Every so often we would like to supplement the weekly original contributions with selections from work which our writers and staff have produced, recently and in the past. These writings have been selected for the light they shed on the lives of writers today and in the past, and for what they tell us about Carcanet Press and about PN Review.
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| Marilyn Hacker |
August 11th was Mavis Gallant’s 89th birthday. She has been in the geriatric hospital in the rue Pascal since January, after a series of falls, increasing weakness, diabetic ulcers on her legs: nothing life-threatening and all debilitating. The goal is still for her to go home, back to her apartment off the rue du Cherche-Midi, in the fall, with a home attendant and visiting nurse. Mavis hates any incursion on her privacy, as who would not, but a shared room in a geriatric hospital is considerably more invasive than home help. I suggested to the photographer Alison Harris, my neighbor, in the rue de Jarente, also Mavis’ friend, and the daughter of a woman who’s known her since youth in Montreal, that the three of us take Mavis out to lunch at the Dôme for her birthday. The Dôme had been her 'cantine' since it was a smoky, shabby café in the 1950s, and remained her choice site to meet interviewers or have a celebratory meal even after it became the elegant and expensive seafood restaurant of its current incarnation. When I made the reservation and said it was for Madame Gallant, the man on the phone pronounced an instant Ah of recognition, and promised her favorite table.
I went to the hospital at eleven-thirty, bringing the rose and black cashmere cardigan that I’d found in the sales, something Mavis would have worn on one of our many restaurant dinners over the last fifteen years when we’d (often) be the last diners at two in the morning, and I’d remind Mavis that 'these young people' – that is, the waiters – 'want to go home'. Mavis was ready, dressed in a skirt and sweater, with a pile of other clothes on the 'guest' chair and her bath towels hanging on the walker that she disdains to use otherwise. The hospital is clean and bright, and there is a garden outside in which the patients can sit if there’s someone to wheel or accompany them (few if any could walk out on their own with a cane), a café area and even a lending library. But a look into almost any room is less cheerful, shrunken somnolent figures in a bed or wheelchair in front of a television of which they aren't aware, and sometimes an incoherent moaning audible from somewhere.
It is the blight man was born for
It is Margaret you mourn for…
(Hopkins)
When Alison arrived, we fetched a wheelchair from the corridor, despite Mavis’ protests that she would rather walk holding on to the furniture (I thought of a British poet, maybe Jo Shapcott’s lovingly condescending poem to an aged 'furniture-walking' aunt who then makes some starkly surreal pronouncement). In fact, she hasn’t gone downstairs other than in a wheelchair since her admission. We navigated the elevator, Alison called a taxi on her cell-phone; got Mavis and then the wheelchair into the cab, and navigated the August-almost-empty streets of Montparnasse to the Dôme. We got the chair out of the cab again, helped Mavis into it, and wheeled her into the restaurant like royalty. Alison’s mother Ann, who had been a 19 year old cub reporter in Montreal during the war in 1944 when Mavis was a seasoned 22 year old, was waiting to meet us. The maître d’ came to greet Mavis, and there were apéros offerts all around...
Another excerpt will appear next week.