MAVIS GALLANT AND THE PARIS CAFE.

LATTES OR LITERATURE?

MAVIS GALLANT IN THE CAFE DU DOME.

            This being August and yet another café having opened in our already grossly oversupplied quartier – from our balcony I count five, on a street only one block long – reminds me that it’s eight years since Canadian-born Mavis Gallant turned in her badge as doyenne of Paris’s expat writers. One of the many ways Mavis swam against the tide was to remain in Paris during August. The silence threw into relief many of the idiosyncracies for which she loved the city, and the heat was kinder to the osteoporosis that increasingly limited her movements.

She’s still sorely missed. Her acerbic presence at dinner parties and in her occasional public appearances added mustard to what can be a bland literary scene. “Bland”, however, was not in her lexicon. Her short stories saw life on the bias, and – to mix metaphors - the crust of these literary souffles frequently disguised a sprinkle of ground glass. Her view of marriage was particularly bleak. An abandoned husband “described in the lightest possible manner how Henriette had followed her lover, a teacher of literature, to a depressed part of French-speaking Africa where the inhabitants were suffering from a shortage of Racine.” Elsewhere, an unhappy marriage for one of her beleaguered female characters ended when her partner “died in her arms - though not without a struggle.”

She was sparing with literary advice, to the point of rudeness.  In the early eighties, she was writer in residence at the University of Toronto - "a completely useless job,” she said. “You are with people who have no talent whatever, and if they had they wouldn't come to me." The only good thing was that she got a discount at the campus book store. A spiky reputation didn’t stop people from seeking her out. “I'm in the Paris phone book, which means I'm a sitting duck  for strangers, most particularly in summer. Some want to talk.  Most want to write. What they expect from me is white magic,  the revelation of a secret, the wizardly formula they think writers  keep under wraps, and now and then bring out for an airing. Several airings should produce a book. A few still take me for a kind of literary travel agent.”

To return to cafes, Mavis had a low opinion of them as venues for literary creation. “The other day,” she wrote, “I was asked, in all seriousness, where one can see authors at work in cafés. It sounded for all the world like watching chimpanzees riding tricycles: both are unnatural occupations. I have only one friend who still writes her novels in notebooks, in cafés. She chooses  cafés that are ordinary and charmless, favoring one for a time,  then another, as one does with restaurants. Some are near home, many involve a long bus trip. If anyone she knows discovers the café, she changes at once for another, more obscure, hard to get to. About café writing, in general, old legends and ancient myths die hard. Think of the way we touch wood-the sacred oak- to guarantee safety, even when we live in streets without trees.”

            Writers here did once work in cafes, but only because there was no alternative.  When Gertrude Stein visited Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in their fourth-floor apartment to read some of his work, she had to sit on the bed while they waited in the only other room. Ernest soon discovered that a home without heating or running water, and generally roach infested, was no place for literary creation. Thereafter, he colonised a quiet corner of the Closerie des Lilas, and spent nights in another room around the corner, leaving Hadley literally holding the baby.

            Plenty of creative people congregated in Paris cafes a century ago, but none were writers, and they weren’t at work but looking for it. With private telephones a rarity and home addresses kept intentionally vague, musicians, bit-part actors, artist’s models, typesetters, prostitutes and anyone else who relied on casual employment congregated in specific cafes where potential employers knew to find them. To help them decide, most wore costumes and make-up, and musicians carried something that signified their instrument: a violin bow, or a clarinet reed tucked into their hatband. 

Things have changed, it’s true, in the age of the laptop. A few writers have taken up residence in the quieter bistros of Montmartre or Belleville, and managers of Starbucks grind their teeth over the clients who plug in as soon as the doors open and remain there until closing, hogging a table and barely covering the cost of the electricity with the occasional latte. Some may be working on the Great American Novel but most are just surfing the net. As for anyone writing in a café by hand, they are probably a college student from New Jersey penning a postcard to the folks back home, generally beginning “You won’t believe where I’m writing this.”  

Whatever their activities, however, café writers are almost invariably foreign. For the French, writing is not a trade but a calling, and should be conducted with appropriate gravity and in private. You are as likely to find a French writer working in a café as a French dentist.

             Mavis shared this view. She didn’t give lectures, and was dismissive of bookshop signings. She’d been bitten once too often.  At one such event early in her career,  a woman confronted her carrying a copy of her first novel, the back cover of which featured her portrait.

            “I knew as soon as I saw your picture,” the woman said, “that you were going to be an important person in my life.”

            As Mavis framed an appropriately modest reply, she went on “I can’t tell you how much you’ve disappointed me.”