Memory, Grief, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 30

the world will have put on a thin gold mask

May 19, 3.03 a.m.

Have become a nut scatterer. It was bound to happen, susceptible as I am to influence: all my neighbours are nut scatterers, too. As cults go, it’s easy-peasy. There are no initiation rituals, no dues, everyone is welcome, there are very few rules or restrictions, and there’s no AGM. To be a nut scatterer you need only commit to never leaving your building, not even on an inconsequential, short-term mission like taking out the trash, without a comestible — preferably something in the nut / seed line — to scatter for the crows, who are as vigilant as they are populous. They know who’s who, know the nuts from the nots, and if you’re a registered nut scatterer, and if you fail to honour the promise you make on the very first occasion you scatter a nut, then you’re seen as insincere, and are fair game once the babies come along. For about six weeks, the span of time bridging late spring and early summer, the crows are raucous with concern for their nests, their fledgling young. Protective, aggressive, they dive bomb anyone, anything they perceive as a threat. However, if they have had sustained proof that you are not an enemy combatant, i.e. if you have scattered nuts with the same lunatic enthusiasm Demeter showed for corn and Johnny for appleseeds, then they’ll leave you unmolested. Their facial recognition software is top drawer. It’s a protection racket, of course it is, but a peanut here, a cashew there is a small enough price to pay for peace on the way to work in the morning.

Coming home from the store yesterday afternoon — the virtue of the early start is the early finish — I watched a crow in flight drop something onto Robson Street; I couldn’t quite make out what, it may have been a chestnut, something with a hard carapace that needed cracking. I saw it bounce a few times, roll to a stop. I supposed that the bird would swoop down, gather it up, and try again and again until the shell was shattered by repeated impact and the meat could be pecked out: a lot of work for a modest lunch. More fool I. The crow waited curb-side, its eye on the prize. It watched, and I watched, as a parked car pulled out and into the street. As it angled into the traffic, the tires passed over the chestnut — let’s agree that that’s what it was — and voila: purée de marron. Was that a happy accident? Or did that damn crow figure it all out, make a plan, enact it? They are scary smart, these strutting little gods, so demanding of our steady, unstinting propitiation.

Years ago — it was just about this time of year, in 2014 — I was driving from Winnipeg to a house I owned in the country, about three hours west of the city. On the highway there was a tragic episode with a crow, one not as canny about traffic and its management as was my friend yesterday on Robson. It came swooping down on some absorbing mission, only to encounter the fast and forward moving obstacle that was my ‘94 Volvo, as sturdy a car as ever was made. Never mind that I was blameless in the result, I was sickened, of course, to have contributed to still more highway carnage; but there was nothing to be done, no resuscitation possible, resurrection was well beyond my pay-grade, so I drove on. When I reached my destination there were a few black feathers, and a smear of red on the grille. Sad. Spooky, a little. My father was failing. An omen. In a few weeks, as it evolved, he would be dead.

That part of the world, southwestern Manitoba, is, or was — I hope it still is — live and aloud with bird life in the spring. The swallows came back on May 13, without fail, and began nesting under the bridges and in the barns. I would look out onto the deck through the French doors off the dining room and see goldfinches, orioles, mourning doves, robins, redwing blackbirds, often sitting on the porch railing, preening, sunning. Crows, though, which here are ubiquitous, were rare there, were never among my visitors, never until the day following the unfortunate rite of passage described above. I was sitting at the dining room table, failing to write, looked up from whatever idea I was torturing, and there, on the railing, sitting very still, and looking at me long and hard, was a crow, solitary and stern, like the raven on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door. “Nevermore?” I said, but it never blinked. I read its stare, of course, as accusatory and perhaps it was. Maybe the crow I killed, albeit inadvertently, was its its mate, its boon companion, maybe it had followed me for thirty miles, from paved road, to gravel road, to the house across from the old mill. “You bastard,” was what I understood to be the message it beamed my way, telepathically. I imagined a crow whisper network, imagined my picture stuck up in some crow post-office equivalent, “Wanted for Murder Most Foul.” How far did word travel? Is there a statute of limitations? Are the crows hereabouts in the know about my long-ago felony? Maybe. So yes. I’ll be a nut scatterer. It’s an easy enough Hail Mary.

There was a huge cotoneaster hedge that ran along one edge of that property; by mid-June it would be in full flower, buzzing with pollinators: many small bees, some butterflies, even the rarer and rarer monarchs. The cotoneaster is a useful shrub, hardy, reliable, easy to cultivate in that climate. One grew in front of the Winnipeg house where I whittled away at the stump of my childhood; steam rose up from it in the winder, for it concealed the dryer vent, though I don’t think that’s why it was planted there. In the fall, its many small leaves took a long time to drop, and by the time they did they’d turned all kinds of shades yellow and red.

At some point, I took one of those little leaves and placed it in a book on my father’s shelf. Any book would have done, the choice was not deliberate. It happened to be an anthology of “modern verse,” 20th century American poetry, nothing more recent than 1950. Oscar Williams was the editor. It had one of those red ribbon book marks sewn into the spine. I placed the leaf — why? a time capsule impulse, probably — closed the book, forgot about it. I would have been 5, perhaps, or 6. A few years down the road, 7 or 8 years, I guess, and around the time my literacy was deepening and I was becoming more exploratory in my ideas gathering, I became interested in poetry, in reading and in writing it. I took that little volume off the shelf. That I’d concealed the leaf I’d forgotten until I found it, and the past came funneling back. It marked the page that contained a poem by Karl Shapiro, “Nostalgia.”

“My soul stands at the window of my room, and I ten thousand miles away…”

I was struck by this first line, it made me think of how I, too, would stand at the window of my room, which faced south, and imagined myself ten thousand miles away, which I thought would put me in California but would, as the crow flies, probably have landed me in Tierra del Fuego. Here’s a reading by a former student of Shapiro whose use of camera angle I admire and hope to emulate.

Nostalgia. Nostalgia. A pretty word, one I didn’t know. I looked it up in the family Webster and felt then, for the first time, the agreeable chill that I’ve since that day often felt when some happenstance insinuates itself, unplanned but perfectly timed, something that’s random but has the feel of being planned, orchestrated, offered. Serendipity. Brush of angel wings. What could have been more demonstrative than to have learned the word “nostalgia” from a poem on a page that was marked by a leaf I had placed there myself in my already faded childhood, a not quite living but still vibrant symbol of what the word itself intended? I own that book, now. The leaf is still there, dry and faded, as am I. I’ll look for it, the next time I’m able to go back to Manitoba. I’ll read the poem aloud to the empty house, laying special, portentous emphasis, as I did age 12 or 13, on its repeated line, its chorus: “Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.”

The other day I posted here a picture of my table on which were piled some of the books I’ve been gathering as I read and re-read and think about Mavis Gallant (MG) during this, her centennial year. They are the pretty, shiny things I’ve been gathering with crow-like rapacity. One observant reader, who goes by Crankypants, pointed out — thank you, Crankypants — that I had two copies of MG’s Governor General’s Award winning collection Home Truths. Crankypants wondered if I intended to use them as currency, and that was why I was hoarding them. Maybe! And the good news is, I’m richer than Crankypants knows. I have, in fact, four copies of Home Truths. One is a second hand paperback, cheaply acquired, a good reading copy that I can bend, fold, spindle, mutilate, and mark as need be. One is a very clean first printing, acquired from an online source, that has the feel of a book never opened, perhaps a promotional copy sent out by the publisher, that proved to contain MG’s tour schedule. Those were the days! Publicists! Drivers! Hotels! Minibars! MG was a busy girl in the fall of ‘81.

The third of my Home Truths, also a prime condition, first printing of the hardback, bears the book stamp of a true Renaissance man, E. D. Blodgett (1935 - 2018).

Blodgett, a lutenist, singer, translator, teacher, was first and foremost a wonderful poet, prolific, daring, allusive, someone whose work I’ve admired and wish I knew better. There’s still time for that to happen. I never met him, which I regret. This, from his collection, Through You I, is germane, I think, to today’s avian subtheme. (I searched for it online by the volume title, hence the yellow highlights, think of them as autumn leaves, clinging to the page.)

The last entry in this catalogue of the copies of Home Truths that have passed into in my care and keeping, the most recently acquired and, I guess, most precious, is a trade paperback, lavishly inscribed by MG herself: fountain pen, blue ink, steady hand.

“Massey College, Easter Monday, 1984, Thank you so much for your call, & for all your counsel. I wonder if anything in this book — in the introduction — will remind you of Australia. Bien cordialement a vous, Mavis G.”

Does the handwriting at the top, with the address of the College, look like hers? I can’t quite tell. Who is the unnamed dedicatee? What Australian was at Massey College in 1984, and what advice / counsel did that person disburse to MG? And how did the book make its way to the second hand dealer in NYC from whom I acquired it? It hardly matters, it changes nothing, but it delights. Small mysteries do. Ever since that long, long, long ago day when I found the leaf and learned nostalgia I’ve treasured the strange things found in books almost as much as the books themselves. They are of bibliographic interest, they are to be taken account of, investigated. Signs of life. Someone came here before. Who?

I ended yesterday’s diary entry with this photograph, said I would return to it. Now I do, by way of wrapping this up.

Two butterflies, pressed and perfectly preserved between pages 152 and 153 of a second hand trade paperback copy of James Merrill’s Selected Poems, 1946 - 1985. (There’s a third butterfly that marks p. 189.) It seems a missed opportunity that whoever placed them there chose the poem “To my Greek,” and not “To a Butterfly,” p. 79, but whatever. I love James Merrill. Love, love, love. His is a voice that’s meant so much to me for more than 40 year. Like MG, he was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. I’m desperate to learn whether they met, want to be assured that, if they did, they got along, were cordial, became friends, maybe even wrote to one another. God knows I’ve looked for the evidence of this but, so far, have discovered nothing that suggests proximity. In fact, as near as I can tell, they never once cozied up under the same cover of the magazine. (Mind, I haven’t made a deeply thorough search; I’ll assign that task to my factotum when he returns from his stress leave.)

What kind of butterfly in here interleaved? Nabokov would know. MG admired him, wrote about him; Merrill was not so fond. In The Changing Light at Sandover, his huge and entertaining and sometimes perplexing trilogy based on Ouija board communications, Nabokov, in the spirit world, is assigned the role of a low level bureaucrat and never gets a chance to speak. What was Merrill’s aversion? I have a vague recollection — I think it comes up in his memoir, A Different Person — that it had something to do with Proust. Well. It would, wouldn’t it? People DO quarrel about Proust, it happens all the time. Friendships end. Duels are arranged, seconds summoned with pistol and sabre. MG was a Proust aficionado, very much so, and this year belongs to MP as much as to MG, it being the centennial of his death. As I’ve said before, I think, MG was 100 days old when Proust took his last, asthmatic breath. I cannot imagine that she didn’t think to perform that calculation. I cannot imagine that it didn’t mean something to her. Enough, already. Time to end. By way of fond envoi, here’s James Merrill. Thanks for reading. Taking a day off to read, reorient, will write again on Saturday. xo, B