Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 19
Ich bin glibberig
2.54 a.m. Tuesday, returning to the store after a day away spent recovering from a strange bout of delirium. The gods did not look kindly upon my having written so glibly — my life-long default position, not commendable, but isn’t it a great word, glib, apparently it derives from the Low German glibberig, smooth or slippery — about scoring a Covid booster shot and the HILARIOUS possibility of a bad reaction. “Hubris must be punished,” said some vengeful divinity, and sent one — a bad reaction, I mean — to keep me company. Oy.
(Still not quite right, truth be told. Having a hard time ordering thoughts, grammar right out the window, spelling, don’t even talk to me about spelling. Should just shut this down and come back to it, but launched now, in for a penny, in for a pounding.)
Got the shot, Pfizer, 7 pm Saturday night. Exactly 12 hours later, in the store — not yet open to the public — on a ladder, in the chips aisle, everything went sideways. First came the stiffening of the arm — left, at the site of the injection — and then it was like being in an optometrist’s chair, clamped up against the cold, hard metal of the examiner’s goggles, hearing the click of the lenses, watching the letters flip between blurry and clear, better like this or better like this? Oh, the first one, better by far. Like this, or like this? No, no. Didn’t you hear me? Go back three. Like this or like this? No! No! Change it back! Back! Like this? Back! Or this? Back, back, back!
This is what you get for choosing “Offenbach Optometry.” Now the trusted professional, Dr. Hoffmann, is laughing maniacally, he’s introducing a strobe effect, also a soundtrack, it’s the famous Barcarolle, but played on a twangy zither, and all the crinkly margins of all the salty products in their green, their blue, their yellow, their orange packaging, begin to lose their integrity, to coalesce, Barbecue becomes Ranch becomes Salt and Pepper becomes Sour Cream and Onion. The liver spots on my hands — many — organize themselves into a slogan, graffiti on a wall, they seem to say, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanking.” No. That doesn’t look right. But there’s no time to dwell on it, whatever ostensibly benign agent was pumped into my body — maybe it was the Woodstock brown acid, I have no idea — is now on a rapid-fire tour of all organs, the major and the minor; it’s a fairy with a wand, touching each and every one of them, poof, now I’ve made you ice, poof, now I’ve made you fire, oh, this is a joint, poof, you ache, and oh my goodness, what have we here, in the fragrant lagoon of the gut? We’re going to have fun with this! Let’s stir things up! What happens if we pull this plug? Poof!
I lasted two more hours, then went home. En route, halfway, conveniently outside a butcher shop, I was seized by a craving for salami, who knows why, it felt like a compulsion, I NEEDED salami. I stopped, bought some — peppery, thinly sliced — and the meatman’s simple question, “Do you want a bag?” provoked such a blistering sense of déjà vu that I had to clutch at the counter to steady myself. The dimensions were breaking down. I made it the two block home without further episode — none that I recall — and slept for 18 hours. Whether this was, in fact, a reaction to the Covid booster I can’t say, definitively; it seems likely, given the coincidence of administration and symptoms. It’s so utterly at odds with my previous experiences with the jab; perhaps it’s a register of overall tiredness. Perhaps I don’t need to meditate on the various possibilities and symptomology here, save to say that what was most peculiar about the experience was how it seem prescribed to tie into what I was getting ready to write here, in this space, which was a reflection on Mavis Gallant’s (MG) 1962 short story “Night and Day.”
When I first started thinking about keeping this diary — I’ve said this before, please excuse the repetition, I am as shallow as I am glib — I’d intended to write about each of MG’s stories in chronological sequence, taking as the timeline their date of publication in The New Yorker; this wouldn’t necessarily correspond to their date of writing, but would come close. This proved impossible — it would be its own full-time job, and I have one of those — but I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to make it work. It would be a rich immersion. I’ve grown especially fond of the stories from the early 60’s; reading them, I have the impression of a writer entering her creative maturity, of really coming into her own. They’re daring, experimental, walls are coming down, time is fluid — delirium — and you get the sense, or I do, of someone forging a synthesis, of making vessels to accommodate, in the most organic way, never contrived or forced, the sum of what she’s reading, watching, looking at, hearing, experiencing. This was a time of great intensity in the national life of France — post-war reconstruction, Algerian crisis, burgeoning critical reassessment of the country’s Cartesian underpinnings, a nascent radicalism in films and literature, first stirrings of the student revolts that would erupt with full force in ’68 — and MG’s own enormous energies (as I suppose them to have been, they can’t have been otherwise) being fed by so much stimulus, so many newspapers, so many conversations, so many books, concerts, galleries, so much travel. It’s probably a mistake, always, to intuit biography from fiction, but it’s also disingenuous to think that that the latter exists in a void, protected from the other by a firewall of discretion. It simply pleases me to think of how rich a time it was, she was in her prime, a decade into her evolving life in a country and a society she had chosen; pleases me to think of how she could assess, if ever she felt the need, the clear evidence that her gamble had paid off: her many friendships, and all those stories, more than 30 in The New Yorker by the time “Night and Day” was published in ’62, and her life as an independent woman, liberated, self-sufficient, free. She could proceed with confidence, and confidence accommodates chance-taking.
He dreamed for a time of swimming. He felt the bedclothes drawn away and his hand gently lifted from the bell. He had lost the sensation of swimming and all that accompanied it — youth and pleasure — yet an indifference to his fate and future made him joyous and pure, as a saint might feel. “I have no past and no memories,” he thought he said. “This is what it means to be free.”
“Night and Day” is a third-person narrative. A man thinks he’s been captured by forces unknown, is being held in some outbuilding, what might be a barn. But why? By whom? Slowly, the reader understands this is a waking dream-state, delirium, a paranoid delusion. He’s French, Parisian, in a clinic, in Lausanne, he’s emerging from anaesthetic. He’s had a procedure performed on his back, a spinal operation. Frame by frame, over the course of a few days, his life shifts into focus, which isn’t to say he remains utterly unchanged.
Very soon he recalled everything he needed for everyday life, although there were crevices now and again: he forgot the names of close friends, and once the number of his own telephone. In conversation with the doctor, an amateur botanist, he forgot “trillium.”
One thing that fascinates me about the story is that the operation itself, what necessitated it, whether it was a success, hardly figures. Her focus is on the mental state of the patient as he makes his way back from the state of suspended animation that is anaesthesia.
I don’t think — I just can’t imagine — that MG was ever careless or casual when it came to character or place names or specific dates in her fiction. Whether the reader was meant to discern it or not, there must have been a reason why she chose as she chose. “Night and Day” begins:
Sitting next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beams of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road. They were driving from Shekomeko to Pulver’s Corner, taking the route of the school bus.
Shekomeko and Pulver’s Corner: neither a name I recognized, but then I’ve had no cause in my long life to pay attention to communities in prosperous Dutchess County, chockablock (see above) with stables that cater to the horsey set in New York and Connecticut. I cannot remember where I read a casual, glancing reference to MG’s horseback riding accident as a child, or young woman — it resulted in a spinal injury, I think. (I’ve seen it referred to only once, but where? Were I a more committed researcher, I’d have made a note.) Again, this half-recalled fact (if a fact it is) of biography has no bearing on the story, its impact, importance, or success. But when such specific details as Shekomeko and Pulver’s Corner are so casually introduced any reader who’s paying anything like attention might be forgiven for making inquiries. If there is a reason, what is it? Why would she choose to name those places of all possible places? Did she open a gazetteer, close her eyes, and point? Or is this informed, is it something like a wink from the writer, a nod in the direction of those who are in the know, and as for the rest, it’s none of their business and it doesn’t matter? (I wonder, writing this, also about the school bus, if she might have attended one of the private schools in that part of the world, if Millbrook — founded 1931 — or some such institution was among the 17 at which she was enrolled. Again, inconsequential.)
A specific indication that “Night and Day,” was born from MG’s own experience comes up in her 1977 interview with Geoff Hancock.
Once, in Switzerland, when I woke up after a long operation I had the temporary amnesia you sometimes have from anaesthetic. I did not know my name, my age, why I was in pain, or which country I was in. But I knew I was a writer, from the province of Quebec, and that English was my first language.
And in her 2009 interview, for Granta, with Jhumpa Lahiri, when asked if she consulted a third party about her work, to make sure she was correct in all the details, MG replied:
Very seldom. I didn’t want them to talk to me about it. There was one friend at the newspaper, Barbara [Kilvert]. She wanted to be a poet, so we talked together and showed each other things, but that was it. I don’t think anyone can help, you know. Now Green Water I showed – I had the proofs, and I was in hospital in Switzerland because of my back. I’d gone there instead of France, because in France they didn’t know much about spines at the time. The owner of this clinic had studied psychiatry, this Swiss gentleman, but then he felt that most things are physical and he got interested in the brain, so he worked on brains and spines. And the proofs arrived in that clinic that I had to read and correct. And I still wasn’t sure about the last story. I gave him just the last story to read.
Green Water, Green Sky, the proofs delivered to her in Switzerland, in the clinic, after a long operation with a long recovery, begins with an epigraph from As You Like It. Ay, now I am in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content. “Travellers must be content,” was the title given the third chapter of Green Water, Green Sky when it was originally published in The New Yorker. “Night and Day,” is also the title of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, published in 1919. (Lauren Groff wrote this smart introduction to the hundredth anniversary edition published by Restless Books, and reprinted in the Paris Review.) MG was a close reader of VW, and Woolf’s Night and Day is replete with As You Like It references. Again, is this the writer making a long-game, strategic move, acknowledging with the shifting of a pawn a sisterhood, allying herself by the borrowing of the title with another great modernist? Or is the reference to the Cole Porter song, with its hypnotic opening lines, exactly the kind of lyric that might lodge itself in the brain of a patient slowly emerging into the hardtack of the quotidian:
Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall
Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops
When the summer shower is through
So a voice within me keeps repeating
You, you, you…
Whether these guesses, these stabs in the dark, have any validity is of no importance. They are of no use, other than to make the point that a great writer gives you something to think about. Right or wrong is hardly the point. My own interest in this line of inquiry is linked to my own recent dalliance with delirium, I’m predisposed to wonder because I’ve spent a day in that unappealing Wonderland. This is just me wondering out loud. This is me with nothing to prove. And as for the delirium, it’s gone from me now, I miss it, a little, like you miss the addict roommate who moves on the day before the rent is due. The hallucinatory is so much more interesting than the straitened world of the everyday.
In January, 2008, MG collapsed at home, in Paris. She lay unconscious on the floor of her apartment for three days. She spoke to Martin Knelman about the episode a year later. Here, in part, is what he wrote, April 15, 2009, in The Hamilton Spectator.
"I call it my accident because that's the term the hospital used," she explains. "The concierge in my building, a lovely Portuguese woman, was worried that I hadn't been picking up my mail, and on the fourth day I was found after she decided to send for a locksmith."
The concierge found the revered author crumpled on the floor like a rag doll. "I felt someone with tears against my cheek," Gallant recalls. "She thought I was dead, but then I opened my eyes. Another few hours and my brain would have been mashed potatoes."
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, for reasons she still does not understand, she had the delusion that she was in China, involuntarily detained.
After two months of institutional care, she returned home and picked up the threads of the Paris life she chose long ago, living alone and focusing on her dream of being a writer dependent on no one.
"The episode left no trace on the brain," she explained yesterday in a phone interview. "It wasn't a stroke. I woke up talking." Gradually teaching herself to walk, she made a dramatic recovery.
"What I had was a strong will to live," she notes. "I wanted to leave the geriatric hospital because it was full of old people and the only old person I like to have around is me."
How interesting — it seems so, to me — and impressive that more than 50 years after the Swiss clinic experience, approaching her 90’s, MG would still have that same capacity for acuity; that she would be so present in her own mind as to have vivid recall of her own altered state, that, even in extremis, she could summon specific memories of such things as her delusion that she was being held in China: not unlike the principal character in “Night and Day,” persuaded he’s confined to a barn. She remembers, and she sees the gallows humour in it, too; when we’re badly off-kilter we can also be hilarious, however unintentionally. (A friend to whom she described the episode, and her rescue, very much in the same words as cited above, added the detail that when the paramedics loaded MG into the ambulance, she asked them, in French, “Do you have a mandate from the Canadian government to drive into China and liberate Canadians needing help?”)
That authorial detachment, that undamaged wit, makes my heart ache for my father who, in his dementia, would often tell stories about having been kidnapped by “the gang from across the river,” but not disbelievingly. He was never able to regain enough ground to grasp how he’d been pantsed by his own mind, and to find it funny. It jars me into remembering being with him — more than forty, almost fifty years ago — when we’d gone to pick up my grandmother, as we did every Sunday afternoon, and finding her helpless on the floor of her apartment (on Furby Street, in Winnipeg, her building was called The Armstrong Arms) where she’d spent the previous night and that whole day, after the first of what would be several strokes. It makes me remember how, 10 years ago, Stan fell at home, broke his hip, had surgery, and, already in a precarious mental state, already showing signs of confusion, never fully and reliably emerged from the delirium that was with him post-anaesthetic. It makes me think that the lessons of history are not so distant, nor are their future application to my own life. It’s coming for me, sooner than I’d wish. A moment of inattention. A slight misstep. A brief short circuit in the brain. An injection that goes wrong. That’s all it takes and everything changes. Our vulnerabilities, our frailties, are as close to the surface as is our blood. Ramble, ramble. Is that just the residual fever talking? No. I think not. It’s just an account of all that’s tired and predictable and dirt usual. It’s not even noteworthy. It’s show business, that’s all. OK, a lot of words, not sure if they make sense, blame it on Pfizer if they don’t.
3.49 a.m., and those kidney beans won’t order themselves. if I don’t call it a wrap I’ll be late again and risk a talking to. Thank God for the imposition of endings — just like life, n’est-ce pas? Off to work, thanks for reading, xo B
P.S. Is this not THE BEST? Taming the Tiger.
Gee, Slim, you've been to Hell and back! Please take care, and I hope you didn't put tapioca in the cornmeal bin in the store before you left the other day! (That said, that mixture might make some interesting pudding, wouldn't it?!)
Hello Bill, I have been a long time fan of yours and am loving this tribute to MG. I did not know of MG before this and am looking forward to reading her work and your continued diary.
I was inspired by you and some other reading to get my 4th jab sooner rather than later and got an appointment for this evening. My partner commented this morning that last time we had the shot neither of us had any reactions. Fingers crossed 🤞 it’s the same this time! I’m glad you made it through to tell the tale! Take care,
Trish xo