Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

“He would not claim those two chapters today. If they followed him in the street, he would probably threaten them with an umbrella. And yet the story is his; it is his duchess, his rustic bandstand. It was also Miss Pugh’s. ‘Have you moved that poor woman out of that filthy old palace yet?’ she would ask Prism at lunch. ‘Have you found out any more about the china?’ When the leaves of Mrs. Wharton’s ash tree began to droop and turn yellow, patroness and protégé were at a stalemate that could be ended only by sincere admission of defeat. Miss Pugh was in her own house; Prism had to play the loser. One day he sat down at the Louis XVI — period table in his room and considered the blank pages still in the manila envelope. He wondered if the time had not come to return to England, try for a good degree, and then teach.

“I can always branch out from there, he said to himself. (How easy it must have sounded.)

“He saw in his mind the museum rooms full of portraits of St. Sebastian, with nothing for protection but a thin coat of varnish. There were two opinions about the conservation of art. One claimed it was a mistake to scour paintings in order to lay bare the original color. The other believed it was essential to do so, even if the artist had made allowances for the mellowing and darkening effect of the glaze, and even if the colors revealed turned out to be harsher than the artist had intended. Prism drew a blank sheet toward him and began to write, ‘Are we to take it for granted that the artist thinks he knows what he is doing?’ At that moment, Prism the critic was born.

“Miss Pugh was sorry when she heard he wanted to give up the duchess, but it was not her policy to engage the Muses in battle. Prism presented her with the manuscript; she gave him the crêpe-soled shoes. She was never heard to speak of him slightingly, and she read with generous pleasure all the newspaper cuttings concerning himself that he sent her over the years. Whenever he came to Paris Miss Pugh would ask him to tea and rejoiced in the rich texture of his career, which he unfolded by the hour, without tiring speaker or audience. Prism made Miss Pugh the subject of countless comic anecdotes and the central female character of Goldfinches . He was always evenhanded.”

Another Easter went by before Grippes received an acknowledgment — a modest check in lieu of the promised fee, and an apology: His memoir had been mailed to Victor Prism to be checked for accuracy, and Prism had still not replied. During the year sweeping changes had been made. The Angliciste had published a paper on the Common Market as seen through English fiction. It was felt to contain a political bias, and the ministry had withdrawn support. The publisher had no choice but to replace him as editor by the only responsible person who seemed to be free at the time, a famous Irlandiste on leave from a university in Belgium. The Irlandiste restored the project to its original three volumes, threw out the English section as irrelevant, and added a division with potted biographies of eight hundred Irish poets favorable to France and the Common Market.

Grippes has heard that it is to be published in 2010, at the very latest. He knows that in the meantime they are bound to call on him again — more and more as time goes on. He is the only person still alive with any sort of memory.

A t an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Grippes — it was a quarter to nine, on an April morning — he sat in a windowless, brown-painted cubicle, facing a slight, mop-headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The man wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and a buttoned-up blazer. His signature was “O. Poche”; his title, on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read, sweating, was “Controller.” He must be freshly out of his civil-service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect, of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine, seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dun-colored folder with not much in it — a letter from Grippes, full of delaying tactics, and copies of his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets; anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale or as case-hardened as Grippes.

At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes had spent in blithe writer-in-residenceship in California. Returning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden, under the Fifth Republic, for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scraped in, converted to francs at bottom rate, and, of course, counted as personal income. Grippes’s unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France, as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out, straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury, Direct Taxation, Personal Income. That was Poche.

What Poche had to discuss — a translation of Grippes’s novel, the one about the French teacher at the American university and his doomed love affair with his student Karen-Sue — seemed to embarrass him. Observing Poche with some curiosity, Grippes saw, unreeling, scenes from the younger man’s inhibited boyhood. He sensed, then discerned, the Catholic boarding school in bleakest Brittany: the unheated forty-bed dormitory, a nightly torment of unchaste dreams with astonishing partners, a daytime terror of real Hell with real fire.

“Human waywardness is hardly new,” said Grippes, feeling more secure now that he had tested Poche and found him provincial. “It no longer shocks anyone.”

It was not the moral content of the book he wished to talk over, said Poche, flaming. In any case, he was not qualified to do so: He had flubbed Philosophy and never taken Modern French Thought. (He must be new, Grippes decided. He was babbling.) Frankly, even though he had the figures in front of him, Poche found it hard to believe the American translation had earned its author so little. There must be another considerable sum, placed in some other bank. Perhaps M. Grippes could try to remember.

The figures were true. The translation had done poorly. Failure played to Grippes’s advantage, reducing the hint of deliberate tax evasion to a simple oversight. Still, it hurt to have things put so plainly. He felt bound to tell Poche that American readers were no longer interested in the teacher-student imbroglio, though there had been some slight curiosity as to what a foreigner might wring out of the old sponge.

Poche gazed at Grippes. His eyes seemed to Grippes as helpless and eager as those of a gun dog waiting for a command in the right language. Encouraged, Grippes said more: In writing his novel, he had overlooked the essential development — the erring professor was supposed to come home at the end. He could be half dead, limping, on crutches, toothless, jobless, broke, impotent — it didn’t matter. He had to be judged and shriven. As further modification, his wife during his foolish affair would have gone on to be a world-class cellist, under her maiden name. “Wife” had not entered Grippes’s cast of characters, probably because, like Poche, he did not have one. (He had noticed Poche did not wear a wedding ring.) Grippes had just left his professor driving off to an airport in blessed weather, whistling a jaunty air.