Memory, Grief, Three O'Clock in the Morning, Post Script

Varieties of Exile / Atwood / New Yorker

This is the URL for the event recently recorded in Toronto with Margaret Atwood reading Mavis Gallant’s (MG) story “Varieties of Exile,” and talking with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/margaret-atwood-reads-mavis-gallant-live

I don’t think it’s paywalled, so if you’re not a subscriber you’ll still be able to listen, and there are many worse ways to spend an hour and change.

Atwood and Treisman talk about the autobiographical elements of the story, and here are a couple of archival glosses that pertain to two particular passages, both found towards the end of “Varieties of Exile.”

The narrator, Linnet Muir, MG’s fictional stand-in, says: Did we write to each other? That's what I can't remember. I was careless then; I kept moving on. Also I really did, that time, get married. My husband was posted three days afterward to an American base in the Aleutian islands — I have forgotten why.

MG married John Dominick Gallant, a pianist, a Winnipeg boy, in Ottawa when she was working there for the National Film Board. I’m not sure of the date, and I wouldn’t count on a reference in a story as a reliable way of time-keeping, but here’s John Gallant, presumably Aleutian-bound, on a ship entering Alaska on July 4, 1943, just after wedding season. (Some trouble sizing the document, he’s number 11, second from the bottom.)

And here:

As well, Linnet says: Instead of enlisting I passed the Saint John Ambulance first-aid certificate, which made me a useful person in case of total war. Here’s a complementary photo from the Montreal Gazette, — it’s sadly very blurry — of some CNR employees, including Mavis Young, “standing by,” doing a First Aid demonstration. It’s from October 31, 1942.

FYI, just me, nerding out on a rainy Friday night in Vancouver. Cheers from here, BR