David Macfarlane's "Traces of Mavis"

Mavis Gallant (Photo by Ian Barrett)

I’ve just finished reading David Macfarlane’s wonderful "Traces of Mavis" (The Walrus, March 2015). It’s an account of Macfarlane’s visit to Paris “for a story about Mavis Gallant.” He goes to the Montparnasse cemetery to see her burial place (“a spare room in the Peron family crypt”). He “strolled as Mavis Gallant had often strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens.” He “ate an old-fashioned French lunch in the artist’s bistro Wadja, on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, as she liked to do.” He “drank coffee with her friend Odile Hellier on the terrace of le Dôme—the grand café Gallant most enjoyed.” He “stood in front of 14 rue Jean Ferrandi, her home for some fifty years, and considered the view she had when she looked up from her work.”

Gallant is among the New Yorker greats. As Macfarlane points out, she contributed 116 short stories to the magazine. And yet, for me, her New Yorker masterpiece isn’t a short story; it’s her "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook" (September 14 & 21, 1968), later collected in her Paris Notebooks (1986), a record of her firsthand impressions of the 1968 student revolts in Paris. It’s written in a style I relish – first-person, present-tense, collage-like, written-on-the-wing, using sentence fragments, bits of dialogue, quotation, comment, observation, description, hearsay, anything at hand to convey reality at the moment it’s being experienced. Here’s a quick taste:

The ripped streets around the Luxembourg Station. People who live around here seem dazed. Stand there looking dazed. Paving torn up. The Rue Royer-Collard, where I used to live, looks bombed. Burned cars – ugly, gray-black. These are small cars, the kind you can lift and push around easily. Not the cars of the rich. It’s said that even the car owners haven’t complained, because they had watched the police charge from their windows. Armed men, and unarmed children. I used to think that that the young in France were all little aged men. Oh! We all feel sick. Rumor of two deaths, one a student, one a C.R.S. Rumor that a student had his throat cut “against a window at 24 Rue Gay-Lussac” – so a tract (already!) informs. They say it was the police incendiary grenades, and not the students, that set the cars on fire, but it was probably both. A friend of H.’s who lost his car found tracts still stuffed in it, half charred, used as kindling. Rumor that police beat the wounded with clubs, that people hid them (the students) and looked after them, and that police went into private homes. When the police threw the first tear-gas bombs, everyone in the houses nearby threw out basins of water to keep the gas close to the ground.

In his piece, Macfarlane says he and the photographer Ian Patterson discussed “how the personality of Paris was part – a crucial part – of the personality of Mavis Gallant.” This is an excellent point. In “The Events in May,” Gallant’s identification with the besieged city is total.

March 3, 2014 Issue

Notes on two pieces in this week’s excellent issue:

1. Deborah Treisman’s absorbing obituary of Mavis Gallant led me back to Gallant’s wonderful Paris Notebooks (1986). Treisman’s mention of Gallant’s “lacerating observations of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, in which no one gets away unexamined” refers to Gallant’s brilliant two-part “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker (September 14 & 21, 1968), and was later collected in her Paris Notebooks. What an exhilarating piece of writing! It’s Gallant’s record of her firsthand impressions of the 1968 student revolts in Paris. It’s written in a style I relish – first-person, present-tense, collage-like, written-on-the-wing, using sentence fragments, bits of dialogue, quotation, comment, observation, description, hearsay, anything at hand to convey reality at the moment it’s being experienced. Here’s a quick taste of Gallant’s fluid, deeply immersive, totally addictive notation:

The ripped streets around the Luxembourg Station. People who live around here seem dazed. Stand there looking dazed. Paving torn up. The Rue Royer-Collard, where I used to live, looks bombed. Burned cars – ugly, gray-black. These are small cars, the kind you can lift and push around easily. Not the cars of the rich. It’s said that even the car owners haven’t complained, because they had watched the police charge from their windows. Armed men, and unarmed children. I used to think that that the young in France were all little aged men. Oh! We all feel sick. Rumor of two deaths, one a student, one a C.R.S. Rumor that a student had his throat cut “against a window at 24 Rue Gay-Lussac” – so a tract (already!) informs. They say it was the police incendiary grenades, and not the students, that set the cars on fire, but it was probably both. A friend of H.’s who lost his car found tracts still stuffed in it, half charred, used as kindling. Rumor that police beat the wounded with clubs, that people hid them (the students) and looked after them, and that police went into private homes. When the police threw the first tear-gas bombs, everyone in the houses nearby threw out basins of water to keep the gas close to the ground.

2. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle” is a masterpiece – in the same league as his extraordinary “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). How do you describe “the largest scientific collaboration in history”? Khatchadourian shows us, in detail after fascinating detail. The piece is about ITER – an audacious plan to build a new type of reactor, “a self-sustaining synthetic star,” based on nuclear fusion. It brims with amazing facts – ITER’s concrete foundation “must support three hundred and sixty thousand tons of equipment and infrastructure”; by the time it’s finished, ITER “will contain ten million individual parts”; “the sun is, essentially, a four-hundred-quintillion-megawatt thermonuclear power plant, fuelled by billions of years’ worth of hydrogen”; the Airfloat pallet on which an airplane fuselage or a locomotive slides “like a shopping cart”; ITER’s magnetic fields will create forces that can reach “sixty meganewtons, or twice the thrust that a NASA Space Shuttle requires for liftoff”; on and on. The sheer facticity of this piece is breathtaking!  

Two especially pleasing aspects of “A Star in a Bottle”: (1) the way it includes details of Khatchadourian’s itinerary, making the piece a kind of journey, e.g., he visits the ITER construction site in Aix-en-Provence (“When I arrived, on a late-summer morning, the air was dry and warm – filled with the aroma of pine, lavender, and wild thyme”) and General Atomic’s sixty-thousand-square-foot workspace overlooking Sycamore Canyon (“The floor looked like a shelf of polished glass; as we crossed it, I asked the chief engineer if he was ever tempted to put on skates and race across it”); and (2) its authenticating first-person perspective (“In a bare lobby, I wandered over to a model of the reactor core: a cylinder, dense with mechanical parts, rendered in brightly colored bits of machined plastic”; “I was supposed to meet Chiocchio on the fifth floor of the main building, but when I arrived there was no receptionist, no security to speak of, no one I could find to ask where he was. I heard my footsteps echo down the long, sunlit corridors as I looked for him”; “Before I left France, I joined Janeschitz and Chiocchio, along with several other members of the Praetorian Guard, for a tour of the ITER construction site”). “A Star in a Bottle” is a great piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

July 9 & 16, 2012 Issue

Jon Michaud’s “Mavis Gallant: Fact Into Fiction” (“Back Issues,” newyorker.com, July 2, 2012) points out an interesting fact: “Gallant took the experiences recorded in her Madrid diary and transformed them into her short story, “When We Were Nearly Young,” which was published in The New Yorker [October 15, 1960].” Comparing the story with the diary excerpts, published in this week’s New Yorker (“The Hunger Diaries”), I find that I much prefer the diary version. It seems more real, i.e., more alive, closer to reality, truer to life. For example, here is Gallant’s diary description of a young woman she encounters on the Barcelona train:

I share the window with a young girl who wears the Saint-Germain-des-Prés uniform – plaid slacks, black shirt, peajacket, mascara, no lipstick. Holes in her socks (the heel is a great grubby-white moon) and she obviously doesn’t give a damn.

That “the heel is a great grubby-white moon” is inspired! There’s nothing like this in the story. The girl gets only a brief mention (“A girl had given me the address on a train, warning me to say nothing about it to anyone”). In the diary, Gallant describes her own face as follows:

Sometimes catching sight of myself in a glass on the street, I am bewildered at what I have become – even my expression seems shabby, as if I were one with the street now.

I love that “as if I were one with the street now.” Gallant omits it from the story. She simply says, “In no time at all, I had the speech and the movements and the very expression on my face of seedy Madrid.”

Some of the incidents recorded in the diary occur in the story, but their details are described differently. For example, the knife that the “poor madman” in the restaurant uses to comb his hair becomes, in the story, a fork that he uses to scratch his head. And in the pickpocket incident, there’s a change from sale of all her books for forty pesetas to sale of a coat and skirt for a dollar-fifty.

The main difference between “The Hunger Diaries” and “When We Were Nearly Young” is that the former brims with sharp observation (e.g., “The sound of Madrid is a million trampling feet”; “There are babies, little girls in white skirts so starched they stand out like lampshades, gold buttons in their ears”; “Streams of urine everywhere, under café tables”). Few of the story’s descriptions are as pungent and specific as the diary’s are.

Geoff Dyer, in his review of John Cheever’s Journals, wrote, “I would go further and suggest that this selection from his journals represents Cheever’s greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival” (“John Cheever: The Journals,” Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, 2011). I suggest the same can be said about Mavis Gallant’s diaries.