The Hunger Diaries

I've recently been reading (working my way: it's funny how all that 'life' stuff catches up with you to ensure you never finish something on the first read-through) an article in a copy of the New Yorker by Mavis Gallant. The article contains exerpts from the diary she kept while travelling through Spain in 1952, a starving artist with an endless well of images around her. The language is beautiful and raw, and she manages to write everything she sees, from scenery to people urinating in the street, in such away as to be captivating.

The funny thing is, reading these entries, I can see how I, for instance, or any number of people who may find themselves walking a similar route in her shoes, would see all the same scenes, all the same people, all the great swath of colors and life...and could write nothing at all.

We don't take advantage of the images around us. Or we see them, smile, think that'd be a good scene, and then forget all about it. I even carry a scrap of notebook and a pen with me most everywhere, and it lies empty. Is this laziness? Is this a lack of habit? Is it that our minds are too obsessed with everything else that goes in to day to day life that we can't stop and see the stories?

Whereas Ms. Gallant writes "Gray stone houses, balconies, trolley lines, dust. Like a bourgeois part of Paris suddenly deserted, disappearing under grit and sand." Barcelona in March.

Gallant is the epitome of a daring artist. In 1951 she left a comfortable job as a journalist and moved to Europe to write fiction. Did she have any connections abroad? Did she have any money saved up? Did she have any idea how she was going to live? I don't know...from her diaries, it sounds as if there is a negative answer to each of those questions. But it didn't stop her. Europe, for her, was where the stories were, and Europe was where she would go.

Perhaps that is something that allowed her to write as she did. Perhaps Montreal where she lived before with her comfortable job and her day-to-day life afforded no time or inspiration in which to write. She could have felt herself too close to the imagery around her to be able to write about it. For certain, picking up out of nowhere and moving to another country would give one perspective, to say the least. And if she had little job beyond her pen (she was indeed writing fiction for The New Yorker and teaching English on the side while she waited for the payment to wire through), why, I bet she would be writing nonstop. But here we find published not short stories about Paris and the fashion of the age or statements about European politics or playing cards...we find personal entries about life in Spain, living hand to mouth, looking at everything all the time as a potential piece of beauty.

At the border, 1952: "An armed guard in gray, a church, a wild rocky coast on which rushes a steel sea . . . Fragile, feathery fruit trees in pink."

Variously in her writings it is clear that Gallant lives a stretched existence. She cannot get enough food, feels sick and tired. And yet still she writes. Madrid, April: "The Monte de Piedad [a pawnshop] is run like a bank, big, efficient, and clean. I part with my typewriter for fifteen hundred pesetas . . . 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."

Giving up all that you have just to survive.

Who among us would have, at this point, simply come home? Throughout the rest of the diary entries she alludes to her struggles without saying anything directly. In order to eat dinner, she sells her watch at the pawnshop. She only reveals this when she says she glances at her wrist, "forgetting the watch is gone." And at that point you wonder...even if she wanted to come home, could she have?

Often our simplest writing is done when we think no one is looking. Is that the best writing, because it is most clearly us? Or does Ms. Gallant simply always stay on point when she writes, no matter who or on what it may be?

"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." The answer is given. She cannot 'go home'. There is no turning back.

The diaries end abruptly and satisfyingly, but in a rather grey, tired way, like victory at the end of an almost impossible battle that has gone on too long and too hard. Like a refugee suddenly handed a glass of milk and a PB&J. The trail to that point left no argument in the following of it. But it is truly more of a battle in endurance than anything else. You have no choice but to continue.

You can find the diary entries here if you are a subscriber to The New Yorker. You might also be interested in the blog post written by Jon Michaud in response.



Mavis Gallant. The Hunger Diaries. July 9th & 16th, 2012. The New Yorker.