Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning, December 19, 2024

A Seasonal Bleat

Gretchen Dow Simpson’s cover, December 2, 1974

Mavis Gallant routinely threw readers off balance with authorial jiu-jitsu, and some of her most unsettling, equilibrium-busting stories are set at Christmas time. These include “O Lasting Peace” (“everyone has a reason for jumping out a window at Christmas and in the spring”); “Rose;” “Virus-X;” “The Other Paris;” “Florida;” “The Sunday After Christmas;” “New Year’s Eve;” “Going Ashore:” these come first to mind, I’m sure you can round out the list. Like one of those tell-all devices deployed by detectives in hazmat suits in crime scene investigation shows - you know, those blue light gizmos that make any traces of blood and semen on the concealing bedspread of the cheap motel stand up and wave and call attention to themselves - it was her particular gift to find disappointment wherever it malingered, however well it might have been camouflaged. She excelled at sniffing out the creeping rot in all those human contrivances and endeavours that are fete-like, that centre happiness and delighted surprise: country weekends, birthday parties, seaside holidays, the city of Paris itself. Christmas, so susceptible to tarnish, was the perfect site for her to set up her hunting blind; something always crept out of the woods and into her crosshairs.

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Three guests came to my tiny apartment for dinner the other night, not a big undertaking, no major fussing required. It was fun. It made me think of Auden’s poem “Thank You, Fog,” where he writes of his pleasure at finding himself fog-bound with a trio of friends - Jimmy, Sonia, Tania - in “Wiltshire’s witching countryside for a whole week at Christmas,” his cosmos “contracted to an ancient manor house and four selves joined in friendship…” True, my own more recent situation was not precisely parallel, in that the night was clear, and it was no manor house, but otherwise — just like Auden! (Interesting, too, how in that poem he salutes the nonmigratory birds whose “blood is brisk enough to bide them bide” in that cold climate all year round: the merle and the mavis.)

At the end of the evening, my little dinner party done, there were the usual and genuine protestations of “sorry to leave you with such a mess, can’t we stay and help,” and I made the usual “no-no” deflections, about which I was sincere. There’s nothing I love better than that hour, or hour and a half, of solitude after guests have decamped when you can think things through and take the time to restore order and let the quiet creep back into its accustomed corners. I have a soundtrack for this happy work of resettlement, the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Post-party cleanup isn’t the only time I avail myself of that melancholy and confessional tonic but, reliably, it’s to Joni I turn to keep me company when the company has gone and I scrape plates and wash glasses and drink the dregs of whatever wine remains. I worry that when I die — not long to wait! — and I appear at the pearly gates, St. Peter will say to me, “We have something to show you,” and then I’ll be forced to watch a long reel of life-outtakes in which I’ll be lurching drunkenly around one of my by now many kitchens, swilling plonk from a bottle, and howling from the immortal “Case of You:”

“On the back a cartoon coaster

In the blue TV screen light

I drew a map of Canada,

O, Canada…”

This performance is from 1974.

Oddly enough, in these clean-up moments I often think of Mavis, too, in part because the theme of Blue is exile, which was very much her turf, and also because her Canadian painter friend, Joe Plaskett, was fond of memorializing the remnants of feasting. Before I clean up the crime scene I enjoy taking in the table, the crumbs, the clutter, the odd geometries of dishes and flatware: the evidence that something happened here. Look. That candle wick is sill smoking. The lipstick on that champagne flute is still fresh. What would Joe have done with this, I wonder. And how many times would an empty place at the table in the dining room of his ancient pile in the Marais have been occupied by Mavis? Often, I suspect.

Joe Plaskett

Blue, from 1971, and “Thank You, Fog,” from 1973, and my favourite Mavis Gallant Christmas-themed story are remnants of the same cultural moment. It was fifty years ago that “Irina” was first published in the New Yorker, the issue of December 2, 1974. I read it again last night and, like Blue (with its by now anthemic seasonal classic “River”), it’s perfect for the season. Evergreen, it never fades, and it always discloses something new. Somewhere in its inner depths there’s a little ornament that was always there but that you’ve never seen before.

Irina is fantastically concentrated, an engrossing piece of chamber music, a trio — Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock, say, where you pay mind to the pianist and the clarinetist, of course, but the soprano is the main focus of your intention. Irina is the lead, and with her on the stage - her small apartment in a modern building in a Swiss alpine village - are her lover, Alec Aiken, and her grandson, Richard, known as Riri. Richard, who has arrived from Paris, traveling by himself for the first time, was named for his grandfather, Irina’s late husband, Richard Notte, a celebrated Swiss novelist. Riri has been farmed out to his grandmother because of a family complication: his mother, her daughter, is having an unforeseen surgery.

On the cusp of adolescence, Riri is old enough to have made his way on his own by plane, by train, but he’s still a child in need of supervision, direction, nurture. At this kind of loving dispensation, Irina excels. She raised and launched her own four children all the while looking after her genius husband (twice her age) who was a hypochondriac, a narcissist, a needy case of arrested development: i.e., a child himself. Free of him now, she has become the lover of an elderly man, Alec, whose health is precarious, who drinks too much, who is shaky on his feet, who has given her ample cause for worry. The quotidian requirements of motherhood she set aside years ago, but Irina’s life still runs on the narrow gauge tracks of patience, concern, and vigilance. She is a paragon, an avatar of caring. Riri could not have come to better place in this moment of family crisis.

There’s so much I love about “Irina.” Let me count the ways. I love how it’s dense but airy, a study of a woman in her own domain - the flat is hers - ministering gladly, also ironically, to the requirements of an old man and a man in the making. I love how here MG does that thing she sometimes does and names a specific date, not because it’s important in the context of world history - Pearl Harbour, or the JFK assassination, or the Edict of Nantes or whatever - but because it’s meaningful, for small, private reasons, to her characters, and, I would wager, to MG, too.

May 26. That’s the date that figures in Irina, with no year attached. May 26 at some time the evermore distant past. There’s a section of the narrative where Irina and Alec banter. trotting out their respective versions of some defining moment in their relationship - presumably the day, years and years ago, when their mutual love became apparent, perhaps the day of their first lovemaking. It’s plainly a fond nod from MG to another writer, her beloved Colette, who wrote Gigi, which became the musical in which Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold sing - very much in the spirit of Irina and Alec - “I Remember It Well.”

Why, of all the possible dates she might have chosen, would MG have settled on May 26? I can’t imagine it was random; what does it signify? Was it there for only person to recognize and understand? A signal?

MG made a kind “Irina c’est moi,” remark to one interviewer (were I in a more thorough mood I’d search out who and when) and I love the way she folds aspects of herself, or her own biography, into her character - her arthritis, a family ring bestowed, a family ring sold in time of need. And what of the setting? Did MG harbour special feelings or a particular fondness for Switzerland, where some of her most unusual stories find purchase? And what I love above all is the combination of imagination, observation, experience, and something spookier, a kind of mediumship, that allows her to get Riri so exactly right.

How old is he? I’d guess eleven, no older than twelve. It’s no small feat for a childless woman in her early 50’s, as Gallant then would have been, to so precisely and fondly inhabit the mind of a prepubescent school boy. I love that she does so, and how she does so, by way of highlighting the secret tokens he carries in his pockets, and how things are ordered in his knapsack, and his hesitant, necessary testing of authority, and the mysterious arcane ways in which experiences are assigned precedence: how, at the end of an eventful day, the one thing Riri can think to tell his father on the phone is that he had a swallow of something alcoholic. I love the way she writes about how the one thing that impresses the boy about the lacquered box he chooses as a gift - a box cherished by Irina, a childhood souvenir - is that the lid fits. I love how, in a tender moment between the two when Irina shows her grandson how she washes her amber beads, the one thing that interests him is the electricity they generate when rubbed with a clean cloth. That is just so — boy. But if I had to name one thing I love above all the others - this would change on another reading, no doubt, as soon as tomorrow - it would come down to a single sentence from the story’s midway point, a description of Riri’s arrival at her flat. It’s late. The child has traveled all day, has followed the instructions he was given, has found his way to his grandmother’s flat. He sees that she has both a knocker and a bell. He knocks. He rings. No one comes. He knocks and rings again. Gallant writes: “It was not nervousness that he felt but a new sensation that had to do with a shut, foreign door.” That she knew such a feeling existed, the she could name it, and that she would assign it to him in that moment is just so damn perfect. Love, love, love.

Out of a perverse curiosity, I decided to engage “Grok,” the AI assistant on X, in a bit of back and forth about Irina. Grok’s machine intelligence is impressive, for sure, and when I offered a correction Grok didn’t take it amiss, went back to the files and replied very cogently in the space of about two seconds. I feel quite sure, however, that Grok will never be able to divine the possibility of a new sensation that had to with a shut, foreign door.

Sharing the pages with Irina in that December 2, 1974 issue of the New Yorker was another great voice of the twentieth century, one of my favourite poets, John Ashbery. I bet this was chosen because it complements so perfectly MG’s story.

City Afternoon

A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of them now
Sucked screaming through old age and death.

If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting too

But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool.

And finally, Auden, recorded in 1973, with “Thanks You, Fog.” Merry Christmas, thanks for reading, BR