Oh, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, 2.

These are now and again accounts of my small life in the Centennial year of Mavis Gallant, born 08.11.1922. Everything I write here has to do with MG. Sometimes, the link will be a tad tangential. Sometimes, it will take me a while to get to the point. You have the patience for circularity or you don’t. If nothing else, you’ll never have to ask for your money back. This windy — arguably too much so — entry has to do with affinity. Of all things.

_____________________________________

April 12, 2022

A fellow has taken up residence on the sidewalk in front of the pet food store on Denman. He’s been there for a couple of weeks. He’s got some rudimentary camping gear, a mat, a sleeping bag. I’d put his age at somewhere between 30 and 40, hard to say; weathered, as people who sleep rough tend to be, he’s probably younger than he looks. He never engages with passersby, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t speak, never begs or panhandles, doesn’t have a cup or a cap for donations. He doesn’t obstruct or impede access, doesn’t block the door. He’s quiet. He’s prone. Still, he’s a conspicuous, assertive presence for someone so passive. He’s incontinent. The slope of the pavement from his lying place to the street is stained by acrid, uric rivulets: a feral whiff as you enter the store, or pass by. Passing by is what we do, most of us. The quickened step, the averted eye is usual in these situations; there are many, so many, and more every day. Avoidance isn’t inconsequential, morally, at least. There’s the unsavoury confrontation, not with the principal player in the drama — quiet, prone — but with ourselves, with all our own failings and inadequacies vis a vis the debt we owe one another as citizens, as social creatures. Also, we come face to face with a possible outcome that people like me — cosseted and fattened, but also precariously positioned — have cause to fear. There but for — no, let’s not go there. There may be insurance less reliable and harder to collect on than the grace of God, but I couldn’t tell you what it is.

I was thinking about God, a little, the last time I passed by this sad encampment, and held my breath, and looked away, which does me no credit. This was on Friday evening, 04.08. 22. I was bound for church, for Christ Church Cathedral, the recently renovated / restored interior of which my boyfriend, the architect, who has an educated opinion or two he is glad to share, describes as “one of the few truly great rooms in the city.” (What are the others? I must remember to ask.) The great stone edifice of Christ Church must be a beautiful place to worship, if you’re a prayerful and / or an Anglican sort of person — I’m neither — and it’s certainly resonant — the high vault of the ceiling, the seasoned and plentiful wood, all that leaded glass — and ideal for certain kinds of concert-giving; a concert was, on Friday, the draw. I tried to remember as I walked down Robson — the street alive with young disciples of Mammon, and the shape-shifting, spooky weather, sunny and warm one minute, a howling gale the next — the last time I’d gone to church for anything like a liturgical reason. I had a faint, shameful recollection of an Ash Wednesday drop-in a few years back when I turned up just to get the forehead smudge, more or less as an accessory. My shallowness is unplumbable.

I was thinking about God and I was thinking about MG, as I often do, in this, her Centennial year. I’d just read in the Paris Review an appreciation of her work, published not long after her death in February, 2014. (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/03/14/ive-lived-very-freely/ )

The writer, Livia Manera Sambuy, (http://www.liviamanera.com) details a conversation she had with MG about Mavis’s difficult childhood. MG quotes the Philip Larkin line we all know, “they fuck you up, your mom and dad,” the eminently citable opening salvo of “This be the verse,” an appropriately churchy sounding title, given my destination. My own favourite Larkin line is, “Hatless, I take off my cycle clips in awkward reverence,” from Church Going, also apt for the occasion, given my secular mission. Larkin dated the poem April 24, 1954. A week prior, Mavis Gallant, who by then had found a secure place in the William Maxwell stable of writers at The New Yorker, had published her story in the April 17 issue of the magazine — a story surely autobiographical in part, about a child who spends a summer in a small Quebec town with her father, an amateur painter, as was Gallant’s pa. I quote here from “Wing’s Chips” a passage that’s musically relevant.

My piano lessons had also begun at four, but lasted only a short time, for, as the nun in charge of music explained, I could not remember or sit still, and my hand was too small to span an octave. Music had then been dropped as one of my accomplishments until that summer, when, persuaded by someone who obviously had my welfare at heart, my father dispatched me twice a week to study piano with a Madame Tessier, the convent-educated wife of a farmer, whose parlour was furnished entirely with wicker and over whose household hung a faint smell of dung, owing to the proximity of the outbuildings and the intense humidity of summer weather in the St. Lawrence Valley. Together, Madame Tessier and I sweated it out, plodding away against my lack of talent, my absence of interest, and my strong but unspoken desire to be somewhere else. "Cette enfant ne fera jamais rien," I once heard her say in despair. We had been at it four or five weeks before she discovered at least part of the trouble; it was simply that there was no piano at home, so I never practised. After every lesson, she had marked with care the scales I was to master, yet, week after week, I produced only those jerky, hesitant sounds that are such agony for music teachers and the people in the next room. "You might as well tell your father there's no use carrying on unless you have a piano," she said. I was only too happy, and told him that afternoon, at lunch. "You mean you want me to get you a piano?" he said, looking around the dining room as if I had insisted it be installed, then and there, between the window and the mirrored china cabinet. How unreasonable I was!

I regret that I never had, or never successfully engineered, the opportunity to speak to MG. To do so wouldn’t have been impossible, or even unlikely, given that, for a long time,  a long time ago, I made my living by talking to people about what they were doing, broadly speaking, in the world, and often, they were artists. Now and again, someone will remember that (a) I did this, and (b) I’m not dead, and will invite me to lubricate my tete-a-tete chops. In this instance, last Friday, at Christ Church, the client was Early Music Vancouver, and the assignment was a post-show conversation — not public, direct to video — with Olga Pashchenko. (https://olgapashchenko.com)  

Olga is a keyboard adept: organ, harpsichord, fortepiano, piano. (She told me that she once tried playing the natural horn, but didn’t see a future in it.) She’s particularly celebrated as a fortepianist, the fortepiano being the ancestor of the concert grand; the fortepiano is what happened when the harpsichord crawled out of the water and traded its gills for lungs. (These are the kinds of observations that ensure I’m never invited to give keynotes at places where musicologists gather.)

The concert was fascinating for reasons musical and extra-musical. In the latter category there was, most loomingly, the question of nationality. Olga, who lives in Utrecht, who was born in Moscow, is half Russian, half Ukrainian. Given how many appearances by pure laine Russian artists have been cancelled, one wonders if the performance could have gone ahead, absent the happy accident, entirely outside her control, of hybrid lineage. Useless to speculate, and anyway it was a stipulation of my engagement that geopolitics were off the table. For this I was glad. To put someone whose taxing enough business is playing the right notes in the right order in the position of having to explain or illuminate the motivations of a President is as absurd as it is unfair. In any case, between the two historical instruments she played and the programme itself  — Beethoven in the first half, Liszt in the second — there was plenty of fodder for conversation.

“Beethoven & Liszt: A Musical Affinity,” was the concert’s rubric and affinity was our short conversation’s leitmotif. Olga spoke about the affinity she feels for Beethoven, how she’s drawn to his revolutionary spirit, his insatiable hungers, his exploratory fervour, his innovative daring, all qualities amply on show in the mammoth Hammerklavier sonata that opened the programme. She spoke about her affinity for keyboards themselves, their material reality, how every new instrument is a new relationship. Olga spoke of how playing Beethoven on the fortepiano, especially, gives an artist clarity into just how monumental and game-changing his writing was, that he was challenging not just the player but the instrument itself, pushing it to the limits of its endurance, challenging the human ingenuity that made it possible. Eventually, if you’re interested in hearing more of what Olga had to say, that conversation will appear on the Early Music Vancouver website. She was most generous in her replies and the performance itself was utterly brilliant. Electric. Unforgettable.

It was late by the time we finished, but I was so energized, so molto agitato, that I wasn’t in a hurry to sleep. The music was a lot to think about but, also, I hadn’t been to a recital for a long, long time and it was its own social study. There was the simple, formerly uncluttered business of gathering, which hasn’t yet shed its air of danger. It was intriguing to see who wore a mask, who didn’t wear a mask, who wore a mask part of the time, who wore a mask for reasons that were palliative, who wore a mask that matched their bag and shoes. There were the two men who sat next to us; they were on a date, as I supposed. Their situation was May - December, no, make that April - mid-October. The older of the two would from time to time fold down 90 degrees from the waist and sneeze, loudly, under his seat, spraying the droplets (unmasked, he was) onto the ankles of whoever sat behind. The younger of the pair, directly he took his seat, found his phone and opened up the Grindr app, I guess to discover who else of interest might be located in the church (which is, after all, one of the few great rooms in the city), and, given the real possibility that his companion looked like he might die of a sneezing accident, or at least be disabled by one, it was probably a good idea on his part to have a viable Plan B in place.  The phone, and Grindr, continued to be his focus throughout the performance, during the length of which he fidgeted, actively, visibly, vexingly. I said a quiet prayer to St. Adderall, but it went unheard; or, at least, unanswered. There was another phone, mid-sanctuary, that went off at a very inopportune and unharmonious moment, there was a crying baby, there was someone in hard-soled shoes who had to leave the hall mid-movement, and did so to percussive effect: all the usual concert interruptions that are annoyances if you let them be but are, as well, symptoms of humanity and, in their way, comic, loveable. I was glad of them all, for what they signalled. We’re here. We’re alive. We’re imperfect.

All this I pondered in my heart as I headed home through the wonky weather. I thought about MG, who I know was more than casually fond of music. I called to mind what I could of her 1970 New Yorker story “New Year’s Eve,” which is set at the opera, in Moscow, in the Bolshoi Theatre. I wondered what she would have made of this performance, wondered what she might make of the present perils abroad in the world, she who played such close attention to affairs of state, who was politically acute, who had wandered all her life, who had a real, yes, affinity with refugees, with exile. I thought about my own affinity for MG, tried to parse how much of it derives from her writing, and how much grows from what I know and what I’m learning about the facts of her utterly astonishing life. That she has been dead 8 years and that there hasn’t been a major biography  — there have been some fine critical works that include biographical details, to be sure — is astonishing to me. She lived big. She lived freely. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she was not intolerant. She had many, many friends to whom she was loyal and generous.

“What would MG make of this?” I wondered, as I wandered, late at night in the wonky weather, walking past the pet food store on Denman, the fellow who camps there stretched on the pavement. What led to this outcome? Is this a case of “they fuck you up your mom and dad?” Probably, to a greater or lesser degree. Why is he here, of all possible places? For what reason? It’s not sheltered, there’s no cover, it’s not located outside a business where someone might buy him coffee or a burger, it’s not even the busiest block on the street. In short, it has nothing to recommend it as a place to stretch out and linger. It’s not a logical place for him to deposit his affinity. And yet, it must be strategic. Is it because he knows that people who might otherwise quicken step or avert eyes as they enter the store might have a reckoning with guilt, will be compelled to grapple with the easily proved, mathematically demonstrable verity of how they’ll spend 40 dollars on a bag of organic, designer kibble, but won’t spare him the time of day? Is he there as a goad to conscience, to bolster the truth of what we all know but don’t like to acknowledge which is that we treat our pets better than we do the poor? The poor, who are always with us?  Horse feathers and apple sauce, his motivations are surely more than missionary. But then, as noted, no cap, no cup, no begging bowl, no practiced pitch. He is simply there, quiet and prone, in the place that he’s chosen to exercise his right to affinity. Which I guess is what we all do, to greater or lesser effect, in one way or another. Which is all I’m doing here. Which is enough.