Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 19

V I B, V I B, Kindly pick up the courtesy phone

May 5, 3.15 a.m.

And a very good morning to you, too. Our starting point in today’s gallop is the above-cited offer which appears in the Vogue Book of Etiquette, the first edition from 1924. I’m not sure how long Vogue keeps it promises, or what statutes of limitations might apply, but I am (emphasis my own) such a purchaser — it is a used copy, true, but that does not alter the material fact — and I’ve got a good mind to test their promissory statement and dash off a note to the Vogue Information Bureau.

The Vogue Information Bureau! I can’t stop thinking about it, rolling it around on my tongue, like an early morning mint — of which I’m in need, I’ve no doubt. Who wouldn’t want to be a G-Man for the VIB? Who staffs the joint now? Is it an hereditary sinecure? Is the great, possibly the great-great granddaughter of the primal incumbent sitting at a small desk, in an airless basement room, waiting, waiting, on the off-chance some flounder from afar might take the magazine up on its offer of almost a hundred years ago and inquire by post, the better to settle some delicate matter? Or might it be some latter day Rip Van Winkle, someone who’s been in the job for decades now, years and years and years, someone impossibly antique, but still vital, someone who endures because to die between May Day and Labour Day is, as everyone knows, highly indecorous, and for the rest of the year she is asleep? Were she to blow the dust — her own talcum — from her silver letter-opener — heavy, ornate, a souvenir from Baden-Baden — and slice through the envelope and extract with trembling fingers the inquiry, the first in what, 50, 60, 70 years, how would it read? Our social quandaries are different from what they were, and no less vexing.

Dear Vogue Information Bureau:

I am an obituarist for the X-Town Examiner, a small, independent daily — well, 6 days a week, and never has an issue not gone to press and been delivered, not once since our founding in 1888!

I have been assigned to write the summing-up for a prominent local citizen who lived their (preferred pronoun) first 50 years as a male (identified as such at birth, by Dr. Mason, who also delivered my mother, me, and my own first-born, before he expired — Dr . Mason, I mean, not my first-born — on the golf course, of a sudden and thorough heart attack, after taking a shot that would prove to be a hole-in-one, not that he ever knew, which was tragic, but made for great copy) and then transitioned, and died, just last week, after living almost 30 years as a woman.

Everyone in town knows the whole story, and while it’s true there was a flurry of talk after the news got around — such circumstances, back in the day, were not exactly coin of the realm hereabouts, and people will gossip, after all — it never really blew up or spun out of control. We all just got on with getting on, which is how we tend to do things around here. Their life was their life, we could all respect that, and this personal decision had no impact on their public job, which was running the sanitation plant, for which efforts we were all grateful, and there was not a soul who did not contribute towards the purchase of a fine mantel clock, French, a genuine antique, on the occasion of their retirement, in 1997.

The point is, since the facts of the life are well-known, would it be permissible to acknowledge the deceased’s original, but long-since discarded, moniker; or would that be an instance of dead-naming which I’ve read is an offence, and I guess I understand why. Could it be dealt with by simply saying Gloria Oppenheimer (nee Harold) — not their real names, I hasten to add — or would I be best advised not to mention any of it at all, and simply focus on Gloria’s accomplishments as a citizen, which were considerable? I want to be delicate, but I also want to be — what? — complete. The life entire, etc. Either way, I’d prefer to avoid a pile-on, if you take my meaning, and I can see how one choice or the other might engender such a thing. It’s a pickle, for sure, and I would appreciate your opinion and I forward to your reply, at your earliest convenience. Yours very truly, etc etc.

“My goodness,” the V I B agent might murmur, “it’s a brave new world out there,” and then apply herself to disbursing her best advice. But what would it be? Nothing to be gained from speculation. Hypothesis. It’s a mug’s game for sure, and all the clocks on all the mantels are ticking away, quiet but relentless. So let’s move on.

Seventy years ago, on the cusp of turning the dangerous age of 30, two years after her 1950 flight from Montreal, well into her re-invention, Mavis Gallant (MG, who was a 2-year old when the Vogue Book of Etiquette first appeared) took off for an open-ended stay in Spain, first Barcelona, then Madrid. Money was, to say the very least, tight; an unscrupulous agent wasn’t sending the fees she’s been paid by The New Yorker, and she was selling her clothes to get by. She wrote about it in her diary; this extract is one of several published by The New Yorker in 2012 (the July 9 & 16 edition) shortly before MG’s 90th birthday, as “The Hunger Diaries.”

I am really shabby now: I noticed it yesterday when I passed two beautifully groomed women, hair waved, good suits, perfume. They brushed by me with the same half-curious, half-impatient air they had for the rest of the street. I have only my Austrian shoes left, very scuffed, and stockings so full of runs that I can scarcely fasten the garter. They’re so sheer that the runs don’t show. Other clothes very tacky: everything needs cleaning. They’ve stood up well, on the whole. (Mummy’s only advice to me, ever, in her whole life, was “Don’t buy cheap clothes.”)

Two things strike me, reading this. One is how my father, by then well into his 80’s and I was in my 50’s, pressed on me a navy blue blazer for which he no longer had any use. Nor did I. I demurred. He looked at me, critically, and said, “There are very few places where a man wouldn’t be welcome if he were wearing a navy blue blazer.” What impressed me about this was that it was, as near as I can recall, the only piece of advice he ever thought to give me, ever, in his whole life. It wasn’t that he didn’t guide; he led by demonstration, set an example to follow, for sure. But on issues of comportment or investment or employment — where counsel might have been appreciated — he was utterly taciturn.

“Mummy’s only advice to me,” Mavis wrote, in 1952, and I think about a story told me by a friend and former CBC colleague, Aynsley Vogel — she follows along here, Hi, A. V.! — and I relate this with her permission.

MG — I think I’m correct in saying this — didn’t make a point of seeking out Canadian company in Paris — it tended to come to her — but she was good friends with the painter Joe Plaskett, born in New Westminster. He’d washed up in Paris round about the same time as she, but it was a few years into their respective sojourns before they met and bonded and grew close. The Vogels were family friends of Joe P. and Aynsley, on a trip to Paris, was invited to his house — a really spectacular pre-Columbian pile in the Marais — for dinner. MG was the other guest.

“She said to me ‘I have one piece of advice for you my dear’ and I was rapt of course — advice from the great Canadian writer to a lost young ‘creative’ — ‘Never, never cut the nose off the Brie.’ And I never have.’”

“Cheese” is strangely absent — strangely as it seems to me, speaking as someone who has many doubts and questions on curdy courtesies — from the index of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, 1924. That’s disappointing, for I lose the opportunity to dazzle with an artful segue. Luckily, however, telephone manners are touched upon, which just about saves the day, which is still young, for it echoes my next-to-most recent entry, Number 17. There I wrote about how MG uses phones in her 1963 short story, “An Unmarried Man’s Summer.”

By 1924, Mr. Bell’s device had become fairly usual, but still presented the well-born and well-bread with problems of usage. Here’s what the agent of the Vogue Information Bureau advised about issuing invitations telephonically.

“Mistakes over the telephone are more easily made than mistakes in black and white. It may save some writing and answering of notes … but whether or note a great deal of time is saved by telephoning, the family butler, who spends a morning at the instrument with a long list of people to be asked and another long list in case the first refuses, may have his own opinion.”

And so on, there’s more, my own butler has the day off, otherwise I’d assign him the task of a more complete transcription. You can look it up yourself if you want to read more.

“When the telephone on the desk rang just before lunch, Charles Kimber picked up the receiver and laid it down softly.”

So begins “Thieves and Rascals,” an early MG story, unusual in that it was published not in The New Yorker, as were 116 others, but in Esquire, July 1, 1953. It’s set in New York. Charles is a lawyer. His wife, Marian, is a model, successful, hard-working, often featured in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue. Their daughter, Joyce, is at a boarding school upstate, St. Hilda’s. The petitioner on the phone that day is the head mistress, who’s calling with bad news. Joyce is being sent home. Not only did she spend the weekend with a boy — from a good family and at a good school — in Albany, unsupervised, she’s also cut off her hair with manicure scissors. Charles has to communicate this unsettling turn of events to Marian, but he pauses en route home to have dinner with his mistress, Bernice, who calls herself Bambi. Their connection, not surprisingly, is hush-hush, discreet.

“In four years, she had complained only once or twice about their secluded relationship. The most difficult argument had taken place after she bought and read Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. She had shown Charles the section on Dining with Married Men…”

The advice Bambi reads in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette sparks a contretemps with her lover, and it was to discover more about their spat, its underpinnings, that I secured for my own personal use the volume cited above. It was not cheap — which is a boorish thing to note, I know. It was only after it arrived — with a nice mylar covering and in really mint condition, especially given its age, nearly a century — that I realized I’d made an error, for it wasn’t the 1924 guide to manners Bambi bought and read, and to which MG refers, but a later, revised edition. Duh! I investigated further, then ordered up the 1948 iteration. Bingo.

It’s in Chapter 5, “A Girl on her Own,” that we find the set of rules to which Bernice / Bambi refers.

a. Never dine repeatedly with the same married man

b. Never drink enough alcohol to be even slightly affected by it.

c. Never allow a man to come into your apartment if you are alone in it, except in the daytime or before going out to dinner in the evening.

d. Never go to a man’s apartment after the dinner hour if he is alone.

etc.

Again, I’ll leave you to pursue it further if you have the time or inclination. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: amusing and old-fashioned, easy to mock from our hoary heights of accustomed libertinism, puritan advice for the preservation of virtue, but good advice, also, if virtue’s preservation is what you’re after. Millicent Fenwick — she is the author of the 1948 edition, and a very intelligent, accomplished woman, also an excellent writer — had similarly stern and cautionary counsel for men, but one gets the sense that her message to women is, “They are what they are and they’re after what they’re after, so watch out.” Millicent wasn’t wrong.

“God, I don’t like them,” is what Marian says to her husband Charles when he finally gets home and tells her the news about their daughter: the boy, the school, the hair. She’s lying in bed, cold-creamed up, moisturizing for the busy modelling day to come. By “them,” she means men, including the boy who took advantage of their daughter, and she means Charles, too, albeit in a fond kind of way.

“Weak, frightened, lying… Thieves and rascals… And never any courage, not a scrap. They can’t own up. They can’t be trusted. They can’t face things. Not at that age. Not at any age.”

There’s something very Mad Men about the tone and setting of “Thieves and Rascals:” New York and new money and mistresses and models and private schools and girls acting out, a slight smell of gin hanging over the whole. About MG’s life in New York and environs: these were the years before the war, when she was in high school and attended a number of different academies, perhaps much like St. Hilda’s, whence is expelled the truant Joyce.

New York, and everything that happened there, was the life MG left, soon after graduation, age 17 perhaps, when she borrowed a few dollars from an actress friend, a Canadian, and returned to Montreal, on the bus, the picnic hamper that was one of her two pieces of luggage full of her writing. Her clothes, we can suppose, were well-chosen and of good quality: not cheap. During those years in New York she lived, at least for a time, in a guardianship arrangement with a woman who was a friend of her mother’s, and the woman’s husband, a psychiatrist. MG spoke in interviews about the arrangement, about how he’d been analyzed by Freud, spoke of his library, and her access to it. What did she read, I wonder?

“Madeline’s Birthday,” MG’s first published story, 1951, is a companion piece to “Thieves and Rascals,” in that it shares that same boozy, restless, transitional, somewhat inchoate post-war ethos and milieu, albeit transplanted to the country, to an old farm house in Connecticut. Madeline — I’ve written about this before — is in the care and keeping of a friend of her mother’s. There’s a library on the premises where Madeline likes to browse, and there’s a paternal figure, a bit threatening, who wonders if what Madeline is reading is appropriate for a young woman. Madeline is quietly furious at this interference. To another young houseguest, a German boy of about her age, a refugee who’s also stuck in the country, in Connecticut, for the summer, she says, “Do you know what I hate more than anything? I hate older men who look at girls and insult them.”

Did MG think of herself as a feminist? I have no way of knowing, though I’m sure it’s a question scholars and critics have pondered, and perhaps have answered, to their own or to general satisfaction. I’m unsophisticated, not analytical, I’m here for the feelings more than facts — as if the facts can ever really be known — and my instinct would be that she wouldn’t have named herself as such, not specifically so, if only because she would have deemed the word imprecise in its meaning, too broad in its application. It’s hard — it’s impossible, really — to know what your interlocutor understands by “feminist,” or by any other descriptor of tribal affiliation, whether social or political: left and right are classic examples. I’m the least astute person you’ll ever meet in this regard — in most other regards, too — so I’ll venture no further into this hot-water territory except to say that whether or not MG thought of herself as a feminist she was devoted to independence of thought and action. She chose a hard path, the writer’s path, because she was following the signposts pointing her to freedom. She never questioned what she wanted, didn’t second guess her desires. To the greatest extent possible, she did what she wanted when she wanted with whom she wanted and as she wanted. Her writing, from early on, was charged by an anger that had been powered maybe not by theory — though she’d read her Beauvoir, that’s for sure — but by the practical, day-by-day example of the men, they many men, who had told her she couldn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, oughtn’t for no reason other than gender. She liked men. She often said so. But her mind was her mind, her body was her body, and, you know, thieves and liars. And so on.

Too much blither, too much blather. End this. I think MG would have been at one with her great Canadian sister, Joni Mitchell, when she wrote and sang, “We love our lovin,’ but not like we love our freedom.” Both knew good advice from bad, that’s for damn sure. Neither would ever cut the nose off the brie to spite her own face. That’s all. Time’s up. Thanks for reading. xo, B