Is there a word more infantilizing than “gummy?” None comes to mind. I feel my dignity slough off like last week’s skin cells when I say it aloud at the cannabis dispensary.
Months of experimentation went into determining that 5 to 1 is the CBD / THC ratio that best meets my hankering for mild alteration; I want to tweak reality, not obliterate it. I enjoy the subtle catch and shift that occurs as the active ingredients kick in; as when the hands of a clock are approaching the hour and the mechanism begins to buzz and whir and the chime hangs on the verge. Something is about to happen — but what? Last night I understood I’d entered the territory of “l’heure exquise” when I looked down at my feet and felt for them an unfamiliar and inexplicably febrile fondness. As extremities go, they are hideous, partners in the firm of Callus, Crack and Fetid. I’ve always appreciated them as the utilitarian add-ons that prevent my ankles from touching the ground, but otherwise have harboured no fond feelings for them. In that moment, though, as the gummy flexed its minor muscles, they struck me — my feet, I mean — as absolutely adorable. For the first time ever during my long tenure upon the Earth, I actively loved them.
It was a short-lived infatuation, forgotten as soon as it was done. I wouldn’t be reporting on it now were it not for a serendipitous (as I choose to believe) weirdness that occurred this morning when I finally got down to “work,” (LOL) intent upon finishing off the bachelor theme I began last week. On my agenda were two Mavis Gallant (MG) stories: “An Unmarried Man’s Summer” (1963), and “Travellers Must Be Content” (1959). I opened the latter to a random page, and read:
Everyone around Bonnie was asleep. The sirocco, unsteady, pulled her parasol about on the sand. Sitting, knees bent, she clasped her white feet. There was not a blemish on them. The toes were straight, the heels rosy. She had tended her feet like twin infants, setting an example for Flor. Once, exasperated by Flor’s neglect, she had gone down on her knees and taken Flor’s feet on her lap and shown her how it ought to be done. She had creamed and manicured and pumiced, while Flor, listless, surreptitiously trying to get on with a book, said, “Oh, Mama, I can do it.” “But you won’t, honey. You simply don’t take care of yourself unless I’m there.”
“She had tended her feet like twin infants,” is one of the all-time great similes, on par with “Doris was proud of her education—a bundle of notions she trundled before her like a pram containing twins.” That’s from “August,” which precedes “Travellers Must Be Content” in the sequence of four linked stories that comprise the short novel Green Water, Green Sky.
The writing is musical. MG’s characters, colliding and separating on their small stage, are like members of a string quartet or other compact chamber ensemble: ideas and themes are passed from one to the next to the next in ways that are as seamless as they are surprising and unexpected. Brandon Taylor describes “Travellers Must Be Content” as “a masterclass of a story because it makes the impossible seem easy.”
The multiple points of view toggle seamlessly, sometimes across the length of a single sentence; flashbacks and flash forwards come with the pulse of thought; characters’ understandings of their relationships to one another pivot on single phrases as they wound each other or love each other; dialogue that sings with real human music. It’s utterly astonishing how she breaks all of the rules for fiction. She shows how arbitrary our sense of the mechanics of style and narrative have become.
MG was an original, but no one emerges from utter darkness with strobes blazing and sirens blaring, and traffic clearing out of the way. If MG could be said to have been following a modernist example in these beautifully crafted, dark, and experimental stories, I’d name Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as chief among her mentors.
Here’s Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary on this day, August 7, 1918. She’s just read, in the August edition of the literary monthly English Review Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “Bliss.”
I threw down Bliss with the exclamation ‘She’s done for!’ Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is very thin soil, laid an inch or two upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; & the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too. And the effect was as I say, to give me an impression of her callousness & hardness as a human being. I shall read it again; but I don’t suppose I shall change.
Ginnie! Hold nothing back! If these two titans were embroiled in a queen bee stinging match, KM gave as good she got. On November 28, 1919, in that self-same diary, VW complained about her rival’s review of her second novel, Night and Day: “A decorous, elderly dullard she describes me, Jane Austen up to date.”
The Bankhead Gleaner is a commonplace book, an annotated collection of citations, gathered hither and yon. Did MG keep track of her reading like this? If so, she probably committed her quote culling to her diaries, where she also recorded her dreams. After reading “Bliss,” she might have copied down this Mansfield morsel:
She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror–but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something . . . divine to happen . . . that she knew must happen . . . infallibly.
From To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1923), MG could have pulled:
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.
MG loved mirrors, alludes often in her stories to what they give back, to what they withhold, to what lies beyond them; to their surface and deeper meaning. For example:
She had told him that this room was like a place she had imagined. The only difference was that her imagined room was spangled, bright, perfectly silent, and full of mirrors. Years after this, he could say to himself “Cannes” and evoke a season of his life, with all the sounds, smells, light and dark that the season had contained; but he never remembered accurately how it had started or what it had been like. Their intimacy came first, then love, and some un-clouded moments. Like most lovers, he believed that the beginning was made up of these moments only, and he would remember Flor’s silent, mirrored room and believe it was their room at Cannes, and that he had lived in it, too.
That’s from “Travellers Must Be Content,” as is this:
Now, Wishart’s personality being an object he used with discretion, when he was doubtful, or simply at rest, he became a sort of mirror. Reflected in this mirror, Bonnie McCarthy saw that she was still pretty and smart. Dear darling Wishart! He also gave back her own air of waiting. Each thought that the other must have received a piece of wonderful news.
Wishart is a cool — as in detached, remote — character, coldly and unsparingly portrayed. MG’s dissection — detailed and pitiless — of Wishart leaves no doubt that he’s about as far from likeable as anyone can land. Everything about him is a calculation, including his name, a monomoniker; Wishart is what he’s called without benefit of honorific or any other identifier, whether family or given name. Wishart, what’s more, is a fabrication, a name he’s chosen because it seems to him to fit his life on either side of the Atlantic.
“If he let his thoughts move without restraint into the world of women, he discovered an area dimly lighted and faintly disgusting, like a kitchen in a slum. It was a world of migraines, miscarriage, disorder, and tears.” MG, Travellers Must Be Content
In America, Wishart passes for English. In Europe, he passes for American. Summers, he comes to the Continent. He drifts from hostess to hostess, a parasite, a solipsist, a leech, and a manipulator. He’s as transparent as he is shameless; many see through him, but somehow he gets away with it, finds women who will indulge his conceits, deceptions, exploitations. There’s something about Wishart that comes close to the psychopathic; he’s a little bit Patricia Highsmith, a little bit Tom Ripley.
“Like many spiteful, snobbish, fussy men, or a certain type of murderer, Wishart chose his friends among middle-aged solitary women.”
In “Travellers Must Be Content,” Wishart, having exhausted the hospitality of a well-to-do sculptress in London, arrives in Cannes to spend a few weeks sponging off Bonnie McCarthy in a hotel decidedly lower-rent than would have been ideal. Once he’s suckled her good will dry, he’ll move on to Venice and another grace and favour situation with the well-heeled and typically accommodating Mrs. Sebastian.
“He had never been foolish enough to dream of a useful marriage. He knew that his choice one season might damn him the next.” MG, Travellers Must Be Content
Equally as contrived and manipulative, though differently (if not more agreeably) so, is Walter, the titular bachelor in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer.” Maybe here, too, if you listen long enough and with sufficient determination — with the single-mindedness of one bent on bolstering a point no one could definitively prove — you can hear the distant echoes of Katherine Mansfield. In “Bliss,” the story that Virginia Woolf proclaimed marked KM’s failure as both woman and writer, we read:
The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony overlooking the garden. At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn't help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver.
"What creepy things cats are!" she stammered, and she turned away from the window and began walking up and down. . . .
In “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” in the not quite kempt garden of not so well-maintained house on the French Riviera, an old cat named William of Orange is observed and commented upon by Walter and his guests: his sister, Eve, brother-in-law, Frank, and their two children.
There was William of Orange now, stalking an invisible victim along the terrace wall. Up in the fig tree he went, with his killer’s face, his marigold eyes. ‘Oh, the poor birds,’ Eve cried, ‘He’s after the birds!’ She saw him stretch out his paw, spread like a hand, and then she saw him detach ripe figs and let them fall on the paved terrace. …
“What is the appeal of cats?” [Frank] said kindly. “I’ve always wanted to know.”
Frank’s question, born of an amused apostasy, is an interrogative version of “What creepy things cats are!”
“When anyone asks Walter why has has never married, he smiles and says he cannot support a wife.” MG, An Unmarried Man’s Summer
Walter, like Wishart, is a lifelong bachelor. Middle-aged and gay, they are men who have made a long habit of tamping down an elemental part of themselves, something they might benefit from declaring, but who simply cannot, not in the late 50’s / early 60’s; not without assuring their own destruction, the total devaluing of what little remains of their social currency. Nor was MG explicit in that aspect of their portrayal — she could no more have been so than could her characters. Decades later, a few years before her death, in an interview with two French scholars, Christine Evain and Christine Bertail, published as Mavis Gallant On Her Work, she was candid.
Let’s talk about [Walter,] the character in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer.”
MG: He’s gay.
Just like . . . Wishart.
MG: Yes. [Wishart is] extremely careful. He passes for an Englishman when with the Americans and an American when he’s with English people. In the 1950’s, gay men had to be very careful. Because it would be an end to their career if it were known, except in certain circles. Even now, I know men who are very careful. …
I’ve read and re-read these stories — “Travellers Must Be Content” and “An Unmarried Man’s Summer” — many times, and I’ve made no progress in understanding quite how MG does what she does with such restrained brilliance. Walter and Wishart are misbegotten men with tragic lives and diminished prospects. Their best years behind them; winsomeness, which might have bought them favour when they were young, is no longer a valid currency. Each man is inhabited by a secret that doesn’t live so very far beneath the flesh, that routinely surfaces for air, and that anyone with a breath of worldliness could guess in a minute, but that no one can articulate or acknowledge. They are not so far removed, socially or circumstantially, from the women of limited means who washed up in Riviera hotels and pensions, and about whom MG so often wrote. Even to lead their sad half-lives, they have to rely on the kindness of strangers and the crumbs they can beg. They have been, effectively, desexed, or driven far underground. They are eunuchs for hire, forever on the lookout for a likely harem situation.
Wishart pretends, to himself and to others, that he might one day marry. He imagines finding a peasant girl, someone uncultured and in need of forming, someone malleable, without education or expectations; someone he could train in the ways — which would be dreadful — of being Wishart’s wife.
This is a step Walter has actually taken, though in a way that’s truer to his nature than would be Wishart’s fantasy, if enacted. Walter has Angelo, who was very young, scarcely a teenager, when Walter found him begging and scooped him up from an Italian village, took him away from his family, and brought him back to the house in which he lives on a long-term lease. So, Angelo, sulky but powerless, lives with Walter and the cat, William of Orange. The uncertainty of who Angelo is to Walter is one of the points of ambivalence and tension that make this story so charged. Walter implies, when implication is required, that Angelo is a servant or houseboy, and a charity case, someone Walter has taken under his wing with nothing but benevolence in mind. But the reader intuits that the truth of the arrangement, and of Walter’s motivations, are considerably darker. From that same interview:
Back to ‘An Unmarried Man’s Summer’ we don’t explicitly see that Walter is gay…
MG: But there’s his relationship with Angelo, and the way he treats this young boy. I saw a lot of that when I was on the Cote d’Azur. They were usually Englishmen with much younger Italians, who were poor. And the boy was undeclared help, but it was more than that. And when somebody would come to visit from England, usually other, older gay men, you’d see the ‘Angelo’ trailing behind them as they went to the beach, because he’d become a servant. I despised it. It was almost slavery. They came from poor families in Sicily who were delighted to see them go and send home the little money they received. They had no social security. I once saw a case, I never forgave the man — he was English. There was a British colony and I ran into him a lot. The young man was dying of cancer and had no social security because the Englishman had never declared his employment. It wouldn’t have cost him much, he could have done it. He was sent home to die because the hospital couldn’t do any more for him. He was put in a maid’s room, and this man who had picked him up as he was begging in Sicily, came and stood at the foot of the bed and said, “Look at what you’re doing to me. All the trouble I’m in now, over you.’ He was dying. As if he’d done it on purpose.
There’s a funny moment in one of her many interviews — it’s getting late and I don’t have the jam to check it but I’m pretty sure it’s her long back and forth with Geoff Hancock — where, dismissing some question she found unnecessary or impertinent, she said, “Well, I wish I’d written Death in Venice but some elderly German gentleman got to it first.” I bring this up only because I suspect that MG, more in her portrayal of Walter than of Wishart, may have held Thomas Mann in mind. About Walter, in particular, there are aspects of Aschenbach.
This is starting to feel like it’s generating more heat than light and I’m mindful that few and far between are those now walking the Earth who care about this kind of minutiae and speculation. Lord knows, no one should. If you’ve read this far, for whatever reason, I thank you. If not, I understand. Not that you’ll know I understand because you won’t have read this far. Everyone wins!
Anyway, I’ll wrap it up for today / tonight by noting that MG liked to write dates into her stories. This fascinates me. I always wonder if these were offhand, random decisions or if, as seems more likely to me, behind their inclusion was some more numerological raison d’être. In “Travellers Must Be Content,” July 10 is the date given that Wishart is to leave Cannes and migrate to Venice. In “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” August 15 is the date that Walter’s sister and her family arrive for what proves to be a long stay chez Walter and Angelo.
So, with this in mind, and by way of wrapping this up, and by bringing Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield back in to play — here at the Bankhead Gleaner we’re all about circularity — have a look at this entry that was posted September 21, 2015 on the website katherinemansfield.com. Note how the date August 15 figures, as do, once again, gardens, and the Woolf - Mansfield rivalry. Circle closed. Thanks for reading.
A visit to Garsington during the summer of 1917 offers us the vision of Katherine and Ottoline [Morrell] cutting lavender, sweet geranium, verbena, rose leaves and rosemary to make pot-pourri. The hot, sunny days and warm nights meant the scent of flowers blew in through open windows.
It inspired her to develop a story idea. "Who," she asks in a letter to Ottoline (15 August 1917), "is going to write about that flower garden? It might be so wonderful – do you see how I mean? There would be people walking in the garden – several pairs of people – their conversation their slow pacing – their glances as they pass one another – the pauses as flowers ‘come in’ as it were – as a bright dazzle, an exquisite haunting scent, a shape so formal and fine, so much a flower of the mind…A kind of, musically speaking – conversation set to flowers."
Katherine conveyed this story idea to Virginia Woolf, who appears to have promptly taken it and produced her story 'Kew Gardens'.
So interesting. The early/mid-century closet was such a terribly degrading place. (Your Artist in Resident has done an amazing job on Woolf. Depending on the signature an oil like that could fetch a tidy sum at auction.)