OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, 10

On the Dark Side of the Globe

April 22, 3.13 AM

Good to be starting at this time, 3.13. One and three are my lucky numbers, or so I believe, even in the absence of evidence that they exert anything like effect or control. Still, whenever I see them in combination I think, somehow, that they’ll smooth the complexion of whatever the moment. I bought my little house in Manitoba online, sight unseen — sounds grand, it was considerably cheaper than would have been say, a car — on the basis of a single picture and the fact that 131 is the street number. Well. Neither here nor there. I want to write a bit about music, which was, I know, a powerful force in the life of Mavis Gallant, MG.

When I say that music saved me I mean it as literally as I mean anything. I don’t think I could have navigated the desperate years (1968 - 1973, approximately) of my same-sex attracted adolescence, in Winnipeg, without the companionship of other young people who were, like me, classical music geeks. I was full of desire, too full: longing was an ungainly fledgling, a heron, an eagle, no, better to say a buzzard, stretching its wings, desperate to hurl itself over the edge and into the unforgiving air, but constrained from launching because there was no branch on which it might reasonably land, nothing that could contain its weight, which was a weight that was sustained, perversely, not by being fed but by being hungry. Look, enough strained metaphor, enough fancy talk, all I wanted was to get laid, but there was no chance of that, not in Winnipeg, not in 1968, and I think that was, essentially, why I played the flute, that narrow silver channel that could turn all my passion and huffing into something that might sound, on a good day, like a bird that had found what it wanted / needed and had the luxury of its own nest, where fine feathered callers could come and go as they wished. Also, the case matched my shoes.

As a musician, I never held any illusions. I studied, worked hard, could hack my way through the basic repertoire. I knew I was OK, but I also knew, even though it took me a while to admit it, that OK was all I would ever be and that, in terms of a future in the business, OK would never be good enough. I have never, not once, thought of the thousands of hours I gave over to music practice, with the possibility of a career in mind, as wasted. It gave me focus. It gave me joy. It gave me — duh — music. And, maybe most importantly, it gave me what I didn’t have and needed most, and that was a social circle, a cluster of mostly outcast kids who, like me, were candidates for drowning where the mainstream was concerned. We played chamber music and we sat around and listened, really listened, to classical music recordings, and we had opinions, strong opinions, about the merits of various orchestras and soloists. It doesn’t speak well of me that, in some ways, I’ve never moved on from there and then; it is the time of my life that, for all its horrible snobbery and pretension, seems to me to be the most authentic. If, for me, the gold standard interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony Number 4 is the recording, circa 1970, with George Szell conducting the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra and the soprano Judith Raskin, it’s because that was the verdict of my little coven of teenage cognoscenti. And if — I can’t imagine the circumstances that might allow for this — I were asked to name my favourite interpreter of Schubert songs — I beg your pardon, lieder — and I were to say, as I would, Elly Ameling, it’s because that was the received opinion of my clutch of snooty music buddies, who were also my lifeguards, and I took them at their word, and never grew enough to form opinions of my own, and assert them.

(About all this I’m a regular Piaf, je ne regrette rien; nontheless, I wish I’d lived less in fear of their judgment — I dreaded shunning — and am sorry that I didn’t have the nerve to tell them that sometimes, at night, I’d lie in bed with my transistor radio held close to me ear and listen to country music from Minneapolis, or blues from Chicago, or that I’d discovered this amazing singer, Joni Mitchell, and that her album Blue had fracked my shale. I wish I could have stood my ground and said that Blue was, for me, at least as persuasive a collection of songs as, say, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und lebend. I didn’t and all of this is beside the point. What, you might well be asking , has this got to do with our gal MG, the prime mover, the ostensible focus of this so-called diary. Patience. Soon enough, all will be revealed. Well. Maybe not “all.” Some of it, anyway.)

Round about 40 years ago, when I was a student at UBC, in the spring of whatever the year — I think it may have been 1979 — Elly Ameling, the Dutch soprano mentioned above, came to Vancouver. MG would have been staring down age 11 when Elly was born, in 1933. When I saw that she was slated to appear with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra I was thrilled beyond telling, but also a little nervous, owing to how, in my circle of friends, it was the widely held opinion that Ameling was a great Schubert singer, and that, while her way with the chansons of Faure and Duparc and all that crowd was winning enough, her voice was too translucent, too light weight, to handle the rigours of, say, Berlioz. And it was Beriloz she’d been engaged to perform, his song cycle “Les Nuits d’Été.” For that piece, most especially, the only performer you’d want to hear would be Regine Crespin, and you’d be a fool, a heretic, an apostate even, to believe otherwise. My circle, mercifully, was in Winnipeg. I was in Vancouver. There was no one to talk me out of it and if I kept it quiet, how would they ever know? I stretched my student budget. I bought a ticket, front row. And then, on the day, I fell ill. Not just a little ill. Really ill.

I’ll come back to Elly, time permitting, and that sickness and that concert. Here let me say that I know, and no one needs tell me, that this is all small gold, I’m beating it thin. It’s germane, however, to my purpose, since it’s come to mind because of reading MG: her 1965 story “Virus X.”

It’s December, 1952. Lottie has come to Paris, is going to stay for a while and then make her way to Strasbourg where she’ll continue her studies: her particular interest is in immigrant communities and their integration. She’s glad of her move.

“The city she had left was under snow, ransacked by wind, and on the dark side of the globe. She was not homesick.”

At her hotel, filling out the detailed registration form required by the authorities, she enters her occupation as “None, yet,” and her address of origin as “The Princess Pat Apartments,” Winnipeg. One of the surprises of reading is you just never know where the mines are buried. “The Princess Pat Apartments,” those four small words in that quite long story, set off a series of minor explosions: the past’s sticky shrapnel everywhere. Growing up, in Winnipeg, I was in love with the idea of apartment living. That I would one day have my own small place in which I could build my own life and do things my own way and, most importantly, where I could live on my own, all alone, was a sustaining fantasy of my childhood. Once a week, I liked to drive with my father across town to retrieve my grandmother, who came every Sunday for dinner, bearing a moulded jellied salad and the paper bags she’d saved and tied with a string. Also the coloured comics from the Winnipeg Tribune: we were a Free Press family. Most often she’d be waiting, curtsied, but sometimes we’d go up to he apartment, just off Maryland, on Alloway: her building was called The Alloway Court. It’s still there, I think; it was the last time I thought to check, which was not so long ago. It was an old building then, and I loved the boiled meat smell of the hallways and the sounds from behind closed doors and the creak of the stairs and the rickety — as I recall, that could be invention — steps of the fire-escape. The fire escape suggested not only the chance for egress in an emergency, but, more interestingly, the possibility of a hidden life, a place where what wasn’t quite fit for the foreground could have a place to happen against a facade that was in no way decorative, a place where you could do things and think thoughts that only required a sooty brick backdrop, a place where you could come and go, unseen. The fire escape was the backstage of the building. (One of the things I like so much about working in the store, whence soon I’m bound, is the contrast between the decorous front of house and the back of house, where the real action takes place. To step from one into the other is a kind of border crossing, the language and the customs change; back of house is where the peasants set aside the seemly folkloric ways beloved of the tourists and perform the dances, sing the songs mere visitors will never see.)

MG invented “The Princess Pat Apartments,” or so I think — maybe it was a nod to the Princess Patricia Regiment. The name is far from unlikely, many of those buildings, the grand ones and the plain, were christened in ways that acknowledged the Empire: Alloway Court, a case in point. I read “The Princess Pat Apartments,” and that sickly romance of childhood returns, and so does a poem by James Merrill, from 1961: “A Tenancy.” Merrill, like MG, was often published in The New Yorker, and, like MG, was a Proust enthusiast. In “A Tenancy,” memory is ignited by the quality of light on a March afternoon. He remembers 1946, and his first rented, furnished room.

“I sat, head thrown back, and with the dried stains / Of light on my own cheeks, proposed / This bargain with — say with the source of light: / That given a few years more / (Seven or ten or, what seemed vast, fifteen) / To spend in love, in a country not at war, / I would give in return / All I had. All? A little sun / Rose in my throat. The lease was drawn.”

I read MG, read about the Princess Pat Apartments, and I read James Merrill, and I remember The Wauneta, at the corner of Wardlaw and Nassau, in Winnipeg, where I had my first apartment, 1977. It’s still there, too, has been considerably gussied — as has the city of Winnipeg — since my short season there. The landlady was a Mrs. Krempanski — I think I have that right — and my mother, whose offence at my decision to move was a living, palpable thing, on hearing the name gave a knowing nod. “Polish?” she said, turning two syllables into a cautionary tale.

Lottie Benz, in “Virus X,” comes to France in 1952; I was born in 55. The Winnipeg she escaped — to which she will return — was the Winnipeg in which I was raised, a city where huge numbers of immigrants had settled. Between the Europeans and the Eastern Europeans there was a class divide; or, so we were taught, if only tacitly. There was a geographical divide, too: the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Romanians and the Galicians and so on in the north end, the children of Empire and the second or third generation Jews in the south. It’s the ethnic mashup of Winnipeg, in fact, that Lottie Benz is studying, following the lead of her professor, Dr. Keller.

MG, who was not a stranger to alienation, was drawn — I say that as though I have certain knowledge, I don’t, it’s a surmise — to emigre circles. She wrote about immigrants when she was working for the Montreal Standard, and she was thick with the Polish diaspora in Paris. She was a fervent anti-Monarchist, was, at least, in her youth, and I suppose she must have been eager to shed the skin of imperialism, wash away its dust. What makes possible the evolving friendship between Vera Rodna, whose family is Ukrainian, and Lottie Benz, whose family is German — its own shame, in 1952 — is that the stage on which they play it out is far removed from the strictures, the class and ethnic impositions of Winnipeg. MG’s husband, John Dominique Gallant, was Winnipeg-born, and I wonder if it might have been conversations with him that provided the insider details that are all throughout the story: little landmines everywhere. I nearly wept at the descriptions of how, of a Sunday afternoon, instead of playing in the parks, immigrant families would go to Wellington Crescent, to look at the fancy homes of the wealthy establishment, the grain barons and so on. I did the same, sometimes, when I was old enough to travel that far on my bicycle. I dreamed of apartments, dreamed of mansions: what never changed was that, in that dream, I was alone.

Lord, the time. 4.47. I was writing about Elly Ameling and her concert with the Vancouver Symphony, Les Nuits D’Été, by Hector Berlioz. That this would come back to me is also the consequence of one of the mines MG so cunningly laid, this time in a story called “The Cost of Living,” which also tells the story of visitors to Paris: two sisters, from Australia. Louise, a widow, arrives and stays at the same hotel, full of bohemians, as her sister, Puss. Puss, a music teacher, narrates. At a given point, while just hanging around with Louise and some other tenants in Louise’s room, a propos of not much, Puss says:

“When Berlioz was living in Italy, he heard that Maria Pleyel was going to be married, and so he disguised himself as a lady’s maid and started off for Paris. He intended to assassinate Marie and her mother and perhaps the fiancé as well. But he changed his mind for some reason, and I think he went to Nice.”

Berlioz, out of the blue, and off I go, like a pea from a straw, back 40 years, to the Elcho Aparments on Davie Street — don’t look for it, long gone — and the arty misfits who lived there, every apartment with its own leaded glass window in the door, and its own platoon of cockroaches under the sink. I loved the Elcho. That was where I was lying abed, sick with a fever, on the afternoon prior to the evening that Elly, my goddess of song, was to perform. I was young. I was eager. I cared nothing if I might be a vector of contagion. I arose. I went. If I can name it as the most memorable experience of my concert-going life it’s because I had a temperature of about 103 degrees, was half-delirious, the illness was a kind of opium and every note of that Berlioz cycle was its own landmine. I sat in the front row and fixated on Elly Ameling’s diaphragm, its sustaining in and out, as the music pearled out. Gorgeous.

“Virus X” and “The Cost of Living” are companion stories, for sure, and in both of them, young women are transformed in the forge of fever. The role that illness plays in the creative process — hello, Proust! — is its own study.

5 AM, time to wrap this up — it was time a while ago, I know. To conclude, there’s a story about how MG and Roch Carrier were at a conference. They spoke to one another about dreams. That night, in their separate rooms, he was reading a book and MG was asleep. In the morning, when they met again, she described to him her dream and what she had dreamed was what he had been reading. I wanted to refer to a passage in “Virus X,” a dream described by Vera. She came to France to conceal her pregnancy: out of wedlock, as once we said. The baby was given up. The child haunts her. In her dream, she is lost in a forest, looking for the child. I couldn’t find the page in time, was fretting, had also promised to phone my boyfriend Billy, a wake-up call. He answered — this was just now — groggily. He said, “Oh, I was having a dream. I was walking in a forest…”

Life. It’s strange. Little landmines everywhere. Outta here. Thanks for reading. xo B

Fever

Elcho