OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 8

Currents

April 20, 3.20 AM

Finally getting around, just about 20 years after it was produced, to watching the film version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Al Pacino’s operatic turn as Roy Cohn is one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen: confined to a hospital bed, in extremis, in agony as AIDS wracks his body and brain, delusional, kibitzing with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, wonderfully, smirkingly played by Meryl Streep. June 19, 1953 was the date the Rosenbergs were executed, convicted of passing state secrets to the Soviets. A switch thrown, a killing current that ran through a whole country, that took two lives, that blew wide a fissure, that generated a legend.

I’ve been thinking about circuits, and how they complete, and how the charge can change you. Angels in America touches the synapse that connects me to The Bell Jar, published 01.14.63. Victoria Lucas was the Sylvia Plath’s nom de plume. She would take her life less than a month later, 02.11.63. Stuff towels under the cracks of the doors to keep the children safe. Throw a switch. Kneel down. Generate a legend.

Sylvia Plath doesn’t explicitly name the year of Esther Greenwood’s magazine internship as 1953, but she lets us know by association in the novel’s opening line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” The ghosts of the Rosenbergs walk with Esther through the summer of her breakdown, just as surely as Ethel sits bedside with Roy in Angels in America. They’ll be her lifelong companions, even after the switch is thrown and the current passes through a young woman’s body and the bell jar of her illness lifts and she can breathe again.

Reading marks you with its moments, as Eudora Welty almost said in One Writer’s Beginnings. I first read The Bell Jar when I was 16, about to turn 17. It was summer, and I was working a graveyard shift as a dishwasher in a restaurant called The Hickory House. I’d leave work at 8, get on the bus, and go downtown to the University of Winnipeg where I was taking English 12 as a summer course. I was doing this in a bid to finish high school early, to get the hell out as early as possible; it was a place, for me, of deep misery. It was a waitress — this was the age of the stewardess, the poetess — at The Hickory House who told me about the novel; I’d never heard of it, nor of Sylvia Plath. I bought it at the Eaton’s Book Department — it was excellent, believe it or not — and during the queer, sultry summer of 1972, when my nights were all about scraping french fries and gravy off plates and I was up to my elbows in great tubs of raw meat, adding and mixing up the spices that gave the places signature burger, the Hickory Burger, its distinctive flavour and kept the customers coming back for more, and my days were all about trying to stay awake while parsing Hamlet, I read, as time allowed, The Bell Jar. What with adolescence, hormones, and exhaustion, what with the bus ride downtown and back, what with sleep grabbed in odd hours in the middle of the day, what with my attraction - repulsion to a cook named Joe who used to come to the basement while I was digging around in the meat, or spreading sweeping compound on the floor of the storeroom, and pinch my ass and say, “Yeah, blondie, you know you love it,” and he wasn’t altogether wrong, well, I was pretty jangled. There were foreign currents running along all my nerves, for sure. It was the right book at the right time. Homeopathic, really. In some ways, it got me through.

Reading connects you to your own moments, as surely as sound or smell. There hasn’t been a summer since then when I haven’t read The Bell Jar — or listened to it, as I did this summer, in an outstanding audio book performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal — and it takes me back, down the long, echoing corridor of the years, as D. H. Lawrence came close to saying, to that queer, sultry summer that unraveled not quite 20 years after the queer, sultry summer of Esther Greenwood, which was also the queer, sultry summer of Sylvia Plath, the summer she tried to take her own life, and was pulled back from the dead, Lady Lazarus. The Bell Jar is a book that reliably makes me laugh out loud, and there aren’t many of those. It’s a miracle of consistency in its tone, so wonderfully detached and mordant, cynical in the best way. I won’t say more about it here, though I could go on and on, but lord, the time, it’s 4.26, how has it taken me this long to get this far, and I haven’t even touched on MG and I’ve got to get to the store, for groceries exert their own urgent imperatives, they wait for no man.

A switch is thrown, a current connects, and you don’t always know what light will illumine. Yesterday I re-read, with more attention than I’ve given it before, Mavis Gallant’s — MG’s — story “Virus X,” published in The New Yorker, January 30, 1965. Lottie Benz goes to Paris. She’s stopping there en route to Strasbourg, where she’s going to deepen her studies in sociology. She re-connects with a school acquaintance, Vera Rodna, who has been in France for a couple of years. Both young women are from Winnipeg. All they have in common is a shared point of origin, nothing more. Lottie resists, Vera persists. They form an unlikely alliance. I’ll say more about the story tomorrow, I guess, because there won’t be time now. What I’m circling around to saying here is that while I was reading “Virus X,” I kept on thinking about Sylvia Plath, about The Bell Jar. Why? There was something about the tone, for one thing, and what is “tone?" It comes down a feeling, it’s not really something you can quantify, or verify. It’s a perception of the reader, not an imposition of the writer. It’s a glimmer, maybe faint, low wattage, from a light that comes on when a circuit connects. The Bell Jar is first person, “Virus X” is third, but something in the way Lottie, who’s very conservative and self-absorbed, starts to come loose from her moorings put me in mind of Esther Greenwood. Lottie writes imaginary letters to Kevin, her not-quite fiancé back home in Winnipeg. Her connection to him put me in mind of Esther’s with Buddy Willard, the medical student she imagines she might marry but whose inadequacies have become undeniable, and are part of her summer of queer, sultry dissolution. There’s a great scene in The Bell Jar when Esther, at the end of her time in New York, getting ready to return to her home in New England, and to life with her terrible mother, goes to the roof of her hotel and feeds all her fancy New York clothes to the wind. “What is going on here?” I asked myself at the moment in Virus X when Vera, not Lottie, receives a Christmas gift package from home that includes a dress that she takes outside and feeds to the wind.

“Mavis Gallant wrote every night for ten years after work to get regular in the New Yorker, although she gave up everything.”

So wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal — I’m not sure in what year, but during the time when she, too, was busy courting The New Yorker. When MG learned that Sylvia had mentioned her in this way, she said, “Why didn’t she contact me? I could have helped her.” MG knew what it was to have, as Plath did, a tortured relationship with your mother. This would have been many years after Plath’s death, many years after The Bell Jar, many years after “Virus X.”

Writers read. They gather from other writers. They echo them, as do composers. It can’t be helped, it’s not immoral, it’s not stealing, not plagiarism - although, of course, that happens, too. Most often it’s benign, simply the connection of circuits, a charge running through, a light going on, perhaps in a distant window. Sylvia Plath read MG, read her in The New Yorker, read her novel Green Water, Green Sky. A mother, a daughter, a suicide. MG is a ghost in The Bell Jar, as surely as are the Rosenbergs. When I read the story yesterday, I had a bit of an “aha!” moment, because I thought I’d discerned an example of how one writer speaks to another. I thought, “Sylvia must have read this story, she must have absorbed the episode of feeding the dress to the wind.” But, of course, she never did. She died in 1963. The story was published in 1965. I had allowed influence as a possibility because I was caught up in the period described in “Virus X,” which is about the same time as the current passed through the bodies of Rosenbergs. MG is very specific. Tuesday. December 9. 1952. That’s the day Lottie arrives in Paris. Why then? It turns out to be a framing device, to set the story of Lottie’s progress in time. It relates to a writer Gallant read and admired — I’ve already noted that in an early entry — Katherine Mansfield. The 30th anniversary of her death, January 9, 1953, becomes a plot element. MG, in a way, acknowledges perhaps not a debt, but a sense of sisterhood with Mansfield, who died just a few months after Gallant was born. They did the same work. They were connected. “Virus X,” which touches on things tubercular, as does The Bell Jar, is a kind of Mansfield homage, or can be read as such, in a way. After a fashion.

Sylvia never read it. But did Mavis read Sylvia? Victoria Lucas, rather — The Bell Jar wasn’t published under Plath’s own name until 1967. MG influenced SP, but did SP echo back, was she heard by MG? Well. What a question. I suspect there’s no answer, which is the way with most questions I pose. As opposed to the ones I’m about to be asked. Where are the crackers? Do you sell wonton wrappers? Is there a washroom? 5.10 AM. I’m outta here. Thanks for reading, sorry for whatever the typos and infelicities, no time to proof. More about “Virus X,” tomorrow.