Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 1

H. T. in pieces, Part One

The time is 2.58 a.m. And oh, dear. Look at the date. August, already. It’s Swiss National Day — Mavis Gallant (MG) would have known that, I’m sure, she was partial to Switzerland, and to its newspapers, perhaps to chocolates — and the Frank Martin cantata posted above was written to mark that patriotic occasion and first performed on this day in 1941. Never was there a better time to be neutral.

August 1. Soon will dawn the great day, 08.11.22, the 100th anniversary of MG’s birth, and my own 67th, a ho-hum age if ever one could be named. Old enough to die, but young enough to live another thirty years. There is still much to do, quite a lot of it in the next 10 days. I’m inhabited by a familiar, unwelcome feeling — I’ve moved house a LOT in my life — which is the one that grips you when you’ve committed to vacating a residence and new tenants have signed a lease and your movers have been booked and you’ve gathered up all the boxes — though never as many as you’ll actually need — and now you have to begin the horrible business of sorting, of keeping or discarding. I am surrounded by the bits and bobs of an MG miscellany, as though someone has scattered the pieces of half-a-dozen puzzles all over the floor, and there's no hope in hell of putting them all together in a way that will make visual or narrative sense. I can only gather them up in handfuls and deal them out as a croupier might chips, letting them fall where they may. Les jeux sont faits and all that. May luck be with me.

Before coming to today’s theme — which with be the next entry’s theme, too — I’ll remind you that on August 10, at 7 PM — that’s 5 AM, August 11, in Paris — at St. James’ Anglican Church, 303 E Cordova St, at Gore, I’m sponsoring a compline service to celebrate the MG centennial. No doubt many other festivities have been planned: county picnics, fireworks, orchestras and choirs assembled to perform compositions commissioned for the day, all gathered together on barges that are poled down the Thames by liveried, licensed barge polers. Compline will be a quieter affair, as comping is: an occasion for inward looking. Father Kevin Hunt, the Rector of St. James’, will be the officiant. There’ll be gorgeous music, chanting from different traditions. There’ll be liturgy. There’ll be time for reflection. MG will, of course, be represented. How? That’s something for me to figure. I hope to post an audio recording of the proceedings here on the 11th. If you’re in Vancouver, and have the evening free, you are welcome to attend. You should come, just for the pleasure of the environment. I’m told by very reliable sources that the architect Arthur Erickson thought St. James’ to be Vancouver’s finest building. About this I’m insufficiently educated to opine, but I can affirm with certainty that it’s a site of historic and spiritual importance, and a very, very beautiful space.

Ok, back to the matter at hand. Yesterday, noting that the Bayreuth Festival had just re-opened — with great fanfare, after the two year COVID-imposed closure — I posted a brief excerpt from a fascinating — gripping would not be too strong a word — conversation, originally reported in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, between Mavis Gallant (MG) and Marta Dvorak. They were speaking about MG’s connections — longstanding and deep — to the visual arts and to music. MG noted that, in the 60’s, she’d been a regular at the Bayreuth Festival. Bayreuth tickets have never been easy to come by; Wagnerites all over the world — this has long, long been the case — wait for years and years for their chance to secure a place in the legendary hall, to experience first-hand the famous “Bayreuth hush,” and then the thunder. That MG was able to get tickets was remarkably lucky, or happened via connections, either in the business — someone well-placed at The New Yorker? — or on the ground. MG told Marta she had some Bayreuth cohorts; whether or not they assisted with tickets, they provided a place to stay.

Bear that in mind and click on this, and study this listing of families with the surname Thaufelder. Note where many of them live. (Here is a partial screenshot of what you’ll see via the link. )

Thaufelder must be a Bavarian, even a Bayreuth name — Eckersdorf, often featured, is, I believe, a Bayreuth “bedroom community.” Why Thaufelder? This is not the first time the surname has come up in this diary.

This is the photo of MG — you’ve seen this before — that appeared on the book jacket for her collection My Heart is Broken, New York, Random House, 1964.

And this is the photo credit.

“Who is / was Heinz Thaufelder?” was the reasonable question I asked myself when I first took note of that photo credit. I couldn’t find much. He was not, first and foremost, a photographer. Must have been a friend or acquaintance. He was also an author — of a technical manual.

There was a patent listed in his name that suggested he worked in some area of physics, or telecommunication.

There was also this.

And not much else. Why did it matter? Was my interest prurient, or verging on it? Did it occur to me to wonder — silently, in some not very subterranean chamber of my black little heart — about whether they were close? Oh, Bill. Why be coy? Of course I considered it. Who would not? It’s a great photo, she cared enough about it to use it, he must have been someone to her. That said, I know very well that her relationship with Heinz, whatever it was, is none of my business, and none of yours, either; nothing is less decorous than sniffing the linens. I have no way of delineating the parameters of their friendship and, in truth and in fact, have not much interest in the details. But, as it turns out, we can learn a lot about Heinz Thaufelder via the primary source, via MG herself. In her own writing, she tells us a lot about him. He wa a person of more than casual interest, especially as he connects to a suite of German-themed stories from the early 60’s.

A major plank of MG’s platform, remember, was the examination of the German conscience in the years after the war; was trying to understand, on a human level, how what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945 could possibly have taken place; how so much was allowed to go so wrong. Heinz Thaufelder was an important informant. About those stories, and what I’m pretty sure he brought to them, I’ll have more to say when next we meet; for the time being, here are a few notes I made while re-reading The Events In May, her detailed diary of the student uprisings of 1968. All MG’s friends and acquaintances are named by initial; no one appears more often than H. T. He’s pretty much a daily presence. His character — essentially conservative, guarded, skeptical, rational, perhaps cynical — can be easily discerned from the few details MG provides in her quick diary sketches. (I could be wrong about H. T. being Heinz Thaufelder, but I’d be very surprised if the case is otherwise.)

May 4. H. T. caught in traffic jam around Saint-Germain-Saint-Michel in midst of student disorders. Says this is “different” — they all seem very young. He sees a barricade made of parked cars they have moved away from the curb. Is very impatient — hates disorder.

May 13. H. T. saw the cortege taking off from the Place de la Republique. He wants to know why there was no delegation of people whose cars were burned last Friday night.

May 18. So shocked to see Stalin that H. T., Z., and I stare. … H. T. steers Z. and me away before polemic develops. … [H. T.] is disturbed at the filth of the place. “They have been given their university now to do as they like with and this is all they can do — parler et pisser.”

May 20. Banks vote to strike. H.T. very kindly turns up with a hundred dollars in case of bank strikes. No one but H.T. would think of this.

May 22. H. T. says Stalin’s picture is gone from the Sorbonne. … Cash check with no problem, so as to repay H. T.

May 23. There were about five thousand kids last night — more than I’d imagined. … H. T. says that it was a mixture of students and toughs, that they set fire to the garbage that is all over the streets. … H.T. describes non-stop discussion at Faculte des Sciences. Each laboratory to be on its own, a private soviet. “But where is the money to come from? They are dividing up a cake they haven’t got.”

May 24. H. T. dined with friends in the Latin Quarter last night, came out to a wall of flame. Girl with their party had to get home. (“My mother will be frantic.”), no phone. H. ties a handkerchief over the girl’s face (tear gas) and they walk across the Rue des Ecoles between a burning barricade and the lined up police. Leaves her at her door, walks back. Tells this as he might say, “I walked along the Seine.” Have never seen him frightened at any time, but he does have an odd tendency (a European tendency, I’d say) to be aggressive with the police, and that could have been the only danger. … H.T., who loathes destruction, suddenly bursts out, “Ils n’ont jamais connu la misere!” He was a brilliant scholarship boy from a poorish family, has a reverence for universities, for learning, for the very stones of an old school.

May 25. H. T. calls from the Select, comes round, tells me about last night. In Les Halles, the new manifestants overturning crates of food, fruit, smashing, spilling. … Parisians don’t deserve their beautiful city, he said.

May 26. Say to H. T., “Nothing shows. This could be any Parisian street, any Sunday. Nothing looks different. But in here…” — meaning the knot in the stomach.

May 27. H. T. gets up during meeting where everyone is discussing committees and sub-committees and how each laboratory will shift for itself (with what funds?). He says, “Et pendant ce temps-la, qui fera de la physique?”

May 29. H.T. turns up… tells me episode in life of Schiller that illustrates the present situation.

May 30. Where is H.T.?

June 1. H. T. saw the demonstrations from someone’s apartment over the Bretagne cinema. He says there were easily fort-five thousand people — he could see all the way up the boulevard, and made some sort of numbers-rate-and-distance calculation. Says dryly, “But if I had seen you, I’ve have subtracted one.”

June 2. Conversation with H.T. Repeat question I was asked late Friday night: What was it we wanted?

H. T. How he entered MG’s life, how long he remained, how and when he exited I have no idea. Eventually, some biographer will source and reveal the details. Whatever the particulars of their connection, H. T. to MG was more than incidental. A lover? He may have been. More importantly — for she never really left journalism behind — he was a source. More about that next time. Thanks for reading, xo, B