{"id":68078,"date":"2014-03-14T13:00:35","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=68078"},"modified":"2014-03-14T13:04:17","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T17:04:17","slug":"ive-lived-very-freely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/14\/ive-lived-very-freely\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019ve Lived Very Freely\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting to know Mavis Gallant<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Mavis<\/a>

A still from Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first of a few unforgettable times I saw Mavis Gallant was in 2004 in Paris. She was eighty-two and had agreed to meet me for an interview at the Caf\u00e9 Dome in the Boulevard Montparnasse, around the corner from the apartment where she had been living for decades. When I arrived at the old fashion \u201cterrasse\u201d of the Dome, framed by heavy red curtains, I found Gallant already sitting at the small table where we were to order our tea. I later discovered she must have arrived early on purpose so that I wouldn\u2019t see her walk in\u2014her spine was bent by osteoporosis, and the condition was most evident when she was walking. She was small and smartly dressed in a purple sweater and a checkered skirt, her hair dark red, her eyes lively with multiple shades of green. The first thing she said was: \u201cDon\u2019t ask me how I write. I wrote an introduction to this volume to avoid discussing such nonsense.\u201d The volume was an Italian edition of her work that included some of her most memorable short stories, such as \u201cThe Moslem Wife\u201d <\/i>and \u201cThe Remission.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cVery well,\u201d I said, taking her challenging attitude as an invitation to play. \u201cWhat would you like to talk about? Men?\u201d She gave me a scornful but not unfriendly look.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat would certainly be a better choice,\u201d she answered, not meaning it at all. But it was a start, and I was determined to put both of us at ease by being relaxed and polite. I asked her about her husband, John Gallant, to whom she\u2019d been married before the war. \u201cWhen he came back from fighting, I told him: I want to go to Europe. And he said: I just returned from there, it\u2019s the last place I want to go back to. So the marriage was over. But for the rest of his life he took pride in seeing himself in most of my male protagonists. And it was never true!\u201d<\/p>\n

She went on: \u201cIt happened the day I sold my first story to<\/i> The<\/i> New Yorker<\/i>. I moved to Paris with a check for six-hundred dollars in my pocket. It was 1950. I was twenty-eight. And I never remarried.\u201d She gave me a glance. \u201cTo men I never asked: do you love me? This is what wives asked\u2014I knew it from the men. I\u2019d rather ask: est-ce que vous <\/i>\u00eates discret<\/i>?\u201d Then she added, in case I hadn\u2019t gotten it: \u201cI\u2019ve lived very freely.\u201d<\/p>\n

She lived so freely\u2014supporting herself by selling more than a hundred short stories to The<\/i> New Yorker<\/i> since 1951, plus publishing various collections and two novels\u2014that she accepted whatever price she had to pay for it. \u201cFor me, money meant earning enough to buy myself the freedom to live the way I wanted and where I wanted. Some days it was meat and butter, some others it wasn\u2019t even butter.\u201d Her stubborn quest for independence meant, among other things, exiling herself for sixty years in a city where to this day her name is mostly unknown to readers, with the exception of some devoted and highly educated friends of hers\u2014it seemed to me a harsh choice. \u201cFrench culture is in terrible decline, have you noticed?\u201d she said, stirring her tea in the white and blue cup of the Dome. \u201cWhen I arrived here after the war, everything was filthy and shabby, but the last of the taxi drivers spoke like a poet. How I admired that!\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoping to hear her expand on her early life, I asked about Canada, where she\u2019d been born. \u201cIt was provincial and depressed, most men were at war, and those who\u2019d stayed weren\u2019t happy to make women like me work. I didn\u2019t go to college and became a journalist at the Montreal Standard<\/i>. I interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre. He was surrounded by a crowd of morons who asked him the stupidest questions. When everybody left, I stayed on to talk with him and he treated me as an equal. Try and imagine what it meant for a girl in her early twenties!\u201d<\/p>\n

She was immune to flattery and intolerant of stupidity, but she was also immensely curious, and willing to find out if you were worth her time. I succeeded, eventually, in persuading her to discuss her childhood. \u201cThey fuck you up, your mum and dad: you know Larkin\u2019s lines, don\u2019t you?\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I was four, my mother took me to a convent and left me there without any explanation. I was wearing my best dress, a beautiful blue dress. The mother superior said: you won\u2019t be allowed to keep that dress here. Then my mother left and didn\u2019t come back.\u201d She gave me a defiant look. \u201cDon\u2019t write that I cried, because I don\u2019t remember crying. Even if I must have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her father, whom she had loved, died when she was ten; she found out only three years later, from a family friend. Her mother remarried someone who sexually harassed her after she turned fourteen. She changed schools seventeen times, for no other reason than that her mother was crazy, and that Mavis had no desire to go home to her and her husband, anyway. Again and again she said how much being able to live by herself had meant to her.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you mind if I tell you something personal?\u201d I asked, pouring more tea in our cups. She nodded, alive with curiosity. \u201cI married someone who was sent away to boarding school at a very early age, too, never to come back to his family. Years later, when we separated, his mother called me on the phone in a state of shock. All she said was: \u2018Is it true?\u2019 Meaning the separation. And then: \u2018We should have never sent him to boarding school!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We both burst out laughing. \u201cSo you know!\u201d Mavis cried. Of course I knew. I knew her life had been trapped in the contradiction between longing for the family she had been deprived of as a child, and fleeing as an adult the possibility of enjoying one of her own.<\/p>\n

We kept in touch after that first interview, though not very often. Then one day I called her and she told me that the \u201cwicked nurse\u201d who was taking care of her insulin shots (she suffered from diabetes) had abandoned her \u201con purpose\u201d on New Year\u2019s Eve; she\u2019d fallen into a coma, alone, on the floor of her apartment, for two days. The recovery in the hospital had been hell, she said; her voice was extremely animated and she sounded uncharacteristically terrified. I tried to console her telling her that an Italian translation of one of her books <\/i>had been a great success\u2014which was true. This seemed to stupefy and please her at the same time. \u201cReally?\u201d she kept repeating, her voice suddenly girlish.<\/p>\n

By the time I saw her again I had moved to Paris myself. This was in 2008; we spent another afternoon at the Caf\u00e9 Dome drinking tea and remembering friends and enemies. She loved Mordecai Richler, even if he affected that \u201ctalking about literature was for women.\u201d And she loathed Simone de Beauvoir who, when they met, \u201cwas drunk and behaved like a royal idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then she was in the hospital again, and I visited her with my friend Mariarosa Bricci, her Italian editor. We found her sharing a room with a very old lady who seemed to have turned to stone. \u201cSee this lady?\u201d Mavis said when the conversation fell to French anti-Semitism. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t talk, but if she could, she would probably complain about the Jewish lady in the room across the corridor.\u201d I told Mavis it was strange she mentioned this, because I\u2019d just read a passage in Edmund Wilson\u2019s journals in which he recalled meeting her in the Paris of the sixties. He described her as \u201cgood looking\u2014dark\u2014and enormously clever and amusing to talk to,\u201d adding that she might as well have been Jewish, even if she said she wasn\u2019t. In her humiliated condition as a geriatric hospital patient, Mavis rejoiced at Wilson\u2019s compliment, and then dismissed him as \u201ca very a pompous man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her deep friendship with William Maxwell came up. \u201cWhat I liked in him as an editor was the fact that he was a famous writer but never in competition with other writers. And this is pure gold, pure kindness. He encouraged me enormously. For years after his death I kept cutting articles I thought could interest him \u2026 \u201d I thought it intriguing that she could speak about the past with such warmth, and still not mourn it.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you realize she doesn\u2019t need anything\u2014no children, no family\u2014that she contents herself with her intelligence?\u201d Mariarosa said while we were leaving the hospital. It certainly seemed that way, but I wasn\u2019t so sure.<\/p>\n

The next time I paid Mavis a visit at Paris\u2019s H\u00f4pital Broca, where she would be confined for nine months, one crisis following another, I found her waiting for me sitting on the bed, with her bandaged legs dangling from its edge, her hair grown longer and half white. She felt rotten, she said with a furious look. \u201cI can\u2019t take it anymore. I want to go home.\u201d She was outraged at her doctors, who wouldn\u2019t let her go unless she accepted to take someone to live with her at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t need any help! I\u2019m perfectly capable of living alone!\u201d she cried. \u201cThe French health system is a totalitarian state! In any case, I feel very well,\u201d she lied. \u201cI\u2019m even trying to put on a little weight to impress them. But I\u2019m not fat, am I? Tell me I don\u2019t look fat \u2026 \u201d She must have weighed about ninety pounds.<\/p>\n

Eventually, before the summer, she did manage go home. And I stopped visiting her, both because her mind had started showing signs of weakness, and because I had begun writing about her for a book of mine, and I didn\u2019t want to pry. But her friend and agent, Steven Barclay, who took upon himself the task of editing Mavis\u2019s journals with her almost every day, kept me informed, and so did our mutual friend Odile Hellier, the former bookseller of The Village Voice <\/i>bookstore, where Gallant had read many times.<\/p>\n

Both Steven and Odile, of course, were at Mavis\u2019s funeral in the Montparnasse cemetery on February 22. It was a sober affair. About fifty people, white and yellow roses, poems and writings read by friends, and the joyful surprise of a bright blue sky after some early morning rain. We were leaving the graveyard in small groups, hoping to go drink something warm, when I found myself thinking of a funny episode Mavis had once relayed to me. It had happened at the funeral of the Polish poet Alexander Wat, who committed suicide in 1967. While the coffin was carried away from his apartment and the widow was following in tears, Max Wat, the poet\u2019s brother, had turned to Mavis and asked her: \u201cHave you ever been to a Jewish restaurant? Because, if you haven\u2019t, I\u2019d like to take you to a place in the Rue des Rosiers \u2026 \u201d She was so appalled that he had chosen such a tragic moment to make a pass at her that she answered \u201cYes! I\u2019ll accept.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I was amusing myself with this recollection of Mavis\u2019s sense of humor and sex appeal, I shook hands with the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who had come to Paris from Utah to give a reading. \u201cYou know, the oddest thing happened to me last night,\u201d she told me with pleasant familiarity while we were standing in the sun near the marble grave covered in roses. \u201cI got myself locked into the bathroom of my hotel. For two hours! I had just taken a bath and I didn\u2019t know what to do. So I had no choice but to open the bathroom window and lean out naked to my waist, to call for the attention of the only person in the street, a Frenchmen smoking a cigarette, who looked up at me and couldn\u2019t help laughing while I begged him to call the concierge. It was like an act out of an opera,\u201d she said. And I thought, here is what I\u2019ve been looking for. One last perfect Mavis moment.<\/p>\n

Livia Manera Sambuy is an Italian literary journalist and the author of the PBS documentary film \u201cPhilip Roth, Unmasked.\u201d The piece on Gallant is taken from a book of \u201cpersonal\u201d portraits of writers to be published in Italy in 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting to know Mavis Gallant. The first of a few unforgettable times I saw Mavis Gallant was in 2004 in Paris. She was eighty-two and had agreed to meet me for an interview at the Caf\u00e9 Dome in the Boulevard Montparnasse, around the corner from the apartment where she had been living for decades. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":663,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[13193,13194,13192,1132,3344,270],"class_list":["post-68078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-cafe-dome","tag-funerals","tag-hospitals","tag-interviews","tag-mavis-gallant","tag-paris"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGetting to Know Mavis Gallant<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 14, 2014 \u2013 Getting to know Mavis Gallant. 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