Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, Erratum
that's, like, latin for screw up
No entry for June 3 other than to acknowledge my GRIEVOUS error of a day or two back when I posted a Man Ray photograph of the jazz harpist Daphne Hellman which was, in fact, a Man Ray photograph of the French actress Catherine Deneuve. I’d like to think this could happen to anyone. Probably, that’s not so. Oh, well. This likely means, as errors pertaining to divas always do, that I’ll be compelled to surrender my Gay License; but as it’s been years since I’ve been carded or otherwise had occasion to use it, I don’t expect anything like a material change in my circumstances. If it’s wrested from my grasp, my principal form of ID will be my Barbecue Chicken Frequent Buyer Card, which now has stamp marks obscuring 8 of the ten small fowl with which it’s emblazoned. The loss of that would hurt, for it is to me a precious, precious thing.
Here’s Daphne for real, but is this a Man Ray portrait? The search engine suggests so, but I can’t find the same telltale MR you can plainly see on the Deneuve photo.
(Looking upon Daphne, her faced striped by the shadows of the strings, I remember how I loved — as a child, I mean — to take from the kitchen drawer the little gizmo that was a hard-boiled egg slicer —
— and walk about the house plucking the thin metal slicey bits, as though it were a lyre. I was the Orpheus of Hearne Avenue, at least, in my own mind.
Here’s some info, via Sotheby’s, on the Deneuve portrait, from 1968. Note how it sold — not sure of the date of the auction — for well over the anticipated price.
I should also extend my apologies to whoever the lucky (and filthy, filthy rich) bidder, whose proprietary rights I’ve surely violated with these unauthorized reproductions, and to whoever manages the Man Ray estate, who might be properly peeved not only at the misattribution but with my wildly cavalier ways with copy and paste. I once chose a hotel in Montparnasse solely on the basis that Man Ray had been a guest there — this because I am what the French delight in calling “un vrai star fucker.” What hotel it was has also been washed from memory; there are several that make the same claim. Man got around.
I thought perhaps I could turn this Catherine Deneuve / Daphne Hellman snafu to my advantage, thought I might make something out of Mavis Gallant’s (MG) friendship with the literary editor and taste-maker Marie Claude de Brunhoff, nee Bloch, who was married for a long stretch to Laurent de B, heir to the Babar empire etc. The connection, I was imagining, would be Catherine Deneuve’s recording of the Francis Poulenc setting, for narrator and piano, of Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar the Little Elephant. When I went to find it I was confronted with yet more evidence of slippage, for the recording I had in mind is, in fact, narrated by Jeanne Moreau. There is, however, a nice rendition, from 1990, of Catherine Deneuve narrating Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis, with a pastoral, even soppy, text by Pierre Louys, for narrator and a small ensemble that includes a pair of harps. This doesn’t exactly circle the square or square the circle but at least it turns harpist Daphne and actor Catherine, both photographed by Man Ray, into comets, winking at one another as their paths briefly intersect, quick as a finger running up the harp strings, a glimmering glissando. The recording lives on Spotify or, if you have the patience for it, you can listen to it track by track on YouTube — probably with many exhortations to try Grammarly.
Finally, here’s Catherine Deneuve as she appears in MG’s short story (1965) “In Transit.” Claire is on her honeymoon with her journalist husband, Philippe Perrigny, who is recently divorced, and the disappointments of marriage, its inconstancies, its invidious comparisons, are already making themselves known, to each of them. It’s a story as powerful as it is short that ends with a kind of vindication for Claire.
I am reminded of how, many years ago, I gave a reading in a public library and when, at the end, I asked if anyone had any questions, a woman raised her hand and told me how much she loved my story about that Christmas Dave cooked the turkey. She had come and she had stayed in the full belief that I was Stuart McLean. “Thank you,” I said, and I say that now, to you, for reading, for your genial corrections, and your future patience. xo, B
P.S. I know that MG and Man Ray were acquainted — both were Left Bank denizens, and he returned to Paris round about the same time she moved there — but does anyone have any more info on that connection?
P.P.S. Here’s Jeanne, because why not?
Your Vinyl Cafe anecdote. Brilliant. You and the librarian must have had a giggle.