Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, July 23

The Group

In the late spring of 1994, someone from The New Yorker coaxed — surely not much was required by way of coercion — seventeen of the literary thoroughbreds in its gilded stable to doff their oat bags, trot from their particular paddocks, and enter the show ring (oh, Bill, excellent use of equine imagery, you’re amazing, give yourself a day off, also a lump of sugar!), there to suffer the ministrations of a makeup artist and then be objectified in a photo spread by Richard Avedon. Three writers were snapped in London — V.S. Pritchett, Edna O’Brien, and William Trevor — and the other fourteen assembled in New York. The air must have been rich with the fragrance of occasion, as it would have been a few days after Mavis Gallant (MG) published in the Montreal Standard a feature called “Art for the Family Pocket.” November 9, 1948 was the date of a near-mythic evening at the Gotham Book Mart when fourteen (that number again! omg! what is going on???) of the leading literati of the day got together for a reception / summit organized in honour of Edith and Osbert Sitwell, in New York on a rare state visit to America.

Look, there’s W.H. Auden on a ladder; I think of him, always, at 4.17 a.m. when I’m risking what remains of my future balancing on the third rung, scanning the upper shelves to assess the state of the tinned vegetables, saying aloud to the empty store, “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be peas.” Oh, Wystan. Thou shouldst be living at this hour. (1948, I note, was also the year he wrote, though denied having done so, the greatest poem in the English language — or any other language, including French — about fellatio, "The Platonic Blow." Click on the link by all means, but parental caution advised. My proudest moment as a graduate student was obtaining, via Interlibrary Loan, a copy of “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts,” which was where, I believe, “The Platonic Blow” first appeared.) And look, there are Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell, engaged not with the camera, but seemingly taking into account something going on just behind baby-faced Delmore Schwatz: something scuttling, a cockroach, maybe, or a mouse. Oh, see, there’s Marianne Moore, looking like a Quaker librarian with a sly little secret, and there’s Tennessee Williams, at the back of the room, taking it all in, suited and tied, just like all the gentlemen assembled there. 1948 was the year of Summer and Smoke; A Streetcar Named Desire was a year into its Broadway run. (Fast forward 33 years, and I was standing behind Tennessee in a queue to enter the Denman Theatre — now a Dollar Store, just a few blocks from where I’m writing — to see Gallipoli. His date was a young man who looked either dazzled or dazed or possibly both. I made sure to take a seat in the posterior, you should excuse the expression, row; of course I did. They didn’t share popcorn, but there was a certain amount of substance sniffing that went on, and when they made their way out, stumble, stumble, after about 45 minutes — blow out your candles, Laura, and so, goodbye — I subdued the urge to follow. Daniel MacIvor’s play His Greatness recounts that multipurpose sojourn — Williams did a stint as Writer In Residence at UBC, was here for the Vancouver Playhouse production of Red Devil Battery Sign, and also wrote for the Playhouse an adaptation that perhaps didn’t need writing of The Seagull — and tells, among other scurrilous tales, how Williams would hire rent-boys — gentlemen callers, pardon me — to come to his room, strip to their underwear, and read to him from The Bible, probably the Gideon version from the bedside drawer. He would then criticize their recitations, and none too constructively. Well. Everyone has their kinks, and who are we to deride the peccadilloes of literary heavyweights? Adam Gopnik’s Proust and the Sex Rats puts EVERYTHING into perspective.)

I love such group portraits, the stories behind them. It was in 1958 that Art Kane was somehow able to persuade 57 jazz greats to gather at 10 a.m. for the shot that became "A Great Day in Harlem." That was on Aug 12; MG would have been one day into her 37th year upon the Earth. Two years earlier, she’d published "Thieves and Rascals" in Esquire, which was the destination for Art Kane’s photograph.

So, the 1994 group portrait of New Yorker fiction contributors fits into a kind of tradition, the impulse behind its creation not dissimilar, I guess, to those more or less contemporary gatherings of pop music greats that produced “"Tears are Not Enough",” or "Do They Know It's Christmas?"” though without a specific beneficiary or headsets or, presumably, electronic pitch correction. It must have been Dan Menaker, then the magazine’s fiction editor, who played the role of Bob Geldof / David Foster and got everyone together at the same time in the same room; Menaker provided the text which appeared along with the Avedon portfolio in the magazine on June 27, 1994, the summer fiction edition. This classic Alice Munro story appeared on the pages immediately following the “Authors! Authors!” spread.

I love how Alice looks here, a little like she’s channeling the spirit of Bea Arthur in Maude. Her highly speculative “get me out of here” facial expression suggests that the thought, “What the actual fuck?” is percolating somewhere very near the surface of her brain.

Staged and staid is how the photographs read, truly, a lot of protective arm clenching and not much in the way of exuberance or spontaneity. It’s telling, too, about the times — not so long ago — that only Haruki Murakami and Jamaica Kincaid ripple the placid waters of racial conformity. Dan Menaker doesn’t have much to say about MG in his reporting of the gathering. He mentions Ann Beattie overhearing MG and Alice talking about the privations — buying their own phones — of their respective Writer-In-Residence gigs; it was ten years prior that MG had been at Massey College. If only they’d been able to be in touch with Tennessee Williams he could have told them how to press their advantage, and they would have understood it might have been possible to have young men come and read to them from the Bible in their skivvies which would probably have been a salve on the horrible telephone situation.

I’m sorry we’re given so narrow a perspective on what the two northern giants, MG and AM, might have said to one another on what must have been a rare meeting. I can’t imagine they were often in the same room, these two Canadian mainstays of The New Yorker. Maybe they maintained a correspondence, I have no way of knowing. Were they friendly with one another? Collegially cordial, at least? Other than Morley Callaghan, MG was for many years the only Canadian to publish in The New Yorker, and she had a quarter-century history with the magazine by the time Alice — who turned 91 earlier this month, July 10 — published there for the first of many times in 1977. I can only suppose they read one another with interest and admiration; why would they not, these two great writers with two different world views?

When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013 — MG was by then 91 herself, and had only a few months ahead of her — MG’s literary executor, Mary K MacLeod, in Cape Breton, offered congratulations on MG’s behalf, noting at the same time that she, Dr. MacLeod, was engaged in editing MG’s vast study of the Dreyfus affair. MG spoke of it often, the Dreyfus book, “my Dreyfus,” all those pages taking up space in her linen closet, so much work, so much love and gathering represented in those pages, but something that couldn’t be worked through, too, what should have been a triumph, there among the towels, a millstone, a rebuke. She addresses it here, with fond irony, the New York Times, March 15, 1987, in a sidebar interview that accompanied a Phyllis Rose review of Overhead in a Balloon.

Wait. Hang on. She’ll finish her novel before she finishes Dreyfus? What is the novel of which she speaks, written in the first person, in a male voice? How far along did she shepherd it? What became of it? It must be among her papers, perhaps in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. How much else is there? Many are the mysteries. I’ve spoken before about my inadequacies as a researcher, about how I locate a puzzle piece and then mislay and can’t find it. I know, for instance, though it eludes me in this moment, that I found a reference in some newspaper’s online archive, a tiny mention in a “What’s Going On Today” calendar, of a dialogue that took place in New York at the Mercantile Library between, as I remember, Richard Howard and MG about the Dreyfus affair. I think the year was 1994, and I can only suppose that it must have been scheduled for when she was in town for the Avedon photo shoot. That’s a conversation I would have loved to have heard. (Richard Howard died on March 31 of this year, and another story I now seem unable to put my finger on had to do with how he once asked MG if she dyed her hair and she didn’t speak to him for a year afterwards.)

What was it like for MG to be in that room, in 1994? She must have been glad of the chance to be proximate to William Maxwell, her editor for so many years, her friend. And probably it was a kick to be able to compare notes with Alice Munro, if only briefly, and to meet the young up-and-comers, like Allegra Goodman and Michael Chabon and Deborah Eisenberg. Did she feel a tremor of old guard rue? Her own production — enormous — was slowing. She’d had five stories in the magazine in that decade — five more than most writers would manage in a lifetime — and there would be but one more, in 1995.

That was it. The end of her published fiction. After “Scarves, Beads, Sandals,” the diary entries — magnificent in their own way — begin to occasionally appear.

In his text accompanying the Avedon photos, Dan Menaker recounts how there was a bouquet of flowers in the studio, and that between them, Jamaica Kincaid and Alice Munro could attach the “horticultural names” to each blossom in the vase. Does he mean the Latin names? Probably. Where was MG when this floral show-offery was going on? She could certainly have joined in, keen gardener and flower lover that she was. It was about MG and gardens that I meant to write, in fact, and all I’ve given you here is a scattered meander that only goes as far as the gateway entrance. Well. No one died as a consequence, so how bad can it be? Tomorrow is another day, fiddle-dee-dee.

I wonder if MG, who loved comics and cartoons, enjoyed the Uncle Wiggily stories when she was a child? They started appearing in 1910, so she would certainly have had the opportunity. My father was fond of them, and read them to us when we were children. I loved they way they ended, always with a promise of more to come, barring some outlandish event.

In case we have ice cream pancakes for supper I'll tell you, in the next story, how Uncle Wiggily got out of the bear's den, and how he went fishing—I mean Uncle Wiggily went fishing, not the bear.

And in the story after this, if the milkman doesn't leave us sour cream for our lemonade, I'll tell you about Uncle Wiggily and the black crow.

And in the next story, providing our wash lady doesn't put my new straw hat in the soap suds, and take all the color out of the ribbon, I'll tell you about Uncle Wiggily and Fido Flip-Flop.

Etc. So in the next diary entry, assuming the robins don’t meet at dawn with their seconds and have themselves a duel with pistols or sabres over who gets the early worm, I’ll say more about MG and gardens, and tell you how, thanks to MG, I found the story of this fascinating American botanist.

Thanks for reading, xo, B