OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, 5

Easter, Esther, Gender, Remember

April 15

My boyfriend — I’ve come to prefer this designation to “partner,” I’m not sure why — and I live proximate but apart. We’re separated by two short city blocks. We’ve never, vacations excepted, shared a domicile. We’ve almost never been shopping together, now that I think of it. This, I’m sure, is why we’ve endured one another’s company as long as we have, more than 20 years now. Neither of us was young when we met; we were both middle-aged, settled, easy in our ways, cozy in our silos, covetous of our independence. Without a lot of talk or analysis — truly, none — we settled on a together-but-apart template that would work for us. So far, it has.

He’s Bill, and I’m Bill, and we call one another Billy, typically. We often eat together, more often in my apartment than at his, but last night, Maundy Thursday, Billy cooked. He’s a secular Jew, I’m a lapsed Protestant, and Easter / Passover has always been the occasion of many a merry jibe having to do with things about which we care not at all. Last night, chez Billy, it went something like this.

Billy: Are you working tomorrow?

Billy: I am.

Billy: Even though it’s Easter Friday?

Billy: Good Friday.

Billy: Is that the day Jesus comes out of the cave to look for chocolate and scares the bunny who sees his shadow?

Billy: It’s the day your people nailed him to the cross.

Billy: We did not do that.

Billy: You did.

Billy: Impossible. We have no idea how to use tools. I mean, we must have called someone

Billy: The Romans?

Billy: Exactly.

It’s gone on like this for years, meaningless, vapid, reflexive irreverence. We laugh and laugh at the same old jokes and tell one another we really should have a podcast. I asked him last night if he happened to have the photos that were taken of us in the synagogue that time when we were dressed as nuns. He thought he did, somewhere, on some computer that wasn’t at home. He promised he’d look them, and if he remembers and sends them on, I’ll post one. For the nonce — for the nuns — suffice it to say that this was a Purim, not a Passover event, and we were robed and wimpled at the behest of our friend, Wendy, who had organized the party and pageant. I dimly recall that we togged out in sister drag owing to her project of the day, which was some deep research into the life and times of the woman who’s usually named as the first Jew to come to Canada — at least, to the colony of Quebec — in 1738, Esther Brandeau. You can read a short account of her passing peculiar particulars here.

(http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/brandeau_esther_2E.html)

Esther’s story is a complicated one — what story isn’t? — but it comes down to the tired old trope — you’ve heard it before — of how an 18th century French girl, worn out by the strictures imposed on her by her religion and her sex, decides to shake things up by masquerading as a pork-eating boy on another continent where she’s looked after by nuns but, after a while, everyone agrees she’d be better off back in France, and she’s put on a ship, and then it all goes dark. Ho-hum. So quotidian.

Here’s an image that’s a long way from nunnish, and this is our way back to Mavis Gallant (MG) who is, after all, my raison d’être.

“Serious, like an intelligent nun,” was the way MG described the young Polish journalist — not named — who came to Paris to interview her, late in the dark, cold afternoon of February 7, 1996. MG wrote about their meeting in her journal; the excerpt was published in Queen’s Quarterly, Winter 2003. Her visitor was researching the Polish diaspora in Paris in the 50’s: a circle of poets and essayists and painters to which MG was more than casually attached. They spoke a few days after the death of the Argentinian painter / adventurer Leonor Fini, famously photographed in 1933 by Cartier-Bresson. That’s Leonor, above. Fini was linked to that circle of Polish emigres through her relationship with the essayist Kot Jelenski. MG, in her diary, wrote:

About Fini: her mother kidnapped her from South America, where her father had taken her. It must have been early in the century. She lived in Trieste with her mother, dressed as a boy, in case her father came looking for her. So she must have looked at other little girls as a boy might, from the other side of the road, and continued to look upon boys (she by now being considered one, though by no means a facsimile of any) as the same but other. I do remember that Georges Bataille said she was not intelligent. They had an affair before the war. He told her to gallop around the room naked astride a broomstick, and she did so, and he decided she was sotte.

MG didn’t think much of Leonor Fini as an artist, but as someone who also had a fractured childhood, she may have sensed some traces of kinship. The imposition of masculine disguise — hello, Esther Brandeau — had a place in MG’s own family history. Consider this:

“I just hated being a girl. That’s why I dressed up like this. A boy has ten chances where a girl has one and I’ll go back to boys’ clothes when I get a chance,” she flashed in the court.”

This is part of the testimony delivered in a Toronto courtroom, and reported in The Globe, in 1913. The speaker was Benedictine Wiseman — reported to be 17, that seems older to me than might have been the case — who had been arrested on a vagrancy charge. She’d left her home in Montreal, had come to Toronto, had disguised herself as a boy, Jimmy by name, had taken a job in a department store by day, and was singing by night in a speakeasy, or a theatre, or some such venue where young women with pleasing voices, but disguised as young men, might go to compete for prize money. Benedictine won 20 dollars just before she was apprehended.

She told the court, “I almost forgot that I was a girl during the last few months. Life has been a perfect dream to me. You know a boy has a much better chance of making a living than a girl.”

The story continues, “Miss Wiseman was sorry to see her freedom taken from her when told that she must return to Montreal to her parents, who were worrying over her. At the time of her disappearance, wild stories of white slaves were floating about…”

Benedictine was sent home, but seven years later, she was on the run and in the news again, this time having decamped for New York state with a married man, Oren Robert Earl. He was a war veteran, father of four, and had been a boarder in her mother’s house. They set up housekeeping in Syracuse, or somewhere nearby, whence the authorities, pressured by her family, had Benny — as then she was known — removed and translated back, yet again, to Montreal. The story got a lot of play in the popular press of the day. On October 26, 1921, in The Washington Times, it was reported that this famous female philanderer, who such a short time ago had declared her undying love for her mother’s boarder, had married “a young British surgeon, A. S. R. Young.” That marriage would also founder, but what’s important to note here was that on August 11 of the following year, in Montreal, a daughter was born. I’m supposing you can guess who. (1)

MG adored her father. She said that she resembled him in every way, physically, temperamentally. From her mother — MG said she was simply not equipped to look after a child — she was more or less estranged. And yet MG was, like Benny Wiseman, inhabited by a fierce need for independence, and was offended by the strictures places on her owing to gender. From an early age she followed her mother’s example, resenting the rough row she’d been given to hoe by dint of being a woman. I think that if Esther Brandeau, Benedictine Wiseman, and Mavis Gallant found themselves together say, at a salon, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or at a library study table, and they got to talking, they’d have more than a little in common. And I’m curious, with both Passover and Easter upon us, if that commonality might include an interest, more than passing, in the “Jewish question.” A name is a name is a name. In and of itself it suggests nothing, carries with it no imperative or allegiance. That said, Wiseman is a classically Jewish patronymic, and although Benny told journalists writing about her case that she was the niece of German President Friedrich Ebert, her mother, hearing about this claim, laughed it off. “We’re Rumanians!” she said.

MG described herself as Protestant. Raised in Catholic Quebec, and educated at any number of convent schools, it was one of the aspects of her biography that gave her early cause to think about her singularity. I can’t help but speculate — for this I can offer no proof, and even if I could, what would proof prove — that, if she had Jewish antecedents, she would have been more than a little intrigued by that part of her bloodline. There’s just so much about her writing, her preoccupations, her person, that suggests this. She had a long, abiding fascination with Eastern European immigrants and refugees, many Jews among them. They were her friends, her circle. She wrote about them in Montreal when she was a young woman working as a journalist, and they populate the stories she wrote after her arrival in Europe in 1950, when the displaced were everywhere — as they are again. One needn’t look far or wide to discern her abiding interest in the German mind and conscience, post-war; and in the long, troubling history of French anti-semitism. With this, and its legacy, she grappled; for more than 30 years she laboured on a study of the Dreyfus case, assembled a manuscript of over a thousand pages that she was never able to finish to her own satisfaction. There’s no proof any anything here. I’m not looking for anything to prove. I’m just reading between the lines, lifting up one of the possible rocks of her reason as Pascaltide arrives. Tis the season.

Somewhere, in my idle, undisciplined googling, I saw a photo of MG with a little dog — a miniature poodle, maybe? — who was her companion for a number of years, I think during the time she was living not in Paris but, for most of the year, in Menton, near the Italian border. I’ve tried and failed to find it just now — Siri, show me a picture and so on, this is what research has become — and the reason I thought to look it out was because I went to dinner at my boyfriend’s apartment on Maundy Thursday night and we made our usual irreverent jokes about our two faith traditions and he told me he’d look for the years-old pics of us dressed as nuns. Then, flipping through the pictures on his phone, he said, “You’ll like this,” and texted one he’d taken at the Hotel Fort Garry, in Winnipeg: me, asleep, spooning with dear, now dead, dog, Esther. She was my soul, the light of my life, and her death, in 2018, took the wind out of my sails in a way I’d never have imagined possible. She came to me, a rescue dog, on Maundy Thursday, 2009, I thought I called her Esther because it was Easter. Our stories are malleable, though, as are our reasons, and maybe I’ll alter the narrative, now, and say that she was named for Esther Brandeau, Canada’s first Jew and, safe to say, among the first of our European cross-dressers: a non-binary settler. Not that she was allowed to remain long, and not that she was settled, not in any way. Esther B. was other than she appeared, as was Esther P, the P standing for poodle. She was an angel, come to earth in the shape of dog, and she saved me.

Ach. Late. I need to get to the store, and I’m leaving all the loose ends of these random threads dangling. If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ll end by saying that if anyone with can find the pic of MG with her poodle, I’d appreciate seeing it. I’ll trade you one of me as a nun. The sun will soon be up. The robins are already hard at it, pitching their pipes, singing their gladsome hymns, their blue sky, blue egg promises of new birth. Easter and Passover are upon us. However you mark these days, if you mark them at all, I wish you much happiness, and greener times to come.

1 (look! a footnote) Benedictine Wiseman’s story has been told in bits and pieces, here and there. This is the most comprehensive account I’ve found, and it’s gold, stem to stern. https://gallantjournalism.wordpress.com