This is a story about two drownings of two persons, both named Buxton, both with links to literary celebrity. It begins with a sidebar distraction that pertains to the season.
Pictured above is a detail of a facsimile page from the US census, 1940, as it appears on the genealogical website, Ancestry.ca. If you haven’t the patience for paleography, a cursor hover above each name — on the website, not as it appears here — will disgorge a plain text transcription of the census taker’s entries, to wit:
This is instructive. Any researcher availing him or herself of digitized primary sources quickly finds that, much as they’re convenient, they can also be arbitrary, inaccurate, incomplete, and lacy (also lousy) with error. Marie Young is, in fact, Mavis Young, born 1922, not 1923, and who was four years away from becoming Mavis Gallant (MG). She was living in Dutchess County, New York, as a guest in the home of Henry and Antoinette Quackenbos: family friends, acting as guardians. She’s named as a servant in the household, a designation that might have surprised her. Henry and Antoinette had an adopted infant son, and perhaps MG, who was attending the local high school, earned her room and board as a part-time mother’s helper. Maybe this was where she acquired some of her clear and rigid views on comme-il-faut strategies for child-rearing, about which she would write — with the spitting, acidic, untired conviction that can only belong to the childless — in the pages of the Montreal Standard a few years later.
The young refugee — occupation, farm hand — named as Raeph P. Binder was Ralph, and he had made his way from Austria to the U.S. and into the Quackenbos home — Antoninette was the second of three Mrs. Quackenboses; the marriage wasn’t a long one — via the Kindertransport. He was, one can safely say, the inspiration for the young German refugee David in MG’s first published New Yorker short story, “Madeline’s Birthday,” just as the Quackenbos household provided a template for the domestic situation in which Madeline finds herself an unwilling conscript. Ralph Binder died on August 9, 2002; his obituary appeared on what would have been MG’s 80th birthday, August 11, in the White Plains Journal News.
All of this comes to mind because I’m writing on November 10, that no man’s land between Kristallnacht and Remembrance Day which, this year, bears the strafe marks of a newly resurgent anti-Semitism. What kinds of conversations did Mavis Young have with Ralph Binder, two teenagers, both of them abstracted, albeit for very different reasons, from their countries and families of origin? How might that connection have informed what would be her lifelong concern for and fascination with the deracinated? Why am I asking such questions? No one can answer them.
When MG moved back to Montreal in 1942, she became friendly with the painter Goodridge Roberts and his first wife, Marion, whose papa, the inventor Thomas Willson, was a founding father of Union Carbide. Roberts enlisted in the RCAF in 1943 and was assigned duties as a war artist. He describes that time, which he spent in England documenting in drawings and paintings the day-to-day life of recruits on training bases, in a beautifully written mini-memoir that appeared in the Queen’s Quarterly, “From This Point I Looked Out;” it was reprinted in the catalouge published to accompany the National Gallery retrospective of his work in 1970.
War artistry was not work to which Goodridge was well-suited; he described it to MG as “embarrassing” in “Success Story of a Canadian Artist,” the profile she wrote of him and published in the Montreal Standard on April 26, 1950, just a few months before her time at the paper cameto an end. She wrote:
“I felt the work wasn't important enough on stations where people were going out on operations every night,” he said when he returned. Roberts has never been able to work to order, and the Air Force was no exception. The work he did is owned by the RCAF, which has rarely exhibited any of it. They are good paintings, but undoubtedly not at all what the Air Force had in mind. Someone described them recently as "typical Roberts landscapes with an aircraft here and there.” For clean-cut etchings of boys in blue looking heroically into space, Roberts was a poor choice.
She wrote about Roberts again, almost fifty years later, in 1998, after the death of her friend Barbara Kilvert. MG remembered their long friendship for the “Lives Lived”column in the Globe and Mail; she wrote beautifully about how they met in the spring of 1944 when they were both hired by the Standard: Barbara, newly arrived from Winnipeg, age 18, as a copy editor; MG, 21, as a reporter / features writer. MG doesn’t describe how, after she moved to Paris, they exchanged hundreds of letters and phoned one another every Bloomsday to read their favourite passages from Ulysses, but she has fond things to say about the bohemian circles in which they moved, which included Goodridge and Marion, and about how they each bought one of his paintings, for which they paid in very small monthly instalments. MG bought a still life, with apples, and Barbara a small portrait for which Marion had been the model. MG had to part with hers (she doesn’t say why), but Barbara’s remained in her possession unti her death; she willed it to MG.
Goodrige and Marion divorced shortly after he returned from his RCAF assignment in England. In 1952, he fell in love with Joan, who was, inconveniently married to one of his painting students, Vincent Thomas. Joan Roberts, as she became, describes with admirable candor that tempestuous time in their three lives in a very good memoir, Joan & Goodridge: My Life with Goodridge Roberts. (Vehicule Press, 2008). MG is briefly mentioned; Joan recalls meeting her at a party in Montreal. She tells another story, too, which attests to the shy and unassuming Goodridge’s power, however unwitting, as a marriage wrecker. This dates from a time, early in the Depression years, when Roberts, living near Ottawa, had a couple of painting students who paid him $1.50 a lesson. Joan Roberts wrote:
“Françoise Sagan, the French novelist, had a sister, Madeleine Quoirez, who was studying under Goodridge. To his amazement she became enamoured of him without any encouragement beyond his customary politeness. She was returning to France and said that if he would not accompany her she would throw herself off the ship. He thought this was just hysterical exaggeration until he learned that in fact she had done so.”
Joan Roberts, who died in 2018, either misrememberd the story, or accurately reported facts which had been incorrectly told to her. Madeleine Quoirez was indeed kin to Françoise Sagan, who was born in 1935; she was her aunt, or would have been, had she not thrown herself over the railing of the S. S. Montrose, mid-Atlantic, in 1933. She was, by then, Madeleine Buxton, the wife of Dr. George Buxton, a newly appointed professor of history at the University of Ottawa. She was bound for France with Frances, their daughter, a year-and-a-half old. There was a nursery on board to which passengers could consign their children, the better to drink at the bar or play shuffleboard unmolested. This was a convenience of which Madeleine took advantage. At some point on November 9, she entered the daycare room, in a distracted state, embraced her child, called out, “Ah, cherie!”, then exited, and was not seen again. Frances, now a motherless child, was left to the care of a ship stewardess, Mabel Howlett, and came back to Canada — Mabel was engaged to superintend her — on the next ship home.
Predictably, the story got a lot of attention in the Canadian and English papers. Dr. Buxton pronounced himself flabbergasted, had no idea why his wife would have taken so extraordinary and irrevocable a step. She had seemed to him, he said, perfectly happy. Nowhere was her unrequited love for a young Canadian painter mentioned — it was presumably not known, save to the two principals, one of whom didn’t take it seriously; nor was her vocation as a painter in any way touched upon, even though Madeleine had had a show in Paris, at the Galerie Vildrac, in 1929, the year before she met and married George Buxton. This is the only image I can find of her work, which would have been part of that show, and which I would happily hang on my own wall.
Inevitably, sadly, nominally, this tragedy calls to mind another Buxton drowning (and possibly through self harm): that of Rupert Buxton on May 19, 1921, a few days after his 21st birthday. Buxton, a brilliant, mercurial young man, scion of a well-to-do, well-positioned family, a talented poet with a history of strange disappearances and head injuries, was pulled from Sandford Pool with another young Oxonian, Michael Llewelyn Davis. They had gone swimming together, but their pleasant dip had come a cropper. They were said to be lovers — it was reported that the bodies were found in a tight embrace — and rumours of a suicide pact were hastily hatched. Michael — this has been well and widely reported — was the ward of the playwright and novelist J. M. Barrie; he’d assumed guardianship after the deaths of the elder Davis’. They were very close, J. M. and Michael, were daily correspondents during the young man’s time at Eton and, later, at Christ Church, Oxford.
That photos of six-year old Michael dressed as Peter Pan were used by the sculptor George Frampton for the P. P. statue in Kensington Gardens — a theory much bandied and examined by those with the time and will for parsing such minutiae — doesn’t withstand scrutiny. That bronze — there are copies scattered round about, including in Toronto and St. John’s — was installed in the gardens in 1912, so it would have been there when the young Goodridge Roberts, born in 1904, had the seminal moment he described in “From This Point I Looked Out.”
“One memory which is relevant is of walking away from Kensington Gardens one spring day when I was about 10 years old. The sun had come out after a brief shower and at intervals along the pavement stood young trees newly covered with leaves. All of a sudden I became intensely aware of the greenness of these leaves and of their density and lightness, of the compact symmetry of the small trees, of the sunlight falling upon them so as to emphasize their solidity and buoyancy and of the smoothness and dampness of the pavement. All this filled me with an acute sense of happiness. It was, I think, the first awakening of my desire to paint. I recall that soon afterwards I went into Kensington Gardens with some water-colours and a pad and painted some trees by the Serpentine.”
Peter Pan and Wendy was, for MG, as it has been for many — not so much any more, chockablock as it is with triggering racial slurs — also seminal. On October 8, 1949, she wrote wryly in the Montreal Standard about attending a press conference, held in French, and in a dark cocktail lounge, with the actor Charles Laughton, who was in town presenting an evening of recitations. Laughton at first thought he was speaking to a group of theatrical professionals, became flustered when he understood he was among the fourth estate, recovered, and carried on. MG wrote:
At one point, Laughton remarked that he had done Peter Pan in Britain with his wife, Elsa Lanchester, as Peter. He had taken the role of Captain Hook.
"Do you like Peter Pan?” he asked.
Somebody nudged me.
"I did at one time,” I said.
"You should like it all the time, "he said. "It's enchanting. What don't you like about it? “
"She doesn't like the theme of eternal childhood," said somebody, helpfully.
"She's probably read Freud or something,” Laughton said, gloomily.
As I left, someone was thrusting a huge menu into Laughtons hands.
“Hold it so that the name shows for a picture,” he was told. He did so, looking for all the world like Peter himself about to fly out of the room.
By way of envoi, I note that during the First World War, Canadian newspapers often featured “Letters from the War Front;” I’ve been reading some of them. I was particularly struck by a pair featured in the Vancouver Province in 1915, the work of Private Hubert Douglas Arden Smith. He was killed on September 8, 1916, and is buried in the Abbeville Cemetery. Born in Comox in 1898, he gave his birth year as 1895 when he enlisted in 72 Seaforth Highlanders in 1914. These, then, are the words of a 16-year old, the words of a boy who was weirdly thrilled by the carnage around him, the words of a lost boy, a boy who never grew up. Lest we forget. Thanks for reading.
Belgium, April 21, 1915
Dear mother — just a few lines as usual. We came out of the trenches last night, had a fine time, great weather. We got the best sergeant in our company killed; two sergeants in the battalion in two days. One private had over 30 shrapnel wounds in him and still kicking. We are having great weather now. It makes it pretty good in the trenches. We relieved one of the French divisions. I saw an aeroplane fight overhead the other day. The Britisher brought the Germantown in about half a minute with his maxim gun. When they came together all there was, was a rattle of the machine gun and down came the German. It's great fun watching the aeroplanes being shelled. I counted over seventy shell burst around a Britisher one day. The shells look great bursting in the sky on a clear day. There is a small church near the trenches with just one end left and a crucifix standing in the middle shot in two. In front of the trenches where we were there were all kinds of Germans lying around, some being up in the barbwire, and when you are digging behind the trenches the first thing you know you dig out part of a Frenchman.
France, April 30, 1915
Dear mother – just a few lines to let you know I am getting fine. I am in Rouen stationary hospital No. 12. I got a shrapnel bullet through my leg just below the knee – not much. I expect I will be out in about a week. I expect you'll have seen about our cutting up in the papers – it was the 16th and 10th Battalion that took those guns back. We had to advance over open fields. The beggars fired with trench mortars, machine guns and shrapnel. As soon as we got close enough to charge we soon kicked them out of the trenches – all we could see was Germans beating it into the woods. Then we had to put them out of the woods, and there was all kinds of hand-to-hand fighting. I thought it was safer with my rifle loaded than with a bayonet. I did not wait to get close enough for the bayonet. I gave them a few bullets. By the time we got through the woods there were no officers left to give us any orders, so we took some trenches on the right, about 50 of us, and got into them – about two came out the next night – that was all that could walk. The dead were so thick that you could not get along the trench without showing above the parapet – two deep in places. That day, they try to get into the woods again – some of them did – and I picked off my share, about 10; took good aim at them running and crawling through the woods; none of them came out again. There were only about four of us who could shoot, but we got them – a hot time. A lot of the rifles they left behind with bayonets on had saw edges filed down one side. I got the wound Friday morning. We took the charges Thursday night. Nearly all the battalion has gone. We had about 725 casualties from latest reports. The dead and wounded lay all over the place in heaps, all through the night the next day, nobody to get them in. We threw our water bottles out to them; some of them managed to crawl under the parapet for shelter.
More wonderful MG lore. Thanks!
Back then, it seems like there were only two or three degrees of separation, hunh? Love the Laughton bath tub article and have been moved by Michael Llewelyn Davis's story since "The Lost Boys". Forbidden lovers drown in a suicide pact is a very romantic trope, especially given the homophobic horrors of that period, but I actually think it's more probable that Brooks went to save Davis, who grabbed him around the arms, as the drowning so often do. Tragis either way.
It seems inconceivable to me that any scholar knows more about MG than you. You should do the definitive biography and be hiored to lecture on mid-late 20th century CanLit.