OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, 11

Briefly ( for once )

April 23

Shakespeare’s birthday, St. George’s Day. Growing up, when it was the usual thing at school to begin the day with O, Canada — we sang along with a recording played in the school office and broadcast over the PA speaker — and then to have a Bible reading, and then to say the Lord’s Prayer and to end the day with singing God Save the Queen, the Queen herself looking on, smiling down from her place on the wall, whence she kept constant watch over us all, her young subjects, many of us with fathers who had fought in the name of her father when she was a child, like us — this was a day that would have been marked, in some way. How? Perhaps with a rousing rendition of The Maple Leaf Forever, the lyrics of which were etched early into my brain, all that imperialistic cant about Wolfe, the dauntless hero and the planting of Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain. What were our St. George’s Day activities; St. Andrew’s Day, St. David’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day would have been likewise commemorated. I can’t recall our St. George markers specifically, apart from a stray recollection of working diligently, bent over a desk, to draw and colour in a Union Jack: an art project at school? Or something for Cub Scouts, a badge requirement? Who knows, memories are like kites, caught in trees, tattered over weeks, months, years, the frame gone, the string, and all you have left is the unverifiable certainty that once, in those branches, was a kite. A matter of faith.

I remember how one pupil left the room after the singing of the anthem, and stood in the hallway during the religious observance. There was never any explanation offered as to why she was exempt — why would there have been, it was none of our business — but of course we all wondered, and spoke about it and came up with theories. We supposed it was a parental request, and that it had a religious basis. Some said she was a Jew, some that she belonged to a fundamentalist sect — I think the Plymouth Brethren were named — but this was all speculation and surmise and it was nothing anyone ever worried about or spent much time gnawing over. The difference marked her, of course, set her apart. She was differently different from the girl who’d had polio and wore leg braces, and the girl was albino and had to avoid the sun and wore dark glasses at all times and the boy who was frequently absent, was sickly, and was the first of us to die — leukaemia — but she was equally apart. She was never one who seemed to care much about social integration, never worked at finding ways to insinuate herself into a circle or group. Whether she was content to be apart, or whether she saw it as a necessity to which she had to cleave, I can’t say. I don't remember her after elementary school, have no idea what because of her her, but I can still summon her name: Janice Haldane. “Janice, you may leave the room now,” was what our teachers would say, morning after morning, and then, when the echoing “Amen” had died, whoever sat nearest the door would be told to let her in. Janice Haldane. Her pale face. Her long braid. Many are forgotten, as am I to them, but she’s vivid. She was accorded a distinction, she was accorded discretion, and so she stood out. Discretion’s byproduct, sadly, is curiosity. It’s a veil that wants lifting.

Late in her life, talking to an interviewer about men, Mavis Gallant (MG) said, and here I paraphrase, “I never asked ‘Do you love me?’ That was a question for the wives. I asked, ‘Est-ce que vous êtes discret?’” To this same interviewer she said, “I lived very freely.” Did she ever name names? Perhaps, probably, within the confines of her journals, or in letters; but not for the public record, not that I’ve ever seen. She was discreet, she expected discretion of others. I think of this, all the time, as I write about her here, not as a scholar or biographer, just as a fond reader.

“Only personal independence matters,” is the Pasternak quote she used as an epigram for her introduction to the collection of “Canadian stories” gathered in Home Truths. MG was single-minded about living the life she wanted to lead: a life lived by fiction, in Paris. I looked at that introduction again last night, and was struck by what she had to say about how her reading, since the mid-seventies, had all been directed to her long, unpublished study of the Dreyfus case. She wrote, “We — Dreyfus and I — were opposites, in every sense, and had he been living he probably would have told me to leave his life alone. From beyond the grave he had the right to fairness.”

As does MG, of course. But there’s no sidestepping how lives that are part of the public record also invite curiosity. The dead, strangely enough, haven’t really stepped outside of the room, they are with us more than ever, are powerless to smack down our questions, some of which may be indiscreet.

“I once dreamed that we met and that he had nothing to say to me, which is probably how it would have been in real life,” she wrote in that same introduction, re: Dreyfus. Reading that, I can but nod. I hear you, sister.

5.39, Saturday, a 6 AM start at the store, wrapping this up, just time enough to remark that MG, setting up the stories in Home Truths remembers being at a new school, in Ontario, and it was known she was bilingual, and she was asked, I think by a teacher, to prove she could speak French, say something, she was told. She recited a La Fontaine poem, and was aware how the other students stared at her not with admiration but with hatred. She was different. She stood apart. From where she stood, the French spooling out, I imagine she could see the door, the hallway on the other side. I’m pretty sure she knew where she wanted to be.