Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 25
a mad rabbit in a cage
May 12, 3.15 a.m.
Back in the day, when my life was a many-splendored thing, and when I would be invited to receptions — though never at an embassy or consulate, which was not for want of trying, lord knows, and for which inexplicable exclusion I blame, entre nous, CSIS — and when I knew, or could reasonably surmise, there would be Order of Canada recipients circulating amongst the elect, sporting the inconspicuous but telling decoration that signalled they’d been pinned by the Governor General, I made a point of fastening my dead dog’s rabies tag to my lapel, the better to broadcast the news that even though I customarily breathed the frosty yet fusty air of the Salon des Refusés I’d been inoculated against the more deleterious effects of whatever damaging and contagious vapours one might there have inhaled, and was certified as safe to mingle. I undertook this childish ruse for years, repeatedly, and not once, to my recollection — my memory is porous, it’s true — did anyone look at or remark upon it. (I did the same, it now occurs to me, with a name-tag — or was it a lanyard? — I discreetly slipped into my beaded evening bag at the end of some event which the intended bearer, Margaret Atwood, never attended.)
Were I ever to penetrate a Rideau Hall shindig, I would first commandeer an entire tray of hors d’oeuvres from an overworked and under-appreciated cater-waiter — “Oh, darling, you look exhausted, here, I’ll take those / Mais donnez-moi ça, cheri, vous avez l’air vachement crevé — and then, munching the while, would scout the gilded perimeters where, as I suppose, portraits of the former vice-regal incumbents must be displayed. I’d want to locate, study, and pay homage to the likeness of Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond, the only GG, as near as I know, to have been born in a barn, and to have died in one, too. His advent, 1764, took place while his mother was on a fishing expedition — literally — and was caught by surprise when the newt within began to wiggle its way free of her depths — one can only suppose that what was good enough for Mary and Joseph was good enough for her, too. It was in a barn, August 28, 1819, that Lennox finally succumbed to the rabies that made his final days an agony, and which he is said to have contracted — this is disputed — from a fox with whom he’d become friends on, perhaps, a fishing expedition. He is also — again, as near as I know — the only one of our Governors General to have perished from the effects of hydrophobia, so he was as distinguished as he is extinguished.
Had Lennox been able to hold on for just a few more years, until 1885, by which time he would have been 121, he could have availed himself of the rabies vaccine developed and successfully tested by Louis Pasteur. This was welcome news the world over, rabies being a singularly nasty business. It wasn’t long before the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, began to authorize franchise operations. The one in New York City opened for business in 1890. From the NY Times, Feb. 19 of that year:
Medical student Miss Frances Deane, “the only one of her sex present” on that day in 1890, was clearly made of strong stuff. She would not have blanched when Dr. Gibier, selected by Pasteur himself to head up the New York branch office, and who was possessed of “a thick head of black hair and bushy whiskers and an intelligent face, and a polished manner,” led the tour to see the specimens in his laboratory including, on the dissecting table, the brain and spinal cord of a rabbit, as well as “a mad rabbit in a cage.”
Not once does Mavis Gallant (MG), in the almost 900 pages of her Selected Stories, mention rabies or Pasteur — although “rabbit” comes up on 20 different occasions. Any canny reader — that would be you — who is here as a Friend of Mavis (FOM) and whose patience is being mightily tested by all this court-side jabber when the game should be underway, the ball in play, might well ask what ANY of this has to do with our main attraction. Not much, in truth, but the peripheral exerts a certain tug, at least on me, and as I’m the one flailing away at 3 in the morning I’m going to bloody well do what I like. This is not a democracy, but that’s not to say there’s no rationale, either. I tell you what I’ve told you because it ushers us back into the story — interrupted yesterday by technical difficulties — of Mildred Wood, of whom I wrote in diary entry 23.
Mildred, to briefly recap, was the fiction editor at The New Yorker who, in 1950, as a recent hire, recognized in MG’s unsolicited manuscript something more than promise; what she saw, in fact, was a promise already fulfilled but nevertheless rich with expansive capacity. For the forty years that followed, The New Yorker was MG’s laboratory where she had license to perform her examinations, her dissections. Her role was pivotal, but she’s not much celebrated in MG lore, and I wanted to find out more about her.
Mildred, as I’ve noted, was a Burgwin, from Pittsburgh. The Burgwins were a prominent family, not quite Mayflower stock but not far from it. They were prosperous, patriotic, cultivated, encouraging of the arts. Augustus, the patriarch, a lawyer, was a graduate and proud alumnus, class of ‘82, of Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. While a student there, he dabbled in composing.
“‘Neath the Elms’’ is one of those classic college anthems — a tad plodding, it must be said — that has somehow soldiered on, a well-loved hazing ritual, a low-rent “Whiffenpoof Song,” and you can enjoy, or endure, a recent Pandemic performance of it at the end of this entry.
It was in the pages of the Trinity Student newspaper, The Tripod, at the end of November, 1929, that Augustus announced Mildred’s marriage.
Her husband, Richardson King Wood - he became the editor of Fortune Magazine, and his personal archives occupy 11.7 cubic feet, that would be 26 boxes, at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Centre; no restrictions apply, should you want to check them out — was no stranger to being in the papers. His family life, not always straightforward, might have proved instructive for Mildred in her own eventual magazine career as a fiction editor, especially when she wanted to illustrate the worn-out adage that truth is, it’s a fact, stranger than fiction.
Richardson — Richard, as he was known — was the first-born child of Arthur King Wood and Marguerite Richardson Wood. Now, remember rabies? This from the New York Times, January 18, 1913: Page One.
This is a terrible story, full of carnage and damage, and I just can’t get enough of reading it, of imagining the horror and the relish with which it would have been devoured by readers of the New York Times, read aloud over breakfast, on January 18, 1913. These were the days when no one saw any need for a by-line, and I so admire the way the anonymous reporter rips into the narrative: the dog acting strangely, the baring of teeth, the fights, the blood on the hands, the muzzle, the brave nurse — probably her first and last mention in the paper of record — and then the rampage through town, chomp, chomp, chomp, and oh, the power house at Glenwood, the collateral damage: Mrs. Judson, Bernard Huston, Charles Wood (relation?) and the wonderfully named Anson Flower Robinson, and oh, the poor cat, drowned to save any further trouble. Drowned! To save any further trouble! And not to overlook Policeman McColl, the Atticus Finch of the moment.
Golly, what a story. The only way it could have been better is if we’d been told the names of the dogs. That it was a traumatic event, deeply so, there can be no doubt. The dog going mad, the rabid raging, the injuries, the 18 days of painful treatment and no guarantee of a good outcome: anyone can imagine how worrying a time it would have been, for the family, the community, and surely not anything to casually set aside and forget about as soon as they all got home, rabies free and aching from the punishing regime of injections. Anyone can imagine the talk in the neighbourhood, the head shaking and the clucking and the my-my-my-ing. It could have happened to anyone, of course it could have, but I wonder if a quality attached to Marguerite Wood nee Richardson that trouble found magnetizing. There’s something in that story — the way she failed to grasp the magnitude of the problem right away, the way she overlooked alerting the family know that the dog — little Angus? — was wearing a muzzle for a reason, the way she just left the animal tied up in the backyard without taking measures to, you know, save any further trouble — that suggests she might have been someone whose judgment was not a well-sharpened scimitar.
Anyway, what happened happened. Life went on, its pleasures, its stresses. The children grew. At some point, Marguerite Richardson Wood and Arthur King Wood divorced, moved apart. Time passed. What always occurs occurred.
Of Dwight Sumner Richardson, Marguerites papa, there’s more to tell. For now, suffice it to say that Mildred Wood would probably have met him, maybe not often, the father of the woman who became her mother-in-law, her husband’s maternal grandpa. What Mildred thought of Marguerite I have no idea, and no way of guessing. What she thought of MG, however, we know. Mildred met MG only twice before MG went to Europe, and settled eventually in Paris, and applied herself to the work that Mildred, in some measure, made possible. I wonder if they would have become friends, had MG stayed on this side of the pond. I wonder if they would have sat over cocktails and told family stories, one upping each other in friendly competition. MG could have gone on about her cross-dressing, cabaret singing mother, Benedictine. And Mildred could have told the story about Marguerite, and the terrier on a tear, and the cat, and the Pasteur clinic.
MG: That could have happened to anyone.
MW: There’s more. Do you want to hear about Marguerite and the diplomat who wasn’t?
MG: (teasingly, while signalling the waiter for another round): Is it good?
MW: (with a merry yet rueful laugh and coltish toss of her head) Oh, my. Oh, yes. I think it qualifies as good.
And then she would have laid it out, have started with the surprise betrothal announcement in the New York Times, placed and paid for by Dwight Sumner Richardson, proudly advising that his daughter, Marguerite, had made an unbelievable late-in-the-game catch. A war hero! A comrade of Lawrence of Arabia! A real English gentleman! You can imagine his sense of satisfaction when he opened the paper and saw it there, December 6, 1927, his proud declaration. This would show what’s what and who’s who to all the naysayers, those who continued to scandalize his daughter’s name with whispers of “divorcee” and “rabies.”
But no. Hell is a dog without a muzzle, tied to a tree, barking, baying, struggling to get free. And all Hell was about to break loose, the kind of Hell that, were you to read about it in a story, you’d be inclined to say, “Oh, come on.” But it’s 4.52. I’ve got to get to work. I’ll finish this off tomorrow. Thanks for reading, xo, B
P.S. Here are the Trinity College Chapel Singers with ‘Neath the Elms, written by Mildred’s Pa, Augustus.
Did you know (hashtag) MG is credited with a “thanks” acknowledgement in Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch. (?)
Gripping is a great word for this. BTW, I was mere wallpaper when I received my OC; the stars were the marvellously chatty Tragically Hip (without Gord Downie, who I believe received his earlier) and Alex Trebec, looking a bit startled to be there.