OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Diary, 6

Considering the source, inviting the saints

April 17

Happy Easter, happy Passover. Thanks to everyone who’s kindly subscribed to this diary. It’s my way of paying a centennial homage to a writer who has meant a great deal to me, Mavis Gallant, MG, born August 11, 1922. I assume that anyone who takes the time to follow, and perhaps to read these free-form entries — they are undisciplined, hasty — is likewise a Fan of Mavis: FOM. I’m not a scholar, not an authority, haven’t got an agenda, or plan or axe to grind. I just, you know, like her. MG was, her friends say, a discreet person, very much so. I expect she’d heap this enterprise with cold, but salty, contempt. It’s not, after all, characterized by rigour, is based as much on reading between the lines as the lines themselves, and is slapdash, what’s more, written quickly in the early hours of the morning before I go my grocery job. I can imagine she would say, “Why are you wasting your time with this? Who do you think you are? Really, what terrible conceit. You’re old. You don’t have much time left. Why don’t you — oh, I don’t know — do something about that terrible pile of magazines over there? It looks like it’s going to go all Tower of Babel any minute.”

Those are all New Yorkers. Year after year I subscribe, and year after year they arrive in the mail, more something to stack than to read. I hold onto them anticipating the advent of a lengthy but hopefully not dangerous but in fact quite pleasant flu that will render me incapable of doing anything other than reading and napping. Paradise.

I think it’s safe to say The New Yorker made MG; well, no, that’s absurd, insulting, of course it was her exceptional talent, her genius, even, that made her, sine qua non. But it was the magazine that gave her what she needed to exploit her gift, a home, and the steady reassurance that she was valued, that she belonged. And, of course, it gave her a living. She’d published two short stories in a Montreal little magazine before her third got the New Yorker nod; it wasn’t the first she’d sent in, over the transom, her maiden effort was returned with a kind note asking if she had anything else they might see. With very few exceptions it was there, in Mr. Ross’s magazine, and under the aegis of William Maxwell, that her subsequent work — fiction and occasional journalism — found its easy stride and eager public. MG soon became a writer synonymous with The New Yorker, like James Thurber, whom she met, in fact, when she was child.

(She told the story during a long, awkward interview on a CBC TV programme, Telescope, in 1965; it’s easy to find on the CBC website. The story of the Thurber encounter, a one-off, comes along towards the end of a laboured exchange MG would clearly rather not be having. The interviewer — for whom my heart aches, I’ve so often been in his situation, not waving, but drowning — tries to engage her by playing a game of word association. “Onion,” he says — it can’t have been random, it must have been a reference to a story, though I’m not sure which. “Use them for cooking,” answers MG, breaking his gambit by the neck. “James Thurber,” he advances, and this time she twigs. While not revealing the circumstances that brought MG and JT, briefly, into one anothers’ orbits — and this, after all, is what one wants to know — she remembers how she shook his hand, and that he called someone a “son-of-a-bitch,” and then apologized to MG’s little dog, whose name was Lida Belle. Or so I recall. I should go back and check but, you know, time, the store, and also, well, frankly, yeesh. )

A byline in that legendary weekly is every writer’s dream. The one and only time I appeared in The New Yorker was when a publisher bought advertising space, about a quarter of a page, for a book I’d written; a book in which they must have seen some promise and invested some hope, but which the public, who sometimes can’t be fooled so much even as once, understood would be best deployed as a coffee cup coaster, or a vermin swatter, or maybe as a handy stopper for a really, really lightweight door, but only if purchased from one of those buck-a-book bins of remainders that whoever works the early shift at the bookstore wheels onto the sidewalk, or the concourse of the mall, first thing in the morning, and if it gets forgotten at closing, and is left out overnight, perhaps in the rain, well, no big deal. I hadn’t known about the ad, only saw it when my copy of the magazine appeared in the mail and I was going through, filleting the thing, removing all those damn subscription cards, and there it was: my book and my name and some bold-face but decaffeinated encomium, the damnation of faint praise, a line or two extracted, with ellipses, from, perhaps, a sixth grade report card: “Billy works … hard and does … well … at spelling.”

I was thrilled for about a minute — the big time! — and then I was surprised — a mite bizarre how no one had mentioned it or thought I might be interested — and then I was embarrassed — the book was a stinker, as I knew better than anyone — and then I was, oh, how do we say it in English, oh yes, that’s right, I remember now, pissed off, for while I had no idea what this up-punching gesture would set one back, moolah-wise, I was reasonably sure it was about six times what I’d been paid by way of an advance. Well. Whatever. I can, at least, say I’ve been in the New Yorker. (Years later, I penetrated not the New Yorker pages, but the New Yorker offices, on CBC business: your tax dollars at work. I interviewed David Remnick, who was not charmed by my awkward line of inquiry; I wondered if he might have a self-wind watch, he raised his wrist so often to look at it. I also had the chance to sit down with Alice Quinn, then the poetry editor, who had pulled together a strange book of Elizabeth Bishop fragments. I say “sit down” but I think I stood, her office was the most extraordinary assemblage of towering middens, yards-high mountains of books and manuscripts and lord knows what, teetering, tempting gravity, on every surface. Remembering this now, I look over my shoulder at my minor hillock of New Yorkers and realize I’ll never be other, in the hoarding department, than a rank amateur.)

Mavis Gallant left Montreal for Europe — for Paris, via London — in October of 1950, and “Madeline’s Birthday” appeared September 1 of the following year. She managed to place a couple of other stories with her longtime editor, William Maxwell, before she left Paris and travelled to Spain. She had a hard time getting paid for her work — she was saddled with an unscrupulous agent — and by the time the dough she was owed found her, she was living in Spain, merry but starving, and selling her clothes to get by. As good as it surely was to get that life-saving cheque, it must have been even more thrilling — well, just as thrilling — to receive the magazines themselves, to see her name in the table of contents, and discreetly, always discreetly, italicized at the story’s end, to see her vision and ambition realized, laid out in columns on the page in that signature typeface and her words interspersed with one or more of the famous cartoons. On her first foray, she shared space with the legendary Charles Addams.

“Well, good night, Ahmed,” says the tall, thin man to the short, stout man. “If you need anything, just rub.” Mutt and Jeff in turbans, and the genie lamp, and all the orientalist tropes of the room: a contemporary cartoonist would certainly make other, less cliche-laden choices. (As I look at the cartoon again, badly reproduced here in an archives screenshot from the New Yorker website I note for the first time that the host’s right sleeve is empty. Or so it seems. Is it? Am I reading that right, or am I just not seeing something? Is that the visual punchline? Is the cartoon darker than I’d imagined? What happens to Ahmed when room service is summoned? Good lord, I’m a dolt.)

I fell in love with The New Yorker, and Charles Addams, in the waiting room of our family optometrist in Winnipeg: F. Gordon Reeves was his name, and his office was on Portage Avenue in either the Boyd Building or the Paris Building. (I hope it was the Paris, for it fits my theme so cunningly.) For reading material, along the usual assortment of Time and Life and Family Circle, F. Gordon had a number of weighty coffee-table size anthologies of New Yorker cartoons. I loved flipping through them, made a point of looking most particularly for the Thurber sketches — I knew some of them from my father’s copy of The Thurber Carnival — and, most especially, for the spooky, gothic Addams drawings, so funny and (to me) edgy, and so beautifully drawn, too. Some of them were beyond my ken — as the one above may be, still — but I took that as an invitation to keep on going. I remember this feeling that I was coming to the crest of a hill, after a long climb, and before me stretched a whole, fresh, unimagined vista, a place where mordancy and wit were coin of the realm, a place where my beloved Enid Blyton (born, like MG, on August 11) might not be the standard bearer of all that was excellent, fine, and emulation-worthy. I held onto that optimistic feeling about the future, with difficulty, when I came to the business end of the visit and submitted to the examination; when I sat in the chair and had to put up with Dr. Reeves — who was a kindly man, for sure — litter the floor with the dropped G’s of his forced, pickle barrel bonhomie. “So, what brings ya here today, Billy? Ya needin’ some new specs? Been winkin’ too hard at the girls? We’ll get ya fixed up. We’ll have ya seein’ those pretty girls all the better. Now. Look at the chart. Can ya read the bottom line?”

Sixty years ago. That’s how long ago it was I got my first pair of glasses, those big, black, bookworm horn rims. I’ve always needed them, with their progressively headier lens prescriptions, but never warmed to them, and for years wished, though never actually prayed, for the intervention of some kindly saint who might cast off the scales, restore my 20 / 20. A strange thing happened late in life, post-60, when I changed professions and became a dishwasher. In that vocation — it was always advanced as a threat against the future by parents and teachers, study hard or you’ll wind up as a dishwasher — steam is a present, steady, and inescapable reality. Glasses were impossible, a foggy liability. I set them aside, first at work, and then, slowly, for day to day tasks, and eventually let them go altogether. Sharp edges aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, as it turns out, and the amorphous image is not without its appeal. I wear them now only on the rare occasions when I drive, or go to the movies. (1)

A propos, and by way of envoi, because I have to wrap this up and get to the store — for it’s Easter Sunday, and that means time-and-a-half, and you can bet your butt I’ll be there on time for that! — here is MG, from “In Youth is Pleasure,” one of the Linnet Muir stories that appeared in Home Truths (and originally in The New Yorker). Linnet, now a young woman, has come back to Montreal from New York where she attended school. She returns on the bus, pretty much broke, with a suitcase and a picnic hamper. She goes to stay with Olivia, the Quebecoise woman who was Linnet’s nurse. Here, she reflects on a telling difference between the place she left and the place to which she returned. I daresay this is very much a case, for MG, of “Linnet, c’est moi.”

The first time I ever heard people laughing in a cinema was [in New York]. I can still remember the wonder and excitement and amazement I felt. I was just under fourteen and I had never heard people expressing their feelings in a public place in my life. The easy reactions, the way a poignant moment caught them, held them still - all that was new. I had come there straight from Ontario, where the reaction to a love scene was a kind of unhappy giggling, while the image of a kitten or a baby induced a long flat ''Aaaah,'' followed by shamed silence. You could imagine them blushing in the dark for having said that - just that ''Aaaah.'' When I heard that open American laughter I thought I could be like these people too, but had been told not to be by everyone, beginning with Olivia: ''Pas si fort'' was something she repeated to me so often when I was small that my father had made a tease out of it, called ''passy four.'' From a tease it became oppressive too: ''For the love of God, Linnet, passy four.'' What were these new people? Were they soft, too easily got at? I wondered that even then. . . . Were they, as Canadian opinion had it, vulgar? Perhaps the notion of vulgarity came out of some incapacity on the part of the refined. Whatever they were, they couldn't all be daft; if they weren't I probably wasn't either. I supposed I stood as good a chance of being miserable here as anywhere, but at least I would not have to pretend to be someone else.

Thanks for enduring, my fellow FOM’s, if you’ve made it this far. Next go round I’m going to re-read and think about “Virus X,” a story made for this time, for all kinds of reasons. It was published in The New Yorker in 1965, round about the same time MG’s Montreal coeval, more or less, Leonard Cohen — did they meet? did one of them have a dog? — was finishing off Beautiful Losers. Leonard is one of the pillars of fire I’m following here, typing along lickety-split, for he wrote Losers very quickly, as a kind of challenge to himself, on Hydra, and it is as gobsmackingly strange today as it was then, a real masterpiece. (He availed himself, I believe, of amphetamines; so far, I’m relying on coffee.) I mention Cohen and Beautiful Losers mostly because today, April 17, Easter Sunday, is the feast day of the first indigenous person to be canonized in North America, Saint Kateria Tekawitha, “the Lily of the Mohawks,” whose story, in part, Beautiful Losers tells, or, rather, interprets. (Appropriates? No. I don’t think so. Not as I remember it. But it’s been a few years since last I looked at it, and the prevailing winds have shifted considerably.) I am not a prayerful person, but I think the time might be right invite Kateria Tekawitha in, to ask her to what she can on our behalf. Something, maybe, to do with vision. To that end, in honour of the day, here’s Buffy Sainte-Marie, performing Cohen’s text from his novel, which is incantatory, even contagious, novel, it’s own Virus X. If magick is indeed afoot, may it enter and dwell among us. May it not pass us over. A la prochaine.

(1) I hope you’re not skipping the footnotes they are PURE GOLD. I’ve seen many photos of MG and in none is she bespectacled. Was that an aesthetic choice for moments of memorialization, or did she have good eyes? I inquired of one of her friends who told me MG did not, in fact, wear glasses, nor makeup — at least, not often and never much. Also, her earrings were clip-ons: a sensible choice.