TELLTALE

TELLTALE.¹ I should begin by noting—if all too briefly—a few key aspects of the late Ms. Ménard’s career that are of great importance but no direct relevance to the following, particularly sordid chapter of her life. Firstly, her little-known, yet life-long fundraising efforts for the Toronto Public Library Foundation; secondly, her ground-breaking if bittersweet translation of The Book of the Knight of Latour-Landry; and lastly, of course, her works of fiction (too short in supply) which, with her passing, must now speak to us beyond a veil which preoccupied so much of her later writing and, one suspects, her final thoughts. This last I can attest owing to a brief—but nevertheless illuminating—run of correspondence that led up to her death.

If one were familiar with these achievements alone they may reckon Ms. Ménard’s a life without significant disagreement or disappointment. She was well-known and well-liked by the circles drawn around her, from childhood friends to colleagues and ex-lovers. However, one ordeal—the one I feel it my duty to recount—left two of her once-closest intimates abnormally estranged.

Ms. Ménard attended a small yet prestigious doctoral school in the South East of England, her thesis dealing with historic translations of vernacular European literature written in the wake of the Black Death (an unusual interest for a young North American). Such interests led her to the door of Professor L. Watts—himself an estranged relative of the c19th British symbolist—whose reputation as a classicist and philologist was, at that time, renowned. From him she learned of the various mistranslations of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Scogan and Gower which developed across the Georgian and Victorian periods; chiefly, the manner in which Charles Cowden Clarke, Francis Newman and their contemporaries, erected a specious pseudo-medievalism in their so-called ‘modernisations’ of those English writers and the Ancient Greeks before them.

In so doing both Watts and Ménard underwent something of a transformation. From each of their cloistered temperaments sprang a newfound confidence. Together they composed poetry. They invented arcane puzzles—which the pair termed ‘anachrostics’— whereby certain letters of a translated poem would reveal, when studied, an erroneous (often euphemistic) anachronism. They wrote (and acted) in a play dramatizing the 1860 debates between Newman and critic Matthew Arnold: On Translating Homer. Should translators try to make readers aware of historical distance through artificial archaisms (Newman's approach), or should they try to capture the essential clarity and directness of Homer or Chaucer in modern English (Arnold's approach)? Yes, together they spoke a language all their own. All this would be brief.

By virtue of this relationship both Watts and Ménard would divulge many secrets to one another. And so came the day for Watts to reveal to his student a most prized possession: a small piece of paper on which was written an address. This, he told her, was the home of a woman to whom he owed his career: Mme. S. Simonne.

Ménard was—understandably—in disbelief at this revelation, being both aware of Simonne’s pioneering work and the date of her first published translation some eighty years prior. If, for Ms. Ménard, there were such things as heroes, Mme. Simonne surely numbered among them. Paper in hand, it appeared there was no time to waste; the address was near and so she made plans to leave the very next morning. And while Watts emphasised caution in his young apprentice’s approach, her mind was resolved, her travels renewed.

It must be said Ménard had never looked more beautiful than on this journey; through her shone a radiance which rivalled that of the chalk downlands, which peeled off over the marshes like silver ribbons, arranged in a series of glittering smiles. On foot she made the distance alone, until her arrival at a quiet hamlet on the outskirts of Ramsgate, itself untouched by age. The magpies sang of her approach, if only they could have warned her.

Mme. Simonne, at this time, was herself a quite incredible sight: her pinstripe hair streaked with white, her silver jewellery singing discordant songs, her accent that of a time displaced. “Pray, you must be dear Laurence’s progeny?” Yes, she was quite full of life; and as with Professor Watts such energy was redoubled upon the young Ménard’s arrival. For three weeks they rambled in the low tides of autumn, and with each ebb it seemed Ménard was transfigured anew. By day they would converse their way up the coast—in some cases as far as Broadstairs or Bleak House—buoyed by the politics of Dickens, the Wife of Bath, the plight of the Huguenots, the arc of a gull’s flight; and by night they would work, crystallizing these experiences by means of translation. It was here that Ménard learned how to affix in writing the winds which gather beneath the cliffs of Dover, the lamentations of pilgrims spoken a half-millennium before, the anthems of housemartins and the subtle gestures of ancient Flemish courts; it was here that she discovered Mme. Simonne as a fraud.

Late one evening, during Ménard’s attempts to modernise a quite troubling passage of Le livre du chevalier de La Tour Landry, she heard a voice. A meek voice, scratching through the dim as would a mouse at the wall. Of course, there were many sounds in a house so old, one was always tasting the sea air through the boards. But why the peculiar cold on this night? Why had she not heard it before? Ménard crept through the house in mime, investigating the origin of the sound until she came upon the door to Mme. Simonne’s study. Why slink about a house once so full of open debate? Why peer through those cracks in that door, just so wide as for the waxing moon to gild silver with light?

And framed by that moon, on the windowsill of her study, the panes of which had opened wide into ink, stood a crow—or perhaps a magpie, a dove?—rasping into Mme. Simonne’s outstretched ear. And as Ménard watched—over what seemed hours, perhaps days—Mme. Simonne’s hand dutifully scribed, such that the crow’s voice appeared to grow more confident, more terribly clear, more modern, more beautiful. And with each page—or perhaps each tale—complete, Simonne would open the drawer of her bureau and therein extract a white feather, fastening it to the animal’s wing, turning crow to magpie, and that magpie somehow leucistic, cloud-like against the lunar haze.

Needless to say, the next morning was a series of polite excuses, a pleasant stay of course but Ménard simply must leave: “I simply must”. Her journey home was tortured by crows, whose erratic flight seemed to taunt the young woman, whose shadows mocked even the marshes with monochrome jeers.

Upon arrival ‘home,’ what then to make of Professor Watts’ response? Her confidant? The sole reason she had not already abandoned her studies to the tempests of Dover? What of the man who would ‘set things straight’? Whose reputation was indeed built upon Mme. Simonne’s? Who himself would ask whether the young woman should not think sensibly—‘pragmatically’—about all this? Perhaps her mind was not so ‘sharp’ as he had once thought; consumed by Ovid, Chaucer and the excitement of the Madame herself? Had she considered that this ‘magpie’ may well have been a trick of the light? That such thoughts are those of a little girl, and not a budding researcher? Yes, if there is but one betrayal more intolerable to academics than plagiarism, certainly it must be youth!

So that was to become Ms. Ménard’s lot; simply to grow unburnished, unyouthful – as she had been instructed. To forget the secrets of housemartins, the gestures of foreign kings, even the prose of Chaucer. To forget the questions from which her life had grown, having been replaced by that bitter series proffered by Watts. And in her fiction to rewrite that same story time and again, the Manciple's Tale, that of Phoebus and the Crow, that of the ‘tell-tale-tit’.

And what, in turn, should be my fate in recounting this tale? Beyond sorrow? Beyond that ceremonial county, the Garden of England? In times past perhaps my feathers would have been plucked, my beak cut and fed to dogs. But I pray this time to have learned my lesson, to have accepted my nature, to have taken flight. Now I pray only to hear the clouds, to count among them my number and—at last—to quietly make in them my nest.

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My sone, be war, and be noon auctour newe
Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe.
Whereso thou come, amonges hye or lowe,
Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

Footnotes

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