QUICK NOTE TO READERS. THE BANKHEAD GLEANER IS A NEW EXPERIMENT, A COMMONPLACE BOOK, AN ANNOTATED COLLECTION OF QUOTES GATHERED AND NOTES TAKEN WHILE READING. IT EXISTS ON SUBSTACK AS A SEPARATE ENTITY. SOMETIMES, AS IN THIS INSTALMENT AND THE ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW, IF WHAT I’M WRITING PERTAINS TO MAVIS GALLANT, I WILL PUBLISH IT HERE AS WELL. IF YOU'D LIKE TO BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TO THE BANKHEAD GLEANER, PLEASE USE THE LINK AT THE END OF THIS ENTRY.
SUBSTACK ALLOWS WRITERS TO BE PAID BY THOSE WHO WANT TO SUPPORT THEM. MANY THANKS TO THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE MADE A MONTHLY OR YEARLY PLEDGE — HOWEVER I’M NOT, AT THIS POINT, TRYING TO MONETIZE THIS WRITING. PERHAPS IN THE FUTURE, IF IT PROVES TO BE SOMETHING THAT SEEMS WORTHWHILE CONTINUING, BUT FOR NOW, IT’S HORS DE COMMERCE, GRATIS AND POSSIBLY GRATUITOUS. PLEASE KNOW THAT YOUR KINDNESS AND GENEROSITY HAS BEEN SO MUCH APPRECIATED. THANKS.
August 3, 2023. Hello, friends. Thanks for reading. There’s no indication that Mavis Gallant knew Patricia Highsmith when they were contemporaries at the Julia Richman High School in New York City — it was a big school — but I like to think their paths might have crossed, somehow, somewhere; hard to imagine that they wouldn’t have had a lot to say to each other, in the cafeteria, the gym, or detention hall. Here’s Highsmith’s journal entry from August 3, 1953, three score and ten years ago.
There should be gold rings, watches, beautiful necklaces, beautiful books and also paintings, which are given away after a time to a friend who admires them, and who in turn will give them on to somebody else. Gifts are food for the heart, to give and be given. These should take the place of religious idols, for they symbolize human love in the name of a charitable God.
I commissioned my AI Artist-in-Residence to come up with an image “in the style of the old Dutch masters that includes gold rings, watches, beautiful necklaces, beautiful books and also paintings.” I’d give this 7 / 10, and suggest more attention needs to be paid to facial details.
I couldn’t sleep last night. Twitchy body. Troubled mind. Went for a walk. I rarely go out after dark (am not much seen during the day, come to that: a kindness I show the community), and don’t keep track of the night sky. I’ve written over the last couple of days about Alfred, Lord Tennyson dying in a room awash with the light of the full moon, but I hadn’t taken into account, nor had I dressed for, the possibility that I would find myself startled by a flood of lunar luminescence. Nothing dresses up a fetid alleyway more than a big-bellied moon: all the more so when the sight is unexpected. A tiny slice of the pie was missing, as it was a waning moon, a night past the full; “the sturgeon moon,” is what it’s called, according to my almanac.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of Walter de la Mare, but the first lines of that poem we all read in elementary school rose up, gaseous, from my swampy brain: Slowly, silently, now the moon, walks the night in her silver shoon. This way and that, she peers and sees, silver fruit upon silver trees. “Silver.” That’s what it’s called. It must have come our way in the third or fourth grade, along with the “The Listeners.” I don’t suppose those Edwardian classics are part of the decolonized curriculum, and if that’s too bad it’s only because there are so few portals through which the young can pass and find the word “shoon” waiting on the other side. I enjoyed the mouthfeel of “shoon” as I stood in the alley, neck craned, stopped in my tracks before my tracks had even kicked in. “Shoon” made me regret that I was wearing flip-flops.
I’ve so often tried to take a persuasive photo of "the face [of] the conquered moon" (as Joni Mitchell almost said), but never successfully. You can see here how our tide-tugging little sister is indistinguishable from the street lamp at the corner of Stovold Lane and Gilford.
It was just after midnight, quiet, not a lot of people around. I walked east a couple of blocks, to Denman, our shopping thoroughfare and one of the city’s most reliably disappointing streets. There, at the corner of Haro, newly flattened in the crosswalk, lay a young raccoon. “Slowly, silently, now the moon / shines its beams on the car-crushed coon. / Bright the moon we call the sturgeon, / no need, though, to summon a surgeon,” was the verse that landed, unfortunately, full-formed in my mind, as if piped there by some discount de la Mare.
A mood enhancer this was not. Whatever solace the night had held was dashed. I went home, confided my troubles to my AI Artist-in-Residence, asked it to come up with an image that might serve as an antidote to the troubling carnage just witnessed. How’s about a raccoon in the moonlight, playing the banjo, in the style of Rousseau? I asked. It did its best.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who passed a nuit blanche last night. Yesterday’s news — the raccoon was just the dreadful icing on a terrible cake — more or less guaranteed a generalized restlessness across the Dominion. You will have heard, or read, or simply scented on the breeze, that Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie, announced their separation. The declaration — tenderness untarnished, one big happy family, already booked the cottage for next year and we’ll all be there together working on jigsaws, tossing horseshoes and playing croquet — was boilerplate, including the usual requests for privacy at this difficult time.
Since then, predictably, there’s been a lot of chatter about how reasonable it is or isn’t for a federal leader to request a hands-off approach to any matter, whether state or domestic. It seems to me — I know you’ve all been waiting to hear my thoughts on this pressing state / moral issue — that what we have here is a family — not quite like any other, it’s true — having a hard summer and their business is their business, no matter how public the clan. So hands off. My only comment — and this neither cynicla nor a privacy violator — comes down to a question, which is: can JT now claim, should he wish, a place in the ranks of bachelor Canadian Prime Ministers, alongside R. B. Bennett and Mackenzie King? What are the boundaries of bachelorhood? Can they be expanded to include “not presently married?” Or can one only be a bachelor if one has never married? About this I wonder only because, through a curry-ass coincidence, it was bachelorhood about which I was poised to write when this diverting news of yesterday broke.
In The Montreal Standard, April 23, 1949, Mavis Gallant — then a staff features writer for that weekly paper, which in 1951 morphed into Weekend Magazine — published a tongue-in-cheek survey of unmarried men. (“Bachelors Aren’t All Eligible” was the title of the published feature, not “Beware of Bachelors” as noted in the preview duplicated above.)
For the past three weeks we have been investigating bachelors, a little-recognized minority group. Few bachelors, in fact, are even aware of themselves as a minority.
Bachelors do not send delegations to Ottawa. They have not been mentioned by the Committee on Human Rights and Freedom. No researcher has ever applied a sympathetic mind to them as a group, though there have been a number of books on how they may be fed, trained, domesticated, etc. When they are made fun of in Shirley Temple movies, they do not picket. Walter Winchell has yet to say a word in their favor.
Bachelors have not, in any organized fashion, struck back at psychiatrists (who consider them immature), sociologists (who consider them drones in society), or Dorothy Dix columnists (who consider them heels — eg., “Forget this man, my dear, it is obvious he is trifling with your time and will never marry you.”) In fact, nothing links them together except mutual mistrust and a tendency to wear blue or maroon ties.
Having interviewed 20 eligible bachelors, and by eligible we mean they could afford to get married, we are now in a position to make a number of sweeping statements. …
What follows in the feature are the funny, candid, sometimes off-beat, and sometimes wince-making replies of the survey group to such questions as “Do you like women, as such?”, “Are you afraid of women?”, “Are your friends happily married?”, and “Do you lose your bachelor friends when they marry?” Also examined is whether married men are more immoral than bachelors: yes, is the general consensus.
We found that bachelors were reluctant to talk about love, but quite willing to discuss the pursuit of women. When they mentioned love, it was “this weird thing called love,” or “this peculiar thing people call love,” or some such coy variation on the subject. By having skirted that nicely, they were not at all loath to talk about women, past and present.
We should state that they always launched into the subject of their own accord, as if it were a stamp collection no one else had ever heard of. We also noticed that men who were sitting so that they can look out of the window find it easier to talk about women.
Mavis Gallant, Montreal Standard, April 23, 1949
MG’s take on post-war bachelorhood will be included in the selection of the Mavis Gallant’s early journalism which Marta Dvorak, Neil Besner, and I are compiling for publication next year by Vehicule Press in Montreal.
Transcribing her many articles — also her radio reviews — has been challenging, because the microfilm record is often mottled and indistinct. That said, I’ve been struck, while chipping away at those tens of thousands of words (well over a hundred thousand, in fact ) at how seldom distracting errors of spelling or punctuation occur. The typesetters at the Standard must have been a crackerjack team.
MG, in what's quoted above, alludes to a Shirley Temple movie. She must have meant The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, for which Sidney Sheldon (he of all those bodice-ripping novels in 60’s and 70’s) went on to win an Academy Award for best screenplay. With accuracy of typography in mind, here’s a review of that movie, published in the Montreal Gazette, January 17, 1948. Take a gander at the abbreviated cast list, bottom left.
Cary Grant, playing Dick Nugent, appears here as Gary Grant. The character of Margaret Turner is twice listed, once played by Mydna Loy and once by Myrna. Shirley Temple, a top-biller who played the role Susan Turner — younger sister of Margaret — isn’t listed at all.
You’d almost have to make an effort to fit that many errors into so small a space. Whoever set this must could not have been in tip-top form. One imagines in play the hand of someone in a hurry, having come back late from a liquid lunch.
Herbert Whittaker, the reviewer, couldn’t have been pleased, knowing full well that readers tend to assign the blame for such slip-ups to the writer, in the same way that headlines are falsely attributed to whoever owns the byline.
Whittaker — most of you will know this — was a leading theatre critic, first at the Gazette, and then at the Globe and Mail. He was also a talented stage director and set designer. I’ve been writing in these last few days as much about Tallulah Bankhead as I have about Mavis Gallant, and Herbert Whittaker can be linked to both of them. In his memoir Setting the Stage, he remembered:
I also have a vivid memory of Tallulah Bankhead from a 1947 interview. It was a group affair with the press gathered around the star in her hotel after her opening in Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads. She reclined on a chaise, suffering huskily from the final fall downstairs at the end of the play. The Montreal press suggested the names of some doctors as Bankhead demonstrated how she had bruised herself. But she must have become bored with this, for she perked up when I asked her about the report in the New York Times that she planned to appear in a drama based on the life of Sarah Bernhardt. She stunned me by saying that the New York Times story was in the nature of a “trial balloon,” in case any investors showed interest. Using the sacred New York Times like that shocked us, perhaps as the lady intended.
Bankhead told us that when she was beginning her career in London she had once given a very creditable impersonation of the Divine Sarah, although she herself had never witnessed Bernhardt playing. ‘Show us,’ I urged her, accounting myself a good judge of Bernhardt. Bankhead’s aches and pains vanished immediately. She disappeared into the bedroom. ‘Hand me my fur coat,’ she commanded from the next room. ‘Turn off that light and put on that lamp.’ All this done, she made her entrance, striking a familiar Bernhardt pose. The likeness was indeed startling until the deep Bankhead voice destroyed the illusion. No voix d’or that, though it was mightily hypnotic.
Mavis Gallant knew Whittaker — not surprising given that they were both young and both working as English language journalists in Montreal in the 40’s. They must have intersected often, professionally and socially. They kept in touch, as she did with many of her Montreal connections. I know they would see each other, years later, in Paris and know that MG did not warmly welcome these visits; at least, she complained of them in letters I’ve been privileged to see, but won’t directly quote. Theirs was a long association and whatever rolling of the eyes their meetings might have provoked, I’d hazard a guess that it was one she valued. Friendship is not friendship if it always has to smell of fondness.
I wonder if Herbert Whittaker might have been one of the bachelors MG interviewed back in 1949, which was the year HW left Montreal and went to the Globe and Mail. Reading that piece again, I’m struck by how there’s not even a sly reference — unless I’m oblivious to it, which is possible — of how bachelorhood is sometimes — routinely, even — predicated on sexual inclination, or disinclination. MG was an urban sophisticate, many of whose friends and contemporaries made their livings in the arts. Of course she would have known gay people, and that some of the gents were among the bachelors she interviewed seems likely. But the society was the society , and the law was the law, and this was more than a generation removed from a time when disclosure could be risked without a guarantee of consequences. Much went unspoken.
I never met Herbert Whittaker, know very little — know nothing, really — about him. He was 95 when he died in 2006. He was, I think — someone will correct me if I’m wrong — a lifelong bachelor. Was he gay? That might be a speculative step too far, but our time is our time and our society is our society and the prurient, invasive question insinuates itself whether you want it to or not. I have no idea. It’s possible he was a straight man who spent his life in the theatre and in the company of “creatives”(as now we annoying call them) and that he simply never found the right girl. Doesn’t matter. None of my business. Changes nothing.
Next time we meet I’ll have a bit more to say about MG, about bachelors, and privacy. And Tallulah, too. There’s a great story about her — there are many — and like a lot of great stories it exudes whiffs of the apocryphal. It has to do with someone asking her if Montgomery Clift was gay. Her reply was, “I don’t know darling, he never sucked my cock.” And so, till next time, farewell.
Reading anything you write is to me like tea in the afternoon reclining on the sofa with something lovely on the CD player set to random. I love what you say and how you say it. Amused and entertained. Bill
Yes, Herbie was gay. Definitely. But only slightly fey in manner and cadence. A lovely gentleman and one of the kindest critics one could imagine, unlike his opposite number at the Star, the appalling and pretentious Nathan Cohen who showed up at opening nights in a cape and flourishing a knob-handled cane.
Herbie truly loved theatre and was a huge booster of Canadian work. Cohen, by contrast, disdained everything Canadian, including the Stratford Festival, claiming high standards.