Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 34

Half Remembered, Fully Disclosed

May 26, 3.05 a.m.

Good morning. Time now to sweep up the stray strands stirred by “The Statues Taken Down,” Mavis Gallant’s (MG) story published in The New Yorker in 1965, and collected in In Transit, 1988. It’s been the engine of the last two entries in this diary I’m keeping to mark MG’s centennial year. If you’re here for the first time, welcome. Don’t worry about coming in in the middle. I began in the middle, have made it my practice to jump towards the beginning and to the end without thought or prejudice. Nothing gets in the way of a good leap like looking. This is no country for the linear. None of it makes more or less sense, no matter where you dip in.

The copy of In Transit I have on my table was borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library; my own languishes elsewhere. It must have been part of some gift or bequest. This inscription is on the inside cover:

Atop that same page, pencilled in neat, micrographic script, are the arcane (to me) bibliographic notations that signal the ministrations of a used / antiquarian bookseller. It’s early here in the West End, dawn has yet to break, and I’m not going to waste precious time breaking open Don — a hopeless investigation if ever one could be named — other than to wonder, stupidly, if it might be Don Stewart of the legendary MacLeod’s Books on Pender Street, here in Vancouver. This suggests itself as a possibility only because of the bookseller markings, and now that I write it down and think about it, it seems an unlikely provenance. Don is all about holding onto books, even when they are for sale; hard to imagine him giving them away. (I’m unclear on how or whether he was able to comply with an invitation from Fire Department, issued a few years back, to straighten things up and pare back. To do so would have been a win for safety but a loss for the wonderment of Dickensian clutter. Safety ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.)

photo of Don Stewart, in his native environment, by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

It was Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, see above, a photographer of legend hereabouts, who flagged for me this passage from MG’s “The Doctor,” one of the Linnet Muir stories in Home Truths.

Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate, and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.

In “The Statues Taken Down,” Hal and Dorothy are brother and sister. Hal is an under-ten. Dorothy is crossing the threshold into the adult world. (The day will come when I’ll regret that I’ve just now looked away from an opportunity to use the word “liminal.”) When we lose our immunity to hypocrisy and the inevitable infection occurs, how does it manifest? Through politics, in part. Hal and Dorothy are spending the summer in Paris, visiting their father, George, a well-known poet, English by birth, Parisian by choice. George is living in the borrowed apartment of a young woman, Natasha; they have a history, of course. The apartment has come with a particular and peculiar encumbrance, a roommate, a shadowy figure who’s a mild annoyance to George and a mystery to the children.

Hold onto that detail, as I make a slight detour. First, allow me to say — how stupid, I’m by myself in a room, how could anyone disallow it — as I’ve done before, that I’m here as an amateur, not as an academic, not as a biographer, not as a literary historian. I write for my own amusement and I “publish” this diary for the amusement or distraction — certainly not the for the benefit — of anyone who might also be a Friend of Mavis (FOM) and who has the time and / or patience and / or will to dally with me a while. I can’t hold myself to an exalted standard of style or accuracy in this enterprise, this is impermanent, unserious. This is a testament to nothing more than my own fondness for the subject, i.e. MG, and also, sadly, to the manifold imperfections of my own carelessness, haste. I preach the Gospel of the Grain of Salt, which is all by way of saying I can’t at this precise moment — the rosy-fingered dawn, maybe also Don, starting to make itself known — locate the reference and quote exactly what Eudora Welty said and that I cited, I think accurately, maybe 10 days back. It’s something like, “Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments; it isn’t steady, it’s a pulse.”

I remember hearing or reading Margaret Atwood in an interview, or maybe in an essay, maybe both, speak of how, around the age of 16, she was walking home from school when she felt something like the imprint of a thumb press itself onto her forehead and leave its mark, its whorls, and that was when she understood her calling: she was to be a poet. The pulse at work. Childhood’s moments, anchored to a particular age. Think of Sylvia Plath:

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,  / In the picture I have of you, / A cleft in your chin instead of your foot  / But no less a devil for that, no not / Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you…

That’s a powerful age, when the double digits kick in. MG spoke in interviews about how she saw her father for the last time on her 10th birthday. She clung for three years to the belief that he would return from England where she believed, because so she was told, he had gone. Learning he was dead, the news delivered casually, accidentally almost, was a shuddering moment, the end point to a fantasy idyll, childhood’s full stop. Childhood’s learning. Not steady. A pulse. Around that same time, age 14 — again, I half remember this, it was in an interview MG gave to a Spanish journalist — in the summer of 1936, she watched the faces of the adults around her as they listened on the radio to the news of the Spanish Civil War. She was impressed by their gravity, and then by the news itself. It was at this same time she wrote a poem — she thought at first that a poet was what she’d become — called “Why I Am a Socialist.” (Did she keep it? Does it exist? I have a kidney to give…) The pulse delivered a coup de grace to childhood’s learning: she became a political animal.

Circling back to “The Statues Taken Down,” and to Dorothy, age 12, 13, 14 — it’s not specified — shedding childhood’s skin, growing into her awareness of herself as a woman, and listening with a new interest to grownups talk about politics. Natasha and George are speaking of a tragedy that’s befallen the mysterious, reclusive roommate.

“…he had shot himself in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice and, still alive, had been taken to a hospital.

“Two forces hung over him for most of his childhood,” said Natasha.

“His mother and father, like everyone, “ said George.

“No, George. Hitler and Stalin.”

So much of MG’s project after she moved to Europe and began the full-time work of writing fiction — with now and again breaks for journalism, reviews, etc — was understanding what had happened to make possible Hitler and Stalin.

Victor Serge - this photo from the Paris Review, where excerpts from his diary, published by the New York Review of Books, appeared, April 2019

On November 5, 1944, Victor Serge, the Russian writer, revolutionary, and anti-Stalinist, in exile in Mexico, writing in French, spoke of his sense of loss and alienation, especially concerning the untimely deaths of writers who were also his friends. While it’s the last line that’s really germane to what I’m on about here, I’ll set down a slightly edited version of what goes before because it seems so timely and powerful, especially in the wake of yet another senseless mass murder: “obviously there are too many deaths and they cannot be counted…”

An enormous indifference greets the announcement of deaths. Giraudoux is dead; Max Jacob was tortured and murdered; Saint-Exupéry disappeared, no reaction, no moved or moving note, no real interest among people who know the works and the men, nothing, or almost nothing, in the press. And when something is published it’s so stupid and pitiful that it would be better not to publish anything. Obviously there are too many deaths and they can no longer be counted. Books and ideas are henceforth worth so little that there’s no need to even speak of them. Decline in value of man and a decline in the quality of people’s character. I’m surprised that people don’t fight harder against this general degradation. It’s possible to have a strong reaction and to remain alive in a more dignified manner. The devastating current is strong, but people surrender to it too much. Always the problem of cowardice and courage.

Death of old Maillol in an auto accident on a road in the Pyrenees. Suspicious.

“The Statues Taken Down” is a symbolic title with a literal source, i.e. the installation of (eventually) 17 statues by the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in the Tuileries, in 1964. They were — as noted earlier — a gift to the state from his model, muse, heir and executor, Dina Vierny.

20 years earlier, on September 15, 1944, age 82, Maillol was driving to visit his friend, the painter Raoul Dufy. There was a storm. His car skidded off the wet road, not far from his home in Banyuls-Sur-Mer, near Perpignan, proximate to the Spanish border. He died of his injuries on September 27. The New York Times didn't exactly leap on the news; perhaps the official announcement came several days after the fact.

A month later, in Mexico, Victor Serge makes his brief mention of Maillol’s death and says, cryptically, “suspicious.” One wonders if he came to his own conclusion or if he’d been hearing rumours and, if so, what, and from whom. Death as a result of injuries sustained in an unfortunate accident was, and remains, the official version of Maillol’s exit. We are, of course, the only species known to concoct conspiracy theories and if Serge was privy to one, its germ can be found in the story that appears above, adjacent to the announcement of the sculptor’s death: the “liberation salon” from which he, and a number of his contemporaries, were excluded because they had been, or were believed to have been, too cozy with the occupiers.

Maillol worked actively to help Dina Vierny, a Jew, in her efforts to smuggle refugees out of France and into Spain. The backwoods paths she used were the routes he taught her. The harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, a Jew, along with her student and partner Denise Restout, camped out at their home — Dina was living with Maillol and his wife, Clotidle — in the Pyrenees for a few months in the early years of the war when they were surreptitiously en route to the U.S.

My French isn’t what it was, but I believe the caption translates as “Wanda Landowska and Rodin.” I am happy to be corrected, as always. I believe Rodin to be the one with the beard, Wanda is foreground.

Maillol, instrumental in saving lives, met the criteria to be, in some respects, a true hero of the resistance. But he was also known to be close to the German sculptor Arno Bekker, a Hitler favourite. Bekker had a show of his work at the Orangerie (I think) in Paris that Maillol attended — a serious mistake, others made it, including Cocteau — even if it was innocently made, or made principally out of concern for Dina. She was always in danger, was twice jailed during the war, and it was through Bekker’s intercession that she was released. It’s easy enough to understand how Maillol might have wanted to do what was necessary by way of nostril-pinching to have a friend in high places, and easy enough to see how he was therefore compromised. The long and short of it was, Maillol, a venerable and well-loved figure, the heir to the throne of Rodin, found himself cancelled, so to speak, vituperation’s easy target. It wasn’t long after his death that rumours began to circulate that his death was due to an attack by an unhinged, hammer-wielding member of the Resistance. Dina, his sons, his biographers always stuck to the authorized version, but credible sources, people in a position to know, told the different, darker story. Why fake a car crash? Out of propriety, I suppose. To preserve a reputation, also the value of the legacy. To avoid scandal.

(Reading about this maybe outlandish notion, I found myself half-remembering — I inhabit a land of shadows — a story about Ambroise Vollard, the celebrated art dealer and collector who represented pretty much everyone, Maillol included. Vollard died in a car crash in 1939, but the legend persists that he was bludgeoned to death by his chauffeur at the behest of a Corsican crime lord. The Picasso biographer John Richardson says unequivocally that this is the case and that, what’s more, the weapon was a small bronze statue by, wait for it, Maillol. Well. Really. What else could it have been? If you’re in the mood to copy and paste, here’s some more on the Vollard story — it’s way more twisty and turny, much more of a goat path than I’ve described, and has a Canadian connection, to the National Gallery:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/was-ambroise-vollard-murdered-3frblxtgphh

And this Irish Times story from 2001 has a thorough rundown of the Maillol murder theory:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/a-shadowy-chapter-in-art-history-1.325494 )

4.35. Time now for summation, always a tricky business. Where does this leave us? Smack dab in the middle of nowhere, I guess. It has anecdotal value, but does it illuminate the story? How should I know, I’m no critic, not of literature and certainly not of art. MG paid attention, was attuned to, things visual, was friendly with many painters, was a Left Bank vernissage regular. If stories about Maillol were in wide, even in limited, circulation, she might well have heard them. What if she did? Would that information have made its way into the cells of “The Statues Taken Down?” And what statues were displaced, by the way, or moved around, to make way for the Maillols that Dina gave to France, and for which Malraux made room? I guess they would have been classical representations, pigeon-mottled erections by Coustou, by Coysevox, maybe of couples locked in marmoreal embrace, a little like the lovers Dorothy sees on the benches in the Tuileries as the sky goes dark and the storm rolls in, unabashed pathetic fallacy.

And what replaced them? The calm, but far from placid, the altogether dynamic bronzes of a strong, proud, independent young woman, of Dina, via the hand of Maillol.

Dorothy is no longer a child. The forces that have controlled her life, her mother, her father, have been toppled. What will replace them, in the year of our lord, 1964? Just months before, in the cold of an especially dark English winter, in the eerily febrile days before her death, the MG admirer Sylvia Plath had written her cautionary homily: “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute, brute heart of a brute like you.” What’s in store for Dorothy as all the Kansas-like certainties crumble around her, are blown away? What fascist lies in wait, in the reassuring raiment of, say, a husband, a lover? Hitler? Stalin? Need it be one or the other? Surely not. The times are modern. The heart of the world is malleable, molten. Cast it into what you want, whatever size and shape. Dorothy will do what every child does when we slough off, sadly but necessarily, the “clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy.” She will be her own foundry. She will make her own heart. She will walk upon the earth. She will find out for herself. Thanks for reading. xo, B