'd terrify any original idea or point of view right back into the pen. It does seem off, though, that, in 1984 she thought you couldn't write and have a family life: Did she resent Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, do you now? The Sixties made all the difference.