Memory, Grief, Three O’Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 23

To observe what is not to be observed, to hear what is not to be heard

May 10, 4.45 a.m.

Day off from the store today. Monday was also a reprieve from the rigours of dry goods merchandising. Sunday’s step count — Mother’s Day, predictably fraught in all commercial precincts — was 13,199. Monday I clocked a magnificent 141, which must represent times when I carried the phone to the bathroom. Spent the day largely in bed, raising my hand mostly to check my pulse points, feeling slightly off, hankering for those palmy seasons of long ago when, if your cursor hovered over subpar for more than a minute, there was no pressing need to start taking a census of your comorbidities, wondering if you should alter your CV to include “vector of contagion,” assessing whether it would be responsible to grab a sharp object and violate the sanctity of your own mucous membranes. Said a few prayers to St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of grocers, who must have heard. Slept. Woke. Feeling improved. My future obituarists can restore their pens to their holsters.

I’ve been enjoying being in touch with other Friends of Mavis (FOM) whom I’ve met through these free-form hasty-notes. I still hope that some high official will take note and do the right thing by Mavis Gallant, MG, born August 11, 1922: that this is her centennial year, and that insufficient fuss is being made, is the reason I’m writing. It’s all I can do on her behalf, but it’s a poor monument. Where are the stamps that bear her face? Where are the statues in the public squares? Where is the new hybrid rose? (MG loved flowers, her apartment was always fragrant with them, so I’m told.) Perhaps one of the decommissioned Prince Andrew Elementary Schools could do the right thing by MG. It’s not too late! Much can be done in three months, if the will is sufficient.

This diary is a kind of commemorative park, more than a bit haphazard in its design. I’m no Frederick Olmsted, am more like Orlando in As You Like It, running love-struck and willy-nilly around the Forest of Arden, appending love letters to trees. At the end of the path we’ll follow today is — what? A bandstand or a picnic shelter, a birdbath or a sundial, possibly just a bench for the weary, and on it a small brass plaque — look, it’s gone all verdigris with age, and its raised letters have been worn down by those who stroked it for luck — that bears the name Mildred Wood. You might want to pack some trail mix before we link hands and head over that way for a closer inspection. This is going to be a bit of a wander.

Some of the best music teachers, the ones who guide the careers of the players who go on to have major careers, were never themselves celebrated soloists. This may be a question of “those who can’t do teach,” but I think it more often has to do with temperament. Not everyone is cut out for the rigours, the pressures of the stage. Similarly, most good editors are also good writers who choose to wear a veil when they commit themselves to the page. Their influence is everywhere in a well-published book or article, but they work with an invisible hand. Now and again there’ll be someone who’s outstanding in both fields. William Maxwell, the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker and for many years MG’s guardian angel at the magazine, was one of those.

In 1979, Jean Gordon interviewed him for Contemporary Authors.

JG: As fiction editor of The New Yorker you must have had to deal with a great many manuscripts from unknown or unpublished writers. How did you manage it?

WM: The usual way: I would read them quickly for signs of talent. When there were such signs I would put the manuscript aside and read it again later, carefully. One of the best of all The New Yorker’s fiction writers turned up for the first time in that pile, but she was discovered by Mildred Wood, not by me.

It’s to his credit that credit is not what he claims. Why he wasn’t specific — misplaced discretion? — I can’t say, but he’s surely referring to our girl MG. From her 2009 interview in Granta Magazine with Jhumpa Lahiri:

JL: Who was the person who first read your writing and told you that you should keep going?

MG: Just, ‘Have you anything else you can show me?’ Her name was Mildred Wood. She read the first story I sent to The New Yorker. I saw her twice, at The New Yorker, before I went to Europe.

Who was Mildred Wood? By way of preamble to what follows let me say that there’s a good reason why no one has ever hired me as a skip tracer or genealogist; my research skills were removed with my tonsils and adenoids, age 8, and my patience withered not long afterwards. Mildred, I suspect, was not someone who sought public attention may even have actively avoided — she preferred offstage to on — but a bit of Sherlocking turns up some odds and ends. It’s at the end we’ll begin, October 13, 1977. In the following day’s New York Times:

One of the challenges of writing an obituary is knowing when to stop when you begin listing the survivors — do those cousins in Tulsa who don’t even send a Christmas card really need naming at 50 cents a word?; likewise, how thorough do you want to be with cataloguing the predeceased? Her husband, who isn’t mentioned, was also a Grub Street denizen; he did the mortal coil shuffle just a few days shy of a year before Mildred quit the quick. His was a Florida residence; perhaps they were separated, who knows? His Christian name, you won’t be surprised to learn, I find particularly resonant; enchanting even. I just can’t stop saying it.

Mildred Carlisle Wood, nee Burgwin, came from a well-to-do Pittsburgh family. Her mother, also named Mildred (d. 1919, I suspect of the Spanish Flu) was one of the Washington Carlisles, and her father, Augustus P. Burgwin (d. 1932, age 71) was the Assistant General Counsel of Pennsylvania Railroad, a position that surely allowed him to travel at a discount pretty much any old time he wanted to get the hell out of Pittsburgh. A family like the Burgwins understood the importance of a good education, and Mildred was sent to Miss Master’s School, in Dobbs Ferry, New York; the school is still there. Also present, and occasionally accounted for, was Barbara K. Wood who eventually, after one or two trial runs, became Mrs. Darnall Wallace, as noted in the obituary above. It must have been through Barbara that Mildred met her brother, Richardson King Wood, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge. Their engagement was announced on September 29, 1929, a month before the stock market crash that began the great depression.

It’s strange, to me at least, that while her fancy girls’ school is named, no mention is made of her professional qualification: she’d finished her nursing training at Columbia-Presbyterian in 1927. The wedding took place, in Pittsburgh, on November 30. While it may have offered a happy distraction from a world in a state of general collapse, it would also have required some delicate maneuvering to pull off; the parents of the groom were divorced. Perhaps Vogue’s Book of Etiquette — the 1925 edition, not the 1948 of which MG availed herself in writing “Thieves and Rascals” — was consulted, and these cautionary words duly noted:

Society permits very confused and confusing relationships to exist independently and be, apparently, unconscious of each other. From the moment they cease to ignore each other, they become ridiculously entangled. If society were to see a girl’s father and stepfather mutually and complaisantly accompany her up the aisle, the bridal hymn might be drowned in peals of laughter. Good breeding always affects not to observe what is not to be observed; not to hear what is not to be heard; but, if one crashes through these light barriers and insists upon focusing the attention of society upon one’s unfortunate domestic relations, one must take the disagreeable consequences and be considered outside the circle of friends.

Whatever the complications, Mildred Burgwin married Richardson Wood. In the manner of the day, obedient to — perhaps unquestioning of — social expectation, she took his name and fulfilled the procreative imperative.

Just as Mildred had carried her mother’s name, Carlisle, so her children would bear hers. She was a working mother. We know, from the thumbnail sketch of her life in her eventual obituary, see above, that she become a nurse, then a reader for the Literary Guild (sounds like a dream job to me) and then, in 1947, as a fiction editor at The New Yorker. (That same year she attended a 20th-anniversary reunion luncheon of her graduating nursing class from the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre; her presence was reported in the schools magazine, Quarterly. I hope she’d already secured her position at the magazine by the time they met, and that, when her classmates asked her what her work entailed, she might have explained that it pretty much came down to administering enemas and inserting catheters, the better to extract what’s being withheld.) Certainly she solidified her claim to bargain rights on that day in 1950 when she had the good sense and instinct to pull from the slush pile of over-the-transom wannabes a manuscript from an unknown young writer in Montreal. Of all places. And lo, here we are.

Mildred and Richardson’s daughter, Mary Burgwin Wood, seems to have lived a below-the-radar life free of public scrutiny. She died in Albany — without issue, as near as I can tell — in 1998. Nicholas attended Cornell, graduated in 1952, joined the army as a corporal, was stationed with the American occupying forces in Japan and there met the young woman he’d marry.

Mildred’s grandchildren came along in 1955, 1957, and 1965.

Nicholas Burgwin Wood seems to have engaged in medical research and development. Through a company called GW Scientific Inc. This patent suggest the W stood for Wood, the G for Golosarsky. (Boris Golosarsky, a Ukrainian physician, trained in Odessa, still has an active practice.)

That same research is, I would guess, the object of this paper.

When Nicholas died in 2011 he was round about the same age as was his father, Richardson Wood, when he slipped away in 1976. Might there have been some hereditary condition that was a motivator in whatever his research? Unnecessary speculation. Unseemly. More generous to wonder if his interest in medical science might have been bred in the bone, have come down to him via his mother, Mildred, a trained nurse whose literary taste proved to be unimpeachable. I suppose the road doesn’t end here, necessarily. It could well wind on. The grandchildren are probably still current — the older ones would be my age — and Sanko Kamiyama, who must have a very interesting story to tell, might also still walk among us. Perhaps I’ll put a note in a bottle and throw it into the waves and see if the tides take it their way. Yes. As I write it down, it seems a good idea. I’ll “reach out,” as now we’re all required to say, and report back if I find anything. Perhaps they’ll welcome the inquiry, perhaps they’ll avail themselves of a curt two-word dismissal. My intentions are, as always, benign. I just want to know more about Mildred; I’d love to see a photo of her, apart from anything else.

It would be wrong to assign Mildred Wood the status of sine qua non; MG would have been MG, no matter what. She was a genius, and would have found her way. But we are all of us, whatever our capacities, shaped by the unlooked for, unpredictable meetings that mark our days. Most are inconsequential. A few are not. I will never, ever forget Miss Redden, my 8th grade English teacher, whose first name I never know, who moved to Australia round about 1968, who was the first person to say to me, “Bill, you know, you can write. If you want to, Bill, writing is something you could do.” I didn’t really believe her then, and I don’t really think I believe her now. And yet, here I am, type-type-typing my fingers to bloody, pulpy nubbins, every morning at 3 a.m. Or there around.

MG, when she went to Europe, buoyed by Mildred’s approbation, carried around with her that New Yorker acceptance letter. She showed it to people who couldn’t have cared less. It was proof, a talisman. Even for someone as gifted as she, validation was important, required. It counted for more than a little. She didn’t owe everything to Mildred Wood, but there was a debt. She forgot the name of her friend who gave her the gift of the plane ticket in 1950 — her chum, her copain — but Mildred she never forgot. To pay Mildred mind here, while honouring MG, is not a mere distraction or sidebar.

About Mildred, in fact, about her time at The New Yorker, and about the light she still scatters, the paths she illuminates, I’ll have more to say over the next few days. Mildred, about whom not much information exists on the public record, who seems to have been rational and organized and contained and accomplished, proves a conduit to some VERY JUICY and wonderfully chaotic episodes. Tune in tomorrow. Thanks for reading, xo, B

p.s. here’s a hint