June 1, 3.17 a.m.
Feeling better today, much improved, thanks for asking. Back to work. Took a gentle invalid midday stroll around Lost Lagoon to have a gander at this spring’s goslings - some already cocky adolescents, a few latecomers, new borns, cute, eager, hungry. Some families of 8 little ones, some of only 2. Goose population is one of the issues with which the city contends, council sub-committees must meet early in the New Year and study reports from the field. Agents are dispatched at whatever the appropriate time to locate the nests and addle the eggs, to safeguard against the future inconvenience of too much sole-sullying poop. I guess something has to be done, though I don’t think I’d much enjoy the labour of egg addling. Quite a few adults, mostly in pairs, hanging around with nothing to tend to other than preening and waddling. No one on to whom they can pass all they’ve learned about the business of being a goose. Web maintenance. Chevron planning. Hunter avoidance. Honking.
On with the business at hand. Yesterday’s diary entry — I’ve lost track of the numbering — had Mavis Gallant (MG) peering in through the window while I dipped and dodged around her, talking about harps and harpists and who they wind up marrying and what happens next. It’s a new day, and a new month, and a new beginning, so let’s get back on track. Let’s give MG the opening salvo.
“On a bright morning in June I arrived in Montreal, where I’d been born, from New York, where I’d been living and going to school. My luggage was a small suitcase and an Edwardian picnic hamper — a preposterous piece of baggage my father hand brought from England some twenty years before; it had been with me since childhood, when his death turned my life into a helpless migration.”
This is from “In Youth is Pleasure,” one of the Linnet Muir stories collected in Home Truths. The narrator, Linnet, is a proxy for MG; Linnet’s journey and Linnet’s eccentric luggage were also MG’s. Let’s suppose, as we reasonably can, that MG, in those early years of the war, had in her picnic hamper the same few belongings as Linnet ferried across the border: some socialist pamphlets, and “the poems and journals I had seen fit to accompany me into my new, unfettered existence…” The urgent need to write poetry was soon to leave her, to break like a fever, and the journals she wouldn’t keep but would burn in a few years time before she hit the dusty trail yet again and moved, permanently, to Europe in 1951: an even more thorough unfettering than had been her return to Montreal, the discarding of her girlhood. What they contained, the diaries in the hamper — precious remnant — will never be known, not substantially, but I’d hazard a guess she used them, in part, to keep track of her dreams, as she would do, I’m reliably told, in the journals she continued to keep after 1951, winding it down around the year 2000, and excerpts from which she published with some regularity from the mid-80’s on.
Dreams are all through the stories, as populous as geese. Flip randomly through any of the collections and it won’t take long to find them.
“My mother dreamed she saw a young woman pushed off the top of a tall building. The woman plunged, head first, with her wedding veil streaming.” Across the Bridge
“She dreamed of being engulfed, of seeking refuge on rooftops. Within the dream her death seemed inevitable.” The Four Seasons
“I dreamed of food. Pilar dreamed of things chasing her, and Pablo dreamed of me, and Carlos dreamed of baked ham and Madeira sauce.” When We Were Nearly Young
“A dream of loss came back. She had been ordered to find new names for refugee children whose names had been forgotten.” The Remission
You could fill a commonplace book with them, truly, dreams, and dreamers, and speculation about they portend. A day or two back, I wrote about MG’s 1984 short story “Overhead in a Balloon,” in which dreams and their interpretation — via one of those one-size-fits-all-what-your-dreams-are-telling-you books — are a recurring and comic theme.
It was this mention of harps in dreams, and her allusion to the Mozart Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, that sent me spiralling off on yesterday’s mostly needless tangent pertaining to the American harp soloist — The Queen of the Harp, as she was inevitably called — Mildred Dilling, famous as a recitalist, harp collector, and teacher, most notably of Groucho Marx. There are certain strands — they look suspiciously like harp strings — that were left dangling, ungrounded wires that need bundling together before we can safely proceed. So, here goes.
Mildred was the subject of a 1940 New Yorker profile.
In this entertaining portrait, E. J. Kahn — already an able writer, just then a few years out of Harvard — mentions a recital given in 1930 by some of Mildred’s pupils, including Daphne Bayne, whom he notes had since married Henry A. Bull, also known as Harry, the editor of Town and Country. If that name sounds familiar, it may be because Henry / Harry led off the previous entry of these Mavis Gallant inspired diaries: his was the sad story — a few were told yesterday — of the man who was found dead in the morning, in his apartment kitchen, by the day maid, cold and motionless in front of the active gas range, his dinner still in the oven. The preliminary finding was of accidental death, death by misadventure, but one has to wonder. I said that it was MG who, however inadvertently, led me to Henry, and also to harps. The best route to the how of it is to walk backwards. It won’t take long.
In 1990, 50 years after The New Yorker published “The Harp Lady,” another profile appeared, this one on Christmas Eve, with substantially the same title, “Harp Lady.” The writer was the ace music journalist, Whitney Balliett. In the latter day version, one Daphne Bayne, who rated a quick passing mention in the Mildred Dilling piece of half-a-century prior, now known as Daphne Hellman, was the subject of the piece; a more engaging one could not be imagined. Here I prove a link, though it may be paywalled. I hope you get to it minus a subscription to the magazine; I can’t recommend the piece highly enough, both for story and for the uplift provided by the writing itself. If you’re sad, it will make you happy. If you’re happy, it will remind you of why.
New Yorker Profile Daphne Hellman, 1990
Here’s a capsule version of Daphne’s story, lifted from a biographical dictionary of jazz musicians — she was classically trained, but it was a jazz player, especially with her group Hellman’s Angels, that she made her reputation and built her career. (Note that her most inclusive name would have been Daphne Van Beuren Bayne Bull Hellman Shih.)
Quite how I managed to live so long upon the Earth without hearing of Daphne Hellman — I hadn’t until a few weeks back — I can’t say. Many are my lacunae. The whistling sound you hear when I walk is the breeze blowing through them. Hers was an amazing life, and were it not for MG, I would know nothing about it. Born to great wealth, educated at all the best schools, given harp lessons as a social appurtenance, the instrument became her passport to la vie boheme. Like MG, she lived freely, embraced the world with all her improvisatory might. About her advantages — she was, apart from anything else, extraordinarily beautiful — she was unapologetic. She had houses and apartments she could drift between, and she did, she could travel freely, and she did, she could buy art, and she did — many museums were the beneficiaries of her bequests — but she could also haul her harp into the subway and play with her friend and roommate Mr. Spoons, she could travel to India to visit her daughter, Daisy Paradis, a sitar virtuoso, or to California to hear her son, the great guitarist SandyBull, and while there, in Delhi or in LA, perform on the streets, as she did in Paris, summer after summer. Did MG see her there? Stop and wonder? She was accustomed to perks, absolutely, but money can’t buy you the gift for life, for living, that inhabited Daphne. I don’t have the time or capacity to say all, or even a tiny portion, of what can or should be said. I can only assure you that it will make your day, it will frack your shale, will addle your eggs, if you take 12 minutes and watch this gorgeous little documentary tribute made by one of her grandchildren, K. C. Bull. It will break your heart and make you glad.
I admire her absence of repentance, her je ne regrette rien attitude towards such life events as the three marriages that went south. Husband three who disappeared, husband one who knelt before the oven, and husband two with whom she got along but with whom life was impossible but whose name, Hellman, she kept for professional reasons. I got to Daphne via Geoffrey T. Hellman, whom she married in Reno minutes after her divorce from Henry Bull, and I got to Geoffrey T. Hellman because I was writing about MG. It was MG who led me to Mildred and it was Mildred who led me to Geoffrey, who then led me to Daphne, who made me richer. Did you follow all that? Probably not. To further complicate things, understand that the Mildred to whom I’ve just referred is not the harp queen Mildred Dilling, but rather Mildred Wood, whom we met some weeks ago. Mildred Wood was the editor at The New Yorker who pulled MG’s work from the over-the-transom slush pile. Everybody sing! You must remember this, obits are still obits, to die is still to die.
Mildred, as an editor, a word-fluffer, was an offstage presence, an invisible hand at the magazine. What little I found out about her came from sources other than The New Yorker itself. I didn’t think I’d find any mention made of her when I searched the magazine’s own website; I was almost right in that expectation. She does, as it turns out, come up twice in connection to a pair of very brief “Talk of the Town” contributions. In those days — this was so until fairly recently — those opening reports were unsigned, were provided by the stable of staff writers. Mildred Wood is attached to two of them not as the unique author, but with a shared credit. From June 2, 1950:
The copy is faint in reproduction. It reads, “A young mother called on a contemporary, the mother of a strenous three-year-old son. She found her friend lying down reading a nove. "Where's Bobo?" the visitor asked. "How do you manage this?" Bobo's mother said she had worked out a system that worked for about 20 minutes. Presently a banging was heard at the head of the stairs and the descending small feet. "Come on, darling," his mother called. "Uncle De Witt's still here!" There was a quick shuffle up the stairs, then quiet." "I never use the system unless I'm completely exhausted," said the boy's mother.”
Mildred Wood and Geoffrey T. Hellman, in the index, are both listed as authors. Why would this be, for something that looks like the work of 10 minutes? Who was Mildred Wood to this throw-away filler? Was she one of the mothers? Did she provide the story, the anecdote, and then hand it over to Geoffrey to write it for publication, to give it that “Talk of the Town” sheen? It hardly matters. The point is, I was looking into the whys and wherefores of MG, and that brought me to Mildred and through Mildred, I found Geoffrey — who is his own great study, as it turns out — and via Geoffrey, into whose life I looked, I found my way to his ex-wife Daphne, and Daphne led me to joy, and joy is in short supply. It can be yours if you read that 1990 New Yorker profile linked above, or her obituary, from August 8, 2002. It’s time well-spent.
MG led to Mildred Wood led to Geoffrey led to Daphne led to Mildred Dilling led back again to MG. This is what reading should do and should be: an opening, a portal, a widening of the world. A joining of the circle. It should surprise. It should delight.
I hear you say, “We get the point. Are we done now? Can we wake up from our dream of harps?” Almost. While we’re connecting all the dots, you might recall that, last week, I shared the letter sent me by Don Davis, who kept as a sentimental token the pen MG used to sign his copy of Home Truths. It’s something we do as a species, collect such tokens of greatness. I mentioned my own desk-side installation of Audrey Hepburn’s cigarette butts and her lipstick stained cup, and referenced a recent memoir about the gathering of celebrity remnants, a fan tribute called Nina Simone’s Gum. With this in mind, I was intrigued to read, at the end of the New Yorker profile, 1940, Mildred’s story of how her star pupil, Harpo Marx, once stuck his gum on the underside of her harp bench; she left it there as a good luck charm, as who would not. After playing a concert at a New York City boys’ school, she told that story of Harpo’s was of Wrigley’s to her young audience. One of them, when her back was turned, before she left the school, pinched it. It’s strange how all these things come together, is it not? Well. I find it so. Strange and satisfying. And spooky, a bit.
I’ll end with this, circling back to where this began a few days ago when I first mentioned MG’s story “Overhead in a Balloon.” It appeared in the New Yorker, July 2, 1984.
Here’s an enlargement of the cartoon on the right, on the story’s second page.
J. B. Handelsman, who died in 2007, was a frequent contributor to the magazine. He drifted back and forth between the US and the UK. His wife, Gertrude Peck, grew up in Michigan. Here’s a recital program from her student days, 1943.
Yep. Gertrude played the harp. Of course she did. Thanks for reading. xo, B
Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 37, Part Two