Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 20

imagined mirrors of life

May 6, 2.57 a.m.

4.30 a.m. start at the store today, earlier than usual, so this is just by way of saying hello to all the Friends of Mavis (FOM), who won’t, I hope, be discomfited at finding not much here today: a place-keeper entry in the Mavis Gallant (MG) Centennial Diary.

I wonder how my connection to MG has been shaped by writing about her — more accurately, writing about the path my thoughts take when I follow her lead — so early in the day, and with so little time — less than usual this morning — to get it out, set it down, plan for snacks, and pack appropriate emergency supplies should the road get rough or the weather inclement. Also there’s the question — I try not to ask it too often or too loudly — of why bother with this? What purpose is served by adhering to this Spartan, punitive regime? It’s more hair shirt than is advisable for a man of my years, and not realistic to think I’ll be able to come to any kind of determination about her whys and wherefores while foggy with sleep and also with one half-shuttered eye on the clock. On the other hand, there’s something to be said about working within constraints, and with the discipline of a hard deadline. There’s a freedom that comes with the assignment, a “what the hell, let the chips fall where they may” sense of liberty. I’m like a potter with a backyard campfire for a kiln and only the crappy clay from a corner of the garden to work with, but never mind, I’ve said I’m going to make a pot and dammit, a pot is what I’m going to make, and it’ll be the best pot I can throw and bake under the circumstances. Even if the regime isn’t ideal, there’s something to be said for the free-associative, tabula rasa moment, the brain still in dream mode, its antennae receptive to waves that are always there, but to which they’re not attuned once the noise and imperatives of the day settle in. Which doesn’t take long.

No one at work knows I do what I do in the approximately two hours — less this morning — available to me before I turn up, don my apron, assume my grocery clerk identity, and launch into whatever the business of the day. I’m undercover. I like that. It’ll happen now and again, in the context of my store-working day, that something or someone will establish a presence in my mind that’s more than passing, will choose a pew in the low-ceilinged cathedral of my brain and sit there until I look down from the pulpit, leave off whatever homily I’m preaching, and take note. Sometimes, a person, whether colleague or customer, or some happenstance presents itself with more than the usual weight, I’ll be provoked to wonder, “What would MG make of this?”

MG often said that a story began for her when a character came to call, turned up on the stoop of his / her own accord, blew in out of nowhere, and not with a mere calling card in hand, but rather with a complete portfolio: a name, a voice, an occupation, a purpose, a past, present, future. I walk through the store trailing clouds of early morning Mavis, and sometimes they are productive: mist, rain, maybe even a little thunder.

Yesterday, a man and a child — a boy, about 8 — were looking a lost and directionless. I asked if they needed any assistance. The man — 40-ish, scruffy in the deliberate way of the prosperous young, a tech exec was my guess — said they were on the hunt for pizza dough. They’d bought it in the store before, the fresh pizza dough, not the frozen pizza dough in a ball you have to thaw, and not the ready made stuff already pressed onto aluminum round, all ready to go, no work at all save for assembly; no, they wanted the glutinous, sticky dough, all mixed up and ready to go, no thawing needed, you just take it home and roll it out, maybe you make a bit of a business of tossing it in the air, and calling each other Luigi, and you put in on your pizza stone and dress it up and bake it and the room goes fragrant and Bob’s your uncle.

There was something about this man and this boy — it was conveyed by posture, by a slight tentativeness, a kind of caution or deference they showed one another — that seemed to me especially precious and tender. Our transaction took about 90 seconds, and it was clear to me pretty much right away — that it was clear doesn’t mean I was right — that this was a shared custody situation, and this was this man’s, this father’s, weekly time with his child, and what they did together, a bonding activity, was to make pizza, and they always did it the same way, with the same dough, and now they couldn’t find the dough, and that was because the dough was out-of-stock, it simply wasn’t available, could not be made manifest from the ether, which was a great shame because it was so, so important to this boy, surely no older than 8, that this day be, in all its particulars, the way he expected it to be, wanted it to be, needed it to be. Is there anything children want / need more than predictability, especially when it comes to their dealings with their parents and their pizzas? It was heartbreaking to be a bit player, a minor villain, in a rupturing, if necessary, moment in his sentimental education, to be the instrument of the lesson that sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want it, need it, it’s not going to be so, and not for any good or any interesting reason, but just owing to some dumb, dull, prosaic practicality. You can still have pizza. You just can’t have it in quite the way you imagined. But, of course, it wasn’t really about the pizza. It was about something else. And the fix for that isn’t available on any shelf in any store.

Now, MG — she would have made something of that, for sure. Here’s something very beautiful she wrote in her diary in May (I don’t know the exact date) of 1959. This was quoted by her friend Steven Barclay in an interview conducted with him by Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker. It appeared in the June 29, 2012 edition of the magazine. The subject of their conversation — it was conducted by email — was MG’s diaries; a plan that then afoot, was well underway, to publish selections from her journals from the 50’s and 60’. Steven Barclay, who’s the principal of a speaker’s bureau based in Petaluma, California, The Steven Barclay Agency. (Please note my restraint in not using the word “eponymous,” I would have, in fact, but I’m never quite sure I’m getting it right.) He’s a part-time resident of Paris, and was a longtime MG friend and supporter, one of the angels who looked after when her health was bad and cash was a problem. He was also one of the two editors who worked on them with her; the other was Frances Kiernan, a writer and former literary editor at The New Yorker. Barclay said this particular observation was, for him, emblematic of how and who MG was in the world as a writer, as a woman.

“Four or five stories, soft as clouds, changing shape as I watch them. The form of my life—the external form—is nothing compared with the anguish over giving form to these imagined mirrors of life. Must reality become unreal? Record, then, that we took the train and walked in the royal park at Marly, and lay in the uncut grass under a sky as warm as wool and blue as itself. The chestnut trees looked as though nothing could oblige them ever to shed their leaves; and when the wind bent the grass around the barren flat, submissively, the grass went all one color, silvery, like the underside of leaves, as if it might rain.”

These imagined mirrors of life.

I think I could die happily if I wrote something like that after a day’s hard slogging. She tossed it off in one of many, many diary entries, writing by hand, in ink, fluently, writing every day.

Imagined mirrors of life.

Mirrors occur in her stories, often. Conspicuously, “Its Image on the Mirror” is the novella she included in her collection My Heart is Broken. Here are a few smaller, reflective examples culled from her stories.

“There were antique tables and bedsteads everywhere. All the mirrors were stained with those dark blotches that resemble maps. Papa often wondered if the Ponses knew what they really looked like, if they actually saw themselves as silvery white, with parts of their faces missing.” (Across the Bridge)

“I got up and dressed, as my mother wanted, and we took the bus to her hairdresser’s. She called herself Ingrid. Pasted to the big wall mirror were about a dozen photographs cut from Paris Match of Ingrid Bergman with her little boy.” (Across the Bridge)

“I had impressions, not memories of my father. Pictures were frozen things; they told me nothing. But I knew that when my hair was wet I looked something like him. A quick flash would come back out of a mirror, like a secret message, and I would think, There, that is how he was.” (The Late Homecomer)

“People in the habit of asking themselves silent, useless questions look for answers in mirrors.” (The Late Homecomer)

“A long glance at the magic hand mirror, lying face upward on the table, assures Amalia that if she does not seem French it is entirely to her credit . . . Madame Gisele will not look into the magic hand mirror, or the ball, she will not burn candles to collect the wax, because Amalia pays a low rate for her time … Peering into Madame Giselle’s magic hand mirror again to see what she can see, Amalia does not recognize her own face … Madame Giselle turns the hand mirror facedown, because when Amalia looks in it she is getting more than her money’s worth.” (Questions and Answers — Mme Gisele is a fortune teller, Amalia her client. Both are Romanian.)

“He was in the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand, and he stood sipping it in front of a mirror, deep in silent conversation. ‘What a good time you and I are having,’ he might have been saying. He smiled and his face went wry. ‘Oh, you know how it is sometimes,’ he might have said now. He was seducing someone in the mirror — only it was himself. Julius was seducing Julius.” (An Alien Flower)

“Netta would hire workmen and have the rooms that needed it repainted — the blue cardroom, and the red-walled bar, and the white dining room where Victorian mirrors gave back glossy walls and blown curtains and nineteenth-century views of the Ligurian coast… 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. She became tidy, silent, less introspective, as watchful and as reflective as her bedroom mirrors. … In the mirrored bedroom there was only Netta. Her dreams were cleansed of him. The looking glasses still held their blue-and-silver-water shadows, but they lost the habit of giving back the moods and gestures of a Moslem wife. … They used the mirror behind the bar for target practice. Oddly enough it was not smashed. It is covered with spider-webs, and the bullet hole is the spider.” (The Moslem Wife.)

There are many more examples I could cite, but you get the idea, and time is tight. So, let’s let spiders bring us to the end today. Here’s link for you to copy and paste — https://www.frieze.com/article/chloe-aridjis-recalls-dining-mavis-gallant. It will take you to an article in Frieze from 2019, charming and a little sad. The author, Chloe Aridjis, remembers a dinner with MG. It took place at the home of her parents, in Paris, in 2010; her father was then the Mexican ambassador to UNESCO. She describes the meal and, most especially, the circumstances that accompanied the taking, by Homero Aridjis, of a series of photographs of MG, seated at the table, her face reflected in a silver charger. Then:

A few years later, once my parents had returned to Mexico and I had moved to London, I visited Mavis in her flat in the 6th arrondissement. It was to be the last time I’d see her; she died in 2014. One of her first questions was, where was I staying? At a friend’s house, I replied, which was a bit rundown and full of spiders. With the mention of spiders, something was triggered, and they quickly became the leitmotif of the afternoon. Each time Mavis spoke, she would include them in the sentence, either in her replies or else to address an imaginary spider at the window. Her thoughts travelled back in time to her childhood in Canada, where she and her brother once found a large spider in their house, then returned to the present to the imaginary spider in her flat. Telling it to go outside, she was now very concerned with the seen and unseen in her home.

Something’s not right; MG was an only child, she would never have played hunt the spider with her brother. Perhaps it was a cousin, or a neighbour friend. Whether she misspoke or was inventing something or whether Chloe misheard or misremembered doesn’t matter much. It’s a lovely story, no less true because of a mistaken detail; and best of all, most memorable, is this beautiful souvenir of that dinner in Paris, in 2010, the really stunning photograph of MG, age 88, that appeared in that issue of Frieze.

“I love mirrors,” MG told an interviewer in 1966. “I’ve got a book about them.”

I wonder what it was, that book; there have been many about their history, their meaning. I’d love to know which was in her library, but probably it’s for the best I don’t find out. I’d have to track down a copy, buy it, as I did with Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, as I did with Dog Shows and Doggy-People, about which I’ll tell you another time. The collector’s obsession is upon me, having passed through the MG looking glass, having deepened, day by day, my exploration of the wonderland on the other side.

Enough. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. Off to the store. There, in the staff loo, is a sign someone taped next to the mirror, a Golden Rule reminder. It says, “Have I left the bathroom the way I found it?”

“No,” I always say, peevish and snide, to no one but my own reflection, wrinkled and pale and tired-looking. Purse-lipped. “No, I left it clean.”

And that is how I leave you here, or so I trust and hope, as clean as when you came in. By way of a thank you for bearing with me, here’s “Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing,” a snazzy mirror-inspired novelty number from Handel’s Semele, featuring the amazing Cecilia Bartoli, burning down every available barn. (I have a version of this I sing if I catch myself, after a sidelong appraisal in the full-length mirror, looking a bit pudgier than seems ideal, and I’ve been overdoing the chips. It goes, “Myself I shall abhor if I persist in grazing.” Works every time! ) Thanks for reading, xo, B.