Canadian Writers Abroad

In my review of Montreal Standard Time, I mentioned that in Gallant’s piece on jazz, she didn’t write about her husband, John Gallant, a jazz musician. I had pointed out that Bill Richardson didn’t cover this in his coda on “What is This Thing Called Jazz?” at the back of the book. Richardson contacted me to offer his notes on this section from the book about Mavis Gallant’s pieces in The Montreal Standard, fleshing out not only the jazz scene but also Gallant’s relationship at the time. Is it just gossip to read details about Mavis Gallant’s ex-husband? No, for two reasons. John Gallant’s biography is a glimpse into the period, a potted history. Second, if you read to the end of Richardson’s note, you will see that John Gallant was a formative influence on Mavis as a writer.
Here follows some of Bill Richardson’s unpublished addendum to “What is This Thing Called Jazz?”

If Gallant never gets around to actually answering the question posed by this title — and that a precise reply is impossible is maybe her point — it’s not for want of research. She cites a dizzying array of sources, but makes no mention of her in-house consultant, her then husband, John (often Johnny) Dominick Gallant (1918 – 1995). He grew up in Winnipeg, and as early as 1925, was performing student recitals as a student of Louise MacDowell. By July 1941, he was established in Montreal. This is from the Star:

“Johnny Gallant, who this season joined Stan Wood’s orchestra which supplies the music in the spacious ballroom [Belmont Park] , has already won a legion of admirers. Johnny who plays the piano and also sings ‘Scat’ songs, was born in Winnipeg where, after leaving school he appeared as an entertainer in the well-known “Rendez-vous.” After a season there he joined a vaudeville unit that took him to the West Coast. An engagement with a travelling band followed and on his return to Winnipeg, two years ago, he became a member of Bus Tottens orchestra which was featured for a solid year at the popular “The Cave.” Coming to Montreal a few months ago he was chosen by Stan Wood as his pianist in the orchestra and his individual contributions, musical and vocal, are outstanding features nightly.”
–The Montreal Star, July 22, 1941.

He joined the RCAF and spent the war entertaining troops as part of a Forces band called “The Blackouts.” By 1946, repatriated, he was a first year student at McGill University, and building a sterling reputation as an able arranger and pianist. He presided over the music at the Ritz Hotel through the early 60s — providing the piano accompaniment for a vast array of visiting chanteuses, then moved to London after marrying Hope Messer Holt. That marriage lasted long enough to produce two children, Julian and Lucinda, both musicians. John moved to Dublin, then back to London, and finally to Winnipeg. He died in 1995, and is buried there in the Elmwood Cemetery.

The marriage ended in 1947. Mavis Gallant, respecting his privacy as much as her own, did not often speak of it, nor of him, but when she did it was with fondness. She would note that he was proud of her, that he thought whenever he read her stories she was writing about him. To two interviewers she made remarks germane to “What Is This Thing Called Jazz?”

“My husband Johnny, who was a musician, was crazy about Béla Bartók but he didn’t go beyond that. To him, modern music stopped there. And to me, French music stopped with Debussy and Ravel – I hadn’t gone any further than that when I met him in the summer of 1942 at the home of mutual friends. I was nineteen, and a young married couple I knew were also friends of his.The husband was going to be in the army and Johnny was already in the RCAF, the Canadian air force. We were both invited for Sunday lunch. The couple had some recordings of Shostakovitch (remember this was 1942), and some piano reductions of some of his work. The young man and our hostess played (she wasn’t a professional musician but she played), and I thought I had never heard anything so silly. Then he played part of the Fifth Symphony, and she said to me, well do you like it?, and I said, there’s no melody. But Johnny said, it’s full of melody. It’s you who doesn’t know how to listen. So I thought, Tiens! Tiens! I’d never been talked to that way. So I thought, I’d better find out.”
–Mavis Gallant in conversation with Marta Dvořák, “When Time is a Delicate Timepiece,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2009.

If you have the book, you can see that this information is more than the note in the book. There is more to be gleaned about John and Mavis Gallant in further notes. For example, in a note on her piece about children’s literature, Richardson tells us about the mutual friends in whose home she met John Gallant: 

Colin Brock McMillan (1913-1990) graduated from Queen’s engineering in 1936. He was married to Nelly Ester Lehtonen (1918-1983). Born in Finland, she came to Canada with her family as a child, and settled in the Chicoutimi region, which was where Colin McMillan worked for Saguenay Power. Mavis Gallant, with her genius for friendship, kept in close touch with the family; Nelly McMillan was the dedicatee of Home Truths. It was at the home of the McMillans, in 1942, that Mavis Young met John Gallant.

In Richardson’s note on “Why Are Book Prices So High?” he concludes:

As in her other interrogative essays from this time — “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?” and “What Is This Thing Called Jazz?” — the reader bears witness to the writer identifying a case that bears examination, assembling and laying out the evidence, arguing with herself about the merits of prosecution or dismissal, and coming to no firm decision or conclusion. “You figure it out,” she finally says, not a cop-out, merely an acknowledgement of the impossibility of hacking a path through those kaballistic weeds.

The last word goes to Mavis Gallant, from her Margaret Laurence lecture, as quoted in Richardson’s note on the final piece in the book, “The Making of a Hoodlum.”

“If I look at my research on the Johnny Young story objectively I can see, quite clearly, that I must have considered this my last chance to explore yet another area of Montreal — to meet people I might never otherwise come across, enter homes I had no other excuse to visit. I had a passionate interest in my native city, but I could never have brought it or that particular period to life in fiction, if I had not first established what I shall call the plain facts of journalism.”
–Mavis Gallant, Margaret Laurence Lecture

“The Making of a Hoodlum” was Mavis Gallant’s last feature for The Montreal Standard. She was already in Paris — she’d flown there on October 3, 1950 — when it was published on October 7. Soon after her departure, the Standard became the Weekend Magazine, and she wrote four more features for the new format from Paris.

Bill Richardson is a co-editor with Marta Dvořák and Neil Besner of Montreal Standard Time. He has written about Mavis Gallant on Substack: Oh MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries. 

Further

• Mavis Gallant was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1993.
• In 2001, she became the first winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life.
• In this interview, Stéphan Bureau probes Gallant’s childhood and early life, where she volunteers the information that at the age of 20, she needed a letter of permission to marry as she was still a minor: “An Interview with Mavis Gallant,” Brick 80 (Winter 2007).
• Nick Mount on Mavis Gallant, YouTube.
• “Remembering Mavis,” by Gregory Shupak, review of Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear by Marta Dvořák, University of Toronto Press, 2019, in the Literary Review of Canada, October 2022.
• On the nationalization of Saguenay Power, Radio Canada.
• Bill Richardson, Bachelor Brothers’ Bed & Breakfast, St Martin’s Press/Douglas & McIntyre, winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1994.
• Bill Richardson’s Substack: Oh MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries.