Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 35.5

Tamavis Gallanowitz

May 30, 3.04 a.m.

Monday. Particularly early start, 4.30 a.m. Heavy ordering day at the store. Many small vendors who need to be contacted, dates set for deliveries throughout the week. Slip-ups are dire. A coveted hot sauce or gluten-free cracker, which must be requested on Monday before 9 and is only available for transport on Wednesdays before noon, could be overlooked, go unaccounted for and plunge some hot sauce or gluten intolerant cracker seeker into the depths of despair as early as Thursday morning by 9. This is how unhingedness begins, or can. Much happiness, even civic harmony, relies on my accuracy and promptitude. So keeping this short.

Was reading somewhere — it might have been in Marta Dvorak’s excellent study Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear — about how MG’s longtime editor, William Maxwell, said — I paraphrase — that the ideas that inform fiction have seasons and paths, that they surface into the light, then bob along on the globe-girdling currents or float on the trade winds and get picked off, retrieved, more or less the same ideas at more or less the same time, but by very different writers in very different parts of the world: strangers who are visited by the same perceptions or intuitions and with them make hay.

MG had a forty-year stint at The New Yorker, 1951 - 1993, more or less. Tama Janowitz was a presence on those pages for a few years in the mid-80’s, 1984 - 1986. I remember reading her first story when it came out, right at the end of the Orwell year. It was smart and funny, a voice both mordant and fresh.

It became the title story — the title slightly revised — of her collection Slaves Of New York. Janowitz, part of a so-called Brat Pack that included Brett Easton Ellis and Jill Eisen and Jay McInerney, was an intimate of Andy Warhol, a Studio 54 regular, one of the Lou Reed / Laurie Anderson / Susan Sontag set. Her sly, satirical take on the art world and the vagaries and hypocrisies of the gallery scene were just right: an insider’s view, informed but detached, tempered by irony.

That was the same year — it was the year of her residency at Massey College — that MG, also a gallery aficionado, and always an able satirist, a gift to which she gave full rein as time went on, published, in The New Yorker, “Overhead in Balloon.”

Walter is a young Swiss man living in Paris, making a tenuous living as an assistant manager of an art gallery. Inadequately and inconveniently housed, he befriends a mediocre painter and moves into a kind of family compound, a situation that proves both bizarre and uncertain.

MG and Tama Janowitz, from their separate vantage points of age — MG in her early 60’s, Janowitz not quite 30 — and separate milieux — the Left Bank, Chelsea — were writing about the end of the bohemian possibility in cities where real estate moguls and developers held all the cards. Mammon won. Eleanor, the eccentric hat maker in the Slaves of New York stories, endures an unsatisfactory relationship with her callow painter boyfriend Stash because, were she to leave him, where would she go? Likewise, Walter, the gallery assistant manager, has no option but to put up with the incursions and humiliations and insecurities that come with his tenancy. Both Eleanor and Walter are in thrall not just to their circumstances but to the cities — that imposed them. A slave of New York. A slave of Paris.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about “Overhead in a Balloon,” and want to write more about it, but, well, Monday. Small vendors, their petty demands, their mewling wants. This brief passage from that story, and its accompanying music, will prepare you, a little, for what is to come.

“Robert got up at five and cleaned his rooms. … The firs thing he did … was to put on a record of Mozart’s Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp. … The Allegro moved in a spiral around the courtyard, climbed above the mended roof, and became thin and celestial.”

This recording of that first movement, with Elaine Shaffer and Marilyn Costello, is one I loved as a kid. The audio here sucks, but sentiment trumps acoustics. Marilyn Costello died in 1998, a few years after retiring from a very long career, more than 40 years, as the principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was a sought after teacher at Curtis — Erica Goodman was one of her Canadian students. (Costello’s obituary in the New York Times notes a stepdaughter in Lillooet, B.C., which is probably its own story.)

Elaine Shaffer was only 47 when she died, in Gstaad, in 1973. She was someone I idolized from the age of 12, when I started studying flute. I learned a lot from listening to her recordings of Bach sonatas and Mozart concertos, including the one referenced here. She started out her musical life playing the timpani in her high school band, was drawn to the flute — easier to carry home, I imagine — and was largely self-taught until she became the student of William Kincaid, the longtime principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Kincaid was a student of Georges Barrere, whose obituary in the New York Times, June 15, 1944, notes that he, Barrere, was famous for his after-dinner speeches. Which makes one nervous. Barrere is now best-remembered for owning the first platinum flute, made for him by the Haynes Company. It was for Barrere and for that instrument that Varese wrote his Density 21.5 — that being the density of platinum. It’s a solo piece, for flute alone, a landmark of 20th century flute repertoire. (MG was very interested in 20th century music, and I expect that Varese was one of the composers she admired.) Barrere’s flute was worthy of note in Time Magazine, in 1935, December 2.

When Georges Barrere arrived in the U. S. 30 years ago he was roundly twitted because he wore a luxuriant spade beard, long pointed mustachios. Through these he managed to play a flute with uncommon skill, but it was not the wooden instrument his colleagues knew. The young Frenchman played a silver flute. Of the 30,000 professional flautists now in the U. S., all but five use an instrument of silver or some cheaper metal. But Georges Barrere, peer of them all, has gone two steps ahead. Ten years ago he took to playing on a $1,000 gold flute. Last week, for the first time in Manhattan, he demonstrated a flute made of platinum. Price: $3,000.

Flutes have been made of wood, bamboo, ivory, jade, rubber, porcelain, crystalline glass, papier-mache, wax and human thigh bones. Flutes have been played by nose as well as by mouth. They were played by Cleopatra's father, by Benvenuto Cellini, Henry VIII, Frederick the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Oliver Goldsmith, George Washington, the first John Jacob Astor. Theobald Boehm, a Bavarian court musician, made the first metal flute in 1847. Professor Dayton Clarence Miller, flute-playing physicist at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, was first to experiment with platinum, proving that the denser the metal, the better the instrument's tone.

Density of silver is 10.5; 14-karat gold, 13.2; pure gold, 19.3; pure platinum, 21.5. Georges Barrere's new flute is 90% platinum, 10% iridium, a combination used for the finest jewelry, rating 21.6 in density. But Mr. Barrere plays any flute so expertly, transmits so much personal charm to his audience, that those who heard him last week, tootling away between two potted palms in a salon at Sherry's, wondered whether they were being impressed by the player or the instrument. Case for the platinum flute would have been more convincing if Barrere had given his listeners a chance to hear the silver and the gold flutes again. But scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories swore that the platinum one was best, said that Barrere had blown all three instruments for them, sounding the same two notes for more than two hours.

”At 59 Barrere still wears his old-fashioned beard, the sharp mustachios now flecked with grey. And his wit is still equal to any amount of teasing. Of his platinum flute, he says: "I don't play it to show that I have a bank balance or that Depression is over." About his whiskers: ''Why should people make fun of me any more than of Charles Evans Hughes. . . . Think of Sousa or the Smith Brothers. . . . While other artists waste a valuable part of each day playing with a razor or being mutilated by their favorite barber, I am having a glorious time working."

Now, back then, the Haynes Company and the Powell Company competed for the favour of the world’s orchestral flutists. If Haynes made a platinum flute, Powell wouldn’t be far behind. Here’s the story, from the Powell website, of the Kincaid platinum flute, that became Elaine Shaffer’s platinum flute, that then went out into the world and traveled. I note, with interest, that, in the “it’s a small world” way of these things, Andy Warhol, cited above, has a small role in what follows.

“In 1938, Verne Powell was commissioned by Engelhard Metals to create a Concert C flute made of platinum for the Engelhard exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair.  Mr. Powell immediately set to the task, and in 1939, he completed Powell #365 – a platinum flute with sterling silver keys.  He engraved the Trylon and Perisphere (the logo for the fair) on the barrel to indicate its unique origin.

One week before the flute was supposed to be delivered to the Fair, William Kincaid (Philadelphia Orchestra, principal flute) came to visit Mr. Powell in his workshop.  Powell asked Kincaid to test the new flute he had made.  Kincaid tried the new flute and was amazed at its fluidity and color.  He offered to purchase the instrument on the spot.  Mr. Powell explained that the flute was to be delivered to the Fair, but that after the show Mr. Kincaid could purchase it. 

As soon as the instrument was back in Boston, Mr. Kincaid picked it up – and from that day until his death in 1967, it was his number one flute. 

When Mr. Kincaid passed away, he left his platinum Powell flute to Elaine Shaffer, a favorite student of his at the Curtis Institute of Music. She went on to become principal flutist with the Houston Symphony and later enjoyed a career as a soloist.  In a tragic turn, Ms. Shaffer passed away in 1973 at age 47 of lung cancer. Kincaid’s platinum flute, along with Shaffer’s 3 other Powell instruments were left to her husband.

Ms. Shaffer’s husband, Efrem Kurtz, was a conductor (Houston Symphony) and understood the value of these flutes.  He kept them in his possession until 1986 when he put them up for auction at Christie’s auction house in New York City.

The auction was held in November and was attended by many fine musicians.  The first silver flute offered at the auction was sold for $4,400 to a professional orchestral flutist, and the second silver flute went to the (then) President of the New York Flute Club for $4,950.  The 14k gold flute was sold to an anonymous bidder for $27,500.

When the bidding for the Platinum flute began, there were only two parties involved - a New Hampshire antiques dealer and a well-known collector of antiques in New York City who was also a flutist.  The auction also drew some very notable celebrated figures, including Andy Warhol, who was a friend of the New York City-area collector.  As the bidding increased to $80,000, the New Hampshire-area dealer dropped out, but a yet another collector stepped in his place.

The antiques collector from New York City won the auction with a closing bid of $170,000.  He paid a total of $187,000 with the buyer’s premium and a record for the purchase of any flute.  Today’s equivalent is $356,000.  At the time, a new platinum flute would have cost $16,000 – today a platinum flute starts at $36,000.

After the sale, the winning bidder said, “I own a dozen great flutes, but this one is the best there is.  If you’re a collector, the greatest in its field is the only thing worth having, and you have to expect to pay well for it.”

In the recent past, Powell #365 was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their Musical Instruments collection but is now in the hands of a private owner.”

This would not be the flute you hear on this recording, but the path of objects as they travel, pass from hand to hand, as their own legends accrue, I find absorbing. Anyway, on harps, if not on flutes, I’ll say more tomorrow, God willing. Windy morning, rain pelting, due at the store in 10 minutes! Gotta bounce! Thanks for reading. xo, B