Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 17

Skinning a Cat: Several Views

May 3, 3.35 a.m.

My apartment is small, about 420 square feet — Mavis Gallant’s (MG) flat at 14 rue Jean Ferrandi, her Paris base for over half a century, wasn’t much bigger. So there. What’s good enough for Mavis, etc. It’s not what I had in mind for myself, exactly, as the site of my slow winding down, but you play your cards as you play your cards and having dealt, you deal. It’s fine, really, it’s as much space as I require, more, even. The only liability is that everything extraneous and visible — I’m thinking mostly of the piles of books with no place to live other than the long bench where they’re piled, a Babelesque palaver of pages — becomes a kind of rebuke, something that nags, an aching tooth, an unanswered letter. I’ve got a little balcony, which I like — it adds 20 square feet to the dimension of the place — but which is sordid beyond telling. The narrow deck is filthy, the one chair is an alley rescue, ditto the little table. There’s also a little Buddha statue someone left in the laundry room, and otherwise there’s nothing out there but unexploited possibility. I live in a city where views are valued and have value: like anywhere else, they’re monetized, command the highest rents or prices, if you’re in the market. My view — I’m on the lowest possible habitable floor, and at the back of the building — is of the parking lot and alley. The only greenery is a tall, unruly hedge. On slow days, I’ve spent hours staring at it, hoping in vain that the corps de ballet might emerge and liven things up with something spritely from Giselle. It would be nice, I sometimes think, to have the kind of arrangement Netta and Jack enjoy in “The Moslem Wife,” set in the Cote d’Azur hotel that’s been in Netta’s family for generations.

“Netta chose for her marriage a south-facing room with a large balcony and an awing of dazzling white. It was furnished with lemon-wood that had been brought to the Riviera by Russians for their own villas long before. To the lemonwood Netta’s mother had added English chintzes; the result, in Netta’s eyes, was not bizarre but charming. The room was deeply mirrored; when the shutters were closed on hot afternoons a play of light became as green as a forest on the walls, and as blue as seawater in the glass. A quality of suspension, of disbelief in gravity, now belonged to Netta.”

The large balcony is where Jack and Netta retreat at day’s end to assess the state of the hotel and, sometimes, of their marriage, nursing a nightcap, their cigarette smoke hanging phantasmic in the still night air, an acrid top note to the whiff of salt, the waves of the Mediterranean a comforting continuo. I step out on my balcony most mornings to take the pulse of the day, assess whether an umbrella might be required for the short walk to work. I look around to see who else has lights on in the neighbouring buildings and feel a sense both of kinship, curiosity, and a kind of resentment, the latter owing to how I somehow want, stupidly and selfishly, this time to belong to me alone. This morning was weirdly warm, which might have been welcome — spring, tra-la — but nudged forward thoughts of last year’s heat dome event, the atmospheric bell jar that proved to be killing for hundreds of old people living alone. Which is starting to feel a bit too close to home.

This will be a close to home day, day off from the store, day of rest. Should be a relief and it is, in a way, but I’ve become so attached to the place that it almost hurts to imagine it going on without me. Who will look after things, tend to them as they need to be tended to? Who will ensure the pickles are left-justified with the price tags, that the chips have been properly faced, that the German mustard hasn’t broken file and taken over the Dijon, that hummus is where the heart is? Someone will. The well-oiled cogs and flywheels of commerce will continue to mesh, the buggy wheels roll on, despite my absence, which no one will mark, other than me. There’s not much more pathetic than someone who really believes in the myth of his own indispensability. Perhaps I’ll do something regenerative, get my hair cut, or buy a stiff brush with cleaning up the balcony in mind, and then consign it to some dark place under the sink. Every now and again, with free daytime to kill, I’ll try to treat myself to a movie — Netflix or whatever streaming service — but the deep strain of Protestantism with which I’m so amply marbled won’t allow it. It’s like drinking before 5. Start pulling from the dike of decency those safeguarding plugs and God knows what flood you’ll unleash.

In her long interview with Geoff Hancock, originally published in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Mavis Gallant (MG) talks about her abiding fondness for the movies. She goes, she says, to the cinema as often as possible. Her favourite film? Fellini’s 8-1/2. Well. So she told Hancock in late October, 1977. Naming favourites — whether films or books or pies or children — is an invidious game, treacherous and malleable. Another interviewer, a week later, might have been told The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. MG was partial to German films, to Fassbinder most particularly.

Preferences, the foundation of taste, are susceptible to shifting. Mine are forever adapting themselves to the stars and seasons, my mood ring glowing green then amber then red, but I’ve been consistent for a long time in maintaining that — as previously noted — “The Moslem Wife” is my top-of-the-heap MG short story. Likewise, should anyone ever think to ask me to name my ne plus ultra movie, I’d answer with lightning round celerity, “John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

From 1971, Sunday Bloody Sunday — sometimes the title is given as Sunday, Bloody Sunday, but the comma is an error — starred Glenda Jackson (Alex), Peter Finch (Daniel), and Murray Head (Bob.) (Notably, Daniel Day Lewis, age 12, makes his film debut, uncredited, as a hoodlum-in-training, keying a car.) It’s a complicated story, but it comes down to this: Alex is in love with Bob, Daniel is in love with Bob, Bob is in love with Alex and Bob is in love with Daniel, too, but Bob is mostly in love with Bob. In the end — spoiler alert — Bob wins.

About Sunday Bloody Sunday — it’s available on Criterion and it looks like you can now watch it on Youtube — I could go on and on, but it’s sufficient, here in the aberrantly warm, dawn-breaking hours of May 3, 2022, the morning chorus at its peak, to note that more than 50 years have passed since it was released and it still shocks, if only because it’s so unrelentingly grown-up, wry, and uncompromising. A very few years after the Wolfenden Commission, and fewer years still after the Sexual Offences Act decriminalized homosexual acts — such as, for instance, decorating — in England and Wales, Schlesinger made a movie that not only anatomized a gay / bi menage a trois, he also worked into the story the complications of Jewish family life. Nowhere, not in a single sequence or frame, is there the cringing whiff of the apologetic. No one is punished, no one dies owing to the sin of same-sex attraction. It’s an incredibly melancholy film, yes, but that sadness that suffuses it is, again, fully adult and radiant with the awareness, however grudgingly accorded, that we, as the authors of our own self-inflated tragedies, bear the sole responsibility for them. To try to land the blame for whatever our discontent — especially our disappointments in love — on someone else is comical, absurd, like trying to draw blood with a rubber-tipped arrow launched from a child’s bow. It’s really wonderful, Sunday Bloody Sunday, serious and contained, more chamber music than symphony, more song recital than opera. (That said, the Act 1 Trio from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte is the leitmotif that runs throughout, and it’s brilliantly deployed. It was via Sunday Blood Sunday, in fact, that I first heard it.)

Yesterday I re-visited MG’s short story “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” and that was what brought Sunday Bloody Sunday, and also “The Moslem Wife,” back to mind. It was published in The New Yorker on October 12, 1963. A great Steinberg cover, two society dames gossiping about their travels, its French references appropriate, given the inclusion in this number of MG’s story, and also Janet Flanner’s (writing as Genet) “Letter from Paris.”

(Impossible, of course, to look at that date and not think about how, a scant six weeks in the future, there would be a grassy knoll. I wonder how long it will be before no one is left walking in the world who remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. I was 8. It was how I learned the word “assassination.” After school I sat at the piano and played a sad little song of my own devising on only the black keys. That night I dreamed my father, the gentlest man who ever lived, rampaged through the house and murdered us all. The imminence of that defining event in Dallas makes this bit of light verse, a throw-away by E. B. White, also in this number of the magazine, the more poignant.)

What I like least in books or movies are the scenes where animals die: the Old Yeller effect. In Sunday Bloody Sunday there’s a sequence where Alex and Bob — Glenda Jackson and Murray Head — take a weekend away, go to the country to look after the children of some friends, permissive, free-wheeling, upper middle-class bohemians. They take the dog — is she a St. Bernard? a mastiff? something large — for a walk. What happens involves a truck. It’s horrible.

In “The Moslem Wife,” a guest who proves to be more than usually disruptive, Iris, comes to stay with her elderly father, who arrives with his old cat.

“He stayed for a long time, and the cat did too, and a nuisance they both were to the servants. When the cat was too ailing to walk, the old man carried it to a path behind the tennis courts and put it down on the gravel to die. Netta came out with the old man’s tea on a tray … and she saw the cat lying on its side, eyes wide, as if profoundly thinking. She saw unlicked dirt on its coat and ants exploring its paws…”

I’ll leave it to you to search out and read the rest: it’s beautiful, after a fashion, but painful, the suffering of the innocent.

There could be a wide gap between the acceptance of a story and its publication in The New Yorker, and I have no idea when MG would have written “An Unmarried Man’s Summer.” Certainly she could have completed it well before Valentine’s Day of 63, which was the release date for 8-1/2. Whether she saw it or not is immaterial, I’m not imputing anything like influence to it, but the story’s oxygen could be described as Felliniesque without too much of a stretch: the minor characters are wonderful grotesques, the old English ladies who came to roost along the southern French coast and whom MG would have observed during her time, not long after the war, in Menton. “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” with its Cote d’Azur setting and its cast of characters who don’t have quite enough money to get by and its connection to the war, is a close companion to “The Moslem Wife.”

Walter Henderson, thanks to his friend Mrs. Wiggott, has secured a long term lease in a house owned by two English spinsters who intend to retire there, 15 years hence. Walter — a veteran, badly burned in the war — is 45. He has until he turns 60 to figure out what might come next. He’s a gigolo, but without the sex, a kept man, reliant on Mrs. Wiggott’s good graces. Her boy-toy, his job is to amuse her with stories of his domestic life with his manservant, Angelo, and his old cat, William of Orange. Walter’s routine is disrupted when his sister, Eve, and her husband, Frank, turn up with their two children, having failed at their farming life in South Africa; they’re returning to England. A few weeks in the south of France is, for them, an exercise in decompression, a way of avoiding the bends as they re-enter a European atmosphere. In “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” as in “The Moslem Wife,” there’s a sidebar episode where the cat comes to grief.

“… he threw up hair balls and string, and behaved as if he were poisoned. Angelo covered his hair with olive oil and pushed mashed garlic down his throat. He grew worse. Angelo found him on the steps one morning, dying, unable to move his legs. He sat with the cat on his knees and roared…”

Again, I’ll leave it to you to find out the rest.

Walter’s connection to Angelo is delicate and dark. Angelo is young, not yet 20. Walter “rescued” him from his large and impoverished family, took him in, employed him. Angelo is a servant, but there’s the suggestion of more, a situation the more morally complicated when you factor in class and age; when you factor in the evidence that Angelo is behaving not according to the dictates of his nature, but is governed by the conditions of his employment. What’s between Walter and Angelo is palpable but unspeakable. Everyone knows, but nobody says. Their relationship is brilliantly observed and it’s a great example of MG’s gift as a pulse-taker, an interpreter of symptoms and maladies. In the same way “An Unmarried Man’s Summer” is a companion piece to “The Moslem Wife,” it’s also complementary to Sunday Bloody Sunday, which is its own Richter scale measuring the vibrations of its moment.

What’s said and unsaid. What’s heard and not heard or, more often than not, ignored. These are themes these pieces hold in common, and the telephone is one way they’re expressed. Sunday Bloody Sunday makes terrific visual use of a snake-nest tangle of phone wires that ferry many missed messages to and fro in the office of an answering service; likewise, in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” Walter feels accused by his phone that never rings during the summer months when his protector is away. In one of the diary entries MG published in Slate in August of 1997 — she was, by then, a longtime full-time Parisian, and enjoyed being there in the heat of the summer when the city had emptied out — she addresses the phone.

August 13, 1997

I’m in the Paris phone book, which means I’m a sitting duck for strangers, most particularly in summer. Some want to talk. Most want to write. What they expect from me is white magic, the revelation of a secret, the wizardly formula they think writers keep under wraps, and now and then bring out for an airing. Several airings should produce a book. A few still take me for a kind of literary travel agent. The other day I was asked, in all seriousness, where one can see authors at work in cafés. It sounded for all the world like watching chimpanzees riding tricycles: both are unnatural occupations. I have only one friend who still writes her novels in notebooks, in cafés. She chooses cafés that are ordinary and charmless, favoring one for a time, then another, as one does with restaurants. Some are near home, many involve a long bus trip. If anyone she knows discovers the café, she changes at once for another, more obscure, hard to get to. About café writing, in general, old legends and ancient myths die hard. Think of the way we touch wood–the sacred oak–to guarantee safety, even when we live in streets without trees.

Something I’ve enjoyed over the couple of weeks since I started keeping this MG tribute gallery is hearing from people who have Mavis stories to tell. Hal Wake, who was for many years the Artistic Director of the Vancouver Writers Fest — as now it’s known — and who, prior to that, was a colleague at CBC, sent this note. Again, the phone is central — and bear in mind that Peter Gzowski, host of Morningside, was of Polish descent. Hal writes:

“I moved recently and brought some memorabilia I probably should have cast off. But I am weak and if I ever finish sorting after unpacking, I hope to find my file box of old phone numbers I amassed as a book producer at CBC. In it, I'm pretty sure I'll find Mavis Gallant's phone number in Paris. 

Responsible for booking writers for interviews at Morningside, it fell to me to phone her and ask her for an interview, although I don't think she had a new book. I think this would have been 1985 or so.

I had phoned enough luminaries that there were few calls where I had to screw up my courage, but this was one. She had a reputation for being, um - let's call it, forthright. When I punched in her number I had that feeling that I've had a few times where I half hoped she wouldn't answer, although I knew the reprieve would be temporary, I'd simply have to try again. And then she answered.

I stammered through my introduction and she listened quietly and then with a brightness in her voice picked up on something I'd said.

‘I was trying to decide what horse to bet on this afternoon at Longchamps and now I know. This call is a sign that I should put my money on Polish Prince, thank you, thank you.’

The call went swimmingly after that, she was animated and kind and was generous with trenchant observations. Sadly, I don't know whether her bet paid off, I'm hoping it did because being a good luck charm for Mavis Gallant is something you could ride home on. Sadly as well, I do know that she was considerably less agreeable during the actual interview. Quelle domage or c'est la vie, feel free to supply your own cliche.”

Sunday Bloody Sunday was written by Penelope Gilliatt. Like Mavis Gallant, she was a fixture in the pages of The New Yorker: stories, profiles (including a hotly contested one of Graham Green), and her many really, really smart film reviews. I love Penelope Gilliatt, thinks she’s vastly underrated and unsung. The job Hal did for Morningside, wrangling interviews, I did for Vicki Gabereau’s afternoon programme for a few years in the late 80’s. I was determined to book Penelope G on the show, secured her number, and called her in New York. She picked up directly — this would have been round about Noon, eastern — and it was quickly apparent that she was more than a little drunk. I simply could not make my purpose clear.

“I’m sorry, what’s your name? Phil? And you’re calling why? You want me to talk to Dicky? Dicky who? Why should I want to talk to Dicky? Why should Dicky want to talk to me? Who are you again? Phil? Why are you calling? Who is Dicky?”

Round and round, a terrible carousel. I cut bait as gracefully as I could. It felt tragic. Well. It was. It was booze that killed her, finally, just a few years later, age 61, on May 9, 1993. (Oddly, Glenda Jackson’s is a May 9 birthday.) In The New Yorker of October 12, 1963, the magazine where PG (not Peter Gzowski) would, starting in 1967, publish her film reviews, Brendan Gill wrote about the newly released Tom Jones. The screenplay was by John Osborne, whom Gilliatt married that same year. They were in for a turbulent time.

Signs. MG looked for them, so do I. I invest them with no meaning. They simply delight, which is reason enough to welcome them when they come along. In “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” Walter’s sister, Eve, is married to Frank Osborn. Without the “e.” Nevertheless — a sign.

I’ve gone on way too long, but I’ll end with this last story of a sign recently received, not by me personally, but I bore witness to its delivery. I spent a beautiful few hours on Sunday evening with two Friends of Mavis: both close readers of her work, and both had met her, knew her to a greater or lesser degree. I’ll call them Felicity and Ann, which may or may not be their real names. Felicity had cooked - a really thoughtful, beautifully curated meal. We sat and ate and drank and talked and talked. As the evening wound down, Felicity asked if either of us wanted to borrow anything from her MG library: she’s collected pretty much everything. Ann said she’d be glad of the loan of Home Truths. She’d read it when it came out in 1981, during a difficult time, and wanted to revisit it. Felicity took us into her study. She reached down from the top shelf her copy — a first edition — of Home Truths. She had no idea how the envelope that fell from between its pages found its way there, no idea how long it rested there. But on Sunday evening it fluttered down, landed on the floor, lay at our feet, the name on the envelope, printed in ink, in a hand unknown, visible to us all. Ann, it said. Ann, with no E. Just as it needed to be, in that place and in that time. A blessing. A sign. What can be said, other than Thank you, Mavis. Which is my entire purpose here, after all. Thanks for reading. xo, B

PS Here are the closing words of an appreciation, very fond, of the life and work of Penelope Gilliatt written by her friend, and Broadway legend, Betty Comden, and published in The Independent.

What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages might have produced we will never know. When she was forced out of denial about the blight that ruined her life, and made gallant attempts at recovery, they never worked. It is hard to picture her joining anything resembling an AA group and 'sharing' with others whom she undoubtedly viewed compassionately, but objectively, more as possible subjects to write about rather than fellow sufferers. I can just hear her saying with a smile crinkling the corners of her candid brown eyes, 'Chaps ought be able to pull themselves together on their own, oughtn't they?' Yes, they ought, but it doesn't often work that way. Most tragically, it did not for her.