Memory, Grief, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 29

unsuffered fool

illustration by W M Berger for The Joyous Travellers

May 18, 3.08 a.m.

Sweet Jesus on a roasted corndog, what a morning. Big wind. Big rain. Wretched. Not the kind of day where you part the curtains and look outside — steam rising from your cup of camomile (organic) tea — and exhale a soppy, Il pleure dans mon cœur / Comme il pleut sur la ville; / Quelle est cette langueur / Qui pénètre mon cœur ? Ô bruit doux de la pluie / Par terre et sur les toits ! etc. Non. All it merits is a shrug and and an “Ugh,” and a return to bed. Not for me though, no, not for the merry labourer, the willing participant in the socialist experiment, ready to meet and greet the world with a callused hand and ready smile and lips pursed to whistle the Internationale. Feh.

Mais vraiment, mes enfants. A quoi bon? Oh, stop whining, comrade. Get to it. It’s an act of faith, that’s all. No matter that the whole premise is flawed, the foundation cracked, the root riddled with rot. I’m talking about the August 11th coincidence: Mavis Gallant (MG) born on that day, 1922, me born on that day, 1955. That’s the kind of nothing that means precisely nothing and no one has to remind me how that’s so. The question is, absent that random, empty husk of sharing, that common square on the calendar, would I be doing this? If nothing else about MG were altered, if every thought, word, action and deed were the same, but if her birthday was, say, November 17, would I be getting up at so ungodly an hour to perform an act of — of — of what, exactly? It’s intended as homage, but it comes down to free-associative sky-writing, or sand reading, or phrenology by mail, or aura parsing by phone, or — oh, I don’t know. No is the answer. For the sake of June 3 or March 12 or July 14, I would not be so engaged. August 11th is the grain of rice on which I’m trying to write my gospel.

It’s ridiculous. MG, who suffered fools not at all, would laugh: not with affection or fond camaraderie or bemused understanding, but with scorn. “Risible,” she would say, in the English fashion and then, for the benefit of any Francophones in the room, “Ree-zee-blah.” “You’re mad,” she would say, if she knew that at 3 in the morning, instead of falling exhausted into bed after a night at the opera and then having drinks with friends at the Ritz, everyone talking Proust, Proust, Proust, I was spending the roughly 100 minutes I have available before I go stock shelves at a grocery sitting at my computer testing a late-breaking “theory” that the one thing we have in common as writers, MG and me — and what arrogance to even presume a commonality, we who exist on such utterly different planets of excellence, mine scarcely habitable — is that we both are more than usually drawn to Christmas for its fictional possibilities, and that we both tend to refer to August more than other months. I know this is true of me, and I thought I observed it in her, so I did a word count on an electronic version of her Selected Stories. Bear in mind that they represent only about half her output, so while the results are a long way from accurate, they might be telling or, at least, suggestive of a proof. The results are as follows for the number of times each of the month is mentioned. (I believe this might be the first time in the history of Gallant scholarship this daring feat has been essayed.)

January, 10

February, 4

March, 7 (NB, these results have been adjusted from a word count of 188, owing to the occurrence of “march” appearing as a verb, or as part of a proper name, i.e. Marchand, or in a title, i.e. Marchioness. You’re welcome.)

April, 36 (Adjusted to eliminate use as proper name)

May, 5 (Again, an adjustment, as the word count of 188 consists mostly of “may” used as part of speech, i.e. modal verb. I think.)

June, 27

July, 15

August, 24 (Again, adjusted, as a world count of 35 includes August as proper name and Augustin, ditto.)

September, 15

October, 11

November, 10

December, 3

Well, then. That’s that. April is the clear winner — that quintessential Parisian month, chestnuts in blossom, etc. — and August crosses the finish line just behind June. My hypothesis is thus put to bed, although, while tucking it in, I’ll croon a little lullaby suggesting that birthdays, as occasions, setting aside a specific date or month, have for MG a particular significance. Had she been alive during the pandemic, and having to choose between Happy Birthday or the ABC song as a way of measuring hand washing time, I feel sure she would have chosen the former. It was important to her that she establish her independence, and her life as a writer before turning 30; she carried with her the memory of how the last time she saw her father was on her 10th birthday; she would say that what you did on your birthday would influence the rest of your year. “Birthday” turns up 31 mentions in a word search. So, I still think I may be onto something, somehow. And even if the August aspect of my theory proves to be full of holes, Christmas, I think, holds water. “Christmas” rates 81 mentions. This suggests, at least, that it held for MG a certain weight, lustre. Were I a publisher looking to release a new anthology of MG short stories — I think it unlikely that any firm, anywhere, is harbouring such ambitions — it would be a Christmas collection I would advise.

Here’s a well-worn book, latterly arrived in the mail.

“A waste of time,” MG would say, “to say nothing of money,” were she to know that I actually purchased a copy of The Joyous Travellers, a Chaucer knock-off for young readers written by Maud Lindsay and first published in 1919. This was the book — I’ve mentioned it before — that MG had in her keeping on the day her mother took her to a nearby convent in Montreal — this was when MG was 4 — and left her there for the nuns to school. It was at the centre of a story she liked to tell about life in the convent school, and of clearly totemic importance, so, to bolster my mission, I bought it.

“And what did you prove by that? What cause did you actually advance?” MG would ask, were she to find out how much I paid to own it, and also how much time I gave over to trying to discover something about the book’s provenance, its first owner, its dedicatee.

In fact, I half wonder if the ghost of MG, or some minor angel dispatched to Earth on her behalf, didn’t infiltrate the chips and circuits of the machine when I put the Dorothy Slater question to the oracle Google. The first thing I saw was this; note her death date.

Dorothy Slater. Uncle Jack. Aunty Alice. There’s not enough to go on to track her down, to account for married names, etc. Even if I could uncover her traces, to what could they possibly lead? Some magical connection to our Lady of the Word Count? Surely not. I suppose, if one wanted to, property records could be searched and they might offer a clue. The address on St. Andrews Street leads to this —

— a little stone duplex, a worker’s cottage, which is a house of historical note in Galt, or Cambridge, Ontario. It’s 1880’s vintage, and surely where Dorothy was living when she was gifted The Joyous Travellers. For a birthday, word count 31? For Christmas, word count 81? Behold, I tell you a mystery. (The book itself, I’m bound to tell you, is not the first thing I’d think to rescue in the, God forbid, event of a fire. It’s a slog. Did she really read this at 4? Amazing, if so.)

During her time in Montreal, during the war, when MG was living independently after returning from New York and the various schools she’d attended there, and before she began writing for the Montreal Standard by day and turning out her fiction by night, she took some Russian evening classes at McGill. But that, I think, was the entirety of the time she devoted to post-secondary studies. On the one hand, she must have known she didn’t need it, that the sea had already parted for her, she didn’t require a degree to get to the Promised Land. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder — and here MG would say, “Stop playing armchair psychiatrist, you’re not even any good at it!” — if she might have felt that as a kind of absence, or loss. I only say this because from very early on in her story-telling career you’ll find her taking a David Lodge like delight in poking fun at the hot-air pretension of some academics. It happens quite a lot, often enough that one might be tempted to see in it a quality of defensiveness. Did she, at some level, feel a gnawing inadequacy, despite being sought after and fought over by academics from all around the world? She said on a couple of occasions when someone was sitting nearby, taking down her words, that one of the reasons she could never make peace with her big book on Dreyfus was because she wasn’t an historian, wasn’t “qualified” to take on so big a project. Again - dumb speculation. By the time she was winding her fiction down, when her sap was starting to slow, what had been a sly irony, a cooly sardonic eye cast upon academics and their conjectural grasping at theory had become the sharp satire of the very funny, almost goofball stories about Henri Grippes, “the Montparnasse author and slum landlord.” Reading “A Painful Affair,” the first of the four, I can’t help but wonder if MG didn’t anticipate the dawning of the day when someone would observe that it was the centennial of her birth and try to make something of it and that the results would be “ree-zee-blah.”

Grippe’s opinion remains unchanged: He was the last author to have received a stipend from the Mary Margaret Pugh Arts Foundation, and so it should have fallen to him — Henri Grippes, Parisian novelist, diarist, essayist, polemical journalist, and critic — to preside at the commemoration of the late Miss Pugh’s centenary.

The story goes on to describe, with wonderfully vitriolic panache, the clash between Grippes and his old friend and rival, the poet and academic Victor Prism, over who gets the spoils of Mary Margaret Pugh. Now, as I re-read the story’s end, I’m inhabited by the absurd sense that MG had not me, exactly, but someone like me in mind when she wrote:

She did not believe in art, only in artists. She had no interest in books, only in their authors. Reading an early poem of Prim’s … she was stopped by the description of a certain kind of butterfly, “pale yellow, with a spot like the eye of God.” She had sent for her copy of the Larousse dictionary, which Rosalia was using in the kitchen as a weigh on sliced cucumbers. Turning to a color plate, Miss Pugh had found the butterfly at once. It turned out to be orange, rather than yellow, and heavily spotted with black. Moreover, it was not a European butterfly but an Asian moth. The Larousse must be mistaken. She had shut the dictionary with a slap, blaming its editors for carelessness. If only there had been more people like her, Prism concluded, there would be more people who knew what they were doing.

The work is the work. The works is what counts. The rest is peripheral, a distraction. It does not speak well of me that I am so easily, readily diverted, that I read about Miss Pugh and the butterfly and I go to my bookcase and find the book where some treasures are pressed, when and by whom I cannot say, they were there when I bought the book I can’t even think how many years ago; I brought them home with me, they live with me still. Exist with me still. Are with me still. You pick. It’s with this image that I’ll start tomorrow — thank God that’s settled — and it’s with this image that I write this morning’s Finis. 4.35. Time’s up, the store is waiting with whatever surprises it has in store: moths hatching in the buckwheat bin, a well-traveled spider, all the way from Ecuador, maybe, in the banana boxes. A joyous traveller. Itsy-bitsy. Eensy-weensy. Up the water spout. Outside, there’s no shortage of washing rain, and cleansing wind. A day of herniated brollies, that, at least, I can safely predict. Thanks for reading, xo, B

p.s. more prosaically, this newspaper clipping was filed in the same book as the butterflies, about which more tomorrow. On your behalf, I checked. Not once in The Collected Stories does MG avail herself of the word “grapefruit.” Go in peace, alors.