The Bankhead Gleaner, 7

Rot, decay, and suppurate / Jesus Christ, I'm Sixty-Eight

New Orleans Democrat, April 8, 1878

Hello, friends. It’s August 11, my birthday — it was Mavis Gallant’s birthday, too; she was born in Montreal, 101 years ago. I think MG enjoyed her birthday, looked forward to the flowers and champagne, to a celebratory meal, to hearing from friends and associates.

My birthday. What occurs on one’s birthday sets the tone for the next 12 months. So far, so splendid. The apartment is like a garden and smells of lilies and roses and even sweet peas. I had a successful tussle with French bureaucracy and left them smiling. (The trick is to say, “I knew this was going to make me miserable,” and just stand there, looking as agreeable as one can, under the circumstances.) My German publisher has issued a friendly press release, announcing my birth date, with a photograph in which I look nothing so much as a boiled potato with earrings. Inland Revenue, the British income tax, has refunded me a sum I never expected to see again. I shall be dining at a place where there aren’t too many bright lights, so that I can see the August shooting stars. That ought to make for a fine year.

So she wrote in her diary on August 11, 1997 - at least, in the diary she wrote for public consumption, for Slate Magazine.

The Ledger Enquirer (Columbus, Georgia), November 24, 1935

I made such a big deal of her birthday last year and didn’t want it to pass by unmarked on this go-round, so asked Artist to provide an image in the style of Norman Rockwell of MG blowing out candles on a cake. Artist complied, but in that spooky way that makes Artist such an eerie and essentially unreliable collaborator. Artist - to whom no pronoun applies, which is stylistically inconvenient for me, though not for Artist — seems to have channeled my own mood on this day, which inhabits the stinking nether- turf between desperate and murderous. In Artist’s mind — whatever that is — a conventionally happy birthday girl should resemble someone enraged by the news that she hasn’t received a callback for the role of either Betty Crocker or the sadistic matron of a women’s prison. Those limbs that put the “arm” in alarm! Oy gevalt! It looks like Artist, culling from all the sources available, selected them from a calendar that featured month-by-month photos of shirtless butchers. And let’s deal with the hands by simply looking away.

It may be that Artist is Rockwell-averse, or has no patience for hardtack post-war American realism, which typically requires a more representative discipline vis a vis such inconveniences as fingers: their numbers and shapes. A more satisfactory result was born of my commissioning something French and misty: a woman in a wedding gown crossing a bridge in Paris.

This notion was inspired by MG’s late-career short story “Crossing the Bridge,” published in 1991. (1993 is the year given in Selected Stories, which is an error.) On this August 11, I transcribe this passage into my gain of function commonplace book.

I got up and dressed, as my mother wanted, and we took the bus to her hairdresser’s. She called herself Ingrid. Pasted to the big wall mirror were about a dozen photographs cut from ‘Paris Match’ of Ingrid Bergman and her little boy. I put on a pink smock that covered my my clothes and Ingrid cut my long hair. My mother saved a few locks, one for Papa, the others in case I ever wanted to see what I had once been like, later on. The two women decided I would look silly with curls on my forehead, so Ingrid combed the new style sleek.

Ingrid Bergman is among the celebrities (Merle Haggard, Sidney Bechet, and Betty Friedan are a few of the others) who dealt with the problem of how to spend a birthday by dying, which pretty much eliminates the need for tiresome discussions about whether it would be best to go to the movies or to go bowling. August 29, 1915 - August 29, 1982: those are her dates.

London Daily Mirror, March 29, 1948

Scholars are divided — no doubt lifelong feuds have been started over the question — about whether the painter Raphael — one website I consulted listed his net worth at 16 million dollars — was born on March 28 or April 6, 1483. There’s consensus that April 6, 1520, was the date of his exit.

Sheboygan Wisconsin Press, August 7, 1915

Is there a word in English that describes someone whose date of birth and date of death, however many years they might be apart, are coincident? If not, there should be. I have no neologists in my address book, so I asked Artist for an image that would fit well in this space at this moment; Artist kindly coughed up a portrait of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca in the style of Raphael.

Tentative title for this work is “Of All the Gin Joints”

Yesterday, by way of a Big Day prelude, we went to see the much-hyped, billion dollar earning Barbie. Weirdly enough, the “Girl Boss Takes Down the Patriarchy” storyline set me to thinking about MG, about “Madeline’s Birthday,” her first New Yorker story, published just after her 29th birthday, September 1, 1951. Madeline, turning 17, is unhappily installed for the summer in the country home of her mother’s friend, Mrs. Tracy.

September 1, 1951. New Yorker. MG would have been pleased, I think, to be keeping company on her maiden voyage with a Charles Addams cartoon.

The house has been in the family for generations and for Mrs. Tracy, it’s a kind of Barbie World, idealized, perfect, a place where she simply cannot accommodate the possibility of unhappiness, not her own, not anyone else’s. She can’t bear seeing Madeline so out of sorts. Madeline, a determined free thinker, misses her independence, resents the governance to which she’s subject, and is especially and negatively reactive to the presence of Mr. Tracy, who comes from the city when work allows. Madeline uses the Tracy family library, and the patriarch suggests that perhaps what she’s reading isn’t suitable for a young girl. Madeline, hungry for knowledge, has tasted enough of the forbidden fruit that she doesn’t care to hear the word of this subpar God. “Do you know what I hate more than anything?” she asks Paul, a young German refugee who’s also a guest in the house. “I hate older men who look at girls and insult them.” Down with the patriarchy. From her stepmother, Madeline receives an inappropriate evening gown. In her dreams, she receives a doll house. Hello, Barbie.

Artist portrays Barbies blowing out candles on a cake.

As “Madeline’s Birthday” opens, Mrs. Tracy is in a state because she’s overlooked the baking of the cake. This is not necessarily a bad thing. One needn’t look far nor wide through the historical record to find examples of birthday cakes gone wrong. Some — I’m thinking of one that involved an oxygen tent in a hospital — are tragic; others, more antic. I leave you with one of the latter, from the Brooklyn Citizen, May 7, 1902, (the ending is a tad grim, it’s true) and with thanks, as always, for reading. Happy Birthday, dear Mavis. Happy birthday to you. BR