Spent a happy few hours re-reading MG’s “Virus X,” a long and rich story about Lottie and Vera, Canadian girls — Winnipeg girls, what’s more — abroad, in France and Germany, in the years just after the War. Published in the January 30, 1965 edition of the New Yorker. If willing gods and compliant creeks allow, I’ll add a proper entry tomorrow, in the wee, small hours, before I go to work.
One of my favourite colleagues, someone I looked forward to seeing from day to day, has left the store, on good terms, but suddenly, without notice. I don’t think I’ll get over how often that happens, an abrupt departure, and how little is made of it. Such news merits nothing more than a shrug, sadly. Retail. It’s a kind of show business. You’ve got to inure yourself to comings and goings that happen without warning. My carapace is too porous to allow that. My old heart is a sentimental pump. Age is a mallet that tenderizes what it doesn’t callus. (Oh, Billy. That was EXCELLENT!)
The fellow who made his way out — he’s taken a job in construction, much more dough to be made — hadn’t been with us long. He was genial, bright, new to the country, and didn’t speak much English. I admired the way he forged on, and found a way to get on with things. I had to resist an avuncular impulse to help him out when he looked like he was struggling but didn’t necessarily want or need assistance. I watched with interest one day as he engaged with a shopper who had a question but who, like my colleague, had no English. Nor did she have Spanish, which would have helped. Nor did he have Japanese, ditto. Undaunted, they both got out their phones, opened up translation apps. Soon enough, the found common ground.
“Salt?” he said.
“Salt?” said she.
“Salt!” they agreed, and off they went to find it.
It’s not so different, really, from what I’m doing here, this talking to myself, and it’s not so different, really, from what any of us do when we read and think about what our favourite writers, the ones on whom we count for direction, are saying. We come hoping for a meeting, an engagement, an agreement, if only agreeing to disagree. It’s not always straightforward. Sometimes you’ve got to work, to commit, to figure out the crossroads and roundabouts. Good will. A little of that still gets you a long way, if not absolutely, reliably, through to the other side.
As much as possible, I’m reading MG not in anthologies, or in the various collections of her stories, but as they first appeared, in The New Yorker, via their archive. One of the pleasures of this sourcing, as previously noted, is seeing them with the cartoons and ads that, somehow, seem part of the whole. Here’s one from that January 30, 1965 edition.
This Bond-inspired haberdashery inducement reminded me that, who knows how long ago, in one of those round-ups of who’s reading what, MG recommended Silk, the slender novel by Alessandro Barrico. (I tried to hunt it down, couldn’t manage to find it. It’s possible I’ve made this up, but I don’t think so. I remember buying Silk on her recommendation.)
Speaking of recommendations, I wrote about how I owe some part of my affinity for MG to the absolutely meaningless coincidence that we share an August 11 birthday: her’s in 1922, mine in 1955. The Vancouver composer and singer and musical mainstay Veda Hille is another August 11 baby. 1968. I don’t think she minds anyone doing the math. I have long been her devoted fan — I can number our occasional collaborations among my happiest, luckiest experiences — and she gave her Pandemic downtime over NOT to day-drinking and porn surfing, like some I could name, but to conjuring the songs on her new album, Beach Practice. “Upbeat, for me,” is how she described it to me. It is, but she’s an artist who can’t help but use all her light to show what’s dark. It’s brilliant. Recommended. Highly. Thanks as always for reading. If you know of anyone you think might like join our community of Friends of Mavis —FOM — please link them in. It’s free. As MG writes in “Virus X,” “The important thing was feeling free, and never being alone.” A demain!