The Bankhead Gleaner, 10

Forest Woman Awaits Her Lost Lover

Mavis Gallant (MG) — a movie-going, bookstore-haunting, opera-loving balletomane — might have been an urban sophisticate, but she still liked to get out of town. Growing up in Montreal she had close ties to Châteauguay — she would later say she thought of it as her “hometown” — and, starting in 1954, and for almost 20 years, she was as much in Menton as she was in Paris. In 1965, for CBC Television’s “Telescope,” Fletcher Markle interviewed MG in her Montparnasse apartment (the building was new when she moved in on Christmas Eve, 1960) and the cameras trail her (a bit clunkily, it must be said) while she moves about the neighbourhood, shopping, visiting various studios and ateliers, and as she travels further afield to some favourite spots in the Île-de-France: to Chartres, where she enters the cathedral and lights some candles; and to the Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers-Combray, where she’s apparently well-known, and is shown chatting with the elderly curator. Another site of ex-urban visitation, had time allowed, might have been the grave of the revered Katherine Mansfield (who also did a stint in Menton) in Fontainebleau.

I love stories of literary pilgrimage — the teenage Susan Sontag knocking on the door of Thomas Mann, P. L. Travers bringing her bouquet of reeds and wattles to Yeats — and no doubt there are those who wander past 14, rue Jean Ferrandi (there’s no identifying plaque) and look up to wonder which was the window from which MG surveyed the street; or who pay their respects at the Montparnasse Cemetery, where she rests in shared accommodations. It’s a particular, peculiar urgency, a bit witchy and superstitious somehow, this longing so many of us (believe me, I’m part of the crowd) feel to be briefly proximate to locations where those we admire lived and breathed, fretted and feasted, wept and cheated, carried on their human lives for however long and rarely left a trace other than what lives in their pages. As impulses go, it tends to the prurient, the cheap, the sentimental; also, the widespread.

MG liked to drive. Who taught her, I wonder, and at what age? When did she get her license? She liked to get out of town and when she was a features writer for the Montreal Standard (1944 - 1950), and mostly self-assigning, she would take on stories that would require she leave the city, writing about emerging industrial towns in the north, or about ship building, or war brides or the post-war housing crisis or about labour and immigration issues in centres removed from the centre. Sometimes, she would have traveled in small planes, sometimes by train, bus maybe; often, by car. Who was at the wheel? MG, or whoever the assigned (always male) photographer?

In 1945, Hugh Frankel had been her companion in North Hatley, summer residence of the then-emerging writers Hugh MacLennan and Dorothy Duncan. Louis Jaques (pronounced Jakes) was with her a few month later when she went to Ste. Adèle to write about Claude-Henri Grignon, the creator of a popular French language radio serial called Un Homme et Son Péché. (It was his Louis’s brother, Ronny, who would work with MG in 1946 to stage scenes in Montreal from Gabrielle Roy’s then newly-published novel, Bonheur d’Occasion. Ronny, of all the photographers with whom MG worked, had the most conspicuously successful career.) Henri Paul — French by birth, one of the first photographers in Canada to use a 35 mm camera — came along for the ride when she went north of Montreal, to the Saguenay, to Péribonka for a photo essay that appeared January 13, 1945 about the lingering effect Louis Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine had on that community and the people whose stories he had borrowed without providing much in the way of camouflage or track covering.

The last farm out of Péribonka on the road to Honfleur belonged to Samuel Bédard who had taken on an untilled concession, soon sickened of the life. To broke and jobless Hémon, whom he met in Robeval, he tried to appeal.

Final result of the discussion was that Hémon was hired for eight dollars a month with one afternoon a week reserved for his “correspondence.” It was during these afternoons that he collected material and made notes for his book. Later, when the Bédards and their neighbors and relatives, the Bouchards, recognized family stories and anecdotes in the novel, they said wonderingly, “But we didn’t even know he was listening.” MG. Maria Chapdelaine. Montreal Standard. January 13, 1945.

It impresses me to think of MG, just 22, new to the paper, new to her job, having the determination and self-confidence, the chutzpah, to have gone to the bosses with an idea that would have required a commitment of pages and a commitment of budget and to have gotten her way and, what’s more, to have brought it off so beautifully. The writing is several cuts above merely solid, and it’s impressive formally. New to the business of crafting a photo essay — there are 16 photographs from Peribonka in those pages — you can tell how much she revels in balancing the two components of the pictorial narrative; you sense her directorial hand. What’s not original, however admirable the presentation, is the content itself.

Maria Chapdelaine was written in 1912, serialized in Paris in 1914, published in French in Montreal in 1916, and in two English translations in 1921. It was a huge bestseller — more than 10 million copies have been sold in its various translations and editions — and has remained an enduring favourite. The most recent of the four film adaptations appeared in 2021.

It wasn’t long post publication before the parallels between the fiction and its source were identified and spelled out. All of the borrowings and dovetailings MG noted in 1945 were in an article that appeared in The Montreal Star while she was in utero, April 8, 1922.

April 8, 1922. Montreal Star.

Eva Bouchard, ostensibly the model for Maria, and with whom MG was concerned in 1945, had been closely scrutinized over years, in Canada, in the U.S.A., and in France.

Windsor Star, March 15, 1928. The memoir never appeared.

Hartford (Connecticut) Daily Courant, June 17, 1928

Montreal Star, November 30, 1928.

And so it went. Eva Bouchard did rather well, really, via a transformation to the page to which she never consented. She sold souvenirs to visitors — there were many — and copies of the novel, which she would sign “Maria Chapdelaine.” She was able to get out of the Saguenay, to travel around a bit, to Montreal and beyond. Her handicrafts — safe to say they were remarkable only because her name was appended to them — were sold at Murray Bay. She asked for and received assistance to preserve the farmhouse as an historical site. In 1937, when she she sailed to France on the Duchess of Atholl to meet members of the Hémon family, we can assume she didn’t write a personal cheque to cover the fare. She was a straightforward woman, by all accounts, uncluttered of mien, seemingly never troubled by deep thoughts. She was no cosmopolitan but was canny enough to recognize and to manage the one very good thing that had come her way. By the time she died, on Christmas Day, 1949, her claim to have been the inspiration for the title character in the Hémon bestseller had been challenged by at least one pretender to the throne, but never mind. Her legend lived on, and her passing was widely remarked in the English and French language press around the world.

I’ve been reading about Eva and about Maria Chapdelaine owing to my present project, which is annotating a selection of MG's writing for the Montreal Standard. This early journalism now requires an effort of will to track down, and I look forward to working with MG scholars Marta Dvorak and Neil Besner, and with Mary K. MacLeod (the executor of the Gallant literary estate) to make it more readily available via Vehicule Press. The main barrier to my progress — apart from an intractable, pitiless lower back spasm that’s been going on for a week now and that requires I work standing at the kitchen counter or else on the floor, in an adapted child pose, it’s all most, most unfortunate — is that I’m too easily distracted by minutiae.

For my purposes — since I’m not, after all, writing a biography of Louis Hémon — the facts of his death are inconsequential. What’s known is that in 1913, having finished his masterpiece and sent it off to France, and eager for some new adventure, he headed west, on foot, following the CPR tracks, bound first for Fort William, then, eventually, for Winnipeg. He was killed by an eastbound train on July 8, 1913, near Chapleau. That’s more than enough for me to know but, of course, one can’t help but wonder at the how of it. If he was walking west on the tracks and the train was coming the other way, how could he not have seen it, or heard it, in time to step out of its path? And was, or was he not, alone? MG writes, “Without a cent, he set off for the West with a friend. At a bend in the railway track  near Chapleau, Ontario, both were killed…”

In some (well under half) of the other accounts of the accident — assuming it to have been such, and not a choreographed ending — the presence of another traveler is noted; but most often, the death belongs to Hémon alone: no co-star. Which is it? Solitary or accompanied? Surely this can’t be too difficult to establish. Surely there was evidence, surely there are records. The question is basic. Was there a pair of bodies?

That one person on foot should fail, through distraction or daring or dumbassedness, to note the dangerous imminence of an incoming train is scarcely credible; but that two such walkers might be taken out by a steaming locomotive, that one wouldn’t have seen or heard what was coming down the track and somehow alerted the other, is all the more unlikely. Who was this anonymous friend?

There’s a phrase that occurs in newspaper accounts published, well after the fact, in 1934, 1938, 1949, and 1950: “vagabond companion,” as in, “Hémon and his vagabond companion died when…”

That such a specific descriptor in such a specific context should be used by different writers for different outlets over a 16-year span probably derives from the bad habit — understandable if you’re cranking out newspaper copy for a living — of one journalist hoisting a phrase from whoever went before and planted the first flag, and then leaving it as a cairn for whoever comes next, then next, then next, until the trail goes cold and eventually grows over.

“Vagabond companion.” It conjures images of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire (or was it Gene Kelly?) dressed as hobos, full tramp face, singing “We’re a couple of swells.” It’s an idea you’d find romanticized in a series of poems by A. E. Housman, later set for baritone voice and piano (or small chamber ensemble) by Vaughn William. For me, it has about it the ring of fondness, of grudging admiration. It’s jaunty, with a top note of Enid Blyton, something Famous Five or Secret Seven, tramping about with one’s rucksack, tenting on the moors or fens or wherever, witnessing the moonlight passage of smugglers. Whew! Jolly lucky one has one’s vagabond companions, one of whom knows how to fly a plane!

To my ear, “vagabond companion,” falls either kindly or ironically. It’s not a phrase anyone would use now unless they wanted to suggest the archaic. For reasons I can’t explain, and that don’t much matter, I began to wonder about “vagabond companion.” Instead of doing what I should have been doing, which was writing my brief annotation pertaining to MG’s long ago trip to Peribonka, I became a companion of the vagabond vortex. Here are some dated uses of the phrase which suggest it wasn’t always used with irony or benignity in mind. The occasional illustrations are by my own vagabond companion, Artist.

• The (London) Morning Chronicle. January 25, 1850.

Other boys have contracted bad habits from being allowed by their parents to run about the streets and pick up vagabond companions. These soon initiate them into their mode of life, and then they leave their homes in order follow it.

• The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle. November 28, 1857.

This arose from all the common lodging houses being situated therein, the whole of the professional tramps reporting thereto; and when they are overtaken by sickness real or feigned, they are a green tax on the rate-payers, as well as Armoury-lane, where the low Irish resort, and invite over their vagabond companions.

• Hannibal Daily Messenger. Sept. 20, 1859.

Horse Stolen. — On tuesday night let some tired pedestrian, who imagined he had walked for enough, walked into Judge Stone’s stable and helped himself to a complete outfit, consisting of a horse belonging to the gentleman who is grading the ground for our side track, a saddle from Judge Stern and a bridle from Mr.s Samuel Shaver, and made track for parts unknown. It is supposed he struck for the missouri river, where he will probably meet with some vagabond companions. Our folks should keep a shear look out for these rascals. — Utica Times.

• Glasgow Herald. March 7, 1866. (from an article about the “Children’s House of Refuge.”)

What they would have been had they been left to themselves — their vicious habits, their worthless parent, and their vagabond companions — Heaven only knows; but there can be no doubt that many of them, by their residence in this excellent institution, have been saved from years of sin and misery.

• The Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet, and General Advertiser. June 4, 1870

It at once occurred to me that the idea of dying together might have been suggested to this unhappy couple by reading the late Alphonse De Lamartine’s Raphael, or pages of the book of Life at Twenty. On that almost incoherent offspring of Frenchinfiedelity, the hero and heroine (by-the-bye, a married woman) resolve to die together, like the self-murderers of Nice. They are alone in a small boat on a Swiss lake, and, after silently admire the beauty of the scenery, the lady is prompted by her ultra empyreal love for her vagabond companion to propose that they should die together.

• The Kansas City Times. July 7, 1878

Writing of the diva Adelina Patti: “From a respected wife, a Marchioness, added to a great artiste, she has suddenly become the vagabond companion of a consumptive tenor."

• Jersey City News. July 18, 1889.

• The Indianapolis News. July 16, 1904.

Maybe I am wrong — but the longer I live the more I miss the vagabond companions of my youth — the idle, improvident folk who could twang the guitar or turn a triolet.

• Pittsburgh Post. October 15, 1913

• Vidette-Messenger of Porter (Indiana) County. August 1, 1934

HEADLINE: FAIL IDENTIFY HER ATTACKERS. (sic) Unable to identify her attackers among men whose pictures make up Gary’s rogue gallery, Ruth Miller, age 21, New York City hitch-hiker, resumed her return home yesterday with her vagabond companion, Sol Salkind, also of New York.