Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 27

the risen full moon in the visible sky

May 15, 3.08 a.m.

I feel inadequate when I read about writer’s and their reading, their childhood reading, most particularly. Some celebrated smithy of words will say, “And then, when I was 8, I devoured Pride and Prejudice whilst recuperating at home from the measles, and then, the following summer, whilst at church camp, it was Middlemarch that clutched my heart,” and I will think back to my own childhood, how it was distinguished by a singular disinclination to say “whilst,” and to the bedroom I shared with my brother — its cowboy wallpaper, decorated with images of bronco busters, and cattle herders, and the dusty street of a one-horse down, the one visible establishment being the Longbranch Saloon — with all its piles of Archie comics and Mad magazines and the various series books that comprised what passed for my reading: the Hardy Boys, and the cheerfully racist Bobbsey Twins, and the sappy Happy Hollisters, with whom I had a summer romance between grades 4 and 5, which I still repent. There was Nancy Drew, too, but I understood these had to be a covert indulgence, knew that my fascination with them was emblematic of some dark, unnameable flaw, that I would be tarred with apostasy’s brush were it ever broadcast that I’d a hundred times rather have gone adventuring with Nancy in her roadster than with Frank and Joe in their coupe. Or whatever it was they drove. I think it depended on the occasion. They were masters of all vehicles, two-wheeled, four-wheeled, aquatic. Does it fly? No worries. We’ll figure it out. I would far rather have been Nancy’s eager subaltern, perhaps a fey — or is it fay? — stand-in for butch George on days when she came up lame or had detention, would gladly have done whatever needed doing in the name of wholesome, restorative questing, held the flashlight she’d had the good foresight to stash in the roadster’s glove compartment when it becomes necessary to penetrate a deep dark cave in the name of finding the stolen jewels, certain that with Nancy all would be well and that she would know the difference between stalagmites and whatever the other. Whatever.

For me, the pleasure of childhood reading was more in being read to, always by our father. It was the sound of his voice, his reassuring presence that mattered. The books, the comics, whatever it was he read, were a vehicle — a roadster — for a paternal affection that was otherwise hard to convey. In the glass-fronted bookcases in the upstairs hallway were many volumes of The Book of Knowledge — from round about 1917 — and the Harvard Classics, but it wasn’t a canto from the Divine Comedy or something improving by Bunyan we wanted to hear, no, it was our comics to which we turned, whatever was on hand, current, brought home from — where? From the drugstore, I guess. By whom? By us? Bought with allowance money, or with the quarters our grandmother would leave next to the Royal Doulton Toby jugs on her weekly Sunday visits? I can’t remember how they got there, the comics, I only know they did, and the only very specific recollection I have of actual content was a Junior Classic Illustrated re-telling of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which was a favourite of mine.

I remember asking for it over and over again. Why this story — is it from Grimm? it must be — exerted such a tug in that moment I can’t say, nor could I recount now with accuracy exactly what happens in the story, beyond the basics — 12 princesses, every night, slip away to dance with 12 princes, their worn-out slippers give it away in the morning, also their somewhat haggard miens, a handsome interloper figures it out at the behest of the king and marries the eldest or the prettiest of the 12. He has his choice, kind of like on The Bachelor, but without the rose. I remember that it wasn’t with any of the princes I identified, or with the swain who uncovers the subterfuge and saves them from themselves but with the princesses, sneaking away by night to do what they wanted with the lives God had given them. My interest, my need for the narrative, must have seemed unholy. I guess it was. “Perhaps something different,” our father would say, and we’d hear about the kids from Riverdale, and that was also satisfying, in its way.

All this comes to mind because I was reading again Mavis Gallant’s (MG) introduction to her Collected Stories, in which she writes, beautifully and revealingly, about reading in childhood, about how it was the early immersion in books and stories that woke the writer in her. I’ve read it often, but this time I was struck by how the cadence of her telling is consonant with Eudora Welty’s account — much longer, more detailed — in One Writer’s Beginnings, which began as a series of lectures delivered at Harvard. I wonder if they ever met, or corresponded. It’s far from impossible. Welty was one of the writers MG would mention when asked by interviewers whom she admired. Eudora’s childhood was as stable as MG’s was disrupted. If she felt the need for escape she never acted on it, lived her whole life in the house where she was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. (I remember interviewing the composer Milton Babbit on the occasion of his 90th birthday, also from Jackson, and he had known her well, growing up. Talking with him about Eudora was pretty great, I can tell you.) What would it be like, hearing these two great writers compare notes about their early reading? Maybe something like this exercise in transcription arranged, hastily on a Sunday morning, as dialogue.

EW: The sound of what falls on the page begins testing its truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know.

MG: The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation.

EW: Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is more acute than listening to them. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

MG: I owe it to children’s books — picture books, storybooks, then English and American classics — that I absorbed once and for all the rhythm of English prose, the order of words in an English sentence and how they are spelled.

EW: An opulence of story books covered my bed; it was the Land of Counterpane. As I read away, I was Rapunzel, or the Goose Girl, or the Princess Labam in one of the Thousand and One Nights who mounted the roof of the palace every night and of her own radiance faithfully lighted the whole city every night just by reposing there.

MG: At seven, I wondered why no one ever married some amiable dog. When my mother explained, I remained unenlightened. (The question possibly arose from my devoted reading of an English comic strip for children, Pip and Squeak, in which a dog and a penguin seem to be the parents of a rabbit named Wilfred.)

EW: Every book I seized on, from Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While to Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important. It comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

MG: I cannot recall a time when I couldn’t read; I do remember being read to and wanting to take the book and decipher it for myself. A friend of my parents recalled seeing my father trying to reach me the alphabet as I sat in a hight chair. He held the book flat on a tray — any book, perhaps a novel, pulled off a shelf — and pointed out the capital letters.

EW: Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.

MG: I was taught the alphabet three times. The second time the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard — pretty-looking, decorative: nun’s handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school in Chateauguay.

EW: In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word. Of a certain word, that is; the connection it has with what it stands for. At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for the supper, just at that hour of a late summer day when the sun is already low below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time, it met my eyes as a globe. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off the vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio.

MG: Some writers may just simply come into the world with overlapping vision of things seen and things as they might be seen. All have a gift for holding their breath while going on breathing: It is the basic requirement.

EW: By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

MG: Shut the book. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Thanks for reading. xo, B