Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, July 14

Allons, enfants...

Alice Sapritch

3.07 a.m. I know, I know. Am supposed to be on a mini-sabbatical, but it’s Bastille Day, after all. Buttonhole a layperson in the street and inquire whether he/she/they can cite a single fact about Mavis Gallant (MG) and, if yes, it will certainly be that she lived in Paris. The city — really, France as a whole, but Paris most particularly, likewise the south — is a character in so many of her stories, and she brings to it, and to her shrewd analysis of French character and sensibility her accustomed wit and acerbity.

This morning, just because the day is the day, I offer a couple of MG rarities that seem to fit the moment, though not the present season; chances are good, I’d wager, you haven’t seen them before. I don’t think "Paris When It Shimmers", published in the New York Times Magazine, October 4, 1987, has been anthologized; too bad, because it’s simply marvellous, a fond and funny look at Paris at Christmas time, a season MG very, very often invokes in her stories. I hope it’s not paywalled. Here’s a short excerpt, to whet your appetite. Any errors here — e.g. absence of accents and other diacriticals — are as they appear on the NYT website; these are, as you’d expect, less usual now than when the site was in its relative infancy.

I knew nothing about Alice Sapritch (1916 - 1990), who was MG’s neighbour, until I read about her in the diary excerpts published in the Paris Review in 2003. These are, I’m pretty sure, available in their glorious entirety only to subscribers, which I am, for I am very high-flying, but as I’m also in a Bastille-storming frame of mind I’m going to treat you to some cunning screen shots of what MG wrote, facsimiles that I made right here in my very own bed via the simple expedient of shift / command / 3. I very much doubt anyone at the Paris Review is paying attention to my “journaling” — for surely to God they would have been in touch, astonished that I’ve been here all their lives and that somehow they never knew — but all it will take to get me to remove them is a sternly worded invitation to discuss the matter over tea and madeleines from a lawyer with a truly fancy Paris address. Also a plane ticket, business class. One way would be fine. If this whets your appetite to find out more about Alice Sapritch, I recommend this and this and also this. Oh, and this. And this is great if you like movies about creepy, repressed librarians with secrets. If you don’t, why the hell are you hanging out here? Watch, from 1973, Une Atroce Petite Musique; it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak French, it’s worth it for the scene with the pistol: every librarian’s fantasy vis a vis the querulous, intractable patron.

Okay. Fini. Enough. Have to get to work. Thanks for reading. Happy Bastille Day a tous. Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Etc. xo, B

P.S. from B.R. (there must be a noun missing, between “ses” and “sont” in this Alice summation — cendres? No, I think “restes” is the word usually used for what we’ve come to call “cremains,” which has about it the elegance and hybrid appeal of craisins, which I routinely scatter at the store when I fill the appropriate bulk bin.)

PPS — it may be time for me to do a file purge. Here’s my desktop as of now, 07.14.22, 4.47 a.m.