Oh, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 3

Voices Lost in Snow

(4.15 PM, 04.13.22. This is, I hope, a remedied version of an early morning post I tried to publish that was, somehow, half eaten in its initial send. My apologies, new to substack, trying to figure it out.)

It’s 3.51 AM, April 13. I’m up early, by which I mean up earlier than most. For me, this is the standard time of waking; has become so since I started working in the store and doing the job I do, which requires pre-dawn attendance. It’s not quite how I imagined my life would look at this stage in the game, but it’s how things have worked out. I don't say this as a bid to be entered in anyone’s book of martyrs, there’s nothing “poor wee Billy,” about it. I do what I do willingly, to pay my bar bill and as a kind of bulwark against emptiness. It’s hard work, exhausting, and doesn’t allow much time for writing; that’s not necessarily a bad thing, a disadvantage or source of privation. Writing, for me, has always been a hobby, a sideline, a distraction, a small piece that fits into the margins of a puzzle where the big picture is the day job. I write when I can, as time and will allow. I am also very slow, a pokey organizer of words, but I’m coming to realize that to keep a diary — which I’ve never done, never had the discipline for — and to make it public will require something more frequent than what I’ve managed so far, i.e. a weekly note in a bottle, tossed at what might or might not be a co-operative wave. A diary should be every day, or something close to it. (Is “diary” connected to “diurnal?” If I had time — I don’t, the clock is ticking — I’d look it up. All you need to make “diary” into “daily” is to switch out an “r” with and “l” and rearrange two vowels. It’s even easier, I’ll point out, because it’s germane, to render “diary” as “dairy.” Ironically, one of my early morning chores at the store is to survey the dairy case and pull all the product that’s reached its end-of-life. I am the angel of death, but for yogurt.) My point is, I’m going to make peace with how I can’t do this and spend hours and hours haggling with semi-colons. This is not an exercise in style, not every phrase needs to be fussed over and gilded. The circumstances require celerity, more spit than polish.

Last night it occurred to me that this year, 2022, which is the centennial year of the birth of Mavis Gallant, MG, is also the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Yvonne De Carlo, pictured above. Yvonne grew up in the neighbourhood where I live, Vancouver’s West End. Like MG, Yvonne’s early life was fractured, disrupted. She and her mother moved around a lot — her father abandoned them when she was very young — and the spawning ground to which they returned, between boarding house stints, was the ancestral manse on Comox Street, in the 1700 block: that’s three blocks south and two blocks east of my present location. I don’t suppose that MG and Yvonne ever met — who knows, they might have collided in one of those strange one-off cocktail party situations, like Ethel Merman meeting Stravinsky, or Edith Sitwell meeting Marilyn Monroe or Freud meeting Mahler — but I’m quite sure MG, who went to the movies, would have recognized the name, would have seen Yvonne on the screen in one of her big Biblical epics.

Part of the reason I’m writing about MG is that I’m not aware of any gathering energy around the celebration of her landmark year; now that Yvonne has entered my thoughts I’m feeling a certain tender pressure pulling me in her direction, too. She also merits venerating — The Ten Commandments! The Munsters! Follies! — but who will take it on? Should I be shackling myself to the doors of City Hall, demanding a statue, or the dedication of a fountain? How much can one man do? My God, I’ve got a job, I have an important mission, saving the shopping public from lapsed milk products. To these quixotic birthday tributes I’m no stranger. Last year, 2021, I did my very best to fan the flames of interest in the centennial year of Deanna Durbin and all my efforts — dozens of Twitter posts! — came to naught.

I’m willing to bet that Deanna exerted on MG a certain fascination. They were born a year apart, MG in Montreal, Deanna in Winnipeg. They both had successful careers as young women, Deanna in Hollywood, MG as a journalist at the Montreal Standard. They both saw greener fields in France and moved there, Deanna to the outskirts of Paris, MG (eventually) to Montmartre. MG had a Winnipeg connection, via her husband, John Dominique Gallant; Winnipeg was his home town. She was 18 when they married — illegally, as it turns out, via a kind of ruse MG concocted to circumvent the rules and regulations of the Quebec civil authorities — and for most of their time as husband and wife, John was at war. By the time he came home — this is what MG told interviewers — she’d set her sights on Europe, and told him so. John’s reply was that he’d just come from there, and it wasn’t any place he was in a hurry to revisit. Amicably — or, so the story was told — they divorced. In 1950, she sold her first story to the New Yorker. She had a cheque for 600 dollars. Sporting the shiny armour of certified literary worth, and with enough do-re-mi to allow her to make her bid for freedom, she took the plunge. Off she went. It would be wrong, though, to say she never looked back. She did, often, scanning her homeland and her past with her cooly ironic, diagnostic eye.

Winnipeg is on my mind just now, and not just because of John Gallant and Deanna Durbin. There’s a punishing, late-season storm bearing down on their hometown, which is my hometown, too. I still have a Manitoba connection, own a modest house a couple of hours west of the city, in a pretty village I haven’t hand the chance to visit in far too long. I’m thinking about Winnipeg, and thinking about the rural municipality of Louise, and wishing my friends in both places well as the winds howl and the snow piles and the conniving rivers plan their floods. I’m thinking about that place and those people and thinking about MG, as always, and, for self-evident reasons, her short story Voices Lost In Snow. It was published in The New Yorker in 1976, and included a few years later in her collection, Home Truths. (I don’t have a copy at hand, most of my books are in Manitoba, but I think it might be the last story in the book.)

This is one of the Linnet Muir stories, set in Montreal before, during, and after the war. They are among her most autobiographical: MG was frank in acknowledging this. In “Voices Lost in Snow,” young Linnet accompanies her beloved father, who encourages her precocity, on a winter visit an overheated apartment, to see a woman who’s an estranged friend of her mother, and with whom her father has a relationship that’s not uncluttered. Someone I know a little, someone who knew MG well, for over 50 years, spoke to me about MG’s uncanny powers of recall, and MG’s artfully laid out accumulation of detail about the rooms, the clothing, the odours, the quality of light speak to that gift. She told me too, this same friend, that MG was always very deliberate in her choice of names for her characters. That the linnet is a bird, as is the mavis, is a pretty firm nod towards acknowledging the creation of a fictional stand-in. And I can’t help but wonder if MG didn’t have Deanna Durbin in mind when she wrote her portrait of the woman who’s the object of the visit, who’s known as Georgie, but whose real name is Edna May. Before Deanna was Deanna, she was Edna Mae Durbin. It’s a far reach to suggest — and it matters not in the slightest, beyond the slight delight it affords — that MG might have borrowed her name, reassigned it. But maybe she did, as a kind of nod to another artist, who traveled a parallel path, her contemporary, likewise discontent with the world in which she lived and worked, who went to France in the same year, and would, as it turned out, not that this could have been known or predicted, die there, also at the age of 91.

(I’ll note, too, that with Yvonne de Carlo, too, there’s an odd Venn diagram intersection. In a journal entry from 1993, published in The New Yorker in 2001 — MG allowed the appearance a number of diary entries there, as well as in The Paris Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and elsewhere — MG, then 71, writes of how she was taken by surprise one day when a great wave of sadness washed over her, and she understood it had to do with her father. He had gone away, back to England. She’d been told, and persisted in believing, as she ricocheted from school to school to school, that he was coming back for her. She was 13 when someone told her, a friend of the family, in an off-hand way, that he was dead. Did she not know? It marked her, deeply. Her centennial sister, Yvonne de Carlo, had a similar tale to tell of an absent father about whom stories circulated, all suggesting that he was out there, somewhere. Implicit in such a narrative is the possibility of return. He never returned.)

The story MG sold to The New Yorker in 1950 must have been Madeline’s Birthday, which appeared in the magazine on September 1, 1951: her debut. Madeline, turning 17, is stuck in a farmhouse in Connecticut, having been forcibly removed from her mother’s apartment, where she’d been living alone, independently, and happily. Now she’s watched over by her mother’s friend — not a close friend, especially — who makes a habit of taking on hard cases. If MG was careful and deliberate in choosing her character’s names — she didn’t simply open the phone book, close her eyes, and point — why Madeline? In this story, too, there are bolts of autobiography. Madeline begins in the same way as Mavis: a PhD isn’t what necessarily follows the MA. MG paid attention to children’s books — she spoke about how important her childhood reading was to her — and she may have known Bemelman’s Madeline: “In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.” This would be a wry choice for someone who was shunted from school to school to school, convent schools among them. Or maybe she had in mind Swann’s Way, its famous goad to memory, the madeleine. This is not impossible. MG was, as she often said, a Proust devotee.

MG was 20 days alive in the world when Yvonne De Carlo was born, and 100 days old when Proust died, in Paris, November 18, 1922. Jean Cocteau summoned Man Ray to take the death mask photo. Not quite 30 years later, Man Ray would meet and befriend a young Canadian who had left her marriage and burned her journals and quit her job and fled Quebec with 600 dollars to her name. She had come home. She would spend the rest of her life thinking and writing about the place she had found, and the place she had left, listening for all the voices, the many, many voices, lost in the snow.