Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 33

Throw out those horrible lamp posts

May 25, 3.06 a.m.

Got home from work yesterday, feeling low. Had endured an end-of-shift dressing down from my supervisor, whose mother, for heaven’s sake, must be about 20 years my junior. (To be clear, I admire my boss, respect her. She’s intelligent, has a gift for authority and, like any other gift, its application has nothing to do with age or gender and it shouldn’t be susceptible to deference.) Part of my job is to fill holes on the shelves — I’m a buyer, or “order writer,” which is an early morning assignment, which explains the bizarre hour for lobbing out these meandering missives — and it seems I’ve been buying TOO MUCH. The evening shift can’t keep up with the colourful carnival of dry goods I cause to arrive with a mere click of an ordering gun, neatly aimed at a barcode. This boon to the grocery shopping public gets hauled into port after I am safely out of there, arrives on the loading dock, all embalmed in plastic and stacked high upon one, or two, or sometimes three palettes — also known as skids — all of them requiring liberating and sorting onto carts and then transporting to the shelves and being placed accurately thereupon. Confronted with the error of my ways, and none too subtly, I was more defensive than was ideal, probably because, well, she was right, and it’s not the first time we’ve had this discussion, truth be told. She is correct in pointing out that if a space can accommodate, let’s say, 20 bottles of, let’s say, canola oil, and there are, let’s say, 10 on the shelf, and perhaps, let’s say, 2 might be purchased over the course of the day, leaving on said shelf an entire octave of canola, which might be, let’s say, a 4-day supply, then there is no need to commandeer from the vendor a case load of a dozen for the sole purpose that they will address the void and fill the shelf completely. I get that. It’s not rocket science. I just happen to think that repleteness is a good look, even if it’s not really a word, and it’s not my money I’m spending, after all, so — why not?

It is possible I’m not ideally suited to my present situation, given that my decisions have more to do with aesthetics than with brute practicality, fiscal prudence, and the chiropractic well-being of my co-workers. But truly, who wants to go shopping and wander aisles with shelves through which the winds can whistle, and think, “Yeesh, looks like Moscow circa 1978?” Why not have plenitude when plenitude is still possible? I suspect it shortly won’t be. So what if those evening shift workers wear themselves to a frazzle trying to load up all that stock? They’re young! They’re resilient! And don’t they know who I am? AN ARTIST? With a VISION? To which they are SUBSERVIENT?

Sigh. Apparently not.

Anyway, got home, feeling low, and was considerably cheered — I may have trilled aloud, “Goody, goody!” — to see a big old box in front of my door, bearing the marks of the U.S. postal service, thoughtfully deposited by the letter carrier, and knew it to be yet another of the many books I insist on ordering from sundry online sources — paid for, I’ll have you know, with my very own money, earned from buying apparently way too many dry goods for a store that doesn’t appreciate me as properly it should, they’ll be sorry when I’m gone, let me tell you. All of these volumes, some rare, some not, are purchased to sustain and bolster my ongoing beatification, or whatever this is, of Mavis Gallant (MG), in this, her centennial year.

This is from 1964, and it’s hard to find, especially in pristine condition, which this copy certainly is: a real collectible. It feels good to hold, weighty, clean, the binding tight, and I love the design, how the fuchsia and red and the font — set ironically against that classic endpaper marbling — speak so clearly of that epoch: exactly the same design sense you might find enlivening, let’s say, a movie poster for, let’s say, The Pink Panther, maybe, or Sex and the Single Girl.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank Mary Meade Harnett, the former owner, for taking such good care of the book that now is mine and will probably soon be bedight with coffee rings. Of course I wondered about Mary, nosey parker that I am, and it didn’t take much more than a minute to find this much out.

She was from an old American family, Great Four Hundred, Mayflower stock, was a stellar student, a Radcliffe grad, published fiction in The Harvard Advocate, worked in publishing and for the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as for various heritage enterprises in and around D.C. and Virginia, was active, visible, and respected in the community until about 2018 or so, when she more or less drops from view. What happened to her remains — “cremains,” as I guess we say, an unfortunate coinage — when they were divvied up and sent off to California and Colorado, I have no way of knowing. Scattered. Stored. Those are pretty much the options, in my experience. None of this is material, it’s a distraction, foot-notery, but not irrelevant, bibliographically.

Here’s a photo of the photo of MG on the back cover. It’s not dated; if it was current at the time of publication, probably it was, she would have been 40-ish. To me she looks in equal measure intense and dreamy.

I always pay attention to photo credits — does anyone else remember that long season when no one but Jerry Bauer or Jill Krementz took author portraits, they really had the market cornered — and I wondered about Heinz Thaufelder. Who was he, and who was he to her, to MG? That name — how many Heinz Thaufelders could there have been? — is attached to a patent having to do with the early days of television, and to an academic thesis, Universite de Paris, published in 1966.

He also rates a passing mention — again, assuming it’s the same Heinz Thaufelder — in a book about the dire situation endured by the German population in the years after the war, though in what capacity he’s referenced, I can’t say. In the diary MG kept in May and the first week or so of June, 1968, her account of the student uprising, one of the friends MG identifies by initials is H.T. Could that be Heinz? It could be, might be, but just as easily might not, and anyway, what would it matter, one way or the other? Was he a friend, a lover, someone she met once at a party when he happened to have a camera, a stranger or passing acquaintance who did her a photographic favour and remembered to pop the 3 X 5 in the mail, as he promised he would? Again, as with Mary Meade Harnett, what material difference does it make? None.

I’ve been asked to do a CBC interview about this diary, and the MG centennial, am not sure when or even if it will take place. Anticipating the line of questioning, I wondered how I might respond to such perfectly reasonable, utterly basic queries such as “What interests you about MG?” I wish I were pure and noble enough to be able to answer, honestly, that my fascination begins and ends with the text. That’s a big part of it, of course; if forced to break it down by a Board of Inquiry convened for that purpose I’d estimate that the stories, the journalism — let’s just call it The Writing — represent the most sizeable percentage of the tug MG exerts. But the life is also compelling. MG lived large. She lived freely. She lived in a way that was deliberately uncommon. She wrote, she traveled, she had many friends, she was politically active: she lived in a way that, frankly, invites biographical inquiry, as well she must have known, however much she might have deflected, found tasteless and needless probing inquiries into personal matters: love, money, friendship, family. She must surely have authorized the thumbnail author biographies on all those book jackets, the ones that note the 17 schools she attended, and the distance she put between herself and Montreal, the city that formed her, and her life in Paris where she formed herself, likewise her connection to The New Yorker, that journal of legends. This is as much as to say, “Come find me.”

And yet, and yet, an undeniable and creepy ghoulishness attaches to this sort of dissection, anatomizing. It’s speculative, gossipy. It’s ignoble. It’s also — what? Irresistible. I should set it aside. Reading isn’t a game of gotcha, caught you out, found you hiding in the armoire, and this applies to what one might deduce from the stories themselves as much as to the scraps of biography book jackets disclose. If the mind of the reader goes galloping off following a scented trail, it’s probably not because the writer was actively engaged in a game of hide and seek, or a treasure hunt. If in reading “The Statues Taken Down,” from 1965, and noted in Monday’s entry, I find myself thinking of Dina Vierny, it’s not because that was what MG intended, or that Dina was anywhere within the field of her vision. Although, she may have been.

This is Dina with the sculptor Aristide Maillol. Here’s the idealized Dina, in bronze.

She was a wise young woman, hardly more than a child, when she was introduced to Maillol, already an old man. She was his muse, never his lover. It was she who inspired, who was his model for the astonishing output of his final years. It’s Dina whose spirit inhabits the 17 — fact checkers, please verify — statues in the Tuileries, the statues to which MG alludes in “The Statues Taken Down.” They were a gift to the nation from Dina Vierny who, after the sculptor’s death in 1944, became his executor and heir.

Of Dina and of Maillol, much has been written. Theirs were amazing individual stories, as was the story of their relationship, artist and muse, during wartime. I won’t elaborate here, time and space don’t allow, but any digging you do will be well-rewarded. Dina was a refugee, from Moldavia, a Jew, an extremely intelligent young woman with a close relationship to an older man. She was in his thrall and she was in control. These are all the boxes MG might have checked on a form labelled “Points of Interest in the Creation of a Character.” Whether or not MG had Dina in mind when she was writing, in “The Statues Taken Down,” the story of Dorothy, trying to figure out from the available evidence who her famous father is, and who she is in relation to him, who she is as an emerging woman in a world that’s starting to show itself inimical to her own requirements, I can’t say, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a connect the dots drawing where there are no numbers, you just take your pencil and go any which way and then make something of the Rorschach, the cloud floating by that might be a monster, might be a pony. About Maillol and Dina, I have a few more words to spill, but that will have to wait. Time has done what time will do, it’s a cad, it’s run out, and left me with the bill. I’ve got to get to the store and do what I should also do here, which is exercise restraint. I have been warned. I am observed. Someone will draw their own conclusions. Thanks for reading, xo, B