Gallant in Paris in 1959. “No one is as real to me as people in the novel,” she wrote.
PHOTOGRAPH: ALFREDO DI MOLLI
In 1950, at the age of twenty-eight, Mavis Gallant left a job as a journalist in Montreal and moved to Paris. She published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1951, and spent the next decade travelling around Europe, from city to city, from hotel to pension to rented apartment, while working on her fiction. The following excerpts from her diary cover March to June, 1952, when Gallant was living hand to mouth in Spain, giving English lessons and anxiously waiting for payment for her New Yorker stories to arrive via her literary agent, Jacques Chambrun.
THE BORDER, MARCH, 1952
An armed guard in gray, a church, a wild rocky coast on which rushes a steel sea. Black rocks, cliffs, wind, a cold spring sun. Fragile, feathery fruit trees in pink. At Portbou, leave the train. A large room, like a drafty baggage depot. I wait; my luggage is wrenched open and inspected by insolent guards. Organized disorder. Luggage is chalked. People drift to the currency exchange to declare what they are bringing in. I am bringing in so little (twelve thousand lire) that I expect them to think I am hiding more. We are funnelled into a doorway between filthy guards to show our passports. I am caught between a quarrelling French couple. Evidently bringing the baby was her idea—he knew better from the start. A wait, a long one. Inexplicable multilingual confusion, lending of pens, filling out of forms. I reach the window. “Journalist?” says the arrogant young man. (Will they all be like this?) “Beautiful, too!” I know what I must look like after a night and a day and a night in a third-class train. On to another window, where something is stamped, and a rush to the Barcelona train. They seem old (the carriages) but not shabby, just high and rather solid. No compartment doors, thank God, as I have been suffocating since Sicily. 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. She has two addresses for cheap rooms in Barcelona and Madrid and writes a note for one, Calle de Hortaleza 7, Madrid. The carriage fills: an old woman, who can hardly hide her loathing for Miss Saint-Germain; two businessmen, who gravely offer each other smoking tobacco and papers for rolling; a booted soldier, fat blond wife, two babies. Everyone sleeps. The soldier wakes up and says to one of the babies, who is crying, “Si tú no te callas, te tiras por la ventana,” which I immediately write down, as it is the first sentence in Spanish I have heard and miraculously understood, though if he had not pointed to the window I might not have known about ventana.
BARCELONA, MARCH
Gray stone houses, balconies, trolley lines, dust. Like a bourgeois part of Paris suddenly deserted, disappearing under grit and sand.
No restaurants open before ten at night. It rains, it blows, every other sign advertises a detective agency. Nothing in the bookshops, just grammars and technical books. No one smiles. It is a big city, and dirty and gloomy. A suit for a man costs five dollars.
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Breakfast is always a cup of warm milk flavored with haricot beans, and a bit of dry bread. Orphanage food. The food is very strange and I am bothered by the people staring. It isn’t the lively Italian curiosity but, rather, heavy and dull, like cows in a field.
MADRID, APRIL
I live on bread, wine, and mortadella. Europe for me is governed by the price of mortadella. I know the Uniprix [department store] in France, the Upim in Rome, and here the sepu, all alike, with music piped in. In Madrid, subdued flamenco, and they seem to like the airs from Sigmund Romberg operettas.
Went to see “Oliver Twist,” which was dubbed and seemed very strange. In one scene, when he is beaten, the young people in the audience burst into maniacal laughter.
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This flat is full of sound. There is a squeaky baby I have not yet seen, who cries like a toy being pressed. His mother croons and sounds like the Duchess in “Alice.” And then there is the strange dark woman who shouts, and a very little, dark old creature with a senile face who creeps up to me and murmurs in the passage. I talk to her cheerfully in English until someone comes and rushes her off to the kitchen. The people are not friendly, but nice. I think not accustomed to foreigners.
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“Mama, look at the señora smoking,” a little girl cried, staring at me, in a café. Cool wind, fluttering apricot-colored tablecloths. At night the sky is deep indigo, the moon a piece of cold metal. Few city lights, and so it is almost a country sky. The sound of Madrid is a million trampling feet. Its smell is cooking oil. Everything tastes of it, even the breakfast croissants. This flat is awash in it. At lunch I saw a meal being prepared—a bath of oil with something sinister swimming inside.
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Everyone looks exactly the same, lower-middle-class. Couples pushing carriages, carrying bags of diapers. There are babies, little girls in white skirts so starched they stand out like lampshades, gold buttons in their ears. I have never been in a city where one was so conscious of crowds.
The children masturbate the way children in other countries skip rope or roller-skate. Spanish parents must consider it like teething—they take no notice whatever. It is startling to see family groups strolling in the park, dressed as if every thread had just been woven and starched, and the little ones tottering along, quite privately absorbed. In the afternoon, cafés are stuffed. Little girls, stupid with beer, slide off their chairs. They play on the street, sit and roll on the pavement, even the babies: no germ phobia here, even though they die like pigeons of typhoid. Streams of urine everywhere, under café tables. Unlike Paris, where babies are held over the gutters, the parents in Madrid simply take down a child’s pants wherever it happens to be, without moving. On Mama’s feet? Mama doesn’t care. Saw a nurse with a boy-baby directing the stream (he on her lap) so that the carriage, a chair, and his toes were splashed. It is like drinking in a public urinal.
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I am haunted by a man I saw outside a cinema on the José Antonio. Elderly, neatly dressed, bent—but I saw in his face that he would have begged if he dared. That face, tragic, proud, and desperate, I am beginning to recognize here. Wanted to let him know I was no better off than he, but my clothes are better and foreign-looking.
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I think I am not eating enough. Twice in the Prado I felt watery and faint. Outside, the traffic seemed far away and the cars very small, and I saw those black molecules swirling around, as if I were being given ether. I don’t feel hungry, only ill and tired.
The Monte de Piedad [a pawnshop] is run like a bank, big, efficient, and clean. I part with my typewriter for fifteen hundred pesetas. It turns out that in this country it is the most valuable thing I own. The clerk shows me bundles of clothing, and somebody’s curtains. Beside me on the bench is an old woman with that straight, strained gray hair they have, hugging her sewing machine. I smile at her, but I realize she is close to crying.
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Tonight it rains and the baby cries all night, is soothed by the harsh rocking cry “Vaya,vaya, vaya.” It is after midnight. Traffic rushes on as if it were high noon. I can hear men laughing and calling in the street. The little maids are washing and ironing in the kitchen. All the flats across the street are lighted and the sky is like blue paper.
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Frederick, wishing to offer me a treat, takes me to “Gone with the Wind,” when I would rather have had a meal. Five hours in the dark, at the mercy of gigantic faces in color. A crushing waste of a day. Either they were eating wonderful American meals or they were starving and gnawing raw potatoes. Frederick, very sentimental, says the Southern civilization reminds him of Hungary, and he suffers from being uprooted. Having no roots, I don’t know what he is talking about. I think, but do not say, that if Hungary were anything like the South I should want to be out of it.
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I have no right to call this [work-in-progress] “a novel” when it is so abstract. It is an abstract idea I have held, or been held by, rather, ever since Austria—six months. Two notebooks stuffed with it—stuffed with an idea. I must be mad.
Worked from coffee to dinner, ate very little, then too tired and ill to work again. Regret bitterly having promised to help Frederick with his book, particularly as I am doing the dullest part, research and typing. Have typed myself numb, and then my own work besides.
Found a place where I can have a meal for ten pesetas. Brown tiled walls, greasy soup I can’t get down, but a good cutlet. Place full of single, sad, youngish men, clerks from the look of them, gulping greasy macaroni. I glance twice at my wrist, forgetting the watch is gone.
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The novel, this bird in my mind, I have carried it there since Austria, suddenly alighted in Madrid. Sitting in the Café Telefónica, eating a dry bun, I saw one of those girls with the long jaw, blackish skin, thin mustache, those girls who so often devote their lives to religion, and of course that was the girl in the book.
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The stove went out, and I discovered the alcohol bottle was empty. Disaster. Waited an hour with a horrid soup of dried vegetable shreds that looked and tasted like floor sweepings and finally cooked it on the kitchen range, where a great iron pot of lentils and seafood bubbled slowly. Frederick arrived with some problem when I really could not cope, and he suddenly said, in a voice wrung dry with bitterness, “Oh, but of course you are the unselfish person, the most unselfish in the world, and I am the most selfish.” It was the remark of someone who has nothing more to lose.
And now it is suddenly cold, like March in New York. This place cries to be written about—the passive, shuffling crowds, crowds everywhere, levelled off, everyone the same. Well-dressed people are the exception, and the gap between them and the rest of us can be measured in miles. I am really shabby now: I noticed it yesterday when I passed two beautifully groomed women, hair waved, good suits, perfume. They brushed by me with the same half-curious, half-impatient air they had for the rest of the street. I have only my Austrian shoes left, very scuffed, and stockings so full of runs that I can scarcely fasten the garter. They’re so sheer that the runs don’t show. Other clothes very tacky: everything needs cleaning. They’ve stood up well, on the whole. (Mummy’s only advice to me, ever, in her whole life, was “Don’t buy cheap clothes.”) Nothing looks working-class, but just Madrid-level seedy. When I think of my life before I came here, it is like someone else’s life, something I am being told. I can’t write to anyone. At the moment, I haven’t the postage, but, even if I had, what to say? I am not pitying myself, because I chose it. Evidently this is the way it has to be. I am committed. It is a question of writing or not writing. There is no other way. If there is, I missed it.
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Frederick brought, wrapped in a newspaper, six pink crayfish with bulging eyes. They are exactly one bite each. The novel now a series of rooms all connected.
Worked all day, without fatigue. Excited now, daydreamed yards of it. Everything is separate, wrapped, like pieces of Spain itself. If only I could give up Frederick’s book and my pupils, but what would I live on? Parted with Granny’s ring—a most unpleasant thing happened, which I don’t want to write here—and spent every peseta of it on food. Felt I had not eaten a good meal in days and days.
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MADRID, MAY
The mother of the baby never comes out of her room, or leaves the crib. All day and much of the night the baby is rocked, clapped at, has little bells shaken over his nose. The mother wears a blue housecoat and her eyes are ringed with pencil. They listen to musical comedy that sounds like old Nelson Eddy. The husband believes in Franco—really believes.
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Chose cinema over potatoes. I found myself watching the women’s clothes, drinking in their texture, appreciating every bite the actors put in their mouths. When one of the characters (because of some imbecility of plot) wore old clothes and pretended to be poor, I was furious and felt cheated, having chosen this over a meal. Now Ireally understand why the Italian poor detest De Sica and neorealist films, and why shopgirls like heiresses and read every line in gossip columns. I mean, I understand it, and not just intellectually.
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Sunshine and little to eat (potatoes and potatoes). To the Prado, that small container overflowing with good things. Back to Goya. I go back and back, and still he is haunting and terrifying. A young man in tweed taps me on the shoulder: a Paris acquaintance. Find myself with nothing to say. Young man is stranded in hotel with bill for a hundred dollars; however, as he had two hundred pesetas for the bullfight, I couldn’t feel sorry. We lost each other without regret in one of the galleries, and I made a quick turn to the Titians. Later, sitting outside on a stone bench, in the sun, I wondered what I would do with two hundred pesetas—or one hundred—or fifty—or twenty-five. But I have seven and promised Frederick I would give him a meal. Hungry and nervous, and went home with a blinding headache. But the day was splendid all the same, sunshine in solid blocks of light, a breeze, trees light green, deep-green grass, fountains throwing spray every way with the wind, all soaked and giddy with light. No birds—are there birds in Madrid?
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Sold my clock to get money for breakfast. But later Frederick turned up and had been paid a great sum—three hundred and thirty pesetas—and I got something I was craving, fresh lettuce.
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R. [a Spanish friend] repeats to me what I had told Frederick about settling one’s life before the age of thirty. R. says we are all raté and he knows I know it. My heart began to pound because I never really considered myself one of them and never thought my life had failed. R. said, “The difference between you and us is that in the end something will always arrive for you. We can wait forever but nothing ever will,” something like that. Discovered that they think my trips to American Express, etc., waiting for the check from Chambrun, are a kind of mild insanity to fill my day! R. also hints that I have rich parents mislaid somewhere. Was filled with ice-cold despair because he had touched on the thing I only sometimes let myself suspect might be true: that I have gambled on something and have failed.
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No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty café were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.
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Today from the balcony I see a blind man tapping his way along the buildings across the street. He reaches a street crossing; everyone watches, silent, and lets him walk full on into the side of a building. When he has recovered (for a moment he was like a butterfly beating its wings in a box) the spectators just walk away. Pure detached curiosity: “What happens when a blind man collides with a wall?” Then, “Only that?”
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Conversation with Frederick. Told him I thought I might still be capable of loving someone but I felt no one would ever love me again, that I had a premonition. Said I might be able to love someone I could trust. But secretly I think even that is impossible for me now. I have been so driven inside myself that I don’t think anyone could see where I am, or care. Frederick then “advises” me about men—warns me! He says I am not interesting enough for the kind of mind I seem to want. He says, “When you have a novel out you will be much more interesting, because you will be someone else. Now, there are many women like you, just as pretty, just as nice. You give all, you do all you can, you can fill a man’s life, but many women are like that. It is not enough.”
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No word from Chambrun so I went to the flea market, having looked it over the other day, and sold a skirt and Frederick’s winter coat, which he asked me to sell for him. Accosted by Gypsies, sold both for fifty pesetas. Noticed several blocks away that string shopping bag was missing. No use going back and am rather amused at being taken in by the Romany cousins. I hope Frederick doesn’t regret his coat but he swears he loathed it.
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I heard my own steps climbing the stairs this morning as if I were indifferent and had nothing to do with that person. Still nothing from Chambrun, not even a letter. I wonder why [Gallant’s editor at The New Yorker, William] Maxwell hasn’t written me and why I haven’t seen the proofs. I suppose I could write directly but it would be asking about money and even with an empty stomach I can’t do it. This is—I was about to write “a nightmare” but no, my dreams are not like that. No, it is the failure of the novel and the awful hope that it hasn’t failed, and then the waiting, and no one, absolutely no one, I can talk to about any of it. I never rid myself of the hope, though, God knows, after this last year I ought to be shot of it. Sometimes I want to hit the sides of the buildings in the street with my fists and tear at the tree trunks or anyone passing by. Nobody knows this. Nobody knows the pain in my chest and throat and how I can’t swallow. I thought it was only the basic fear of not having anything to eat, but now it is a fear I can’t analyze. Somehow I do eat and even feed others, selling my clothes a little at a time and pawning things. There is still my tweed coat, and the green suit. So, I can get bread and coffee and cigarettes. I hang on the edge of hunger. We are all as pale as this paper. I can’t wear my blouses because they are dirty and I haven’t soap for them and for me and it has to be me. I look at that after I’ve written it and I wonder if it is myself I am describing. 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.
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No letter, so gathered up all books and got forty pesetas. Luxury greater than food is a foreign newspaper but as I paid for it I saw that my pocket had been picked. What a fool to have put the money in a pocket. Lunched very inadequately and later sold my tweed coat, because of the mishap, which had left me with thirteen pesetas. Later I sat on a bench facing a green little square with a monument to a cardinal (I think). Children playing in the dirt by the sidewalk, building something complex and important. Boys and girls. They pour water to make mud. No quarrels, the big ones tender with the babies. Suddenly a thin, nervous, shabby man approaches and shouts that they have no right to play in the street. He is unemployed, I guess from his dress and manner. The little girls run away but the boys go on building, stubborn and silent, and the man puts out his foot and rubs to a muddy ruin the beautiful complex city, the canals and bridges and boulevards. The little boys look at the ruin silently. No one cries or speaks or glances up, and the man walks off and sits on a bench. What a day.
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I had again that second of pure joy I sometimes experience. It came, as always, without warning, and vanished nearly at once. I was on my way to the bakery with exactly eleven pesetas left. It is difficult to define and perhaps I shouldn’t try. It must be the highest and sharpest point of all the senses, or the mind, I don’t know. Remembering, I see myself and the street in a clear but blurry light, static, like a film abruptly stopped. I remember thinking suddenly these words, “Now I shall know,” then, when the rush of feeling I can only describe as pure joy was pulling away, these words: “This is why one lives.” It was like a wave and an inner explosion of light all at once, and not physical in any way.
MADRID, JUNE
Looking through the tangle of unfinished stories I carry with me everywhere, I find only three worth going on with, and am suddenly overcome by such a load of depression that I put the lot away. So much to finish and so much to keep me from it, like a wall of glass between myself and the page. The greatest inhibition is that Chambrun says he has sold only one story in twenty months. I wonder why no one liked “The Legacy” [a story published in June 26, 1954, issue of The New Yorker]. I am revolted at the idea of exposing any more of the things I write. I have always despised the people who write “for themselves”—who keep things in a trunk as if they would fade or disintegrate in the light and air. Now I begin to understand it. Each story means as much to me as the one before. I think of each one as honest. If they are bad, that is something else. I wish there were someone who could say “yes” or “no,” “keep on writing” or else “give it up.” As long as there is no one but myself I shall of course keep on, but can I be trusted? And how could I trust an editor? Is he free to trust himself?
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A hot dusty day. Spent most of it under the plane trees on the Prado watching the Cibeles fountain, and remembered the little fountain at Salzburg, the gauzy spray blown everywhere in the wind, and the thin smell of autumn there. Lunched very quickly in the cheaper of the two cheap restaurants on a few bites of meat and potatoes, but the meat was rotten and I was afraid to finish it, remembering how I nearly died of that kid stew in Sicily. In the corner, a poor madman who never stops moving or chattering through his broken teeth. His wife, in a pretty mantilla, smiles pathetically and with a kind of apology when anyone looks. The man holds his head to one side, takes out a very sharp knife. He combs his hair with it, and then splits open a small loaf into which he pours meat and potatoes from his plate. Everyone looks, but not with amusement, as they would in America: they look with a suspension of all attitudes; watchfulness; they hold their forks in midair. Behind their eyes is the thought: “How marvellous this is! How much worse can it be?” I am made ill. When I pick up my wine I feel a madman has touched it. His is the insanity of devils.
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Wasted day. Wrote letters to avoid the novel. It is all there, and, once I begin working, I am submerged, but the plunging in frightens me. The people in it aren’t as immediate as they were. I can’t see them on the street anymore. They are real people, but only I know what happened to them. Sometimes when I write I feel I am watched by, what—ghosts? Ghosts of people I have invented? If anyone comes in unexpectedly while I am working I am terrified.
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Extraordinary déjà vu today. Decided to sell the green suit and as I spread it out on the bed had the giddy feeling of a mistake in time. It came back: the day I bought it in New York, not quite two years ago, and spreading it on the bed so John [Gallant, Mavis’s ex-husband] could see it as he came in the room. I thought I would see on his face exactly what he thought of it, no matter what he said. His opinion was so important to me, but mine was not to him. I don’t mean it was indifference; it probably never occurred to him to wonder what I thought. Couldn’t bear to sell it, suddenly, though I hope not for sentimental reasons: I wasn’t sentimental about Granny’s ring. It is my last “good” thing.
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Today I have no money and no food. Frederick came and I took what I had and we had coffee and a bun apiece. The important thing when you don’t eat is not to get tired. In any case, the mind takes over. If I think about food I am physically revolted.
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R. comes with ice cream in a covered plate melting down to something like an egg-powder omelette. We eat it out of the same plate but not with the same spoon. He also returns the fifty pesetas, which he leaves without a word on the bed. I pick it up and put it on the table and say, “You must not be so delicate. It is all right to talk about money.” Spanish pride gets on my nerves. He wasn’t ashamed to ask for it. Also, the gesture of money on a bed is disgusting, like someone paying a tart. R. says that Frederick said to him that anyone could get anything from me. He said, “You must appeal to her maternal feelings, to her sense of guilt, and, remember, she is very Protestant and will not help you if you do not seem to be working at something. But also she is like all the Americans: she gives in the long run what is not needed.”
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I can scarcely write this. Today there was a letter from The New Yorker. When I saw “One Morning in June” [a story published in the magazine on June 7, 1952], I wrote about the change of title and the mistake in spelling of the Cap Martin monument. They write, “Dear Miss Gallant, Thank God you had occasion to write me because you evidently not only haven’t been getting your mail from Mr. Chambrun but fromThe New Yorker as well. The last address he gave us was American Express, Capri. . . .” It goes on, “What is more to the point, have you been getting checks? We sent Mr. Chambrun $790 for ‘The Picnic’ [a story published on August 9, 1952] and $745 for the Cap Martin story.” Also they sent a copy of the letter sent to Capri (and returned to them), which is dated May 5. “I had the great pleasure, last Thursday, of sending off to Mr. Chambrun . . . $1304.75 with $230.25 to come . . . for the two stories. Mr. William Shawn, The New Yorker’s new editor, remarked in a memo that he did not know how much you had been encouraged but that he thought it ought to be a good deal.”
I could not take it in all at once. “The two stories!” And if the Cap Martin story had not been published I would never have known. I could not take in that Chambrun had had this money from the beginning of May, simply could not admit that anyone would do this to me. I felt and still feel sick. I walked out of American Express like a person in shock and turned, I don’t know why, into the sepu. People shuffling around trying on carpet slippers and choosing fans. I realized I could not even buy a cake of soap. The sensation of disgust was curious, as if a colony of flies were stuck to me. Then I saw something so disgusting I can’t write it here, and that was a symbol of what had happened and what people could be like.
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Told Frederick I no longer believe in the novel. He said, “Write it whether you believe in it or not.” It is like watching a plant die. Something in me was lacking, or I would have kept it alive. Death in the grain. The shape of the leaf in the seed, and the death. Then, everything was decided? That must be what is frightening me. Say, that I was not meant to exist (as I often believe) or to have anything or anyone; that it was decided within the cell. Say, with the death of my father; my failed marriage; loving a married man. The end with John H. was in the beginning. We heard a child cry and he said expertly, “That’s a tired cry.” I knew from then that he had everything and I had nothing, that we were not equal because of that. It was not love, but a situation. It was implicit in the beginning, in the grain. Frederick said, “If you stay with him, you complement his life. He cannot fill yours.” True. “You will never be a writer. You will spend your time scheming and struggling to see him and think how clever you are.” True. “You will never have anything of your own.” True. When John spoke of his children, I felt humiliated. It was a situation. Then, what? Cross-purposes: as I walked away he said, “With you goes my youth.” But no—it was mine. I felt I was leaving a situation behind, not a man. All I could see was his blue raincoat.
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Chambrun has sent four hundred dollars and says he will send the rest later. The first thing I bought was good white bread. ♦
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